From Roosevelt to Truman
Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War

On April 12, 1945, Franklin Roosevelt died and Harry Truman took his place in the White House. Historians have been arguing ever since about the implications of this transition for American foreign policy in general and relations with the Soviet Union in particular. Was there essential continuity in policy, or did Truman’s arrival in the Oval Office prompt a sharp reversal away from the approach of his illustrious predecessor? This study explores this controversial issue and in the process casts important light on the outbreak of the Cold War. From Roosevelt to Truman investigates Truman’s foreign policy background and examines the legacy that FDR bequeathed to him. After Potsdam and the American use of the atomic bomb, both occurring during Truman’s presidency, the United States floundered between collaboration and confrontation with the Soviets. The resolution of this debate represents a turning point in the transformation of American foreign policy. This work reveals that the real departure in American policy came only after the Truman administration had exhausted the legitimate possibilities of the Rooseveltian approach of collaboration with the Soviet Union.

Wilson D. (Bill) Miscamble, C.S.C., was born in Roma, Australia, and educated at the University of Queensland. He pursued graduate studies in history at the University of Notre Dame, where he received his doctorate in 1980. He then served for two years as North American Analyst in the Office of National Assessments, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Canberra, Australia. In August 1982, he returned to Notre Dame and entered the priesthood formation program of the Congregation of Holy Cross of which he is now a member. He was ordained a priest in 1988 and has taught at Notre Dame since then. He chaired the History Department from 1993 to 1998. His book George F. Kennan and the Making of American Foreign Policy, 1947–1950 (1992), received the Harry S. Truman Book Award. He also authored Keeping the Faith, Making a Difference (2000) and edited American Political History: Essays on the State of the Discipline (with John Marszalek, 1997). He has published a number of articles, essays, and reviews and has received a number of awards for his teaching at Notre Dame.

From Roosevelt to Truman

Potsdam, Hiroshima, and the Cold War

WILSON D. MISCAMBLE, C.S.C.
University of Notre Dame

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo

Cambridge University Press
32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521862448

© Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C., 2007

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2007

Printed in the United States of America

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Miscamble, Wilson D., 1954–
From Roosevelt to Truman : Potsdam, Hiroshima, and
the Cold War / Wilson D. Miscamble.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN-13: 978-0-521-86244-8 (hardback)
ISBN-10: 0-521-86244-2 (hardback)
1. United States – Foreign relations – 1945–1953. 2. Truman, Harry S., 1884–1972.
3. World War, 1939–1945 – Diplomatic history. 4. World War, 1939–1945 – United States.
5. Nuclear warfare – United States.
327.73009′044–dc22    2005036290

ISBN-13 978-0-521-86244-8 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-86244-2 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for
the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or
third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such
Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

To
my sister and brother
Jenny & Phillip ofm

Contents

Preface

On April 12, 1945, the United States Senate recessed around five o’clock, and its presiding officer, Vice President Harry S. Truman, walked leisurely to the office of House Speaker Sam Rayburn for end-of-day drinks and conversation. As soon as he arrived, Rayburn told Truman to call presidential press secretary Steve Early, who immediately summoned him to the White House. Expecting to see President Franklin Roosevelt, he was ushered instead into the study of Eleanor Roosevelt. “Harry,” she informed him, “the President is dead.” Momentarily stunned, Truman eventually spoke and asked with genuine concern, “Is there anything I can do for you?” Mrs. Roosevelt replied insightfully: “Is there anything we can do for you for you are the one in trouble now.”¹ Within two hours, Truman recited the oath of office, becoming the thirty-third president of the United States. Immediately after his swearing-in ceremony, the new president addressed the hastily convened cabinet. “It was my intention,” Truman recalled saying, “to continue both the foreign and domestic policies of the Roosevelt Administration.”² How effectively he fulfilled this promise has been the subject of intense discussion ever since.³

   Over the last four decades, historians of various stripes waged a serious debate over how well – if at all – Truman fulfilled his commitment to continue Roosevelt’s foreign policy, particularly his policy toward the Soviet Union. Some historians framed the question rather pejoratively as in the case of Thomas G. Paterson who asked, “How much of a difference did it make that a parochial, ill-informed, impatient man like Harry S. Truman replaced a cosmopolitan, knowledgeable Roosevelt just when the international system was undergoing tremendous change?”⁴ However slanted this particular formulation may be, the key issue remains clear. What difference did the transition in American leadership from FDR to Harry Truman exert on U.S. foreign policy in general and on relations with the Soviets in particular?

