Harry Truman (39 page)

On the international scene, my father had to cope with imminent signs of famine in Europe. Reserves of food in the United States had to be rushed across the Atlantic to avert this catastrophe, forcing him to maintain wartime food rationing controls here. Along with the epidemic of labor-management conflicts, Dad had to struggle with increasing pressure to demobilize America’s armed forces as quickly as possible. With an aggressive Russia pressing its claims from the Kurile Islands to Iran to Berlin, Dad knew such a step was not in the best interests of the nation. So did most of his military commanders, and all except one loyally supported him.

My father and his military planners in Washington were operating on figures given them by General Douglas MacArthur that he would need 500,000 men to occupy Japan. On September 18, General MacArthur blithely made a unilateral statement that he would need only 200,000 regular army troops. The White House was forced to issue a special statement on demobilization, promising no one would be held in the service a day longer than necessary. Dad authorized Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson - Secretary of State Byrnes was in London for a foreign ministers conference - to make a statement that included the rather harsh words: “The occupation forces are the instruments of policy and not the determinants of policy . . . and whatever it takes to carry this out will be used to carry it out.”

Already General MacArthur was arousing my father’s political suspicions. Twice in the months after the war ended, Dad invited him to return to Washington, as General Eisenhower had done after the end of the war in Europe, to receive the tribute of a grateful nation. Both times MacArthur refused, pleading the urgency of his duties as commander of the Allied Occupation in Japan. My father suspected that he preferred to await a political summons from the Republican Party, so he could combine a triumphal return with a nomination for the presidency.

My father was particularly irked because the demobilization problem was linked with his hopes for one of his most important programs - universal military training. He sent a request for this program up to Congress and followed it with a speech before a joint session on October 23, 1945. Carefully he pointed out: “. . . Universal military training is not conscription. The opponents of training have labeled it conscription and by so doing have confused the minds of some of our citizens. Conscription is compulsory service in the army or navy in time of peace or war. Trainees under this proposed legislation, however, would not be enrolled in any of the armed services. They would be civilians in training. They could be no closer to membership in the armed forces than if they had no training. Special rules and regulations would have to be adopted for their organization, discipline, and welfare.”

Dad’s plan called for a year of training for every young man in the nation, whether physically qualified for actual combat service or not: “There should be a place into which every young American can fit in the service of our country. But some would be trained for combat, others would be trained for whatever war service they are physically and mentally qualified to perform.”

No program he presented to Congress aroused deeper feelings in Dad than this one. You can sense his anxiety in the words he wrote to his mother a few hours after he made the speech: “It is 10:40 and I have been listening to a rebroadcast of my address to Congress on military training. When I listen I don’t know why they applauded - except maybe because I am the President of the United States and they probably wanted to be respectful. But in spite of that we need the program which the President urged them to adopt.”

Congress refused to agree with him. Dad was terribly frustrated by his failure to get UMT across and he remained frustrated. He was convinced that if we had had universal military training, there would have been no war in Korea, and possibly no war in Vietnam. The Communists would not have dared to challenge us because we would have been ready to respond with maximum strength and maximum speed.

Another of Dad’s major frustrations at this time was his inability to create a Missouri Valley Authority, similar to the TVA. This was a dream he had nurtured from his earliest days in the Senate, but it was an enormously complex problem. He began talking about it with David Lilienthal as early as September 18, 1945. In his journal, Lilienthal gives a very realistic description of Dad in action - discussing the problem: “‘In the Missouri Valley . . .’” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, “‘that’s the hard one . . .’ He explained the conflicts between the downstream people and those upriver, how dams below Sioux City wouldn’t do, would fill up with silt in a year; there wasn’t any power in that part of the river. Flood control dams would have to be built on the little streams and kept empty - and so on, with a loquacity and excited interest that reminded me of his predecessor on such a subject. He went down the list of Senators in each of the nine states - all against MVA except two. ‘We’ll have to figure out something . . . We have got to figure out something that they will accept.’”

Lilienthal said he hoped Dad meant it would be a regional authority that could deal with the people on the spot. He dreaded the possibility Dad might propose a National River Basin Board, one of the pet ideas of Secretary of the Interior Ickes.

Dad shook his head. “I’m against it. If these things are going to be just part of the bureaus here in Washington we might as well leave them in the hands of Congress.”

A relieved Lilienthal agreed. He said one of the things he liked about working in a decentralized agency was that people “can get at you and you feel you are part of their life.”

Dad nodded. “Do you know why I go back home every once in a while? So people can kick me around.”

Another problem that required a vast amount of my father’s time and attention during these first postwar months was atomic energy. His talks with David Lilienthal convinced Dad this was the perfect man to head the Atomic Energy Commission. He had both the administrative ability and the breadth of vision Dad wanted for this enormously important job. Behind the scenes, there was a terrific battle going on between Congress, the White House, and the army about the final control of atomic energy. General Leslie Groves was busily deciding what facts could or could not be disclosed to members of Congress. He was also negotiating agreements with foreign governments to give us access to more uranium, without bothering to tell the State Department.

On October 3, 1945, my father sent a message to Congress, calling for the creation of an Atomic Energy Commission for the development of peaceful domestic uses of the atom, as well as an international atomic policy, which he proceeded to hammer out in conferences with Prime Minister Attlee and Canadian Prime Minister MacKenzie King. After a tremendous amount of wrangling among Congress, the military, and the scientists, some of whom favored military control, Dad settled the dispute by emphatically calling for an AEC composed “exclusively of civilians.”

