Harry Truman (35 page)

To everyone’s amazement, all opposition to the UN practically melted away. Everyone had expected Senator Burton K. Wheeler to lead the assault on the Charter. He was the man who had killed the Supreme Court revision bill in 1937. He was the Senate’s best parliamentarian - and an outspoken isolationist. Everyone waited anxiously for the anti-UN maneuvers they were sure he had up his sleeve. But they forgot Burt Wheeler was also one of Harry Truman’s closest friends. As Dad left the Senate chamber, he made a point of shaking hands with him.

There is no better example of my father’s inside knowledge of the Senate at this point in his presidency than the amazingly accurate prediction he made to his mother of how the senators would vote on the UN Charter. On July 3, the day after he made his speech, he wrote: “Went to the Senate yesterday and you should have seen the carrying on they did. I could hardly shut ‘em up so I could speak. And they did the same thing after I finished. Some said the Senate never did carry on so over a President or anybody else. Well anyway, I believe we’ll carry the Charter with all but two votes.”

Scarcely a word of opposition was heard from Senator Wheeler and from more than a few other senators who were expected to rampage against the idea of America joining the UN. The charter, of course, profited from FDR’s foresight in creating a genuinely bipartisan American delegation to the San Francisco Conference. From the Democratic side of the aisle, Tom Connally voiced his support, and Arthur Vandenberg echoed him on the Republican side. After less than a month of debate, the Senate approved American membership in the UN by an astonishing eighty-nine to two - exactly as my father had predicted.

WITH THE UN off his mind, my father was free to concentrate on three far more complex, intertwined problems - the atomic bomb, the invasion of Japan, and the Big Three Conference with Prime Minister Churchill and Marshal Stalin, scheduled to begin on July 15 in Germany.

For over a month, Churchill had been pressing my father for an early conference between him and Marshal Stalin. On June 4, 1945, the prime minister sent Dad a telegram containing a phrase that would grow very familiar in years to come:

My father had stalled on a date for the conference because he wanted to put it off until the atomic bomb was tested. If the bomb was a success, there would probably be no need for Russia to enter the war against Japan - and no need to make any more concessions to the Soviets in Europe for their promise to help in the Far East. Dad had been wrestling with the atom bomb and the plans to end the Japanese war almost continuously since his April conference with Secretary of War Stimson. On Sunday, June 17, he made the following memorandum:

The only one of these advisers whom I have not mentioned is Fred Vinson. “Papa Vin,” as I always called him, was a congressman from Kentucky for several terms, then a federal judge, and after that a wartime administrator for President Roosevelt. He was a very solid, thoroughly shrewd politician from Kentucky, and a very likable man in the bargain. In the first twelve months of Dad’s presidency, “Papa Vin” was one of his most important advisers. Then he was elevated to the Supreme Court and passed out of the inner circle.

The day after he wrote this memorandum, Dad had a climactic conference with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to decide the final strategy against Japan. They handed him plans for a November 1 assault on the Japanese home island of Kyushu with a total force of 766,700 men. Some of the chiefs predicted light casualties - but Admiral Leahy strongly disagreed. He pointed out that in the bloody Okinawa campaign just ending, American losses (41,700) had been 35 percent of the attacking force. The Japanese still had an estimated 5,000 planes ready for kamikaze assaults. There were an estimated 2,000,000 troops in the Japanese home islands. Facing the Americans on Kyushu would be seventeen well-equipped battle-ready divisions.

If the capture of Kyushu, the westernmost Japanese island, did not persuade Japan to surrender, in the spring of 1946 there were plans for a landing on Honshu, the main Japanese island, where a climactic battle would be fought on the Tokyo Plain. On both Kyushu and Honshu, Japan’s soldiers would, if their performance on Okinawa was any indication, fight with total fanaticism to defend their sacred home soil. Based on this assumption, General George C. Marshall predicted total American dead on land and sea might reach 500,000 men.

Moreover - and this was a very big moreover - the entire American battle plan was based on the assumption Russia would enter the war before the American invasion. This would pin down Japan’s crack 1-million-man Manchurian army, as well as the additional 1 million troops on the Asian mainland fighting the Chinese. If substantial portions of these troops could be shuttled back to Japan - by no means an impossibility, in spite of our air and sea superiority - American losses might be many times that already appalling figure. More than anything else, these facts explain Dad’s policy toward the Russians during these crucial months.

The atomic bomb was not mentioned in this conference. It continued to be a question mark. No one really knew whether it would work. At Los Alamos, during these same weeks, scientists were still trying to perfect a detonator that would be completely reliable for triggering the bomb. Later statements by some scientists connected with the project that they were 90 percent certain of success were certainly not reflected in the reports that reached the White House. Admiral Leahy still kept insisting the bomb would be a dud. Jimmy Byrnes was more optimistic, but he still felt we needed the Russians in the war to help us bring it to a speedy conclusion. Behind these problems loomed another specter, mentioned again and again in cables from Prime Minister Churchill: the possibility that with the Allies heavily involved in the Pacific, there would be nothing to prevent Russia from taking over most of war-ravaged, prostrate Europe.

Not until June 27, 1945, did new detonators arrive at Los Alamos from the Du Pont Company, reducing the chances of misfire from one in 300 to one in 30,000. On July 1, while my father was returning to Washington from his four-day stopover in Independence, the climactic test was set for July 16. The official estimate of the power of the bomb was 5,000 tons. Actually, this was a guess. During the first week in July, the top scientists at Los Alamos set up an informal betting pool, to see who would come closest to the actual explosive yield. These insiders’ guesses ranged from 45,000 tons to zero, with the majority betting on very low figures. Robert Oppenheimer, for instance, bet the explosion would yield no more than 300 tons.