   Beginning especially in the 1960s, some historians discerned a sharp break between the policies of the two presidents such that they assigned a large measure of responsibility for the onset of the Cold War to Truman and his supposedly hard-line advisers.⁵ In this view, Truman reversed a relatively successful policy of cooperation with the Soviet Union and, in so doing, provoked the dissolution of the Grand Alliance. In effect, the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought on the Cold War. Historians of both orthodox and revisionist persuasions vigorously disputed this thesis.⁶ Most orthodox historians denied a reversal in policy, although disagreements existed within the group over the nature of the policy that Roosevelt left Truman to continue. Herbert Feis, the undisputed dean of the orthodox school, argued that Truman pursued FDR’s firm but conciliatory policy, while Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., argued that the basis for continuity rested in Roosevelt’s prior conversion to a relatively tough policy toward the Soviets.⁷ On the revisionist side, historians like Gabriel Kolko, who emphasized the causal force of America’s expansionist, capitalist political-economic system, largely dismissed the role of personalities and down-played the impact of Truman’s accession to power on American policy toward the Soviet Union.⁸ These various (and rather contradictory) responses failed to stem the tide of arguments that portrayed Truman’s arrival in the Oval Office as a crucial way-station on the road to the Cold War.

   In substantiating their thesis of a reversal in policy toward the Soviet Union, its proponents focused especially upon Truman’s meeting with Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov on April 23, a meeting at which, according to columnist Drew Pearson’s colorful description, Molotov “heard Missouri mule driver’s language.”⁹ At this celebrated clash, Truman reprimanded Molotov for the Soviet failure to carry out the Yalta accord on Poland, sharply curtailed the Soviet minister’s attempt at an explanation, and stated bluntly “that he desired the friendship of the Soviet government but that it could only be on the basis of mutual observation of agreements and not on the basis of a one way street.”¹⁰ Although Charles Bohlen’s official minutes do not record the incident, Truman claimed that in an acrimonious final exchange Molotov exclaimed that “I have never been talked to like that in my life,” to which he retorted: “Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that.”¹¹

   The April 23 meeting with Molotov and the discussions Truman had with his advisers prior to it served as the keystone of arguments for a reversal of policy. Daniel Yergin in his influential Shattered Peace, published in 1977, argued that what was said at the meeting “signified a major shift in American attitudes towards the Russians” and that the exchange “symbolized the beginning of the postwar divergence that led to confrontation.”¹² This essential position has been argued more recently by historians like Warren Kimball and Diane S. Clemens. The former argued that “there was a sharp reversal in presidential policy once Harry S. Truman took over that office” and that “it seems that Roosevelt’s death provided an opportunity for what came to be called Cold War ideology to set the broad strategy for American diplomacy.”¹³ The latter contended that “beginning in March and culminating in late April 1945, a political battle was fought in the highest echelons of the government of the United States, the objective of which was to overturn the wartime policy of cooperation with the Soviet Union. As long as Franklin D. Roosevelt remained president, the attempt failed; but in the aftermath of his death, it was successful.”¹⁴ More notably, this reversal thesis has trickled down, so to speak, into influential textbooks and found an eager expression in more popular histories of the Cold War and is now widely held.¹⁵

