1
The Transition
For twelve years and one month Franklin Roosevelt was President of the United States. It was the longest period of continuous elective power which had been seen anywhere in the world for a century or more. Moreover, this decade and a quarter coincided with the advance of America to world leadership.
Then, on April 12th, 1945, Roosevelt died, suddenly if not unexpectedly, at Warm Springs, Georgia. Three hours later Harry S. Truman was sworn in as the 33rd President.1 He was nearly 61. It was the most intimidating succession in the English-speaking world since Addington succeeded William Pitt in 1801: ‘Pitt is to Addington as London is to Paddington,’ Canning wrote. And Paddington did not then even have a railway station. But Addington had been an intimate of Pitt’s for years and enjoyed his continuing friendship until their quarrel of 1803. Truman knew the Senate, of which he had been a member since 1934, but his experience of the executive branch, with its expanded war-time complications, was minimal. He had been Vice-President for less than three months. During this period, except at Cabinet meetings, he saw Roosevelt twice. Also, as Truman recorded, ‘Roosevelt never discussed anything important at his Cabinet meetings.’
Even more certainly Roosevelt never discussed anything important with his Vice-President. He looked to Truman to keep the Senate in order and to ensure that his peace treaty of the future did not meet the same fate as that which had befallen Woodrow Wilson’s in 1919. He had encouraged him to do ‘some campaigning’ in 1944, adding rather incongruously ‘I don’t feel like going everywhere.’ (In fact he went only to New York, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia.) But there had been no question of treating Truman as a deputy head of government. In accordance with the American tradition, he regarded him as part of the legislative not the executive branch. He treated him as he had treated Garner and Wallace, and as indeed much as every previous president had treated every previous vice-president. There was however an essential difference between Truman and his two predecessors. They were just vice-presidents, threatened with the obscurity which was mostly the historic fate of those who had occupied that office. Truman, from the moment of his nomination, was a likely president. But Roosevelt was the last man who wanted to recognize that. He never thought of including him in the party of a hundred or more Americans who went to the Yalta Conference in late January 1945. He gave him no special account of the outcome. Nor did he tell him about the Manhattan project, which was on the threshold of creating the atomic bomb.
Roosevelt had indeed tossed the vice-presidential nomination to him rather like a bone to a dog, except that Truman was not hungry. But in so doing he had given almost his only indication that he was concerned about the succession, and that a very faint one. He was prevailed upon not to have Wallace again. This was partly due to electoral considerations and threats from the South. But he could have ridden these. He encouraged James Byrnes, but eventually ditched him. Finally he committed something to paper, although phrased in a manner well short of enthusiastic endorsement. He passed through Chicago on the opening morning of the Democratic Convention, which he deliberately did not attend. He had a conference in the railroad yards there, without getting out of his train, with Robert E. Hannegan, the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and Edwin Pauley, a Los Angeles oilman who was a Democratic king-maker of the time. They emerged with a note which expressed Roosevelt’s willingness to have either Truman or Justice (of the Supreme Court) William O. Douglas on the ticket.2
As Douglas had no support in the Convention, and Roosevelt knew it, this effectively threw the President’s endorsement to Truman. The only obstacle was that Truman genuinely did not want it. This was from a mixture of motives. He thought the vice-presidency itself was a grey and obscure job, and did not want it for that reason. ‘I’ll bet you can’t name the names of half a dozen vice-presidents,’ he told his sister during a discussion of the prospect. He apprehended however that in the circumstances of 1944 it might well lead to the presidency. And that he did not want for almost opposite reasons. He thought the responsibility was too great for him, and that in any event no man should seek the position. (Exactly how presidents were to emerge if this rule was followed was not clear.) Furthermore he was committed to nominating James Byrnes.
Although genuine, his reluctance was not unshakeable. After he had been present in the room (at the receiving end) when Roosevelt said to Hannegan on the telephone: ‘You tell him that if he wants to break up the Democratic Party in the middle of a war that is his responsibility,’ he gave in. He even made fairly strenuous efforts to find a proposer in the shape of his fellow Senator from Missouri. He was nominated on the second ballot. And so, nine months later, he found himself President of the United States. He was relatively old, more so than any new president since James Buchanan in 1857, although there have since been three older ones. Yet he was completely inexperienced in the executive side of government. He was unbriefed, and untravelled outside North America since 1919. The war against both Germany and Japan was still unwon, and he had succeeded the most charismatic figure in the world.