The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Origins of the Cold War

By Bonny Norton

Using recently declassified documents, Messer traces Byrnes's performance from the Yalta Conference through the postwar dealings with the Soviet Union. He sees the failure of the Soviet-American collaboration to continue into the postwar years as the result of several unrelated events--the struggle between Byrnes and Truman to become Roosevelt's successor in 1944, Roosevelt's use of Byrnes as his Yalta salesman," and Byrnes's distorted view of the Yalta Conference."

Originally published in 1982.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781469640259

Bonny Norton

Bonny Norton (FRSC) is a University Killam Professor and Distinguished University Scholar in the Department of Language and Literacy Education, University of British Columbia, Canada. Her primary research interests are identity and language learning, digital storytelling, and open technology. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Educational Research Association, she was awarded the BC 2020 Academic of the Year Award for her leadership of the Global Storybooks project (https://globalstorybooks.net/). Her website is https://faculty.educ.ubc.ca/norton/

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The End of an Alliance

The End of an Alliance

James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Origins of the Cold War

Robert L. Messer

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 1982 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Messer, Robert L., 1944-

    The end of an alliance.

    Bibliography: p.

    Includes index.

      1. United States—Foreign relations—1945-1953 2. World War, 1939-1945—Diplomatic history. 3. United States—Foreign relations—Soviet Union. 4. Soviet Union—Foreign relations—United States. 5. Byrnes, James Francis, 1879-1972. 6. Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 1882-1945. 7. Truman, Harry S., 1884-1972. I. Title.

E813.M46 327.73 81-7618

ISBN 0-8078-1494-6 AACR2

For Karen, Elise, and Ingrid

Contents

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. Introduction

Chapter 2. The Struggle for Succession

Chapter 3. The Making of a Myth: Byrnes at Yalta

Chapter 4. The Selling of a Myth: Byrnes as the Expert on Yalta

Chapter 5. The Partnership: Byrnes, Truman, and the Bomb

Chapter 6. Together at the Summit: The Potsdam Conference

Chapter 7. The First Big Test: The London Council of Foreign Ministers

Chapter 8. The Decline: Byrnes in Moscow

Chapter 9. The Fall: Truman Takes Command

Chapter 10. The Cold War Consensus

Chapter 11. Man of the Year

Chapter 12. Et Tu Brute?: Byrnes and Truman in History

Notes

Selected List of Sources

Index

Illustrations

1. James F. Byrnes at age sixty-six. 5

2. Byrnes and Truman at the bow of the cruiser Augusta en route to Potsdam, July 1945. 85

3. Byrnes and members of his staff, Charles Bohlen, H. Freeman Matthews, and Benjamin V. Cohen, in Byrnes’s cabin preparing for the Big Three summit conference at Potsdam, July 1945. 91

4. The two leaders chart unfamiliar and troubled waters, July 1945. 98

5. The Big Three leaders pose for their official portrait with their top advisers. 113

6. The Big Three foreign ministers raise a glass at the London conference, September 1945. 129

7. Byrnes delivering the Stuttgart address. 204

8. Cartoonist James Berryman’s commentary on the Byrnes-Truman relationship and its public dissolution, January 1950. 228

Acknowledgments

To thank by name everyone who in one way or another helped me with this project would add considerably to the length of the volume. I only hope that those unnamed teachers, students, archivists, and colleagues will forgive me for expressing my gratitude to them collectively. You know who you are and I thank you.

Some contributions, however, require specific recognition. I thank Martin Sherwin for his inspiration, encouragement, and support over the years, Walter LaFeber and Richard Fried for their meticulous and informed reading of the manuscript, Robert Ferrell for his expert and timely archival references, Walter Brown, Donald Russell, and Benjamin Cohen for their generosity in sharing with me their memories, and, in the case of Brown, his invaluable private papers. I am indebted to Priscilla Sutcliffe and Berniece Holt at the Byrnes Papers and Dennis Bilger at the Truman Library for their extraordinary patience and exemplary professionalism. I am grateful to the University of Illinois Faculty Research Fund for financial support and to the Department of History, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, for time off from teaching for research and writing. I owe much to Lewis Bateman, Sandra Eisdorfer, and Iris Tillman Hill of the University of North Carolina Press for their many contributions to the finished work.

