Harry Truman and the atomic bomb
Truman had been vice-president for only three and a half months when FDR died he inherited the presidency, and he knew nothing about the Manhattan Project
Talk about steep learning curves. Harry S. Truman had been senator for Missouri for nine years when he was selected to be Franklin Roosevelt’s running mate in the 1944 presidential election. There was a sitting vice-president, Henry Wallace of Iowa, and before him the position had been held by John Nance Garner, the spiky Texan known as “Cactus Jack” who famously described the vice-presidency as “not worth a bucket of warm piss”. But in 1944, suddenly, it was worth a great deal: Roosevelt was standing for an unprecedented fourth term—no-one had served more than Washington’s two terms, though some had considered it—but his health was poor and declining.
FDR had been paralysed from the waist down since contracting an illness, probably poliomyelitis or Guillain–Barré syndrome, in 1921, but in March 1944, an examination at Bethesda Hospital in Maryland revealed him to be suffering from hypertension, atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease causing angina pectoris, and congestive heart failure. He was 62 and had been a chain smoker all his adult life, and those around him, both in the White House and in the Democratic Party, had to face the possibility that he would not live to the end of a fourth presidential term ending in 1949. The vice-presidential nominee, therefore, had a strong chance of becoming president of the United States.
There were senior men in the Democratic Party who thought Wallace an unacceptable replacement at the nation’s chief executive. He had been secretary of agriculture from 1933 to 1940—his father, also Henry, had held the office from 1921 to 1924 under Republican presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge—and was a passionate advocate of FDR’s “New Deal”. But he had only become a Democrat in 1936, and was distrusted by the party’s city bosses and its southern segregationists. In 1944, a group lobbied the president to drop Wallace from the ticket; it included the Democratic National Committee’s chairman, Robert Hannegan; its treasurer, Edwin Pauley; the party’s secretary George Allen; postmaster-general Frank Walker; and Edward Flynn, a former DNC chairman and political boss of New York City.
On 11 July, this group met Roosevelt at the White House and proposed that Wallace be replaced as nominee for vice-president with Harry Truman. They had decided on the senator from Missouri more because he lacked the disadvantages of other potential candidates—James Byrnes, director of the Office of War Mobilization, was unpopular with black voters; Sam Rayburn, speaker of the House of Representatives, did not want to be vice-president; Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, at 66, was thought too old, though he went on to be Truman’s own vice-president from 1949 to 1953. Roosevelt didn’t know Truman especially well but knew he was politically reliable, and eventually, according to one account, told Hannegan, “Bob, I think you and everyone else here want Truman”.
The deal was effectively done. The Democratic National Convention in Chicago undertook a formal process of voting, and Wallace led on the first ballot, with 429½ votes to Truman’s 319½; there were 15 other candidates. Once the party managers set to work, however, the issue was not in doubt, and Truman came home ahead of Wallace by 1031 votes to 105. Prentice Cooper, governor of Tennessee, collected 26 votes, Barkley took six and four went to William Douglas, associate justice of the Supreme Court.
In November 1944, Roosevelt and Truman beat Republican nominee Governor Thomas Dewey of New York and his running mate John Bricker, governor of Ohio, by 432 Electoral College votes to 99, taking 36 of 48 states. In popular terms, however, they “only” won by 53.4 per cent to 45.9 per cent, a margin of 3.6 million. Truman was sworn in as vice-president on 20 January 1945, after which he made a telephone call to his mother, who told him “Now you behave yourself”. As vice-president, he spent most of his time in the Senate, where of course he was presiding officer, and retained the rooms he had used as a senator, only using the vice-president’s official office to greet visitors. He envisioned his role as a liaison between the presidency and Congress, reflecting the history of the vice-president as a figure as much of the legislature as of the executive, who had only attended cabinet meetings regularly since 1933 (they had done so sporadically since 1919). Truman had virtually no influence over the conduct of government, and he and Roosevelt would only meet alone twice in their time in office together.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945, having suffered a massive cerebral haemorrhage. Truman had adjourned the Senate for the day and was preparing to have a drink with Speaker Rayburn when he received an urgent message to go to the White House. He arrived at 5.25 pm, and was taken to the president’s study on the second floor. Eleanor Roosevelt, putting her arm around his shoulders, said, “Harry, the president is dead.” For a moment, Truman could not speak. Eventually, he asked Mrs Roosevelt, “Is there anything I can do for you?” Eleanor turned the question around on him.
“Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.”
Over the next 90 minutes, congressional leaders were summoned, and Bess Truman, Harry’s wife, arrived with their daughter Margaret. Truman was sworn in as 33rd president of the United States at 7.09 pm by Chief Justice Harlan Stone.
A year before, Truman had been the junior senator for Missouri. Six months before, he had been the Democratic nominee for vice-president. He had come a long way, and was now part of the Allied “Big Three” with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill. In Europe, the war was grinding to a bloody end: the Red Army had entered Austria and would capture Vienna the next day; Allied forces in the West had crossed the Rhine a fortnight before; the Royal Air Force and the US Army Air Force bombed Berlin almost round the clock. Adolf Hitler celebrated his 56th birthday in the Führerbunker underneath the chancellery on 20 April, and 10 days later committed suicide.
In the Pacific theatre, the United States had captured Iwo Jima in March, at a cost of 7,000 dead and nearly 20,000 wounded, and invaded Okinawa on 1 April. It would take nearly three months to capture the island, and losses were higher still than on Iwo Jima, 12,520 killed or missing and 36,631 injured, some 35 per cent of their original strength. Tellingly, nearly 100,000 Japanese soldiers and sailors died, and only 7,401 were taken prisoner. Okinawa was 400 miles south of Kyushu, and the potential cost of an invasion of the Japanese home islands was almost impossible to contemplate, let alone calculate.
The United States, however, had a secret weapon which would change the game. The Manhattan Project had been created in 1942 to design and build a nuclear bomb, and by April 1945 the moment of truth was drawing very close. But Truman had been told nothing of the new weapon as vice-president, and even when he became president on 12 April, he was only told vaguely that scientists in New Mexico were developing a new and potentially devastating weapon. Henry Stimson, the 77-year-old secretary of war, had stayed behind after Truman’s first cabinet meeting to impart this news of an “immense project”, and the new president recorded in his diary that night that the weapon was powerful enough to destroy the world.
Finally, on 25 April 1945, Stimson and Major-General Leslie Groves, commanding general, Manhattan Engineering District—director of the Manhattan Project—briefed President Truman fully on the United States’ nascent nuclear capability. Interestingly, when he pressed for a meeting the previous day to discuss the matter, Stimson framed it as “a highly secret matter” which was important because of its “bearing on our present foreign relations”. Truman wrote on the letter “Put on list for tomorrow, Wed. 25”.
The briefing lasted for 45 minutes, during which Stimson explained the full nature of the atomic bomb and outlined the progress and prospects of the Manhattan Project. According to his diary, the secretary of war told Truman that “within four months, the US shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city”. As well as the immediate military capability which would soon be placed in his hands, Truman grasped the importance of the atomic bomb in terms of international relations, and especially as a factor in America’s relations with the Soviet Union. “If it explodes, as I think it will, I’ll certainly have a hammer on those boys,” he noted.
It was quite a day, Wednesday 25 April 1945. Soldiers from the US First Army and the Soviet First Ukrainian Front physically met in Europe for the first time, encountering each other on the bridge at Torgau on the Elbe in north-west Saxony. Meanwhile, 5,700 miles away in San Francisco, the United Nations Conference on International Organization opened, a convention of 850 delegates from 50 nations. They met in the War Memorial Opera House and were welcomed by the governor of California, Earl Warren, later chief justice of the US Supreme Court. The conference would over the next two months draft the Charter of the United Nations, and there is an astounding archive of sound and newsreel coverage.
