April 12, 1945. In Europe, Hitler is holed up in his bunker. Japan desperately continues its fight in the Pacific. The war is not over, but on Capitol Hill it was a smooth day for Vice President Truman …
-Return to a time when the United States was bigger than it is today. 1945, Truman arrives at the White House in tragic times. How to be up to the task?
April 12, 1945. In Europe, Hitler is holed up in his bunker. Japan desperately continues its fight in the Pacific. The war is not over, but on Capitol Hill it was a smooth day for Vice President Truman.
The speaker of the House of Representatives joins him: “Harry, do you want us to discuss policy and procedures?” This is the code before sharing a good glass of bourbon …
But the White House is calling in turn.
Roosevelt, invested for the fourth time on the previous January 20 but ill for so long, has just died in Georgia.
“Jesus Christ and General Jackson” Truman would have whispered, putting the receiver down. General Jackson? The early 19th century president whose portrait Trump had portrayed in the Oval Office.
– To take the head of the United States, it is at the same time to assume an crushing military responsibility and to exercise an impressive moral magistracy.
We must both end the war and earn the role that the United States has just played: nothing less than that of saviors of freedom. This year 1945, in a world upset by conflict, often starving, America is at its zenith. It enjoys a power that no country has ever had. In addition to ideological prestige, there is economic preponderance. The 140 million Americans – 7% of humanity – alone produce and consume half of the world’s wealth.
-Will Truman, whom the establishment regards as a Missouri grocer – turned senator all the same, up to the task?
He is the first to wonder. He has been vice-president for less than three months!
He questions Roosevelt’s widow: “What can we do for you, ma’am?” The dreaded Eleanor replies; “But we should be asking you the question, my poor Harry, it is you who are in big trouble now.”
Roosevelt had by no means associated Truman with his policy. The new president ignores much of the course of the war; above all he learns that a Manhattan project is on the verge of completion. The United States will dispose of a bomb of an unprecedented kind. It takes Truman several visits from military specialists for him to understand. The staff is questioning its ability to decide. Truman will write in his Memoirs: “Even if I live to be a hundred years old, I will never forget the day I was first told about the atomic bomb”. Nor either the one, a few months later, where he will trigger the expeditions that we know against Japan.
-On the other hand, the United States was less disunited than today.
Learning the lesson from Wilson’s unfortunate experience, who had failed to get Congress to ratify his Treaty of Versailles, Roosevelt had taken the precaution of involving the Republicans in the preparation of peace. Truman had nothing to fear from that side.
On the other hand, racial clashes had not ceased during the war – example: Detroit in 1943. But it was difficult to fight against a dehumanized enemy without questioning one’s own racism. There was a lever there. Whether Truman, the next eight years, really made it happen is another matter.
The truth is, American democracy cannot function according to the ideals it displays if it is founded only on a narrow materialist, nationalist basis. “Our only chance,” wrote the boss of Time Life when it entered the war in 1941, “is to make it work in terms of an international moral order.”
Since then, the prestige of the United States which founded this democratic messianism has largely eroded following successive failures, the last of which took place last week at the Capitol where Truman had lived quietly.
The 46th President’s job is in some ways more difficult than Truman’s.
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