William Howard Taft, as Governor General of the Philippines under Calvin Coolidge, as Secretary of State under Herbert Hoover. Roosevelt had called him back to active service in 1940 and with able assistance especially from George Marshall and despite insomnia and migraines that frequently laid him low he had built and administered the most powerful military organization in the history of the world. He was a man of duty and of rectitude. “The chief lesson I have learned in a long life,” he wrote at the end of his career, “is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way to make him untrustworthy is to distrust him and show your distrust.” Stimson sought to apply the lesson impartially to men and to nations. In the spring of 1945 he was greatly worried about the use and consequences of the atomic bomb.
The other man who spoke to Truman, on the following day, April 13, was James Francis Byrnes, known as Jimmy, sixty-six years old, a private citizen of South Carolina since the beginning of April but before then for three years what Franklin Roosevelt had styled “assistant President”: Director of Economic Stabilization and then Director of War Mobilization, with offices in the White House. While FDR ran the war and foreign affairs, that is, Byrnes had run the country. “Jimmy Byrnes… came to see me,” writes Truman of his second briefing on the atomic bomb, “and even he told me few details, though with great solemnity he said that we were perfecting an explosive great enough to destroy the whole world.” Then or soon afterward, before Truman met with Stimson again, Byrnes added a significant twist to his tale: “that in his belief the bomb might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.”
At that first Friday meeting Truman asked Byrnes to transcribe his shorthand notes on the Yalta Conference, three months past, which Byrnes had attended as one of Roosevelt's advisers and about which Truman, merely the Vice President then, knew Uttle. Yalta represented nearly all Byrnes' direct experience of foreign affairs. It was more than Truman had. Under the circumstances the new President found it sufficient and informed his colleague that he meant to make him Secretary of State. Byrnes did not object. He insisted that he be given a free hand, however, as Roosevelt had given him in domestic affairs, and Truman agreed.
“A small, wiry, neatly made man,” a team of contemporary observers describes Jimmy Byrnes, “with an odd, sharply angular face from which his sharp eyes peer out with an expression of quizzical geniality.” Dean Acheson, then an Assistant Secretary of State, thought Byrnes overconfident and insensitive, “a vigorous extrovert, accustomed to the lusty exchange of South Carolina politics.” Truman assayed the South Carolinian most shrewdly a few months after their April discussion in a private diary he intermittently kept:
Had a long talk with my able and conniving Secretary of State. My but he has a keen mind! And he is an honest man. But all country politicians are alike. They are sure all other politicians are circuitous in their dealings. When they are told the straight truth, unvarnished, it is never believed — an asset
A politician's politician, Byrnes had managed in his thirty-two years of public life to serve with distinction in all three branches of the federal government. He was self-made from the ground up. His father died before he was born. His mother learned dressmaking to survive. Young Jimmy found work at fourteen, his last year of formal education, in a law office, but in lieu of classroom study one of the law partners kindly guided him through a comprehensive reading list. His mother in the meantime taught him shorthand and in 1900, at twenty-one, he earned appointment as a court reporter. He read for the law under the judge whose circuit he reported and passed the bar in 1904. He ran first, in 1908, for solicitor, the South Carolina equivalent of district attorney, and made himself known prosecuting murderers. More than forty-six stump debates won him election to Congress in 1910; in 1930, after fourteen years in the House and five years out of office, he was elected to the Senate. By then he was already actively promoting Franklin Roosevelt's approaching presidential bid. Byrnes served as one of the candidate's speechwriters during the 1932 campaign and afterward worked hard as Roosevelt's man in the Senate to push through the New Deal. His reward, in 1941, was a seat on the United States Supreme Court, which he resigned in 1942 to move to the White House to take over operating the complicated wartime emergency program of wage and price controls, the assistant Presidency of which Roosevelt spoke.
In 1944 everyone understood that Roosevelt's fourth term would be his last. The man he selected for Vice President would therefore almost certainly take the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1948. Byrnes expected to be that man and Roosevelt encouraged him. But the assistant President was a conservative Democrat from the Deep South, and at the last minute Roosevelt compromised instead on the man from Missouri, Harry S. Truman. “I freely admit that I was disappointed,” Byrnes writes with understatement approaching lockjaw, “and felt hurt by President Roosevelt's action.” He made a point of visiting the European front with George Marshall in September 1944, in the midst of the presidential campaign; when he returned FDR had to appeal to him formally by letter — a document Byrnes could show around — to endorse the ticket with a speech.
Byrnes undoubtedly regarded Truman as a usurper: if not Truman but he had been Roosevelt's choice he would be President of the United States now. Truman knew Byrnes' attitude but needed the old pro badly to help him run the country and face the world. Hence the prize of State. The Secretary of State was the highest-ranking member of the cabinet and under the rules of succession then obtaining was the officer next in line for the Presidency as well when the Vice Presidency was vacant. Short of the Presidency itself, State was the most powerful office Truman had to give.
Vannevar Bush and James Bryant Conant had needed months to convince Henry Stimson to take up consideration of the bomb's challenge in the postwar era. He had not been ready in late October 1944 when Bush pressed him for action and he had not been ready in early December when Bush pressed him again. By then Bush knew what he thought the problem needed, however:
We proposed that the Secretary of War suggest to the President the establishment of a committee or commission with the duty of preparing plans. These would include the drafting of legislation and the drafting of appropriate releases to be made public at the proper time… We were all in agreement that the State Department should now be brought in.
Stimson allowed one of his trusted aides, Harvey H. Bundy, a Boston lawyer, father of William P. and McGeorge, at least to begin formulating a membership roster and list of duties for such a committee. But he did not yet know even in broad outline what basic policy to recommend.
Bohr's ideas, variously diluted, floated by that time in the Washington air. Bohr had sought to convince the American government that only early discussion with the Soviet Union of the mutual dangers of a nuclear arms race could forestall such an arms race once the bomb became known. (He would try again in April to see Roosevelt; Felix Frankfurter and Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, would be strolling in a Washington park discussing Bohr's best avenue of approach when the bells of the city's churches began tolling the news of the President's death.) Apparently no one within the executive branch was sufficiently convinced of the
I told him of my views as to the future of S-1 [Stimson's code for the bomb] in connection with Russia: that I knew they were spying on our work but had not yet gotten any real knowledge of it and that, while I was troubled about the possible effect of keeping from them even now that work, I believed that it was essential not to take them into our confidence until we were sure to get a real quid pro quo from our frankness. I said I had no illusions as to the possibility of keeping permanently such a secret but that I did not think it was yet time to share it with Russia. He said he thought he agreed with me.
In mid-February, after talking again to Bush, Stimson confided to his diary what he wanted in exchange for news of the bomb. Bohr's conviction that only an open world modeled in some sense on the republic of science could answer the challenge of the bomb had drifted, in Bush's mind, to a proposal for an international pool of scientific research. Of such an arrangement Stimson wrote that “it would be inadvisable to put it into full force yet, until we had gotten all we could in Russia in the way of liberalization in exchange for S-l.” That is, the quid pro quo Stimson thought the United States should demand from the Soviet Union was the democratization of its government. What for Bohr was the inevitable outcome of a solution to the problem of the bomb — an open world where differences in social and political conditions would be visible to everyone and therefore under pressure to
