For years under Roosevelt, the political climate in Washington had been growing more hostile, the partisan tension mounting. By 1945, a Democrat had occupied the White House for nearly thirteen years. With the Depression subsided, the war over, and a new president deemed by many to be weak and inexperienced, Republicans believed that the nation was ripe for a return to conservatism. Truman’s 21-Point Program rallied the cause. Senator Charles Halleck of Indiana summed up Republican reaction, the day after Truman released his domestic agenda.
“This begins the campaign of 1946,” Halleck said, referring to the upcoming midterm election. “The gloves would be off from here on out.”
2
“The Buck Stops Here!”
ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 21—five weeks after Truman’s announcement of Japan’s surrender—the president arrived in the West Wing in a foul mood. The offices teemed with employees who, like their boss, were fairly new on the job. Here was the handsome thirty-seven-year-old Irish American Matthew Connelly manning the Oval Office door as the president’s appointments secretary. Here was the president’s secretary Roberta Barrows, with two incessantly jingling telephones on her desk, and press secretary Charlie Ross trailing an ever-present cloud of tobacco smoke.
The pressure of the job was getting to Truman. In his morning staff meeting, he erupted in anger. “[Truman] said . . . he was liable to come in some morning with a headful of decisions and tell them all to ‘go to hell,’” assistant press secretary Eben Ayers wrote in his diary of this meeting. “He said he did not want ‘this job’—the presidency—but he’s got it and he’s going to do it.”
In the weeks after the president had announced Japan’s unconditional surrender, every typewriter in every newsroom in America, it seemed, was firing off bad news at machine-gun speed—with Truman’s name in the headline. At megacorporations like Ford Motor Company and Westinghouse Electric, strikes had crippled production. The United States was on the brink of the biggest labor crisis in its modern history. Prices of consumer goods were rapidly rising, and Congress had ignored the president’s anti-inflation policy, which Truman had called “a declaration of war against this new enemy of the United States.”
Rising unemployment.
An acute shortage of meat in grocery stores.
A housing crisis. In Chicago alone, it was reported, one hundred thousand military veterans were homeless, living on the streets.
The nation’s economy was in the grips of unprecedented change. During the war, the entire country—government, free enterprise, military—had joined in what Roosevelt termed “the Arsenal of Democracy,” united in the goal of defeating the Axis powers. It could be expected that a return to normalcy would be rocky, but the government now found itself in gridlock, the president at the intersection of conflicting advice. “Everybody wants something at the expense of everybody else,” he wrote his mother and sister, “and nobody thinks much of the other fellow.”
All the while, the foreign policy of the United States was being challenged as never before. The Soviets were aggressively expanding power and control across Eastern Europe, shamelessly flouting agreements they had made at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences. All over the globe, the war’s destruction created power vacuums, and the United States and the USSR had become rivals in the effort to fill them—with the American brand of freedom and democracy or the Soviet brand of totalitarianism. Many in Washington were already predicting military conflict. One of the State Department’s chief foreign policy experts, Joseph Grew, had come to the conclusion that “a future war with Soviet Russia is as certain as anything in this world.”
What position was the Truman administration going to take?
At 2 p.m. on September 21, hours after Truman blew up at his morning staff meeting, he met with his cabinet to discuss the most explosive issue confronting his administration. The proposed agenda: “The atomic bomb, and the peacetime development of atomic energy.” What was to be done with this revolutionary new science? The US State Department used the term balance of power to describe a recipe for peace between the two emerging superpowers. And yet nothing tipped the balance more than the bomb. The United States had it; the Soviet Union did not. The science behind the weapon was still a closely held secret, but it was only a matter of time before the Soviets developed their own atomic technology.
In the Cabinet Room, just down the hall from the Oval Office, Truman sat in the president’s customary chair, with windows behind him offering a view of the White House Rose Garden. He turned first to his secretary of war, Henry Stimson. It was Stimson’s seventy-eighth birthday and a bittersweet day. He was the only Republican in Truman’s cabinet, and a holdover from FDR’s administration. His career in high-level federal government went back thirty-five years (he had been secretary of war under William H. Taft), and it was his final day of work before retirement. Stimson had headed up the Manhattan Project in the executive branch since the early days of its existence. Now he was called upon to recommend policy for atomic energy going forward.
Stimson had come to a controversial conclusion: He wanted the United States to partner with the Soviets, to share the secret of atomic energy—now, before it was too late. “We do not have a secret to give away,” Stimson said, according to the meeting minutes. “The secret will give itself away. The problem is how to treat the secret with respect to the safety of the world.” The bomb had made the Soviets deeply suspicious