Meanwhile, the Interim Committee had handed my father a report on the use of the bomb - if it worked. This report, submitted on June 1, recommended the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible. Even after this report was made, the scientific panel that was advising the Interim Committee continued to debate the possibility of other alternatives. What about demonstrating the weapon to representatives of the United Nations on a barren island, or in the desert? This was the recommendation of a team of scientists in Chicago who had developed the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in 1942. The scientific panel, pondering this suggestion, and balancing it against their conservative estimates of the bomb’s power, rejected this idea as unlikely to convince the fanatical Japanese, who would naturally be inclined to be extremely suspicious of our claims to possess such a superweapon in the first place.

What about dropping the bomb on some relatively uninhabited area of Japan? There were large drawbacks to this idea. In the first place, we did not have very many bombs. The giant plants constructed in secrecy at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, had only created enough plutonium to build three bombs, and even this small number had been possible only with a day-and-night crash program. Dropping one bomb on an uninhabited area, where it would do relatively little damage, might not impress the Japanese. If we gave them forewarning of the area, they were very likely to move Allied prisoners into the locality and dare us to go ahead. Above all, such advance warning might destroy what my father and his advisers saw as the chief virtue of the bomb - its shock value.

If we wasted two out of the three bombs we possessed in ineffective demonstrations, and the third failed to bring the Japanese to terms, the invasion of Kyushu would probably begin as scheduled, Russia would come into the war on August 8 - Stalin had already assured Harry Hopkins of this - thousands of Americans would die, and the Russians would demand a share in the occupation of Japan, with the same nightmarish results that were already beginning to haunt the Allies in Germany.

At the June 18 meeting, my father also discussed with his chief advisers the possibility of blockading and bombarding Japan into defeat with conventional weapons. General Marshall, surely the most authoritative military figure in the meeting, dismissed this possibility. He pointed out that no nation had been bombed as intensively as Nazi Germany. But the Germans remained in the war until their home territory was invaded and occupied by Allied troops. The army air force spokesman at the meeting, General Ira Eaker, concurred. He pointed out that it would be more difficult to knock out Japan’s scattered industry from the air than Germany’s relatively more concentrated factories. Moreover, once the Japanese realized we were trying to knock them out by air power alone, they would intensify their air defenses, and we could expect very heavy losses among our attacking fliers. Admiral Leahy continued to insist he preferred the blockade and bombardment solution, but no other military man in the room agreed with him. While accepting this expert advice, my father ordered redoubled efforts by the army and the navy to bring Japan to her knees with conventional weapons.

The stage was now set for the Big Three meeting. At Winston Churchill’s suggestion, the code name for the conference became “Terminal.” Churchill’s code name was “Colonel Warden,” Marshal Stalin’s was “Uncle Joe,” and Dad was “The Other Admiral.” Coded cablese is a language all its own, and it is fascinating to read when you know the reality behind the curious nicknames.

One thing is evident from my talks with my father and from reading the memoranda and letters he wrote at that time: He did not want to go to this conference. There were several reasons for this. High on the list was his political instinct that the American people did not like to see their Presidents cavorting abroad, at state dinners in royal palaces. The dreadful political consequences of President Wilson’s journey to Europe in 1919 were never far from his mind. His close association with Congress also made him aware of how deeply they suspected and resented President Roosevelt’s habit of making agreements at secret conferences that were revealed to the Congress only piecemeal, if at all.

Finally, there was the problem of how to tell the Russian dictator about the atomic bomb, if the July 16 test should prove successful. It would be almost insulting to Stalin not to tell him about it. This in turn raised the sticky question of what to do if he began asking questions. Prime Minister Churchill had a veto over any decision Dad might make, because in 1943 at Hyde Park, the prime minister and President Roosevelt had entered into a secret agreement which stated “the suggestion that the world should be informed about Tube Alloys [British code name for the bomb] with a view to international agreement regarding its control and use is not accepted. The matter should continue to be regarded as of the utmost secrecy; but when a bomb is finally available, it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese who should be warned that the bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.” The Interim Committee, incidentally, had no knowledge of this agreement when they discussed the problem of whether or not to use the bomb against Japan. Once more we see the tremendous complexity of presidential decision-making.

My father’s reluctance was visible in a letter he wrote to his mother on July 3: “I am getting ready to go see Stalin and Churchill and it is a chore. I have to take my tuxedo, tails . . . high hat, top hat, and hard hat as well as sundry other things. I have a brief case all filled up with information on past conferences and suggestions on what I’m to do and say. Wish I didn’t have to go but I do and it can’t be stopped now.”

On the eve of his departure, he had to deal with another Cabinet crisis caused by the strange presumption of another of Roosevelt’s appointees. Henry Morgenthau had been Secretary of the Treasury throughout almost all of Roosevelt’s administrations. He was married to a close friend of Mrs. Roosevelt’s and was used to having ready access to the White House. At the Quebec Conference between Roosevelt and Churchill, Morgenthau had proposed a plan to turn Germany into an agricultural nation by demolishing its vast industrial plants in the Ruhr and elsewhere. The so-called Morgenthau Plan was a fanciful scheme at best; it would have reduced 60,000,000 Germans to the status of beggars, and left a heritage of hatred the Communists would have been happy to reap. To my father, it was the politics of revenge which had failed so tragically after World War I. He had no intention of implementing the plan, and Morgenthau was not among the list of presidential advisers invited to the Potsdam Conference. Morgenthau demanded an appointment with Dad and insisted he join the conference. Dad told him he thought the Secretary of the Treasury was “badly needed” in the United States - which he was, as postwar inflation was already beginning to soar.