Truman (11 page)

Stettinius's replacement was Byrnes. He was one of Truman's two most mistaken appointments. (The other, much later, was Louis Johnson, Secretary of Defense, 1949-50). Byrnes was quick-footed, self-confident, politically astute, but at once know-all and ill-informed about foreign affairs. Above all, however, his disadvantage was that he thought he and not Truman ought to be President,
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and so behaved. As a result their relations quickly declined. This neutralized what should have been the big gain of getting someone more able than Stettinius.

Biddle, a distinguished Attorney-General, was replaced by one of his less good assistants, Tom Clark. For the rest, as with Byrnes, Truman leant heavily upon former members of Congress, which Roosevelt had never done. Anderson, the new Secretary of Agriculture, Schwellenbach, the new Secretary of Labour, and Vinson, the new Secretary of the Treasury, were all in this category. Schwellenbach was a near disaster. Vinson was the best, certainly the one Truman most respected. Unfortunately, from the point of view of the quality of the Cabinet, Truman added friendly consideration to respect and appointed Vinson Chief Justice of the Supreme Court when Stone died in the spring of 1946. He was then succeeded by Snyder, Truman's old St Louis banker friend, who was already in the government, and who made a thoroughly second-rate finance minister.

Little of this either sounds inspiring or gives an adequate picture of the quality of mid-1940s Washington. This is largely because of
Roosevelt's fondness for operating outside structures. Many of the most talented officials whom he bequeathed to Truman were in neither the Cabinet nor the White House staff. They operated from somewhere between the two, and became a feature of the Washington scene which has never been wholly paralleled elsewhere. Hopkins, Harriman, McCloy, Lovett were quintessential figures of this
demi-monde.
When he could Truman kept them on (Hopkins was dead in nine months but Truman had probably got more hard information about what Roosevelt had done or intended out of him in the first three months than from any more formal source), often gradually drafting them and others into more structured positions. He was also extremely lucky to have General Marshall available, first for a special mission to China, then as Secretary of State after Byrnes, and finally, after a gap, as Secretary of Defense during the Korean War. He, with Dean Acheson, Under-Secretary of State from 1945 to 1947, Secretary of State from 1949 until January 1953, were the twin pillars of Truman's international reputation.

In the spring and early summer of 1945 all this lay well ahead. Truman floundered. But as is frequently the case in comparable circumstances the nation either did not notice or it decided, after twelve years of Roosevelt and with the initial shock over, that what they would most enjoy was a little presidential floundering. By mid-May Truman's approval rating in the Gallup poll rose to 87%, three points higher than Roosevelt had ever achieved. It compensated for the frustrations of dealing with Stalin, and indeed with Churchill too. ‘… I was having as much difficulty with Prime Minister Churchill as I was having with Stalin,' he recorded on May 19th.
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This was broadly the mood in which he set off on July 6th for the Potsdam Conference. He was temporarily popular beyond belief. He had the sense to realize how temporary this was likely to be. He had been fully (although for the first time) informed about the atomic development and knew that there was a good chance that the bomb would be shown to work in the next couple of months. He was willing to be conciliatory with the Russians -much more so than he had been at a Washington meeting with Molotov on April 23rd, which he had handled so roughly as to be in danger of giving the impression of a big shift of policy from Roosevelt. But he was equally prepared to be tough and felt
fortified for this by the news about the bomb. He approached the expedition—his first outside the Western hemisphere since 1919 -with distaste and in no over-generous mood. ‘How I hate this trip!' he wrote in his diary on the first day out in his battle cruiser. ‘But I have to make it—win, lose or draw—and we must win. I'm not working for any interest but the Republic of the United States. I [am] giving nothing away except to save starving people and even then I hope we can only help them to help themselves.'
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In the event he probably disliked it less than he expected. He found Berlin ‘an awful city' and never wanted to see it again—but who would not in the circumstances—and he was impatient to get back after a month away. However, he felt that he acquitted himself well. As the only Head of State he presided over the conference. The surprise—and the misjudgment—was that he liked Stalin. He reminded him of Pendergast! To his wife he recorded it without ambiguity: ‘I like Stalin' (July 29th).
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To his diary he was no more circumspect, ‘I can deal with Stalin. He is honest—but smart as hell.' (July 17th)
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He was rather less forthcoming about the British, whom he approached with a slightly ungracious suspicion. Before he sailed for Europe he told Bess: ‘George VI R.I. sent
me
a personal letter today by Halifax. Not much impressed.' However, he added ‘Save it for Margie's scrapbook.'
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This was an invitation to stay at Buckingham Palace, which visit, to save time, he managed to change to a luncheon in a British battleship. This he approached with little more enthusiasm: ‘I've got to lunch with the limey King when I get to Plymouth.' However, to his diary, after the event, he was rather more forthcoming. He found the King ‘a very pleasant and surprising person' and the lunch ‘nice and appetising'.
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Perhaps he was primarily concerned to assure Mrs Truman that he was not acquiring Roosevelt's taste for European royalty.

