Grave risk accompanied either option—to include the Soviets in US nuclear research, or to exclude them. But Stimson believed that sharing the technology involved less risk. The difference meant “some chance” of “saving civilization not for five or twenty years, but forever.”
The bombs used on Japan—code-named Fat Man and Little Boy—shocked the world with their destructive capacity, Stimson said, but the bombs soon to be born would be infinitely more powerful. Scientists were concerned, Stimson explained, that future bombs would have the potential to ignite the earth’s atmosphere and “put an end to the world.”
Truman ruminated. He alone had ordered the atomic bombings of Japan; now, six weeks after the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fallout continued to poison relations with the Soviets. Truman’s advisers were sharply divided. Attorney General Tom Clark believed the bomb was the best leverage the Americans had in terms of negotiating with the Soviets. Clark thought the United States “should continue to carry a big stick,” according to the meeting minutes.
Another participant at the table—Henry Wallace of Iowa, the secretary of commerce—was dubious, and it was Wallace who would soon voice the loudest dissent. Wallace agreed with Stimson. The Soviets would soon have the bomb. “Science,” the commerce secretary said, “cannot be restrained.” Why not share the secret now, and make the Soviets partners in the quest for future peace?
Wallace’s words carried significant weight. The fifty-six-year-old former vice president was a hero among liberal Democrats. In the Cabinet Room, he was unnerved. Truman was not inclined to share nuclear secrets with the Soviets. For the time being, Wallace would keep his thoughts to himself. He believed Truman and his closest advisers were on the wrong path. As he wrote in his diary, “Their attitude will make for war eventually.”
“The pressure here is becoming so great I hardly get my meals in,” Truman wrote his mother on October 13, 1945. Three weeks after the bomb debate, he faced increasing hostility in Washington and a disintegrating approval rating. A new sign appeared on his desk—painted glass on a walnut base, measuring thirteen inches long and two and a half inches tall. On the side facing the president, it said, I’M FROM MISSOURI. On the side facing whomever walked into the Oval Office, it said, THE BUCK STOPS HERE!
Truman doubled down on increasingly controversial policies. He knew his ideas would spark fury from the Republicans and even conservative Democrats, but he felt that he was right. On October 23, he made what the popular columnist Roscoe Drummond called at the time his “boldest, most vigorous, most uncompromising speech” yet to demand that Congress enact a “Universal Military Training” plan, in which every American male between age eighteen and twenty-two would serve the nation for a year in some capacity. It was the only way, he declared, “to maintain the power with which to assist other peace-loving nations to enforce its authority.”
America was sick of war and tired of service; millions of voters were repulsed by the idea. It was all but ignored by Congress.
On November 19, 1945, Truman called on Congress to pass a national compulsory health insurance program for all Americans “who work for a living,” regardless of their ability to pay for health care. “Under the plan I suggest,” Truman argued, “our people would continue to get medical and hospital services just as they do now—on the basis of their own voluntary decisions and choices. Our doctors and hospitals would continue to deal with disease with the same professional freedom as now. There would, however, be this all-important difference: whether or not patients get the services they need would not depend on how much they can afford to pay at the time.”
Republicans pounced. Truman’s plan was “socialized medicine,” said Senator Robert Taft of Ohio—“Mr. Republican.” The American Medical Association opposed the plan. So too did many Democrats. The initiative went nowhere.
Truman began to lose the confidence of those advisers he depended on most. In Moscow, Secretary of State James Byrnes was conducting meetings with the Soviets, and he released to news agencies a communiqué on the proceedings without first informing the president. Truman learned of the outcome of the negotiations by reading the newspaper. He was livid.
When Truman asked General Douglas MacArthur—the supreme commander of the Allied occupying forces in Japan—to make a trip to Washington for a meeting in the White House, MacArthur defied the president’s request and refused to come home, citing “the extraordinarily dangerous situation in Japan.” (Truman told staffers that he was “going to do something with that fellow.”)
In February 1946 Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr.—an African American Democrat from Harlem—attacked the Truman family in an interview with newspaper reporters after Bess Truman attended an event at a segregated theater, closed to African Americans. “My mind is not made up on some things but there is one thing of which I am now certain,” Congressman Powell declared. “I will not vote for Harry Truman for president in 1948.”
That same month, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes—the self-styled “old curmudgeon,” a highly respected Roosevelt holdover—resigned after a disagreement over Truman’s choice of a new undersecretary of the navy. Ickes accused Truman of trying to appoint a political crony who had grave conflicts of interest. Ickes held a press conference and viciously rebuked the president. The Los Angeles Times called it “the biggest press conference in the history of Washington”; “the White House will be rocking on its foundations from the reverberations two years from now” (i.e., the next presidential election).
When railroad workers went on strike in the spring of 1946, paralyzing the nation’s transportation system and threatening the safety of the economy, Truman came up with a plan to draft striking railroad workers into
