Truman ended with a plea. “Now my friends, with the help of God and the wholehearted push which you can put behind this campaign, we can save this country from a continuation of the 80th Congress, and from misrule from now on. I must have your help. You must get in and push, and win this election.”
The clamor was deafening. “Everybody jumped up. It was the wildest thing I’ve ever seen,” remembered Frank Kelly, a journalist who was soon to join the Truman campaign staff. “Everybody was like zombies and all of a sudden they were alive. They were yelling. Truman amazed us all that night.”
The convention’s national committeewoman from Pennsylvania, Emma Guffey Miller, seized the moment. Convention workers helped her wheel onto the stage a five-foot replica of the Liberty Bell made out of eight thousand flowers, donated by the Allied Florists union of Greater Philadelphia. The floral Liberty Bell was a surprise to all. At Ms. Miller’s signal, men with broomsticks started poking inside the bell, and from within it, forty-eight pigeons—one for every state—flew frantically into the hall.
Panicked pigeons swirled around the stage. Some flew toward the ceiling, where the metal blades of four thirty-six-inch fans whirled at high speed. Former Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn was on the stage, swatting at birds flapping desperately around his bald head. The national radio audience heard him yelling, “Get those goddamned pigeons out of here.”
“I remember vividly all over the nationwide radio . . . you could hear the Speaker say, ‘Shoo, shoo, shoo,’” recalled Neale Roach, the convention’s director. Roach managed to flip the switch to the metal fans near the ceiling, turning them off. “All I could visualize was a bunch of blood and feathers being sprayed all over everybody.”
By the time Truman’s train was headed back to Washington, one of the most memorable national conventions of all time was over, and the empty hall in Philadelphia was littered with programs, newspaper balls, and a few feathers. As the train clattered over the tracks, news of Truman’s “Turnip Day” emergency congressional session spread nationwide. Republican Speaker of the House Joe Martin would remember being woken up at three o’clock that morning, at his sister’s house in North Attleborough, Massachusetts. His sister had picked up a ringing phone to find a reporter in Philadelphia yelling at her, wanting to talk to Speaker Martin.
“What do you want him for at this hour?” she inquired.
The reporter said, “Haven’t you heard about the President?”
“Arrived in Washington at the White House at 5:30 a.m., my usual getting up time,” Truman wrote in his diary the morning after the convention. By nine fifteen, he was in his upstairs study, surrounded by those familiar groaning White House walls. His door creaked open and the White House head butler Alonzo Fields peered in. Fields was surprised to see the president awake.
“Good morning, Fields,” Truman said.
“Good morning, Mr. President. We did not hear from you and I was nosing around to see if you were up.”
“Yes,” Truman said. His wife and daughter were still asleep. “You send me a tray up here when it is ready.”
“Sir,” said Fields, “you had a rough night.”
“Yes, I did,” said Truman. “But, Fields, I am going to win this thing if there is a God in heaven.”
“Yes sir,” said Fields. “With God’s help, you will win.”
15
“What Is at Stake Here Is the Very Survival of Western Civilization”
AT 11:30 A.M. ON JULY 15—just six hours after Truman’s return to the White House from Philadelphia—Secretary of Defense Forrestal and Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall arrived at the Oval Office for a scheduled appointment with the president. Forrestal had requested the meeting to discuss the bomb. It was time to address the vexing questions surrounding history’s most dangerous invention.
“The president was chipper and in very good form,” Forrestal wrote in his diary, “and obviously pleased with the results of his speech at the Convention last night.”
All over the country, Americans were reading in their newspapers about the most bizarre political convention that anyone could recall. Truman was not angry at the southern revolt, he told the secretary of defense: “I would have done the same thing myself if I were in their place and came from their states.”
Forrestal brought with him a nervous energy that tended to put people on edge. He had a flattened nose, having taken a punch to the face as a young boxer in the military. He had earned a fortune on Wall Street before taking a job as undersecretary of the Navy under FDR in 1940, and although he did not need to work, he threw himself into his job so completely, he had become incapable of relaxing. On this morning, in discussing the bomb, he raised what he called the “serious question as to the wisdom of relying upon an agency other than the user of such a weapon, to assure the integrity and usability of such a weapon.” In other words, he was asking the president to hand custody of the bomb over to the Defense Department.
Truman did not like what he was hearing. No one but the nation’s chief executive should be able to make the decision to use an atomic weapon, he argued. He did not want, in his words, “to have some dashing lieutenant colonel decide when would be the proper time to drop one.”
More than any other American, Truman understood the power of an atomic weapon—politically, psychologically, and practically. At