Finally, I want to state publicly what we both know privately. I could not have completed this book without the incalculable help of my wife, Karen Ahlvin Messer, who shared the burdens and suffered the deprivations familiar to any author’s spouse, and some not-so-familiar ones as well.

Robert L. Messer

Chicago, Illinois

January 1981

The End of an Alliance

Chapter One: Introduction

An overflow crowd of well-wishers and the suffocating atmosphere inside the White House on that sweltering afternoon forced the ceremonies outside into the Rose Garden. There, amid the trellised blossoms, cameramen, and microphones, former congressman, senator, Supreme Court justice, and assistant president James Francis Byrnes of South Carolina officially became the forty-eighth United States secretary of state. The date was 3 July 1945. The European phase of the greatest war in history had just ended. But its meaning for the postwar world had yet to be resolved. The long and increasingly bloody war in the Pacific was approaching its unexpected, stunning conclusion. Among the throng of government leaders gathered that day at the White House, only a handful besides President Harry S. Truman and his new secretary of state knew of the frantic preparations in New Mexico for the world’s first atomic explosion. It was a time of exhaustion and exhilaration, of intensity and tension, as a partly ravaged, partly exuberant world teetered expectantly on the edge of an unknown future. It was a time of great opportunity and of great responsibility.

Despite the burdens of that responsibility and the oppressive heat, the mood during the swearing-in ceremony was lighthearted. When the oath was completed, Truman said: Jimmy, kiss the Bible. Byrnes did so. He then handed the Bible to the president and told him to kiss it. Truman did and the crowd laughed.¹ This bit of fun reflects the friendly, egalitarian relationship between the two men. It also suggests the eminence of Byrnes’s position as Truman’s secretary of state. He was not only legally next in line of succession to the president, but he was also prepared to assume the unofficial role as Truman’s assistant president for foreign affairs.

Truman had been catapulted into the office of president upon the death of Franklin Roosevelt just eighty-two days before. One of his first decisions had been to make Byrnes his chief foreign-policy adviser as soon as possible. The delayed announcement was the new president’s first major change in the personnel he had inherited from the Roosevelt administration. When, after weeks of press speculation, the appointment was finally made public, it was widely considered to be both a predictable effort toward continuity and a politically prudent gesture of personal reconciliation.

During a war that still seemed far from over, Byrnes had earned the title of Roosevelt’s assistant president for the homefront. But for some last-minute maneuvering at the Democratic convention the summer before, Byrnes and not Truman might well have succeeded to the presidency upon Roosevelt’s death. Finally, Roosevelt had chosen Byrnes to accompany him to the last and most important Big Three summit conference at Yalta. There, Byrnes had witnessed firsthand world politics at its highest, most intimate level. Now, on the eve of another Big Three summit, it seemed both logical and wise for Truman to have called Byrnes out of his short-lived retirement from a long and varied career of public service in all three branches of government and turn over to him the conduct of United States international policy at a time when such experience and ability were sorely needed.

Such was the tone of much of the public comment upon Byrnes’s installation as secretary. However, a contemporary, private commentary is also worth noting. On the same day that Byrnes was sworn in as Truman’s secretary of state, the British ambassador to the United States, Lord Halifax, set down in a report to his government his appreciation of the personality of Mr. James F. Byrnes . . . together with some comment on the effect which his advent to office is likely to produce on the conduct of United States foreign policy. This assessment began by noting the facts of his early life and career: his birth in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in 1879 to poor Irish immigrant parents, and his self-made career in law and politics. Halifax compared Byrnes’s rise to the career of his much-admired friend, former Senate colleague, and predecessor as secretary of state, Cordell Hull.

