Harry Truman (32 page)

Two days after he saw Molotov, my father had an even more momentous conference with Secretary of War Stimson. He informed Dad in detail about the project to create the atomic bomb.

The brief discussion of the bomb that Stimson had with Dad, a half hour after he became President, covered little more than a general description of the weapon’s power and its possible impact on the war. Major General Leslie Groves, who was in charge of the Manhattan Project, joined the meeting by entering the White House through the back door. This was typical of the super-secrecy with which the whole operation was shrouded. Stimson handed my father a memorandum which began, “Within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb which could destroy a whole city.” The report went on to discuss in very wary terms the possibility that other nations could produce the bomb, adding, “Probably the only nation that could enter into production in the next few years is Russia.”

Stimson feared that, in the state of moral achievement which the world had reached, the bomb was simply too dangerous to handle. He was afraid modern civilization might be “completely destroyed.” He also felt the new weapon was “a primary question of our foreign relations.” In their ensuing conversation, after my father finished reading this thoughtful, wide-ranging memorandum, Secretary Stimson added that if the bomb worked it would “in all probability shorten the war.” But that
if
was a very large word. When Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, gave my father a scientist’s version of the bomb, Admiral Leahy was present, and he scoffingly declared, “That is the biggest fool thing we’ve ever done. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.”

General Groves’s report, twenty-four pages long and crammed with scientific data, stated that a test of the bomb would be made in the middle of July if everything remained on schedule. If it succeeded, the explosion would yield an equivalent force of about 500 tons of TNT. A second bomb, which could be used against Japan, would be ready around the first of August and would be the equivalent of 1,000 to 1,200 tons of TNT. The correct figure turned out to be 20,000 tons - graphic evidence of how little even the top people knew about the awesome weapon they were creating.

In his memorandum, Secretary of War Stimson recommended the creation of a distinguished committee to study the question of using the bomb against Japan. My father immediately agreed and ordered the formation of this group, which came to be known as the Interim Committee. The impression some people have, that my father made a snap decision to use the bomb, could not be further from the truth. Stimson, seventy-eight years old, one of the most respected Americans of his time, was the chairman of the Interim Committee. Byrnes was Dad’s personal representative. The other members included Dr. Vannevar Bush; Dr. Carl T. Compton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and James B. Conant, president of Harvard. Assisting the committee was a scientific panel, whose members were Enrico Fermi, Ernest O. Lawrence, Robert Oppenheimer, and Arthur H. Compton. All of them had played major roles in the development of the bomb.

The same day my father had this fateful conference with Secretary Stimson, the United Nations Conference opened in San Francisco. In Europe, the war was hurtling toward a conclusion. German resistance was collapsing on all fronts. Ironically, Heinrich Himmler tried to negotiate a separate surrender to the Western Powers. Dad and Churchill agreed, in a telephone discussion, they must immediately reject the offer and notify Marshal Stalin.

Here was an opportunity for the Americans and the British to commit the treachery which Stalin had accused Roosevelt of plotting. Having read these insulting telegrams, my father took not a little pleasure in informing Marshal Stalin he had rejected the German offer: “In keeping with our agreement with the British and Soviet governments, it is the view of the United States government that the only acceptable terms of surrender are unconditional surrender on all fronts to the Soviet, Great Britain, and the United States.”

Two days later, word was flashed from Europe that American and Russian forces had finally met on the Elbe River. It meant the beginning of the end of the European war. From San Francisco, meanwhile, came word from Secretary of State Stettinius that Molotov was refusing to budge on the communization of Poland. The political problems of peace were already crowding into the White House. My father decided it was absolutely vital for him to know exactly what Marshal Stalin and Prime Minister Churchill were thinking on a broad range of topics. Random discussions of specific problems, attempts to deal with doctrinaire, obnoxious underlings like Molotov, were getting nowhere. So he asked Harry Hopkins to undertake a personal mission to Moscow. He also requested Joseph E. Davies, former ambassador to Russia, to make a similar journey to London, to talk with Churchill as the President’s personal representative. Both of these men were in poor health, and it bothered Dad’s conscience to ask them to undertake these grueling trips under wartime conditions. But they accepted their assignments without a moment’s hesitation, knowing what was at stake.

