HISTORICAL NOTES: Dear Mamma & Mary

A few days after President Franklin D. Roosevelt died in April 1945, his successor telephoned Jesse Jones. The President, he said, had appointed John Snyder, a St. Louis banker, as Federal Loan administrator. Jones was surprised. “Did he make that appointment before he died?” he asked. “No,” snapped President Harry S. Truman. “He made it just now.”

The Lonely Hours. The story is told on himself by the ex-President, in his memoirs, which begin in this week’s LIFE. The first installment covers Truman’s first 18 days in office—a period of historic decisions, wrenching personal adjustments, “unbelievable burdens,” and flickering self-doubts for the jaunty little man from Independence, Mo. “The presidency of the U.S. carries with it a responsibility so personal as to be without parallel.” writes Harry Truman. “To be President of the U.S. is to be lonely, very lonely at times of great decisions.” In the hourglass of history, Harry Truman’s capacity for his high office and his stature as President may well be measured from those moments of great loneliness. For whatever else he did, the climactic decisions—to proceed with the United Nations, to drop the Abomb, to go to war in Korea, to send aid to Western Europe—were Harry Truman’s own decisions.

Truman hardly had time to absorb the impact of President Roosevelt’s death and the immensity of his new job before he was called upon to make a big decision. Minutes after taking the oath of office —less than three hours after Roosevelt’s death—he was preparing to hold his first Cabinet meeting, when Press Secretary Steve Early came into the Cabinet Room. “The press, he explained, wanted to know if the San Francisco Conference on the United Nations would meet, as had been planned, on April 25th. I did not hesitate a second. I told Early that the conference would be held as President Roosevelt had directed. It was the first decision I made as President.”

After Early left, Truman spoke to the Cabinet. “It was my intention, I said, to continue both the foreign and the domestic policies of the Roosevelt Administration. I made it clear, however, that I would be President in my own right, and that I would assume full responsibility for such decisions as had to be made.” After the Cabinet meeting, Secretary of War Henry Stimson lingered behind. “[He] told me that he wanted me to know about an immense project that was under way —a project looking to the development of a new explosive of almost unbelievable destructive power. That was all he felt free to say at the time, and his statement left me puzzled. It was the first bit of information that had come to me about the atomic bomb.” With the events of that first day whirling in his head, Truman finally returned to his family. That night, he reports: “I went to bed and to sleep.”

A Strenuous Time. In the first trying days, Harry Truman was almost overwhelmed with his work, but he found time to write proudly to his 92-year-old mother and his sister, back in Grandview, Mo. “Dear Mamma & Mary,” he wrote. “I have had a most strenuous time for the last six days . . . Monday, the Congress had to be told what I would do. I took all Sunday afternoon, half the night and until eleven a.m. Monday to get the job done on the speech. But I guess there was inspiration in it, for it took Congress and the country by storm, apparently.” There were other, less self-assured letters: “Things have gone so well, that I’m almost as scared as I was Thursday, when Mrs. R. told me [about Roosevelt’s death]. Maybe it will come out all right.”

Harry Truman has a great reverence for the office of the presidency, and one of his first concerns was the line of succession. When James Byrnes came in one day, Truman told him that he was a candidate for appointment as Secretary of State after the San Francisco Conference. “As matters now stood, the next man in line after me was the Secretary of State, Edward R. Stettinius Jr. Stettinius, however, had never been a candidate for an elective office, and it was my feeling that any man who stepped into the presidency should have held at least some office to which he had been elected . . .

“There was still another consideration, though it was mostly personal. Byrnes had felt that by virtue of his record of service to the party and the country he had been the logical choice to be the running mate of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1944 election. As it turned out, Roosevelt and the convention willed otherwise, and Byrnes undoubtedly was deeply disappointed and hurt. I thought that my calling on him at this time might help balance things up.”

Byrnes became Secretary of State three months later.

“I’ve Paid the Rent.” In the goldfish bowl of the presidency, the Truman family felt acutely uncomfortable. “Dear Mamma & Mary,” wrote the President. “This afternoon we moved to this house, diagonally across the street (Penn. Ave.) from the White House, until the Roosevelts have had time to move out of the White House. We tried staying at the apartment, but it wouldn’t work. I can’t move without at least ten Secret Service men and 20 policemen. People who lived in our apartment couldn’t get in and out without a pass. So—we moved out with suitcases. Our furniture is still there and will be for some time . . . But I’ve paid the rent for this month and will pay for another month if they don’t get the old White House redecorated by that time.”

As the San Francisco Conference approached and the war in Europe waned, Truman began to be more concerned with international affairs. The Nazi armies were disintegrating, and Winston Churchill telephoned from Britain to discuss a peace feeler that had reached him from Heinrich Himmler. On his way to San Francisco, Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov called at the White House and got an unexpected dressing down from Harry Truman. Russia was not living up to its Yalta agreement on the composition of the Polish government, and Truman had some testy comments to make about the necessity for keeping obligations. ” ‘I have never been talked to like that in my life,’ ” Truman says Molotov said.

“I told him, ‘Carry out your agreements, and you won’t get talked to like that.’ ” After two weeks, Harry Truman was clearly President in his own right.