Harry Truman (36 page)

Morgenthau grandly declared either he went to Potsdam, or he quit.

“All right,” Dad replied, “if that is the way you feel, I’ll accept your resignation right now.”

In Morgenthau’s place, my father appointed Fred Vinson. He had planned to give the job to him eventually, but he very much regretted having to leave him behind on the trip to Potsdam. On Sunday, July 7, Dad left Norfolk aboard the cruiser
Augusta.
He would have preferred to fly, but with no vice president, and the whole question of presidential succession so muddled, it was too risky.

One can now see clearly the reasons why the high hopes so many held for this conference ended in disappointment and frustration. But it is important to remember how hard Dad tried, at that time, to create a peaceful postwar world. From this viewpoint, the judgment of some of the best newspapermen is worthwhile. Arthur Krock, writing in
The New York Times
on June 14, 1945, commented: “The just criticism has often been made, especially of our government, that plenary conferences are called and entered upon without the preparation required for effective discussion and solution of the issues. But if the next Big Three meeting is unsuccessful, no such criticism can be made of President Truman. . . . If any chief of the Big Three states, when the meeting is held, encounters unexpected obstacles on unforeseeable issues, it will not be the fault of President Truman or his envoys.”

My father had sent Davies and Hopkins to London and Moscow to lay the groundwork for the meeting. On the
Augusta
,
he took from his briefcase long memoranda prepared by the State Department on all of the problems we were facing in Europe and the Far East. He prepared an agenda for the conference and carefully outlined his major goals. Even Jimmy Byrnes, whose later comments on my father are not especially kind, wrote that the American party arrived in Germany with “objectives thoroughly in mind . . . and the background papers in support of them fully prepared.” Admiral Leahy said the President “squeezed facts and opinions out of us all day long.”

In between squeezings, Dad managed to tour the
Augusta
from “the bridge to the bilges,” to quote Admiral Leahy again. On one of these inspection tours, he found a young man named Lawrence Truman from Owensboro, Kentucky, who was the great-grandson of Grandfather Truman’s brother. “He’s a nice boy and has green eyes just like Margaret’s. Looks about her age,” Dad told his mother and sister. As a good politician, he ate meals in each of the ship’s messes - the officers’, the warrant officers’, the petty officers’, and the crew’s. He went down the chow line, aluminum tray in hand, with the crew.

Landing at Antwerp on July 15, Dad and his party flew to Gatow Airfield, ten miles from the Berlin suburb of Babelsberg, where he was to stay. The conference had long been called the “Berlin meeting,” but too much of the German capital had been destroyed to permit any sizable gathering there. So the Russians selected Potsdam, about twenty-five miles from Berlin, as a less damaged site, and chose a number of palatial houses in nearby Babelsberg for residences. By nightfall, Dad was settled in a three-story yellow stucco house, which formerly belonged to the head of the German movie industry. It was on a lake swarming with mosquitoes. Prime Minister Churchill had another large house only a few blocks away, and Stalin was also nearby.

Thanks to the hard work of the communications specialists who preceded him, Dad was able to pick up a telephone and call us in Independence. It was a “scrambler” phone, which automatically garbled what was being said for anyone who tried to tap the line. But for us on the receiving end, it was amazingly clear. Overseas phone calls in those days were usually pretty garbled, but Dad sounded as if he were calling from around the corner. He spoke to us almost every day while he was in Potsdam. He never mentioned affairs of state. It was just family chit-chat. Even when he was trying to settle the problems of the world, he kept in touch with his family world in Missouri.

The next morning, my father learned Stalin would be a day late - he had suffered a slight heart attack. Dad took advantage of this delay to spend several hours with Winston Churchill. This delighted the prime minister, who had wanted to meet Dad in London before they met Stalin. But my father had turned down this idea, because he felt it would only feed the Russian dictator’s paranoia by giving him another chance to claim, as he had frequently done in his cables, that the British and the Americans were “ganging up” on him.

Friendship was instant between Churchill and Dad. Their talk ranged over a wide variety of topics, from the Pacific war to their tastes in music. They found themselves in hearty agreement on everything but music. Churchill loved martial music and just about nothing else in that department. He was startled to find Dad’s taste running to Chopin, Liszt and Mozart.

Later the prime minister’s physician, Lord Moran, asked Churchill: “Has he real ability?”

“I should think he has,” replied Churchill. “At any rate, he is a man of immense determination.”

The following day, after spending more time with Dad, the “P.M.” told Lord Moran: “He seems a man of exceptional charm and ability. . . . He has direct methods of speech and a great deal of self confidence and resolution.” Several days later Lord Moran noted in his diary: “Winston has fallen for the President.”

That afternoon my father drove into Berlin and saw the desolation and tragedy Hitler’s madness had wreaked on that once impressive city. When he returned, he found an extremely excited Secretary of War Stimson waiting for him. He handed Dad a message which read:

This was the first word received from General Leslie Groves’s Washington office, reporting the successful test of the atomic bomb in New Mexico. It was flashed from Washington by George Harrison, who was acting as chairman of the Interim Committee while Stimson was in Germany. The local press release meant the explosion had attracted enough attention to require a public statement by the army that an ammunition dump had accidentally exploded.

