The Man with the Iron Heart

them because they were the experts and they were on the spot. Something like that, anyhow. But Harry Truman didn’t seem to work that way. He’d done what he’d done, and he was ready to argue about it. Right or wrong, he had the courage of his convictions.

“And now I’ve wasted enough time on you,” he continued. “Too much time, to tell you the truth. Let’s get back to business. Who else has got a question for me?” Hands shot into the air. Truman pointed at a heavyset bald man. “Drew?”

“How long can we keep troops in Germany if the American people decide they don’t want to any more?” Drew Pearson asked.

If the look the President sent him didn’t scream Et tu, Brute? Tom had never seen one that did. “Since I don’t believe the American people are going to decide any such thing, that isn’t worth answering,” Truman said.

“Diana McGraw will tell you you’re wrong, sir,” Pearson responded.

“I respect Diana McGraw. I sympathize with her, too, and with all the good people who’ve lost loved ones because of Heydrich’s fanatics. Hitler called Heydrich the man with the iron heart, and for once Adolf wasn’t lying.” Truman deigned to shoot Tom another glare. Then he went on, “I talked with her when she came to picket the White House last month. I’m convinced she’s sincere. I’m also convinced she’s wrong. If we run away from Germany without finishing the job we set out to do there, we’ll be worse off in the long run than if we stay. And not in the very long run, either.”

“More and more people seem to agree with what she’s saying,” Drew Pearson observed.

“Well, so what? That doesn’t make them right.” Yes, Truman could be as stubborn as a Missouri mule. “And just because there are more of them than there were, that doesn’t mean there are very many of them. Most Americans can see farther than the end of their nose-and a good thing, too.” He nodded to another correspondent. “What’s on your mind, Walter?”

Walter Lippmann asked him a question about farm legislation. Truman answered it with every sign of relief. Most of the time, foreign-policy issues weren’t what swayed elections. In the aftermath of the biggest war in the history of the world-no, not in the aftermath, dammit, because it wasn’t over yet, no matter who’d signed which surrender documents-the usual rules might not apply. But they would if Truman had anything to do with it.

Tom Schmidt remembered the line from The Wizard of Oz. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” the Wizard had said desperately. That was only a movie, but the President was trying to pull the same stunt for real. Could he make Germany disappear from voters’ minds? To Tom, that would be a bigger trick than any the Wizard managed.

He wasn’t the only one with such thoughts on his mind. When Truman pointed to another reporter, the man said, “Seems like the Republicans want to use Germany as a club to hit you over the head with in the upcoming elections. What will you do if you have to deal with a Republican Congress next year?”

“Ha! That’ll be the day!” Truman was a dumpy little guy, but he had an actor’s control of his expressions and attitudes. His whole body radiated contempt.

“Work with me, Mr. President,” the newspaperman urged. “Suppose they do win the election. Then they’ll be holding the purse strings. What can you do if they decide not to appropriate any money for the occupation?”

FDR would have set his granite chin and looked indomitable. Harry Truman didn’t have that kind of chin. He didn’t look indomitable, either-he looked pissed off. “They wouldn’t dare,” he snapped. Before the reporter could even try to follow up, Truman shook his head. “I know what you’re gonna say, Bernard. Suppose they do, right? Okay, I’m supposing. And this is what I suppose. No matter what kind of stupid stunts the Republicans try and pull with the budget, this country still only has one commander-in-chief, and you’re looking at him. The United States of American isn’t a box turtle, no matter what some people think. It can’t pull its head and its legs inside its shell and pretend the rest of the world isn’t out there. That got us in trouble before the war. It’d be a lot worse now.”

Yet another reporter said, “If you were to try to do something after Congress said you couldn’t…That’s how Andrew Johnson got impeached.”

“Congress has no business telling me how to run the country’s foreign policy,” Truman retorted. “And this is all moonshine, anyhow. I’m just indulging Bernie there. Everything in Germany will be fine. The Republicans won’t win in November. And even if they do, they aren’t asinine enough to play games with the public purse.”

“You hope,” the reporter said.

“No, I hope they do try it. They’d give me all the platform I need to bang on ’em like a drum in 1948,” Truman replied. “But they’re just not that stupid…. Well, a few of them are, but not many.”

“What if they run Eisenhower against you?” Walter Lippmann asked.

“Nobody knows whether Ike’s a Republican or a Democrat. I’m not sure he knows himself,” the President answered. He got a laugh; even Tom chuckled. Truman went on, “But I am sure of one thing: Eisenhower likes the idea of pulling out of Germany even less than I do. And they said it couldn’t be done! For the isolationists to line up behind him would be as foolish as for the antiwar Democrats to line up behind General McClellan against Lincoln in 1864.”

“But the Democrats did do that,” Lippmann pointed out. Tom thought he remembered the same thing, but hadn’t taken American history in a hell of a long time.

“Damn straight they did-and they got their heads handed to them that November,” Truman said. “If the Republicans want to try what didn’t work for my party in 1948, good luck to ’em.”

He didn’t lack for confidence. Tom had known that before. Seeing it face to face was more than a little daunting, though. He had to remind himself that being confident and having good reasons for confidence were two different critters. Would Harry Truman remind himself of the same thing? Off this morning’s performance, Tom didn’t think so.

“God Damn the Russians to Hell and gone!” Reinhard Heydrich ground out.

Hans Klein made sympathetic noises. “No one ever hit them a lick like the one we gave them New Year’s Eve,” he said. “Not even Stalin purged their officers the way we did.”

“Wunderbar,” Heydrich said sourly. “Just killing them didn’t matter. Killing them and accomplishing something does.”

“The new men in those slots won’t be as sharp as the ones we got rid of,” Klein said. “That’s bound to help us later on.”

“Wunderbar.” Heydrich sounded even more morose this time. He didn’t know what the hell to do about the Russians. In the western occupation zones, the resistance was going as well as he’d hoped, maybe better. Lots of Americans and Englishmen and even some Frenchmen were yelling that holding Germany down was more expensive than it was worth.

They hadn’t taken a blow even close to the one poisoned liquor gave the Red Army. But the Russians didn’t miss a beat. They hanged Germans and shot them and deported them and hunted Heydrich’s underground more ferociously than ever. Nothing seemed to faze them. The Reichsprotektor couldn’t understand it.

Well, Hitler hadn’t understood it, either. He’d said one good kick would bring the whole rotten structure of the Soviet Union crashing down. And he’d proceeded to deliver the good kick with 3,000,000 men, 3,000 panzers, and 2,000 planes. And the USSR staggered and lurched and reeled…and then, like one of those toys weighted at the bottom, bobbed upright again in spite of everything. And it started kicking back, and didn’t stop kicking till the Reich lay prostrate under its boot.

The same thing was happening now. Knock out that many top French or British or American officers-hell, knock out that many top German officers-and the army you’d just sucker-punched would do its best imitation of a chicken right after it met the hatchet.

(Which reminded Heydrich: what would happen to the resistance if he went down? Jochen Peiper, his number two, was a pup-he’d just turned thirty. He was a damned capable pup, though. He ought to be able to carry on. Heydrich had to hope so.)

As for the Red Army, the Germans had seen too often, to their dismay and discomfiture, that it had an almost unlimited supply of human spare parts. Take out a bunch of people and Stalin would simply bolt on replacements and carry on as before. Maybe the military engine ran rough for a while. But it kept running. Since it hadn’t had much luck rooting out Heydrich’s fighters, it avenged itself on the German people as a whole.

When Heydrich growled about that, Johannes Klein said, “It’s bad for even more reasons than you’re talking