Physically, Byrnes was described as small in stature with quick observant eyes and a lively face, a man richly endowed with characteristic Irish charm. His wide fame and popularity in Washington political circles was attributed in part to his skill and smoothness as a negotiator on the behalf of the late Mr. Roosevelt to whom he was, until almost the end, very deeply devoted. As for his weaknesses, he was known for a certain thinness of skin, sensitiveness to his treatment by others and a need for open tokens of esteem and affection on the part of friends, his colleagues and the public. Halifax speculated that this sensitivity may have been caused by the fact that Byrnes was fundamentally unsure of himself, somewhat insecure socially and intellectually. That insecurity in turn may have resulted from the fact, as Halifax expressed it, that his background is no less provincial than that of President Truman.

1. James F. Byrnes at age sixty-six. (Courtesy of the James F. Byrnes Papers, Clemson University Library, Clemson, S.C.)

In comparing the new secretary to the still relatively new president, the ambassador noted that both men were known to regard the State Department with a highly critical eye and to be irritated by the manner and outlook of the typical departmental career man. According to Halifax, neither of the two had any use for the reactionaries and snobs that inhabited the professional foreign service. However, the two men were unalike in that Byrnes had demonstrated an eye for ability and [was] not afraid of surrounding himself with clever young men in the best Old New Deal tradition. This choice of able associates and advisers, in Halifax’s words, differ[ed] markedly from Mr. Truman.

As for Byrnes’s approach to his new job, Halifax noted that he prided himself on his capacity to act as a cautious mediator and conciliator in the most strained and tangled situations. This Cavour-like attitude would most likely cause him to perform as the ideal pilot, the idealistic honest broker. Although, as he put it, the great Roosevelt impetus and its imagination and courage was no longer there, Halifax looked forward to Byrnes’s improving upon the lackluster performance of the outgoing secretary, Edward Stettinius. Halifax even went so far as to say that it could be confidently anticipated that the Roosevelt-Hull line in foreign policy would be followed more faithfully under Mr. Byrnes than it was under the somewhat indeterminate direction of Mr. Stettinius.

But the British diplomat qualified his prediction with what was a prophetic warning. Throughout his analysis of Byrnes’s personality, Halifax cautioned that the new secretary was occasionally liable to oscillate under strong political pressure and that he was temperamentally inclined to follow the lines of least resistance toward public pressure. Elsewhere in the report, Byrnes was described as not of strong character, settled convictions, or capacity to fight too hard for them against strong odds. Although a very experienced and shrewd negotiator, he was also a born politician, that is, a person endowed with exceptionally sensitive antennae responsive to the smallest variation of the popular, Congressional, and sectional mood of his country.²

In typically British understatement, Lord Halifax was trying to say that, if those exceptionally sensitive antennae picked up any variation in the domestic American political mood, Byrnes—and American foreign policy—could change accordingly. One year later, another British diplomat, after observing for some time and at close range Byrnes’s performance as a domestic politician-turned international statesman, confirmed Halifax’s initial assessment in blunter language: Byrnes is an admirable representative of the U[nited] S[tates], weak when the American public is weak and tough when they are tough.³

Lord Halifax’s character study is in some ways remarkably insightful, even prescient. It also illustrates the complexity and elusiveness of its subject. Even a shrewd and longtime Washington observer such as Halifax could be wrong about Byrnes.

