“I am introducing a Resolution,” Truman said to his fellow senators, “asking for an investigation of the National Defense Program.” Truman’s idea was to set up a Senate committee to police government military spending. Soon he was traveling the nation with a team of senators—five Democrats, two Republicans—uncovering inefficiencies and raw-material bottlenecks. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States entered the war, Truman found himself in an extraordinary position. The so-called Truman Committee was poised to become vital to the war effort. When the committee released its first report in 1942, on cost overruns at military construction sites, the Washington Post commented: “To thousands, the first question after the shock of the Truman report must have been: Who in the world is Truman?”
Two years later, as an ailing FDR prepared for his fourth election campaign, his advisers convinced him to drop his vice president, Henry Wallace, from the 1944 ticket. Wallace had a following, but he had failed to ingratiate himself with many in Roosevelt’s inner circle, and aides feared his far-left-leaning views and personal idiosyncrasies would be a liability in the campaign. FDR needed someone new. “Truman just dropped into the slot,” recalled Ed Flynn, a powerful Bronx political leader who was in the White House with FDR on July 11, the night the decision was made.
Truman himself had no idea of the machinations that would land him on the 1944 ticket—not yet. As the party delegates readied to nominate a VP candidate at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago Stadium, Truman agreed to take a phone call from Roosevelt, who was in Washington. The Missourian ended up in a crowded suite at the Blackstone Hotel on July 22. The phone rang. A party official named Bob Hannegan picked up, and Roosevelt’s voice came through so loud, others in the hotel suite could hear.
“Bob,” FDR said, “have you got that fellow lined up yet?”
“No,” said Hannegan, with Truman standing next to him. “He is the contrariest goddamn mule from Missouri I ever dealt with.”
“Well, you tell that senator that if he wants to break up the Democratic party in the middle of a war, that’s his responsibility.”
Truman agreed to follow Roosevelt’s lead, and was nominated by the party at a frenzied convention meeting that night. On election night—November 7, 1944—FDR won a fourth term, and Harry Truman became America’s vice president.
Eighty-two days after the beginning of his fourth term, FDR was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage, and the first thing that could be heard out of the mouths of many when they learned the news was: “Good God! Truman will be President!” Truman was a few weeks shy of his sixty-first birthday. He took the oath of office on April 12, 1945, with Bess and his only child, Margaret, standing beside him. “The gravest question mark in every American heart is about Truman,” Michigan senator Arthur Vandenberg wrote in his diary the night Truman was sworn in. “Can he swing the job?”
Patriotism and victory were on Truman’s side. Democrats and Republicans rallied behind the new president. The Allies won the war, and revealed the war’s greatest secret—the atomic bomb. Truman’s approval rating hit 87 percent after the Japanese surrender, higher than Roosevelt’s had ever been. But in the weeks following, that number began to sink slowly and steadily, and with it, the hopes of the entire Democratic Party.
4
“I Was Amazed at How Calm He Seemed in the Face of Political Disaster”
ON JULY 9, 1946, ROUGHLY eleven months after Truman announced the surrender of Japan, he held a lunch at the White House unlike any that had ever occurred in the executive mansion. Administration officials gathered around a projection machine, and fresh footage of the latest atomic bomb test rolled. The test shot had gone off eight days earlier, on July 1, at a site in the Pacific. Film cameras captured the fury: A sudden white light blinded the camera lens momentarily, giving way to a ballooning fireball that resembled a new sun being born.
The president watched silently as the footage showed the shot from different camera angles. No one in the room felt the impact more than Truman. The death toll in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was so vast, the actual numbers would never be known, and Truman was haunted by the decision he had made to use the bomb. It was the most controversial decision any president had ever made, and Truman feared having to make it again.
Sitting near the president, Henry Wallace—now the secretary of commerce—said the explosion looked like a tremendous “blooming chrysanthemum.” Wallace leaned over to Dean Acheson, an official from the State Department, and said that in fifteen or twenty years, “You will look toward Washington and see these beautiful chrysanthemums arising one after another.”
The latest bomb test was the culmination of a series of events over the past five months that made everyone watching the footage feel as if World War III was in the making. On February 9, 1946, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin made a rare appearance on a speaker’s platform, at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. An avoidance of future war “was impossible under the present capitalistic development of world economy,” Stalin said in his speech. He announced a Five-Year Plan of preparation “to guarantee our country against any eventuality.” His Five-Year Plan sounded suspiciously like the Four-Year Plan Adolf Hitler had announced in 1936, which in retrospect was an economic and industrial campaign to prepare for war. Clearly alluding to the atomic bomb, Stalin added a promise that Soviet scientists would “not only catch up with but also surpass those abroad.”
Less than a month later, on a stage at Westminster College in Truman’s home state of Missouri, former British prime minister Winston Churchill delivered his chilling “Iron Curtain” speech.
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has