His first judgment of Churchill was more surprising, but also a little cool: ‘He is a most charming and a very clever person -meaning clever in the English not the Kentucky sense. He gave me a lot of hooey about how great my country is and how he loved Roosevelt and how he intended to love me, etc. etc. Well,
I gave him as cordial a reception as I could—being naturally (I hope) a polite and agreeable person. I am sure we can get along if he doesn't try to give me too much soft soap.'
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The change of British Government on July 27th he took with less dismay than, he believed, did Stalin. But here again his comments certainly betrayed no anglomania: ‘The British returned last night. They came and called on me at nine-thirty. Attlee is an Oxford man and talks like the much overrated Mr Eden and Bevin is a John L. Lewis. Can you imagine John L. being my Secretary of State—but we shall see what we shall see. ‘
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During his journey back across the Atlantic the Hiroshima bomb was dropped. The final decision to do so had been taken by him at Potsdam a day or so after the full results of the Alamogordo test in the New Mexican desert had been received. This is now regarded as the most controversial, some would say immoral, and therefore difficult, decision of the Truman presidency. At the time it was not so seen. The testimony of Churchill puts the contemporary view with complete authority: ‘The historic fact remains, and must be judged in the after-time, that the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never even an issue. There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table; nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise.'
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Did this point to short-sighted callousness on the part of Truman and all those around him, including the British? The charge of short-sightedness may have more validity than that of callousness. To evalute either, however, it is necessary to think oneself back into the circumstance of the time. Brutal though the world of the 1980s may be in some ways, and appalling beyond belief though the contingent nuclear threat may have become, the carnage actually experienced in the mid-1940s was qualitatively quite different from that to which countries at peace, or even engaged in sporadic guerrilla fighting, are habituated. Now an accident involving a hundred deaths rings around the world. Then an estimated 45,000 people had recently been killed in three days of ‘conventional' bombing of Dresden. The comparable, and still more recent figure for the fire raids on Tokyo was 78,000. Dresden was unnecessary, but nobody thought that the war against Japan could be waged without such raids, and only one close advisor, Arnold, the Commander of the Army Air Force, believed that it could be won by
them alone. The rest believed that victory would involve an invasion of the Japanese mainland. In the aftermath of the bloody battle for Okinawa General Marshall estimated that this would cost half a million American casualties. In any direction therefore there stretched a path of carnage.

The news that the Alamogordo test had been a success, and that the bomb was available for use, which reached Truman on the fourth day of Potsdam, came to him as a relief and not as a burden. It justified a huge secret investment of money and resources which had been made on executive responsibility alone. It assured a much quicker victory at a cost of many fewer American casualties, and probably of fewer Japanese ones too. It eliminated the (fairly faint) possibility of the Russians getting the bomb first. And, Truman felt, it strengthened his position in trying to handle Stalin during the remaining two weeks of the conference and beyond.