Although the date 1879 is carved in stone on his grave marker, Byrnes probably was born in 1881.⁴ Whatever the year, he definitely was born in Charleston, not Spartanburg, though by 1945 the latter place had become his nominal hometown. By no means well off and of Irish descent, Byrnes’s parents (his father died before he was born) were neither first-generation immigrants nor apparently quite so destitute as his log-cabin, Horatio Alger campaign biographies suggest.⁵

Byrnes’s meteoric rise from local court reporter to district attorney to United States congressman (1911-24), senator (1930-41), Supreme Court justice (1941-42), Roosevelt’s economic stabilizer, director of war mobilization, and unofficial assistant president for the home-front (1942-45), and finally Truman’s secretary of state was more varied and spectacular than the career of Cordell Hull. The two southern politicians-turned diplomats were personally close and alike in some ways. But Byrnes accepted the job of secretary of state with the explicit understanding that he would not be just another Cordell Hull—a mere conduit of policies and decisions by a president who was his own secretary of state.

Byrnes unconsciously may have been socially and intellectually insecure. Certainly, to a cosmopolitan British lord, his background, like that of Truman, must have seemed both modest and provincial. Truman at least finished high school. Byrnes was self-educated past the age of fourteen. Although remarkable in its breadth and duration, Byrnes’s career before 1945 was almost exclusively limited to domestic politics. However, outwardly he did not seem concerned or even aware of these limitations. On the contrary, throughout his long line of political successes and in his approach to his job as secretary, Byrnes exhibited a sense of confidence in his abilities, especially when compared to those of Stettinius or Truman, that at times bordered on hubris.

Halifax did not know other things about the new American secretary of state. He could not know of Byrnes’s behind-the-scenes role as Truman’s personal representative on the top-secret committee formed to advise the president on the wartime use and postwar implications of the atomic bomb. He could not know of the unpublicized trips from South Carolina to Washington in the weeks following Roosevelt’s death, of the off-the-record appointments with Truman, of the nighttime briefings at Byrnes’s apartment, of the clandestine meetings with atomic scientists. Until they finally were declassified in 1976 no one other than Truman and Byrnes could know the contents of Byrnes’s top-secret and exclusive stenographic record of Roosevelt’s last summit meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Yalta.

Until recently, historians could only guess why Truman became convinced that only Byrnes could fill the gap in foreign policy left by Roosevelt’s death. New evidence, including the discovery in late 1978 of Truman’s diary for this period, contributes to understanding of an Alice-in-Wonderland relationship in which official or public reality was very often myth. Separating myth from reality is one of the tasks of the historian. But, until now, partly because of the active intervention of the mythmakers, the tools have been inadequate to the task.

If Halifax was a less than perfect witness on some counts, on other matters he was closer to the mark. Like Roosevelt before them, Byrnes and Truman both at first disdained the advice of State Department experts. Byrnes did include in his personal staff talented young men such as the New Deal legal whiz kid Benjamin V. Cohen. Byrnes later came to make an exception to his prejudice against department professionals by relying on the young Russian specialist Charles Chip Bohlen. But, rather than necessarily a strength, this reliance on a small circle of handpicked aides eventually isolated Byrnes from his primary and only indispensable source of support, the president. As Truman’s confidence in his own abilities grew, his early dependence upon Byrnes waned. At the same time, the president became more receptive to criticism both of Byrnes’s independent methods and of the substance of his diplomacy.

On the central question of Byrnes’s impact on the course of American foreign policy, Halifax was essentially correct. Byrnes was a born politican. He was responsive to variations in the public, the press, and congressional opinion—what could be called the political mood of the country. As the British ambassador’s colleague later pointed out, Byrnes was conciliatory when Americans were in a conciliatory mood. He was also tough when it seemed politically prudent to be tough. Byrnes was not simply an indicator of mass public opinion. His antennae were more sensitive, more sophisticated than that. As an experienced and astute legislative manager, he had spent much of his public life estimating majorities among those who counted. He was alert to the first breath of a change in the domestic political winds.

This study focuses upon Byrnes as an exceptionally sensitive indicator of American political opinion regarding international relations during the onset of the cold war. It reduces that macroscopic process of change in mass perceptions, expectations, goals, and means to the more comprehensible microscopic human scale. Examining the formation, conduct, and dissolution of the Truman-Byrnes partnership as president and secretary of state reveals changes in their lives as well as changes in the larger context of national and international history in which they played such a large part. More accurately, the subject of this investigation is the Byrnes-Truman partnership as assistant president for foreign affairs and president. The history of that unofficial partnership does not coincide with the period during which Byrnes officially served as Truman’s secretary of state.