   The lively plot line of the new president sharply reversing his predecessor’s conciliatory policy and violently berating the foreign minister of an Allied nation possesses a certain dramatic quality. It surely satisfies those who like their stories of the past served up simplistically and in the stark colors of black and white. But for those who seek a fuller understanding of the past, a more nuanced and careful approach is required – one that sets the Truman–Molotov meeting in its proper context and appreciates that it was but a single episode in a sustained series of actions during Truman’s early months in office. One must resist the temptation to use a single incident as emblematic of his whole approach to the Soviets. More exploration is needed to understand how successfully – if at all – Harry Truman fulfilled his commitment to continue his vaunted predecessor’s policies. This study undertakes such an exploration and seeks to resolve the matter as to whether Roosevelt’s death should be portrayed as representing “a turning-point in American foreign policy.”¹⁶

   This study unashamedly is Washington-centered and, to a significant extent, White House–centered, although it records the influences upon and the constraints applied to American policy by other powers and their representatives. In this regard, it avoids a tendency in some American studies to present the emergence of the Cold War as a drama with only two principals, the United States and the Soviet Union.¹⁷ Here the British role is not ignored, and the significant contributions of the British policy makers Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, and Ernest Bevin are duly noted. It rests upon a firm conviction that the existing and substantial literature on the Truman administration’s foreign policy neither has discerned correctly the full meaning of the presidential transition from Franklin Roosevelt nor has understood adequately and explained the development of the policies his successor pursued after April 12, 1945.¹⁸

   Although a quite separate study, this work’s conceptual approach builds upon and borrows from my earlier effort to understand the development of policies in the State Department during a later period of Truman’s presidency.¹⁹ The present study likewise adopts what Barry Rubin has termed “a middle ground between two extremes: the dry diplomatic history that presents decisions as clear-cut and inevitable by omitting the clash and blend of motives, personalities, abilities, and even accidents that occur in the policy process, and the journalistic account focusing on gossip and personalities to the exclusion of fundamental issues and options.”²⁰ It seeks to capture something of the world of the policy makers, especially Truman, with its inevitable compromises, ultimate objectives only dimly perceived, and constantly competing pressures that confused and obscured policy vision.²¹ It accepts the complexity, the uncertainty, the sheer messiness of policy making and tries to convey the tense atmosphere in which policy makers usually worked, the heavy pressures they endured, and the complex of influences that weighed upon them.

   My approach is much influenced by the insight of the British historian C. V. Wedgwood that “history is lived forward but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was like to know the beginning only.”²² This study attempts to avoid simply reading history backwards and writing of Truman’s foreign policy in light of subsequent Cold War events. My effort has been to provide some sense of the evolution and development of policy from the perspective of Truman as a maker of it and to avoid the unrealistic and rather mechanical quality that characterizes many studies of American diplomatic history. I accept the premise that individuals can and do make a difference in foreign policy as one can appreciate readily by imagining the course of events if Henry Wallace had won the vice-presidential nomination in 1944 rather than Truman. Events then might easily have turned out quite differently, to state the obvious.

   In pursuing this study of the development of the Truman administration’s foreign policy, a genuine effort has been made to treat the president as more than a one-dimensional figure. Truman has often been misunderstood by both his defenders and his critics and presented in an overly simplistic manner as a plainspoken, straightforward, decisive figure best captured by the motto proudly displayed on his desk – “the buck stops here.”²³ In reality, he was a more complex man blessed with certain strengths and beset with notable limitations who was occasionally given to uncertainty and indecision on matters of foreign policy. Understanding this more complicated figure allows for a deeper appreciation of his foreign policy as I trust this study well clarifies. It is indebted to Truman’s recent biographers, especially to Robert H. Ferrell for clarifying so well Truman’s talents and toughness as a politician and to Alonzo Hamby for revealing the more complex Truman personality in such compelling fashion.²⁴