This did not mean that he intended to threaten the Russians with the use of the bomb against them. Indeed he waited another week before almost casually informing Stalin of its existence, and then did so in terms so vague that had Stalin not been already well-informed through his spy network it might have meant little to him. What it did mean was that the Americans ceased to have an interest in getting the Russians to enter the war against Japan, and were therefore no longer hobbled by this consideration in arguing with them about Poland and the other puppet régimes which they were imposing in Eastern Europe.
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Henceforward it was the Russians who wanted to get in before the peace, and the Americans who had become indifferent. This new freedom however only released the flow of American argument and not the peoples of Hungary, Bulgaria and Roumania, where the Russians remained firmly in occupation and control.

Truman half, but only half, realized the qualitative difference between the new bomb and the previous use of massive quantities of high explosive. He recorded in his diary for July 25th: ‘It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler's crowd or Stalin's
did not discover the atomic bomb. It seems to me the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.'
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This immediately followed a passage in which he said that he had instructed Stimson to use it only against military objectives so that ‘soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children'.
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(Quite how this was reconcilable with what happened at Hiroshima, and still less with Hiroshima plus Nagasaki, is difficult to see. In reality with a weapon of such force, the distinction was unsustainable.)

What had been deliberately decided by Truman and his advisers was that it should not be used against Tokyo or Kyoto. But this saved face and buildings of note, not lives. The second or Nagasaki bomb seems to have been dropped, five days after the Hiroshima one, under a single authorization and without intermediate civilian re-appraisal. (It was a bomb of a somewhat different type but its release could hardly have been justified on the need for further experiment.
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) The issue here is tied up with whether more explicit warnings should have been given to the Japanese, both before Hiroshima and between then and Nagasaki, and whether indeed a demonstration in the waters of Tokyo Bay might have been equally effective.

These issues were in turn entangled with a dispute within the US Administration as to whether the unfortunate commitment to unconditional surrender could be interpreted sufficiently elastically to allow the Emperor of Japan to remain upon the throne. An undecisive approach to this, partly in deference to ‘progressive' opinion, made it more difficult to send clear messages which might have achieved peace without carnage.
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The Americans were also subject to the inhibition that they started with a total of only four bombs. Nagasaki used up the last but one. They did not therefore feel that they had much margin to spare for error, explosions which did not occur, or demonstrations which failed to convince.
Furthermore they were impatient to end the war before the Russians could become effectively involved, and start making in Asia the territorial and political demands which were disfiguring Eastern Europe.

Truman therefore allowed the two bombs to be dropped and the world to enter a new era; and he did so with a good conscience. At the time the decision did not lie heavy upon his mind, and he did not subsequently regret it. The case in his favour is considerable. He believed he was saving rather than sacrificing lives by acting as he did, and he may well have been right. Certainly no alternative figure with whom the ultimate decision could conceivably have rested-Roosevelt, Churchill, Attlee-would have acted otherwise. Equally certainly he did not offend Stalin or provide the Soviet determination to catch up by
dropping
the bomb. Stalin, when told by Truman at Potsdam what he broadly already knew, answered that he hoped the Americans would make good use of the weapon against Japan. What spurred the Russian nuclear programme was the knowledge that the Americans had the bomb, not their decision to use it. Possession Truman could not conceivably have concealed.

The case against him, Nagasaki apart, which in retrospect at least looks unnecessary and therefore inexcusable, is almost more one of style than of substance. He took the decisions and received the results of their being executed with an inappropriate lack of sombreness and sensitivity. He could be excused for not wholly foreseeing the qualitative nature of the change over which he was presiding. Very few people did. But he knew the immediate destructiveness, even if not the longer-term damage of the weapon he had unleashed. His reaction on board USS
Augusta,
when news of the successful attack on Hiroshima came through, which was that of rushing round the ship and proclaiming the news with glee, does not sound right. Nor does his laconic diary comment on the White House staff conference on the morning after Nagasaki ‘Nothing unusual to discuss.'
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No doubt a wringing of hands would have served no purpose other than that of self-indulgence.
But he was too brutal about those with less strong stomachs. When Robert Oppenheimer, a key figure in the development of the bomb, expressed remorse a few months after its use, Truman told Acheson that he had no patience with such a ‘cry-baby'.
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