The origins and circumstances of that short-lived but historic unofficial partnership also involves their relationship to a third person: Franklin D. Roosevelt. As Halifax noted in his report, Byrnes had been politically closely associated with and personally very deeply devoted to Roosevelt until almost the end. Diplomatically, Halifax did not go into detail about the source of this disaffection. Indeed, he need not have done so. At the time, everyone knew that Byrnes blamed Roosevelt for his unnecessarily humiliating defeat in his bid to become vice-president and Roosevelt’s successor.

The struggle for the 1944 Democratic vice-presidential nomination is one element in the contemporary Roosevelt-Byrnes-Truman relationship. Byrnes’s highly personalized perception of the Yalta conference and his public and private explanation of it to the country and to Truman is another element. In reconstructing that complex, subjective, three-way relationship it becomes clear that, to borrow Halifax’s phrase, Byrnes was a transitional figure between the great Roosevelt impetus and the indeterminate direction of Truman’s early foreign policy. Byrnes formed a politically sensitive human link between the wartime and postwar presidents and their differing approaches to international relations. As such a link, his living out of the process of change in American-Soviet relations from wartime cooperation to open postwar hostility provides revealing insight into the origins of the cold war. Roosevelt used Byrnes as his Yalta salesman. For a time, Truman considered him the ideal pilot. When the time for a mediator and conciliator had passed, the pilot was dropped and the cold war began.

Obviously such a reduced focus illuminates only one aspect of one side of a two-sided (and in some ways multi-sided) process. That macroscopic process is interrelated and reciprocal. Scholars do not have and are not likely to have comparable evidence about the inner workings of the Soviet side of the process. In his recent contribution to our understanding of the Soviet side of the cold war, Vojtech Mastny concludes that, though certainly a guilty accomplice, Stalin was also a victim of American inconsistency.⁶ This study attempts to show that such inconsistency can be explained in part by the Roosevelt-Byrnes-Truman relationship. Such an approach does not provide a total or sufficient explanation of how or why the cold war began. But examining the interaction of three of the key participants in that process provides a new perspective not only on the American half of the origins of the cold war but also on how that half must have appeared to the Soviet leadership.

Perhaps more than anything else, this book reveals how human frailties can influence what is too often portrayed as a totally rational, systemic, or Machiavellian process. The irrational, the petty, the unintended, the vagaries of chance are also part of history. Being reminded of the truism that people make history and that people are fallible should lead not to a smug sense of superior wisdom or morality, but to feelings of sympathy for those who make history and of humility on the part of those who would write it.

Chapter Two: The Struggle for Succession

. . . Byrnes, undoubtedly, was deeply disappointed and hurt. I thought that my calling on him at this time [to become secretary of state upon Roosevelt’s death] might help balance things up.—Harry Truman, 1955

Certainly [Roosevelt] played upon the ambitions of men as an artist would play upon the strings of a musical instrument.—James F. Byrnes, 1966

He had attended every Democratic party national convention since 1912. For the 1944 gathering in Chicago, he had arrived early, fully expecting that this one would be by far the most memorable. It was, but not in the way he had expected. Without waiting for the nomination for vice-president to be officially announced, he left the convention and boarded a train for the return trip to Washington.