   The overly simplified view of Truman usually portrays him as a veritable blank sheet with regard to foreign policy when he became president. This view neglects his range of involvements and experiences in the foreign policy domain prior to taking office and the deep convictions he brought to it. This study initially investigates Truman’s foreign policy background because an appreciation of it is essential to understanding his early actions as president. Any assessment of these actions depends upon a clear grasp of the legacy that FDR bequeathed to Truman. Clarifying Roosevelt’s hopes and plans for the postwar world is an obvious prerequisite for determining if Truman continued or reversed his policies. Had the Teheran and Yalta conferences settled divisive issues within the Grand Alliance such that a steady and cooperative course had been charted? Are there grounds for conjecture about what Herbert Mitgang has termed “the great might-have-been,” which resides in “whether post-war Soviet-American relations would have been different had Roosevelt lived.”²⁵ Was the postwar peace lost because of FDR’s death? Or is such conjecture mere wishful thinking? Was President Roosevelt in reality in the process of reversing his own policy of cooperation by April 1945 and already moving along the road to becoming the “Cold Warrior” that Truman later became?²⁶

   Upon locating Truman in the Oval Office, this work looks in detail at his first challenging days in office culminating with his controversial meeting with Molotov on April 23. It identifies the pressures and influences upon him and indicates those advisers – including a notable foreigner – who guided his actions. It then proceeds to track Truman’s policy making in the months prior to the Potsdam Conference. The effort is to discern not only what Truman did but also why he did it. In doing so, I seek to borrow from the biographer’s approach of “retrieving a set of mental processes” that the new president applied.²⁷ Which advisers did he find most trustworthy? Did they change during these months, and, if so, why? How did Truman as a neophyte leader deal with the other principal members of the Grand Alliance – the Soviet Union and Great Britain – and their erstwhile leaders Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill?

   As the reader will assuredly note, Truman’s policy making can’t be understood in a static manner. It must be discerned while appreciating the dynamic of constantly changing circumstances. One of the most significant of these was the movement toward the successful testing of the atomic bomb, which raised crucial questions about how the new and powerful weapon should be used both in war and in diplomacy. Did the likely possession of the atomic bomb transform American military calculations as the war came to an end and alter U.S. intentions toward its Soviet ally?²⁸ Should the bombing of Hiroshima be seen as the opening salvo in the Cold War as Gar Alperovitz suggested so provocatively more than forty years ago?²⁹ How is the Potsdam conference, Truman’s one and only exercise in Big Three summitry, related to America’s possession of the A-bomb? Would FDR have used the atomic weapons in the manner that Truman authorized? Would his approach have been similar at the concluding summit of the Second World War?

   In the aftermath of the Potsdam meeting, Truman entrusted much of the responsibility for the execution of American foreign policy to his new secretary of state, James F. Byrnes, who served in this capacity until George C. Marshall succeeded him at the beginning of 1947. American endeavors during Byrnes’s secretaryship are not susceptible to easy categorization. There are obvious attempts at cooperation and instances of confrontation with the Soviets, and at times the United States edged somewhat to the sidelines as the British clashed more directly with the Soviets. Clarifying the main developments over the period and their causes is the object here. Clearly after 1947, Truman led a major transformation of American foreign policy. The United States assumed sweeping new international obligations motivated in large part by a desire to preserve the security of the noncommunist world from perceived Soviet expansionism. As is well known, for example, the United States worked to secure the political and economic recovery of the European democracies devastated by a brutal war, and it joined them in forging a military alliance committed to the defense of Western Europe. A new conceptual worldview of America’s international role surely was framed during Truman’s tenure as president. When the Missourian consigned his office to Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 20, 1953, the United States stood unmistakably as a global power with global interests committed to playing a central and abiding role in international affairs and locked in a deep and protracted conflict with the Soviet Union. One might ask if such a result could be seen as consistent with the directions that Franklin Roosevelt had consigned to his successor in April 1945.

