The United States had roughly fifty atomic bombs stockpiled. As of 1948, the Soviets had none. During the three Operation Sandstone nuclear tests in the Pacific that year, military scientists had designed a long-range detection system that could—if it worked—tip off US officials to an atomic-bomb detonation in other parts of the world, so the United States could monitor Soviet activities in this regard. If the Kremlin tested a bomb, Truman would know about it, and quickly. According to the latest estimates from the CIA—in a memo to the president dated July 6, 1948, two weeks before Truman’s nomination in Philadelphia—“it is estimated that the earliest date by which it is remotely possible that the USSR may have completed its first atomic bomb is mid-1950, but the most probable date is believed to be mid-1953.”*
For Truman, the whole discussion with regard to atomic bombs and how to stockpile them and when one might be used was a stiff reminder that he was going to have to conduct his election campaign under excruciating pressure. The tension from within Washington was growing. The threat to national security due to instability outside US borders was too. Violence was rampant in Palestine. The Israelis were clamoring for a $100 million loan from the United States, and for the US government to lift an embargo on the shipment of arms to the Middle East. Communism was spreading deep into the Far East. According to a US intelligence report from that month, “The position of the present [US-allied] National Government [in China] is so precarious that its fall may occur at any time.”
On July 19—four days after Truman’s nomination—the president’s cabinet convened again to discuss the standoff in Berlin. Secretary of State Marshall outlined the situation for the president. General Lucius Clay was recommending the deployment of armed convoys—specifically, convoys of two hundred trucks with an engineering battalion as an escort—to push through Soviet territory to the western sector of Berlin. There would be casualties, and the potential for all-out war. General Clay’s bosses in Washington, headed by Army Chief of Staff General Omar Bradley, had countered Clay, preferring to continue the present airlift. Even as Truman sat talking with his cabinet, across the Atlantic in Berlin, thundering C-54 airplanes were landing and taking off in western Berlin, delivering hundreds of tons of food and supplies daily.
Secretary of Defense Forrestal pointed out to Truman that there was not enough manpower in the army to fight if the Soviets started a war in Berlin. Truman wrote in his diary, “We’ll stay in Berlin . . . I don’t pass the buck, nor do I alibi out of any decision I make.”
The day after this cabinet meeting, on July 20, 1948, Truman issued Executive Order 9979—a peacetime draft that would call for nearly ten million men to register for the military over the next two months, a draft that did not make Harry Truman any more popular among war-weary voters. The draft executive order was tantamount to political suicide four months before an election, but Truman believed he had no choice.
Everywhere, there was talk of war. “The atmosphere in Washington is no longer a postwar atmosphere,” the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop wrote. “It is, to put it bluntly, a prewar atmosphere . . . It is now universally admitted that war within the next few months is certainly possible.”
In the days after the Democratic National Convention, Republicans reacted in shock to news that the president had called the Eightieth Congress back into an emergency session. They had followed the Democratic National Convention closely on radio and TV, but almost all were snoozing when Truman made his 2 a.m. acceptance speech.
By lunchtime the next day, the term Turnip Day was a national phenomenon—and a gauntlet. What were the Republicans going to do about the special session? With Congress in recess, many of these politicians had already left Washington to visit their families or head off on vacation.
In the Senate building in Washington, the congressional leaders of the GOP who were still in the city met to strategize—Senators Taft of Ohio, Vandenberg of Michigan, Eugene Millikin of Colorado, and the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Representative Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, among others. As Scott remembered the scene, Vandenberg told his colleagues that the Eightieth Congress had to compromise and give in to Truman.
“Bob,” Vandenberg said to Taft, “I think we ought to do something. We ought to do whatever we can to show that we are trying to use the two weeks [the emergency session] as best we can. Then we have a better case to take before the public.”
Taft was livid. Scott would remember him saying, “We are not going to give that fellow anything,” referring to Truman. Remembered Scott: “Anyone familiar with Bob Taft’s method of ending a conversation will know that was the end of it.”
Scott himself gave a statement to the press following this meeting: “It is the act of a desperate man [Truman] who is willing to destroy the unity and dignity of his country and his Government in a time of world crisis to obtain partisan advantage after he himself has lost the confidence of the people.”
A few days later, on July 28, Taft went on national radio to fight back. “The Constitution says that the President may convene Congress in special session ‘on extraordinary occasions,’” the senator began. “This call was announced by the President
