Chapter 1 Over the Rainbow On Armistice Day, November 11, 1943, a year and a half before the abrupt transition of power from the president to the senator, the two of them happened to be traveling on the same day but in opposite directions. Senator Harry Truman again was alone, this time on a westbound train to Chicago, scheduled to deliver a paid speech that evening to the Chicago branch of the American Association of Advertising Agencies. Franklin Roosevelt, in the eleventh year of his presidency, was being driven secretly, under cover of darkness and cold rain, southeast to the marine base at Quantico, Virginia, where he and his entourage of aides and military chiefs would begin a 17,400-mile trip by sea and air to Tehran. Roosevelt, "in good health" and with an enormous zest for living," could hardly wait to begin the voyage by battleship and C-54 that would take him more than halfway around the world-beyond the rain. For months he had been pressing Premier Joseph Stalin, via top secret cables, to meet with him and Prime Minister Winston Churchill-a meeting of "vital importance," he wrote. "The whole world will be watching us for this meeting of the three of us," Roosevelt declared. Stalin finally agreed but only on condition that the meeting take place in Tehran. A part of the world, the very worst part, would in fact be watching. On the day FDR departed Washington, he cabled Churchill: "I have just heard that U.J. [meaning "Uncle Joe" Stalin] will come to Teheran . . . now there is no question that you and I can meet him there between [November] twenty-seventh and the thirtieth." Within a few days, a photo of this top secret cable was on a German courier plane from Ankara to Berlin. A valet, code-named "Cicero," who was working for the British ambassador to Turkey, had stolen the cable from his master's safe and sold it to a Nazi undercover intelligence agent for several thousand pounds sterling (skillfully counterfeited). In Berlin, the arrival of the purloined cable breathed new life into an audacious Nazi plot to assassinate Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at Tehran. The plot, a "priority for Hitler," was already in the planning stages because of solid intelligence that the Big Three would be meeting somewhere in the fall of 1943. Thirty-three-year-old Walter Schellenberg, the SS general in the Reich Intelligence Service (SD) with responsibility for planning the assassination, could scarcely believe his good fortune, because he had previously installed a network of agents in Tehran. They were put there to sabotage the Trans-Iranian Railroad, which was carrying forty thousand tons of Lend-Lease war supplies to the Soviet Union every month. These agents would provide safe houses in the city for assassination teams that would be parachuted into areas surrounding Tehran. _________ Roosevelt knew nothing about the leaked cable, much less the plot. For him, the summit in Tehran was critically important not only to nail down once and for all a date in the spring of 1944 for the Allied invasion of France but also to persuade Stalin to sign on to the president's vision of the United Nations-a postwar world-peacekeeping organization with enforcement powers. It was the achievement of the latter objective that was FDR's most fervent hope. Having paid homage the morning before leaving DC at the World War I Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, FDR was keenly aware that President Wilson had failed miserably to secure the Senate's advice and consent to the League of Nations and in doing so had suffered a complete breakdown in his health. As Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Sherwood wrote, "The tragedy of Wilson was always within the rim of [FDR's] consciousness. Roosevelt could never forget Wilson's mistakes." The first leg of what Roosevelt called in his diary "another Odyssey" began a few minutes after midnight on Saturday, November 13, when the spanking new steel gray battleship USS Iowa, the navy's largest and fastest, weighed anchor, emerged from Chesapeake Bay into the Atlantic, and then steamed east toward Gibraltar at a cruising speed of 25 knots. By then the president was asleep in the captain's cabin, which had been refitted to accommodate his disability with a small railed bathtub and two portable elevators, one that would lift him in his wheelchair up to the bridge and the other down to the main deck. Vice Admiral John McCrea, former head of FDR's Map Room in the White House and captain of the Iowa, vacated his quarters and moved up to his small cabin in the conning tower. In addition to the president; his physician, Vice Admiral Ross McIntire; aides Harry Hopkins and Edwin "Pa" Watson; as well as the joint chiefs and their staffs, the monstrous ship was home to a crew of 2,700 sailors and marines. On McCrea's shoulders rested an awesome responsibility. Aboard his battleship was invaluable human cargo-the American commander in chief and his entire military team, who were in the midst of an existential global war. Though they were protected by 157 guns, a screen of six