   Perhaps as the foregoing suggests, this work is mainly one of a “splitter” as opposed to a “lumper” (to borrow yet again J. H. Hexter’s terminology which John Gaddis has made so familiar to American diplomatic historians). It at least partly resists the lumper’s temptation “to systematize complexity [and] to reduce the chaos, disorder and sheer untidiness of history to neat patterns.”³⁰ But this is not to suggest that this work does not have implications for lumpers and splitters alike, and I seek in the concluding chapter to draw these out and to clarify their meaning for the debate over America’s participation in the Cold War and its responsibility for it. Now that the Cold War is over, one strain of thinking suggests that there is no longer any need for historians to go on fighting it, as it were.³¹ In this time of transition from one discernible era in international relations to another, this sense might be seen as an understandable desire to move beyond the Cold War and to avoid undue celebration of the American triumph in it. Yet the central importance of the Cold War to the twentieth century cannot be disputed. To avoid seeking to understand it more fully is to engage in a most curious scholarly denial. Given the moral and political stakes involved in the Cold War, its enormous impact on the postwar world, and its implications for the present, the historian is obliged to continue the work of comprehending better its origins and course. This study aims to further that endeavor.

Acknowledgments

I can say without fear of any contradiction that this book has been some years in the making. In fact, its origins lie in work I did as a graduate student at the University of Queensland thirty years ago. I renewed my serious engagement with the topic in the early 1990s after completing my book on George F. Kennan and the Policy Planning Staff. However, my appointment in 1994 as chair of the History Department at the University of Notre Dame pushed my research and writing of this book to the “back burner.” My subsequent appointment as Rector of Moreau Seminary at Notre Dame removed it from the metaphorical stove altogether. With the completion of my service as Rector in 2004 and with the benefit of a sabbatical year at Yale University, I finished the research and writing of the book the reader presently holds. I am very glad to have done so because I now have an acceptable answer to the many people who inquired over the past years as to the progress of my “Truman book.” That answer is, of course, that it is now available for purchase!

   In the course of completing this study, in rather episodic fashion over this lengthy period, I have acquired debts to both people and institutions. I wish to acknowledge them here, although, of course, the responsibility for the study’s contents belongs solely to me. In identifying those to whom I am grateful, I fear that I might have forgotten someone. If so, let me apologize for that in advance.

   My initial work on this topic took form as a M.A. thesis at the University of Queensland under the direction of Joseph M. Siracusa. He introduced me to the study of American diplomatic history and to serious historical research. I value his continued friendship and support. My doctoral mentor at Notre Dame, Vincent P. DeSantis, has been a constant source of encouragement for me to remain committed to my work as a historian, especially when other responsibilities seemed to be leading me down a different path. I am glad that we now do some co-teaching, and I look forward to addressing the subjects raised in this book in his courses in the future.

   I owe my greatest debt for their work on this book to my colleagues Thomas Blantz, C.S.C., and Steven J. Brady. Each has read every word of the manuscript and commented upon it at length. They are true friends. Others who read parts of the manuscript and offered helpful comments include John Lewis Gaddis, Robert Jervis, Diane B. Kunz, Bruce H. Smith, and John Young, C.S.C. Stephen M. Koeth, C.S.C., took time away from his own studies to give the next-to-final draft of the manuscript a careful reading and made helpful corrections. My two readers from Cambridge University Press made valuable suggestions that ultimately led to improvements in the book. Robert Beisner graciously shared his forthcoming study of Dean Acheson, which helped me clarify significant matters of interpretation. Marc Tractenberg generously shared his thoughts regarding the Potsdam settlement and made available source materials from his A Constructed Peace.

   In addition to the work of Beisner and Trachtenberg, I am indebted to the historians of American foreign policy whose studies I have drawn from in completing this book. Readers of the footnotes will note the large number of scholars from whose labors I benefited, but I must make special note of Robert H. Ferrell, Richard B. Frank, John Lewis Gaddis, Alonzo L. Hamby, Fraser J. Harbutt, Warren F. Kimball, Deborah Welch Larson, Elizabeth Kimball MacLean, Eduard M. Mark, David Robertson, Gaddis Smith, and Randall Bennett Woods. I especially want to express my debt to Robert H. Ferrell for his fine example of scholarly integrity and for his great editing work, which has made so many primary source materials easily available to other historians. On a more personal level, I want to express my gratitude to Thomas Alan Schwartz and Diane Kunz for their continued friendship, which, in ways they probably don’t appreciate, has helped sustain my scholarly work. My friend Jim McAdams, director of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies at Notre Dame, gave me sound advice on publishing this book and on other matters.