Our atomic energy policy was intimately connected with our relationship to Russia. Some remarks that my father made on this subject in a press conference around this time show how hard he was trying to reach an understanding with Moscow. One reporter asked: “Mr. President, I have read that one of the causes for the lack of accord between this country and Russia grows out of the fact that we have the atomic bomb and Russia doesn’t.”

“It isn’t true. It isn’t true at all,” Dad said. “The difficulty, I think, is a matter of understanding between us and Russia. That has always been a difficulty, principally because we don’t speak the same language. It is a most difficult matter to translate the meaning of what I am saying right now into Russian, so it will mean the same thing in Russian as it means in English. The same thing is true when you translate Russian into English. When I was at the conference with Stalin at Berlin, he had an interpreter and I had one, and it took the four of us to be sure that we each understood the meaning of the other.”

Later in the same talk, Dad said he would love to go to Russia. “I think Russia has been badly misrepresented in this country as we have been badly misrepresented in Russia. If there is complete understanding, there wouldn’t be very many difficulties between us, because Russia’s interests and ours do not clash and never have. We have always been friends and I hope we always will be.”

Secretary of State Byrnes found Molotov totally hostile and disagreeable at the foreign ministers’ meeting in London. Still my father persisted in hoping for the best and continued making friendly statements about Russia. At a press conference on October 8, he insisted the London meeting was not a failure but only one step in arriving at eventual peace settlements. He was not a bit alarmed, he said. He had no doubt the world situation would work out just as he believed the domestic situation would eventually settle down. He foresaw a new era of international friendliness and understanding.

These words concealed Dad’s mounting concern about Russia’s intentions and our ability to live in peace with our erstwhile ally. They were consolidating their grip on the countries of Eastern Europe and fomenting guerrilla warfare in Greece. Yugoslavia was still insisting on its right to Trieste. The Russian army was showing no sign whatsoever of moving out of Iran, and Stalin was repeating his demands for control of the straits of the Bosporus, which would mean the virtual occupation of Turkey. He wanted to replace our Occupation regime in Japan with a “Control Council,” which would have meant the kind of partition that gave him a third of Germany.

To make the situation even more difficult for my father, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes was beginning to act as if he was a totally independent operator. Shortly before he left for another foreign ministers conference - this one in Moscow - he conferred with a group of senators from the Special Committee on Atomic Energy and the Committee on Foreign Relations without bothering to tell the President. Two days later, the members of this special committee arrived at the White House in a flap, to inform Dad his Secretary of State seemed ready to give away vital atomic secrets in Moscow. Dad reported this complaint to Secretary Byrnes but assured him he was confident the senators were wrong. He wanted the Secretary to have the widest possible latitude to receive any proposals the Russians might make on sharing atomic energy and defusing the atomic arms race.

From December 12 to Christmas Day, when my father left the White House for Independence, Byrnes was negotiating in Moscow. Dad had expected the teletype in the White House map room to hum with messages detailing Russian proposals, not only on atomic energy, but on the other major problems Byrnes was supposed to discuss: the Balkan nations, China, the Japanese Occupation, and - an item which Dad had specifically ordered on the agenda - Russia’s refusal to get out of Iran. Instead, there was almost total silence from Moscow. Byrnes obviously did not feel any need to seek the President’s advice.

Mother and I had returned to Independence for a family Christmas. My father stayed in the White House alone, worrying over the silence from Moscow. Writing to his mother on December 24, he explained why he was not coming home until Christmas Day: “It’ll take sixteen Secret Service men and about that many newsmen to get me to Kansas City and back. The reason I didn’t come sooner was to let all of ‘em have Christmas Eve anyway at home.”

That same night, my father received a very brief message from Secretary Byrnes, giving only an optimistic summary of what had been discussed at Moscow. The next day, Dad flew home to Independence and was resting there on December 27 when Charlie Ross called to tell him Secretary Byrnes wanted the White House to arrange for him to make an all-network speech to the American people on the results of the Moscow conference. Several hours later, the State Department’s communiqué on the conference was handed to Dad - an hour after it had been released in Washington.

Thoroughly incensed, my father flew back to Washington the next day, to find Senator Vandenberg threatening to resign as Republican spokesman of our bipartisan foreign policy. He thought Secretary Byrnes had agreed to give the Russians atomic secrets without hammering out inspection safeguards. It took hours to calm him down and issue a statement clarifying the cloudy wording of Secretary Byrnes’s communiqué. Later that day, Dad boarded the presidential yacht
Williamsburg
with a number of advisers to work on a major speech he was preparing for January 3. They were anchored off Quantico, Virginia, when Secretary of State Byrnes called from Washington to ask about his all-network broadcast.

Charlie Ross took the call. My father was sitting next to him and told him what to say in reply. “The President asks me to tell you that you had better come down here post haste and make your report to the President before you do anything else.”

At 5:00 p.m., that afternoon the Secretary of State boarded the
Williamsburg
and got a lecture which made it very clear to him he was not the President of the United States. Harry S. Truman was President, and he expected to be the man who made the final decisions on all aspects of our foreign policy. A few days later, after studying the documents Byrnes brought home from Moscow, Dad summoned him to the White House and read him a long handwritten letter which spelled out in detail his disappointment with Byrnes’s accomplishments at Moscow. He felt we had made concessions - particularly on the matter of recognizing the puppet governments in Rumania and Bulgaria and Poland - in return for very little from the Russians beyond an agreement to continue talking. Dad summed up his position in the last line of his letter: “I’m tired of babying the Soviets.”

Two other problems began troubling my father in these first postwar months. The first was Palestine. From the moment Dad took office, American Jews began pressuring him to support the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. On April 20, 1945, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council, conferred with Dad at the White House, and left declaring Dad supported Roosevelt’s policy of unrestricted immigration to Palestine.