This is the point I want to make. Truman fully understood what the atomic bomb would be and that the United States would soon possess one on 25 April. “Little Boy”, a gun-type uranium-235 bomb, was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August. That is 103 days. It has always struck me as a terrifyingly short space of time for a man to go from a standing start, more or less, to the consequences of a decision which would change the face of war and move the world into a new age.
In fact the period was much shorter than that. On 25 July, General Carl Spaatz, commanding officer of the United States Army Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, was ordered to drop an atomic bomb one of the cities identified as soon as the weather permitted, after 3 August; the grim shortlist was Hiroshima, Yokohama, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki. It had been prepared by the Target Committee, chaired by Groves, and Nagasaki was a late addition, a replacement for Kyoto—the seat of the imperial court for 11 centuries until 1869 was removed at the instigation of Secretary Stimson, who knew Kyoto well.
By this stage, Truman had travelled to Europe to meet the other Allied leaders at Potsdam. No-one knew it but it was Winston Churchill’s swansong, as he returned to the count for the 1945 general election, on 26 July resigned as prime minister when it became clear that Clement Attlee and the Labour Party had won a landslide victory. The president made perhaps the first act of nuclear diplomacy when he revealed the existence of the atomic bomb to Joseph Stalin.
On July 24 I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make good use of it against the Japanese.
At least, Truman thought this was a revelation. James Byrnes, the newly appointed US secretary of state, was nonplussed when he observed Stalin’s calm reaction.
I was surprised at Stalin’s lack of interest. I concluded that he had not grasped the importance of the discovery. I thought that the following day he would ask for more information about it. He did not. Later I concluded that, because the Russians kept secret their developments in military weapons, they thought it improper to ask about ours.
In fact Stalin already knew about the bomb from the Soviet intelligence sources inside the Manhattan Project. He had probably been informed about the successful Trinity test on 16 July not long after Truman himself. Accordingly to Michael D. Gordin’s Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly, Stalin said after his conversation with the president to Vyacheslav Molotov, people’s commissar for foreign affairs, “We need to discuss with Kurchatov the acceleration of our work.” Igor Kurchatov was the scientist in charge of the Soviet nuclear programme which had begun in February 1943.
Truman never accepted that Stalin had known about the atomic bomb. In 1959, he was insistent:
When [New York Times journalist William Laurence] says that Stalin knew, he did not. He knew nothing whatever about it until it happened… He knew no more about it than the man in the moon.
The Soviet archives, since opened, prove otherwise.
I don’t want to open the can of worms here about whether Truman’s decision to use the bomb, first on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki, was correct, militarily, politically or morally. I will write something about it at some point, and, just to make clear, my own view is that it might have been correct but much more importantly it was absolutely inevitable. To have held back on the use of a weapon which could have brought the war to a conclusion in favour of continuing conventional warfare against Japan would have been unacceptable in political terms, and I doubt, in truth, whether Truman ever gave the idea of not using it very much thought.
All I wanted to flag up here, as well as telling the story of Truman’s road to nuclear enlightenment, is the extraordinary rapidity of his evolution as a politician and decision-maker. The period of 100 days is totemic in politics, so let us take that as an approximation: imagine finding out about a weapon of revolutionary power, not just a step forward from anything in your current arsenal but a shift in kind, rather than degree. This weapon is powerful enough to “destroy the world”, whatever you might conceive of that meaning by the standards of 1945. Once you have this knowledge, the clock is ticking, and 100 days, more or less, you will be asked for your authorisation to use this new weapon in anger. You will be given advice and recommendations, briefings and supporting data, but you alone will make the decision, which cannot be countermanded or overruled.
Try to imagine that thought process. And remember what your mother told you only weeks before: “Now you behave yourself”.