“We are faced with the greatest task with which we have ever been faced,” Truman said into the microphone. That task was to bring freedom to humanity all over the world and cultivate peace and prosperity at home. “It is going to take the help of all of us,” the president stated. “I know we are going to do it.”
All around the globe on this night, chaos reigned.
In the Far East, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still smoldered under radioactive clouds from the atomic bombings on August 6 and 9. Two days before Truman announced Japan’s unconditional surrender, the first aerial photos of Hiroshima post-detonation appeared on the front page of the New York Times. It was almost impossible to understand what this new weapon was, how it could harness the power of the universe, and what it would mean for the future. The secretary of commerce, Henry Wallace, put the situation in perspective, writing in his diary the day after the Hiroshima bombing, “Everyone seemed to feel that a new epoch in the world’s history had been ushered in. The scramble for the control of this new power is going to be one of the most unusual struggles the world has ever seen.”
In Europe, surviving populations clawed out of the rubble from nearly 2.7 million tons of bombs dropped by Allied airpower between 1940 and 1945. Huge numbers of people were without food and water. In France, according to the nation’s Ministry of Public Health, more than half of the children living in industrial areas had rickets. A third of the children in Belgium were tubercular. The US State Department estimated that nine million displaced persons were homeless in Europe—many of them Jews who had survived Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Some of the most gruesome death camps—Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück—had only recently been liberated, revealing the true depth of Nazi madness. At Auschwitz, the liberating Red Army had discovered more than fourteen thousand pounds of human hair.
In June 1945 the State Department had sent a lawyer named Earl G. Harrison to investigate the concentration camps, and his now-famous report—delivered to Truman just days after the president announced the surrender of Japan—painted a picture of a desperate situation. The occupying Allied forces in Europe had little resources to help the hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews, who were still dying in large numbers, right before their eyes. “As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them,” Harrison wrote.
In the Middle East, Soviet, French, British, and American troops occupied the homelands of increasingly bitter ethnic and sectarian tribes. China was on the brink of a Communist revolution. The British government was destitute and desperate for loans. The United States and Soviet Union, meanwhile, were emerging from the war as history’s first two global superpowers, and relations between the two were declining profoundly.
“Secular history offers few, if any, parallels to the events of the past week,” reported CBS radio news anchor Edward R. Murrow, at the time of Japan’s surrender. “And seldom, if ever, has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured.”
In Washington, the nation’s elite politicians and officials were set to confront a scintillating mystery. Truman was a new president, a vice president who had risen to the Oval Office just four months earlier upon the death of Franklin Roosevelt. His obscurity confounded the world. What exactly did he intend to do as president of the United States? The atomic bombs had ended the war so unexpectedly quickly, there had been no time to plan for the postwar future, and the American people knew little about their new president’s politics.
How would the administration handle the staggering challenge of converting to a peacetime economy? What would be the administration’s policy regarding the Soviets and the bomb? What was Truman going to do about the millions of American workers who would now be laid off from domestic wartime jobs and pushed out of factories? How many of the 12.2 million men in uniform would be allowed to come home and resume their lives, and when?
Many of Truman’s friends on Capitol Hill were sure he would bring conservatism to a Democratic presidency, as so many had hoped for so long. Others were convinced he would maintain the path of FDR and embrace Roosevelt’s liberal New Deal policies.
“Whither Harry S. Truman?” asked the columnist Edward T. Folliard in the Washington Post, days after the war ended. “Is he going to the left, the right, or down the middle of the road?”
Politically, Truman had to know: This was not going to go well for him. Roosevelt had held the White House for over 12 years, and there is a natural tendency in democratic societies for periodic change. Churchill was unceremoniously swept from power in London in July 1945. In all of America’s 169-year history, only twice before had a vice president been elected following a two-term presidency. And in those years, the political environment was hardly as fraught as it was now, in the aftermath of World War II and at the dawn of the atomic age. “The President’s task was reminiscent of that in the first chapter of Genesis,” noted Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, “to help the free world emerge from chaos without blowing the whole world apart in the process.”
Even before the war ended, Truman had begun to confidentially lay out a political philosophy of his own, what he called “the foundation of my administration.”
In July 1945—the month before the atomic bombings of Japan—he had ventured to the Potsdam Conference in Allied-occupied Germany for a series of talks