As the train eased into Union Station, he could see the Capitol dome gleaming white in the mist and gray clouds. The sight evoked a wistful lament: I would give all that I own to be back in the United States Senate. Disappointment, hurt pride, wasted sacrifice, betrayal by a friend, and regret for not having held on to something dear that now was out of his grasp all flowed beneath his words. It might have seemed a curious wish for a man who at that moment held the singular position of Franklin Roosevelt’s assistant president, the second most powerful man in the country, and a man who to that time had experienced a virtually unbroken series of successes at every level and in every branch of government. Throughout his long political career, Jimmy Byrnes, the jaunty little Irishman from South Carolina, had always seemed to be the jovial, indefatigable optimist. But now, in a private moment of reflection upon what seemed to be the end of that career, he was uncharacteristically low. He looked tired; he was no longer the spry, almost boyish, dynamo whose inexhaustible energy belied his sixty-three years. Equally out of character was his bitterness in defeat.¹

But his mood and emotions were understandable. Despite all his high offices and political successes since he had first come to Washington more than thirty years earlier, the ultimate prize of any politician had eluded him once again. Harry Truman, not James Byrnes, would almost certainly be the next president of the United States. It was no consolation that the man who at the last possible moment had stepped ahead of him to accept that prize was a friend and former colleague. If anything, this irony only added to the pain and sense of personal humiliation.

Truman and Byrnes met for the first time in 1935 when the newly elected political unknown from Missouri first arrived in Washington to take his seat in the Senate. Byrnes was nearing the end of his first term as senator. The following year, he was elected for life by an 87 percent majority. Before his elevation to the upper chamber, in what at the time was termed the liberal wave of 1930, he had served fourteen years in the House of Representatives with many of the same men who were to become his senatorial colleagues. By 1935 he was a popular and powerful veteran of nearly a quarter century of Washington political life. Although he never officially held the title, he was universally recognized as the de facto majority leader of the Senate.²

Byrnes’s influence extended beyond the legislative branch. He had known Roosevelt since 1912 when, as fellow delegates to the Democratic convention that nominated Woodrow Wilson, they had shared a house in Baltimore. They had been friends and political allies ever since. Congressman Byrnes campaigned for the Cox-Roosevelt ticket in 1920. Eight years later, he encouraged Roosevelt’s candidacy for governor of New York. Senator Byrnes was a member of the exclusive For Roosevelt before Chicago group that had helped to nominate Roosevelt in 1932. During the campaign, Byrnes served as political adviser and unofficial member of Roosevelt’s brain trust, traveling with the nominee aboard the campaign train. Immediately after the election, Byrnes established himself as the president’s fair-haired boy on Capitol Hill, the New Deal’s behind-the-scenes legislative ball carrier.³

By contrast, the self-consciously inexperienced Truman was at once disparagingly referred to as the Gentleman from Pendergast, the stooge of the Kansas City machine. It was an unfair appellation that he eventually disproved by his actions. But, as he took up his duties, he was painfully aware of the low regard in which he was held by many of his colleagues. In casting about for friends and tutors, he could not help but be impressed by Byrnes’s parliamentary skills. Certainly Truman envied Byrnes’s wide popularity among the members of the world’s most exclusive club. At first very much the outsider, Truman years later recalled his gratitude to Byrnes for immediately accepting him as a full-fledged colleague and for always treating him with the consideration and respect due a fellow senator. Chronologically, Byrnes was just three years his senior, but in terms of political knowledge and skill Truman held him in the sort of awe a younger sibling feels toward a more experienced and more talented older brother.⁴

Aside from the personal indebtedness for his early considerate treatment of an insecure neophyte, Byrnes also earned Truman’s gratitude on a more practical political level. In 1940 Truman was struggling for his political life in seeking reelection, this time without machine backing, against the challenge of Missouri Governor Lloyd Stark. Despite Truman’s record of consistent support for the administration, the president made known his preference for the progressive Stark over the conservative Truman. Desperate, Truman appealed to Byrnes to intervene with Roosevelt on his behalf. Byrnes argued Truman’s case before the president, only to be told that he knew little about Truman and that Stark was an old friend whom he wanted to see in the Senate. As Byrnes later recalled the conversation, I did not convince the President that he should abandon his interference but I left no doubt in his mind that I would do everything in my power to help my friends who were marked to fall under the ax.⁵