   Over the years I have had a number of student research assistants aid me in various endeavors. Some may have helped in researching this book, while others might only have been forced to listen to me whine about how I wasn’t working on the book. I dubbed each of these able folk as “chief of staff,” and I am glad to thank here: Lina Ona Balciunas, Emily Todd Bastedo, Carolyn D’Amore, Laura Holland Hoey, Laura Keane Sanderson, Carol Dominguez Shay, and Paul Wasinger. In the History Department at Notre Dame, Myrtle Doaks and Jackie Wyatt have provided me with administrative support and with friendship as have Judy Kuzmich and Diane Welihan at Moreau Seminary. I trust they know how I appreciate both.

   In a very basic way, archivists and librarians have made my work possible and I readily acknowledge my debt to the staffs of all the libraries and archives listed in the bibliography. I want to specifically thank my friends at the Harry S. Truman Library, especially Liz Safly and Randy Sowell for their willingness to assist me – even at long distance! The staff of the National Archives Photographic Branch, from where I obtained the photos used in this book, also proved most cooperative and efficient. I was able to test out certain of the arguments offered in this book on various audiences at the National War College, Old Dominion University, the Cold War History Group at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Sacred Heart University and with my colleagues in the History Department at Notre Dame. I’m grateful to those who organized for me to speak and to those who offered their response to my work.

   Institutional debts which I must note are to the History Department of the University of Notre Dame; to the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at Notre Dame, which awarded me two research grants; to Dean Mark Roche of the College of Arts and Letters at Notre Dame; to the Harry S. Truman Institute for National and International Affairs; to the Congregation of Holy Cross who “carried” me for a year; and to the International Security Studies Center at Yale University, where I was a visiting Fellow in 2004–5. I also must thank all the fine people at Cambridge University Press who contributed to the preparation and production of this book. Lewis Bateman gave support from the outset. I trust I might have the chance to work with him again. I also thank Ciara E. McLaughlin, Camilla T. Knapp, and Sara Black for their assistance. It has been a pleasure to work with them. Cynthia Landeen prepared the index with competence and dispatch.

   George Kennan once pointed out “that the studying and writing of history is a relatively lonely occupation.” In retrospect, I might have finished this book sooner if I had experienced more such “loneliness,” but, however that may be, I know I could not have finished it without the interest of good friends who encouraged me along the way. I thank my confreres in Holy Cross, especially the men of Moreau Seminary, whose brotherhood I treasure. I owe a special debt to John Young, C.S.C., and the Maple Street community in New Haven where I resided during my sabbatical year. I am also grateful to Daniel, Mary Ann, and Alice Rogers for their wonderful generosity in support of my scholarly efforts. My time in New Haven was blessed by the friendship and kindness of Sun-Joo Shin and Henry Smith (thanks for all the meals!); Fr. Dan Sullivan and the people of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Parish in Hamden; and John Gaddis and Toni Dorfman. I went to Yale with the express purpose of completing my book, but, as all true students of history know, things never turn out quite the way one expects. Quite surprisingly, I gained at Yale a renewed commitment to my teaching ministry, which I hope to apply to my students’ benefit at Notre Dame in the coming years. This came through observing devoted teachers like Toni Dorfmann, John Gaddis, Paul Kennedy, and Charles Hill in action. I am grateful to the latter three for allowing me to participate in their year-long Grand Strategy seminar and to the excellent students who constituted it.

   Lastly, I must thank my family members who have supported me over a long period on this and all else I have undertaken. My parents and my sister and brother, Jenny and Phillip, maintained an interest in the book and never doubted that I would complete it. Neither my sister nor my brother worked their way through much of my book on George Kennan, and I don’t really expect them to read much more of this work. Yet, each has been a fount of support for me since our days growing up in Roma, and the dedication here is but a token of my love and gratitude.