On May 1, my father found time to write his mother: “I have been as busy as usual trying to make the country run. . . . I am hoping we will be able to move into the White House next week and then I want you to come to see us. I’ll make all the arrangements from here, so keep it dark until I tell you about it.” By this time, Mrs. Roosevelt had moved out of the White House, and Mother and I had gone over to inspect our future home. What we saw made me yearn to stay in Blair House. The White House looked splendid from the outside, and the public rooms which tourists visit were beautifully painted, decorated, and appointed. But the private quarters were anything but comfortable in those days. It was not unlike moving into a furnished apartment, where no new furniture or equipment had been purchased for twenty or thirty years. The furniture looked like it had come from a third-rate boarding house. Some of it was literally falling apart. Grubby was the overall word that leaped into my mind. Even more unpleasant was a bit of information Mrs. Roosevelt left with us before she departed. Here is how Dad reported it to his mother and sister: “Mrs. Roosevelt told Bess and me that it [the White House] is infested with rats! Said she was giving three high-hat women a luncheon on the south portico when a rat ran across the porch railing. She said each of them saw the rat but kept pretending that she didn’t. But they all finally confessed that they’d seen it.”

Mother, ever the good soldier, plunged into conferences with painters and White House staff people. She assured me the old place would look a lot better once we got some fresh paint on the walls, and she was right. I chose Wedgwood blue for my sitting room, which had a pretty marble fireplace. For my bedroom, with my own antique white furniture, I chose pink with deep pink draperies and white window curtains. Mother preferred blue for her bedroom and gray for her sitting room and cream for Dad’s bedroom and off-white for his oval study. Getting my grand piano into my study proved to be quite an engineering challenge. They had to take the legs off and swing it through a second-floor window with a block and tackle. Dad decided he wanted a piano in his study, too.

We moved in on May 7, so that Dad could celebrate his birthday in the White House, the following day. We had no idea just how much celebrating we and the rest of the country would do on that day.

On May 6 and May 7, reports of the final collapse of German resistance poured into my father’s office. Finally, on May 7, General Eisenhower cabled that the German generals had surrendered unconditionally to him at 2:40 that morning. The next day, he expected to have Russian signatures on the agreement. That morning Dad got up and wrote a letter to his mother, telling her the story:

In that letter, he commented on the trouble he had had with both Churchill and Stalin about the cease-fire date. A few days later he was far more explicit in a letter he wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt, here published for the first time. My father told her how the Germans continued trying to surrender only to the Americans and British, and kept fighting the Russians, until General Eisenhower warned them we would reopen full-scale hostilities and “drive them into the Russians” (Dad’s words). The Germans finally agreed to surrender unconditionally to be effective at 12:01 midnight of May 8-9.

My father’s first thought, after announcing the glorious news of the victory in Europe, was the war with Japan. In a letter to his mother, written the day before the Germans surrendered, he said: “We have another war to win and people must realize it. I hope they will, anyway.” He ended his V-E Day statement with the words, “Our victory is only half over.” He then added a plea to Japan’s leaders to lay down their arms in unconditional surrender - the only terms which Roosevelt had said he would accept from either Germany or Japan.

Some people have criticized this approach, claiming modification of this demand would have persuaded Japan to surrender earlier and avoided the use of the atomic bomb. It is sad, how each generation’s hindsight is based on a criticism of the preceding generation. Roosevelt and Churchill were attempting to avoid the error of World War I, which left Germany uninvaded, virtually intact. This permitted Hitler to propound the myth that Germany had not really lost the war and create a new military machine to launch World War II.

My father was aware that unconditional surrender was particularly unfortunate for dealing with Japan, where military fanaticism already made suicide preferable to surrender on the field of battle. On Okinawa, thousands of Japanese soldiers destroyed themselves with hand grenades rather than give up, in spite of the obvious fact the battle was lost. So, in this announcement, Dad did his utmost to soften the term unconditional surrender for Japan:

On May 11, the presidential plane, the
Sacred Cow,
touched down at Washington, and my father personally escorted his mother down the steps while an inevitable swarm of reporters and photographers recorded the event. Dad had hoped to fly out and pick her up, so she would have no uneasy moments on her first flight, but Germany’s surrender killed that idea. Mamma Truman was her usual peppery self. She eyed the crowd of newsmen and snapped, “Oh, fiddlesticks, why didn’t you tell me there was going to be all this fuss. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have come.”

True to the family tradition of teasing each other to distraction, on the way to the White House in our car, I told Mamma Truman that Dad was going to make her sleep in Lincoln’s bed. Mamma replied she was ready to sleep on the floor, before she made such a concession to her Southern principles. Dad finally had to shush me and calm her down by assuring her she was going to sleep in the Rose Room, where visiting queens and other prominent female VIPs stayed. Mamma decided the bed was much too high and too fancy for her taste and chose to sleep next door in a charming smaller bedroom. She left the grandeur of the Rose Room to my Aunt Mary.

Mamma Truman was her usual uninhibited self in the White House. She went exploring on her own and had lively comments to make on everything and everyone. One night during her stay, Joseph Davies had dinner with us. Dad and he began discussing politics, and when the ambassador happened to mention a certain politician’s name, Mamma Truman asked, “Isn’t he a Yankee?”