destroyers, fighter planes that could be summoned from a nearby aircraft carrier, and three scout planes, not to mention that the Iowa had a top speed of 32 knots, the ship was vulnerable. It was no secret that the Germans had developed guided missile technology capable of directing radio-controlled glide bombs and torpedoes, and that they had begun using them to sink enemy naval vessels. Plus, the new German "snorkels," which allowed U-boats to remain submerged for much longer periods, had led to a resurgence of the U-boat menace in the Atlantic. Given the risk and the stakes, airtight security and absolute secrecy were McCrea's watchwords. On the second day at sea, during an afternoon gunnery exercise, the Iowa and the American high command narrowly escaped disaster, possibly death, but not at the hands of a German U-boat or a guided missile. As the president, seated in his armless wheelchair on the port side of the promenade deck, was enjoying the sights and sounds of antiaircraft guns firing at target balloons, Captain McCrea shouted into the conning tower, "Right full rudder." An officer on the bridge announced, "Torpedo on the starboard beam," and a sailor roared, "This ain't no drill." The gigantic battleship, almost three football fields in length, surged to flank speed and began to vibrate as it heeled over to starboard, heading straight toward "the broaching 'fish'" so it would present the narrowest possible target. The president called out to his valet, Arthur Prettyman, to wheel him "over to the starboard rail." John Driscoll, a young navy officer who was watching the president from the bridge above, recalled that FDR, grasping a lifeline on the starboard side, "was facing the rear of the ship . . . his head was held high, intent, curious and fearless." Seconds later, the torpedo plowed into Iowa's churning wake a half mile astern and exploded with such force hammering the hull that many aboard thought the ship had been struck a mortal blow. A mile away, the escort destroyer USS William D. Porter, ever after known as the Willy Dee, broke radio silence to conditionally confess, "the torpedo may be ours." Roosevelt later dictated a note explaining that the crew of the star-crossed destroyer had been "holding a torpedo drill, using the Iowa as a spotting target." A live torpedo had been accidentally fired "and the aim was luckily bad." Either guns from the Iowa or the force of its wake caused the torpedo to explode. At dinner that evening, Hopkins tried to make light of it, joking that the torpedo "must have come from some damn Republican." During a meeting in his cabin on November 15, FDR's military chiefs presented a unanimous recommendation that he should reject once and for all Churchill's "Balkans-Eastern Mediterranean" strategy for defeating Germany, which the prime minister had been promoting for months, and in so doing implicitly confirm his support for Operation Overlord, the massive cross-Channel invasion of France that was planned to take place in the spring of 1944. As if the president were answering their prayers, and he most certainly was, the minutes recorded FDR as simply saying, "Amen." The chiefs were relieved. They had reason to believe that this time their commander in chief would not accede, as he had in the past, to Churchill's seductive eloquence. Addressing the next item on the meeting agenda, Roosevelt announced that it was his "idea" that General Marshall should command not only Overlord but all "British, French, Italian and U.S. troops involved" in defeating Germany. This was the first time the president had gone on record as favoring the appointment of Marshall to be supreme commander in Europe. In his many hours out on the sun-splashed deck as Iowa raced from Bermuda to the Azores, Roosevelt's thoughts drifted beyond the war and often fixated on Joseph Stalin: whether and if so how he could establish a personal relationship with him, a relationship both friendly and cooperative. FDR was obsessively interested in learning about Stalin's background and personality, having read extensively about him and questioned those who knew him well. The president was under no illusions. He knew that Stalin was a ruthless tyrant, responsible for the indiscriminate murder of tens of thousands of innocent victims in Ukraine and elsewhere. Nevertheless, since only two superpowers-the U.S. and the Soviet Union-would remain after the war, there would be no international peacekeeping organization without buy-in by by the Soviet premier and the membership of his empire. In FDR's mind, Joseph Stalin, the absolute dictator of the Soviet Union, was the key to his plan for postwar peace. Supremely confident that Stalin was "getable," as Roosevelt and Hopkins used to say, the president remarked one afternoon to Doc McIntire, who had accompanied him on the Iowa, "If I can convince [Stalin] that our offer of cooperation is on the square, and that we want to be comrades rather than enemies, I'm betting that he'll come in." Roosevelt reasoned that because Stalin and the vast Soviet Union would be faced with daunting challenges after