In Truman’s case, that help took the form of some indirect financial assistance. After Truman told him he needed money for radio time, Byrnes prevailed upon his friend and Democratic bankroller Bernard Baruch to pump much-needed cash into Truman’s impoverished campaign. Baruch’s $4,000 contribution, modest by today’s standards, at the time equaled half of Truman’s total campaign chest. The successful 1940 campaign for reelection in his own right against formidable opposition and with little money was one of the proudest moments in Truman’s public life.⁶

A subsequent effort by Byrnes to raise money for Truman may have seemed somewhat less than a favor. In his initial request for funding of what later became known as the Truman Committee, Truman had asked for $25,000. Byrnes, as chairman of the Senate Audit and Control Committee, at first doled out just $10,000. They finally compromised on a figure of $15,000. Some years later, Truman expressed his suspicion that this magnificent sum was a deliberately inadequate appropriation meant to limit the committee’s effectiveness.⁷ However, at the time Truman seemed satisfied with what he had received. Moreover, that modest seed money soon grew, and with it grew his national reputation and political prospects.

Whether or not he intended to do so, the man who had helped reelect Truman senator in 1940 had indirectly helped make him president. Truman’s favorable public image as the Senate’s Billion Dollar Watchdog over the wartime defense industry gained him new respectability, especially among liberals, and was a major factor in Roosevelt’s decision to make him his running mate in 1944. That decision not only changed Truman’s life, but it also significantly altered his relationship with Byrnes.

As with so much of their relationship, the impact on Byrnes and Truman of the 1944 Democratic vice-presidential contest must be assessed not in retrospect, not even in terms of what really happened, but from the point of view of the participants at the time. From that perspective, Byrnes unquestionably emerged as the aggrieved party, having gained personal and political due bills from both Truman and Roosevelt. Byrnes had not been the victim of Truman, who himself had been little more than a pawn. The villain for Byrnes was Roosevelt. Truman, as the reluctant beneficiary of Roosevelt’s conspiracy against Byrnes, though not actively or even wittingly involved in the plot, nonetheless could not help feeling guilty about what had happened to Byrnes.

As a result of events surrounding Truman’s nomination as vice-president, a complicated mix of emotions infused the triangular relationship between Byrnes, Truman, and Roosevelt. As in a triangle, the Byrnes-Truman relationship functioned as part of the whole relationship with Roosevelt. But, unlike the geometric figure, that three-sided relationship was not an objective fact that could be precisely measured. It was a subjective phenomenon.

Reconstructing the 1944 Democratic national convention from the differing perspectives of Byrnes, Truman, and Roosevelt yields confused and sometimes contradictory versions of that event. Nonetheless, that mix of perceptions gives a more accurate sense of how that event influenced the component parts of the Roosevelt-Byrnes-Truman triangle. For both Truman and Byrnes, the 1944 convention was both an end and a beginning. It was the end of one stage in their respective lives and careers and the beginning of a new stage that was characterized by an altered relationship with each other and with Roosevelt.

The 1944 convention was not the first time Byrnes had missed at least the opportunity of becoming president. But this time hurt the most. This time he had been close. Not only in his own astute political judgment, but also in the opinion of less subjective analysts, Byrnes, among all the aspirants, had seemed to enjoy the best chance to gain the Democratic party’s nomination for vice-president. One independent preconvention estimate had given him no less than 400 of the 589 delegate votes needed for nomination. This was by far the single largest bloc of votes in a field of nearly a dozen candidates. That unmatched delegate strength, plus repeated assurances from the lips of the president that he only needed to run to win, had brought Byrnes to the party’s convention in Chicago as the front-running candidate for nomination as Roosevelt’s vice-president. So certain was the outcome of the voting in Chicago that the Democratic national committee had ordered ROOSEVELT and BYRNES campaign placards. As late as the weekend before the official opening of the convention, the consensus among those closest to the president and in control of the convention was that for vice-president It’s Byrnes.⁸