The following morning, Premier Stalin visited my father at his residence, which was already being called the “little White House” although it was yellow (little or summer White Houses were seldom white). My father persuaded him to stay for lunch, and they talked “straight from the shoulder.” Dad found he liked the way Stalin looked him in the eye when he spoke, and the meeting ended with Dad in a very optimistic mood. Although he sized up Stalin as a very determined, forceful man, he found him personally quite likable in this first encounter.

That afternoon, the Big Three met for the first time at ten minutes past five in the ornate, 300-year-old Cecilienhof Palace. Two huge wrought iron chandeliers hung above a big circular table, at which the leaders and their delegations took their places.

Marshal Stalin proposed that my father become the presiding officer. Although he thanked them for the “courtesy,” he did not relish the task. In a hitherto unpublished letter he wrote the following day to his mother, he described some of his problems:

The following morning Secretary of War Stimson received another flash from Washington, which he rushed to the “little White House” in Babelsberg.

Big Brother was the atom bomb that had been exploded at Alamogordo Air Base in New Mexico. The Little Boy was atom bomb number two, ready to be used against Japan. “From here to Highhold” meant from Washington to Secretary Stimson’s estate, Highhold, on Long Island, 250 miles away. “From here to my farm” meant from Washington to George Harrison’s farm at Upperville, Virginia, forty miles away. The medical terminology baffled the young officers who were manning the American communications center at Postdam. They thought seventy-seven-year-old Stimson had just become a father.

While this was a sensational indication of the bomb’s power, it was not factual enough for my father. He wanted a complete report from General Groves before he made any decision connected with the new weapon. While he waited for this report, he had to continue negotiating with Prime Minister Churchill and Marshal Stalin.

My father meant it when he said he wanted results at Potsdam. He had brought with him his Joint Chiefs of Staff and put them to work with their Russian counterparts on a coherent plan for ending the Japanese war. He wanted to settle the future of Germany, and he wanted to extract from Stalin a genuine commitment to make the Yalta Declaration on Liberated Europe a reality. On both these points, he was more or less frustrated. Stalin was not really interested in making firm agreements on anything that involved surrendering control of nations or territories occupied by the Red Army. He was, on the other hand, eager to obtain concessions of every sort that contributed to the growth of Russia’s power.

Stalin revealed his inner thinking in an offhand remark to Ambassador Averell Harriman. The ambassador congratulated him on the defeat of Germany and said it must be very gratifying to see Russia’s army in Berlin. Stalin shrugged and said, “Czar Alexander got to Paris.” Faced with a prostrate Europe, the Russian leader saw no reason why he could not push communism to the English Channel. There was, as it turned out, no reason - but Harry S. Truman’s determination not to let it happen.

At Potsdam Stalin coolly asked for a share in control of the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland, for control of one of Italy’s African colonies, and for a say in the destinies of Lebanon and Syria. Secretary of War Stimson worriedly wrote in his diary that the Russians “are throwing aside all their previous restraint as to being only a continental power and not interested in any further acquisitions and are now branching out.”

My father remained unruffled by these demands. He assured the Secretary they were largely “bluffs” to distract attention from the Russian seizure of Eastern Europe. Though he knew exactly what was going on, Dad maintained a friendly face and struggled to reach agreement on important matters. He extracted from Stalin a promise to hold free elections in Poland. In return, he agreed to give Russia the port of Koenigsberg to satisfy their need for a northern warm water harbor.

In these debates, Churchill was not always helpful. More often than not, he was concerned with maintaining the colonial influence and holdings of the British Empire. This badly weakened his position when, for instance, he argued for Russia’s withdrawal from Eastern Europe and Iran. He was also haunted by an agreement he had made with Stalin, in a private conversation, in October 1944, that created “spheres of responsibility” in southeastern Europe. At that time, he had agreed to assign Rumania and Bulgaria to the Soviet Union and Greece to Great Britain.

In the midst of this complicated wrangling came the detailed report on the atomic explosion at Alamogordo Air Base. It arrived on July 21, the fourth day of the conference, at 11:35 a.m. Major General Groves and his second-in-command, Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell, had labored two consecutive days and nights to complete it. At 3:00 p.m., Secretary of War Stimson brought it to the little White House. At this suggestion, my father had invited Secretary of State Byrnes to join them. Stimson began reading the report aloud but he was so excited, he frequently stumbled over words.

1. This is not a concise, formal military report but an attempt to recite what I would have told you if you had been here on my return from New Mexico.

2. At 0530, 16 July 1945, in a remote section of the Alamogordo Air Base, New Mexico, the first full scale test was made of the implosion type atomic fission bomb. For the first time in history there was a nuclear explosion. And what an explosion! . . . The bomb was not dropped from an airplane but was exploded on a platform on top of a 100-foot high steel tower.

3. The test was successful beyond the most optimistic expectations of anyone. Based on the data which it has been possible to work up to date, I estimate the energy generated to be in excess of the equivalent of 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT; and this is a conservative estimate. Data based on measurements which we have not yet been able to reconcile would make the energy release several times the conservative figure. There were tremendous blast effects. For a brief period there was a lighting effect within a radius of 20 miles equal to several suns in midday; a huge ball of fire was formed which lasted for several seconds. This ball mushroomed and rose to a height of over 10,000 feet before it dimmed. The light from the explosion was seen clearly at Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Silver City, El Paso and other points generally to about 180 miles away. The sound was heard to the same distance in a few instances but generally to about 100 miles. Only a few windows were broken although one was some 125 miles away. . . .