the war, it would be in the best interests of the Russians to remain friendly with the United States. "I bank on his realism," he told McIntire. "He must be tired of sitting on bayonets," meaning the calls for the restoration of his war-torn country, the demands of his people for humanitarian relief, and the grumblings of his satellite nations, which would soon yearn for freedom. He was convinced that Stalin needed the U.S. as much as FDR needed him. William Bullitt, former ambassador to the Soviet Union, was skeptical. He had warned Roosevelt in three private letters against "the vice of wishful thinking." The president responded with disdain, saying he was "going to play my hunch," gambling that if he asked Stalin "for nothing in return, noblesse oblige," he "will work with me for a world of democracy and peace." George Kennan, who emerged after the war as the leading expert on Soviet intentions, believed FDR was naive. He wrote that Bullitt's letters "deserve a place among the major historical documents of the time." As Iowa neared the narrow Strait of Gibraltar, where the huge battleship would become exposed to lurking U-boats and bomber-launched Hs-293 glide torpedoes, Admiral Kent Hewitt, the naval commander in the area, was ordered to call upon his destroyers, subs, and aircraft to clear the strait and keep it clear. With all of its lights blacked out, the Iowa began sliding through the strait under cover of darkness. Suddenly, its superstructure was silhouetted by beams of powerful searchlights situated on the nearby Spanish shore. Hewitt's task force, however, had done its job. The Iowa emerged unscathed at dawn into the broad, sunlit Mediterranean Sea. After the eight-day voyage, Captain McCrea anchored Iowa in the harbor of the great Mers-el-Kébir naval base, six miles west of the Algerian city of Oran. The American commander in chief had weighed anchor in a war zone, the southern edge of the Mediterranean theater. For the next few days, he and his entourage would fly with fighter escorts in his comfortably fitted Douglas C-54 transport along the North African littoral to Tunis and then Cairo, where they would confer with Chiang Kai-shek and Churchill for four more days before departing for the flight over the Middle East to Tehran and the long-sought meeting with Stalin. _________ On the eve of departure from Cairo, November 26, 1943, reports from the world's battlefields were mixed. In Italy, the battle closest to Roosevelt, savage fighting by the Anglo-American troops in San Pietro was taking place at what was called "the Winter Line." Plagued by mounting casualties, outbreaks of trench foot, and supply shortages, General Mark Clark gathered the senior commanders of his Fifth Army and ordered them to pause and "hold to [their] present positions" for two weeks. The defending forces of German field marshal "Smiling Al" Kesserling enjoyed a natural advantage in the mountainous terrain. General Lucian Truscott, one of the war's most successful combat generals, drawled, "There's still a lot of fight left in the old son of a bitch." Eight thousand miles to the east, dispatches from the Pacific in November were encouraging but progress was terribly slow. General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral William "Bull" Halsey had worked out a plan to isolate, starve, and bypass Rabaul, a strategically located Japanese bastion at the eastern end of the island of New Britain, the most heavily defended position by Japan in the South Pacific. By the time Roosevelt had departed Cairo for Tehran, the noose was beginning to be draped around Rabaul's neck. But it would take weeks for MacArthur to encircle Rabaul, cut its supply lines, and deprive the hundred thousand Japanese infantrymen on the base of an opportunity to fight and die for their emperor. By far the most optimistic reports in late November 1943 came from the Eastern Front, some two thousand to thirty-five hundred miles northeast of Cairo. Having paid a terrible price in military and civilian casualties-an estimated twenty million dead-the Red Army had regained more than half of the territory lost to the Germans since 1941. While Leningrad was still under siege, the cities of Smolensk, Kyiv, and Kharkiv, among many others, had been recaptured. After crippling defeats at Stalingrad and the Kursk salient, an epic battle in which two million men fought for fifty days, the once vaunted Wehrmacht was no longer capable of sustained offensive action. In the south, the German 17th Army had been forced to withdraw across the Kerch Strait into the Crimean Peninsula. Though its land-based connection and its communications were severed by the Soviets, the Germans were able to hang on to Crimea for the next several months. Nevertheless, Hitler's dream-a nightmare for the Allies-of capturing the oil fields in the Caucasus and linking up with the Japanese in the Middle East would never come to fruition. Excerpted from Ascent to Power: How Truman Emerged from Roosevelt's Shadow and Remade the World by David L. Roll All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