Then, within a matter of hours, the word changed. The whispers in the hotel hallways, delegation suites, and soon headlines in the press proclaimed that It’s Truman. The it was not just the vice-presidency. Long before the convention convened in July, even those not in a position to observe firsthand Roosevelt’s alarming physical deterioration realized that whoever was nominated as the president’s running mate would likely succeed him in office before the end of the fourth term. In what was the most humiliating defeat of his life, Byrnes belatedly realized that he was not to be that successor. That honor and burden instead would go to his former Senate colleague. Politically, Truman was a safe, uncontroversial, even innocuous choice. But, as the handpicked heir to Roosevelt’s position of national and world leadership, he made little sense, particularly to the man who had come to regard himself, not unjustifiably, as Roosevelt’s second-in-command.

Ironically, Truman did not really want what Byrnes was so bitter about having lost. Like Byrnes after the convention, Truman before it in many ways would have preferred staying in the Senate. He was much more at home there in the clubbish atmosphere of poker parties and talking politics over drinks than in the lonely glare of publicity focused on the White House. Over the years, he had earned acceptance and respect among his colleagues. He was proud of his unexpected status as United States senator. Both he and his immediate family were satisfied with that degree of public prominence and the chance to maintain their private life-style. From his reading of American history, Truman concluded that accidental presidents seldom succeeded and were more often the objects of ridicule by their contemporaries and by historians.⁹

Any politician faced with the opportunity to become president must feel a variety of emotions. But for Truman, more than any other of the eligible candidates in 1944, fear was a major obstacle to his acceptance of the nomination that designated him as Roosevelt’s successor. That obstacle was not overcome by egotism or personal ambition. Rather, Truman seems to have been motivated primarily by a real sense of privilege in being considered worthy of the position, even though he personally doubted his own worth. As one eyewitness said, throughout all the Byzantine maneuvers that made him the vice-presidential nominee, Truman seemed astounded by it all. To the end, he seemed unable or unwilling to believe that people really wanted him to be Roosevelt’s running mate. It was not feigned reluctance or false modesty. It was self-doubt and fear of failure.

Truman’s personal reluctance to put himself in line for the presidency was reinforced by his knowledge that his wife, who meant more to him than any office, was wild in her opposition to his becoming vice-president. But the opinion of another person equally dear to him was also a factor. A mother’s pride entered into Truman’s decision. As one of his oldest friends told him, in brushing aside all his protests about not wanting to be vice-president, if the job were offered he would have to take it because there’s a little old ninety year old mother down in Grandview Missouri that would like to see her son President of the United States. At first this penetrating observation almost made Truman weep, but then it made him furious perhaps because he did not want to admit it was true.¹⁰

Truman’s fears and self-doubt were also offset by his sense of duty and what can only be called his patriotism. Through a complicated series of maneuvers beyond his control, some even beyond his knowing, he found himself faced with what amounted to an order from the president and the leader of his party to volunteer for service. Captain Harry Truman and loyal Democrat Senator Truman was not one to disobey or even question such an order. His attitude is reflected in his advice to a friend who earlier that same year had been upset over the prospect of also having to take a job he did not want. Truman told him: Don’t take it unless the President calls you personally. When the president did call to offer the job, the friend, still reluctant to say yes and looking for a way out, went back to Truman for more advice. His only reply was: You take it. Truman’s similar pained but dutiful acceptance of the vice-presidency is eloquently summed up in his private first reaction upon finally hearing directly from Roosevelt that he had been drafted for the job. The vice-president designated only comment was: Oh shit.¹¹

Roosevelt issued that unwelcome order only at the last possible moment during the final hours before the convention voted on the vice-presidential nominee. The timing was deliberate. An earlier commitment to Truman may have resulted in his nomination, but it would have risked splitting the party even more seriously, perhaps mortally. To avoid that risk, the master