Truman set the scene, then gave the news

Press, 9 May 1985, Page 28

Truman set the scene, then gave the news

By HARRY ROSENTHAL of the Associated Press (through NZPA) Washington He got up early, as always, on his first morning in the White House and sat down at the desk in the study next to the presidential bedroom. “Dear Mamma and Mary,” Harry S. Truman wrote, “I am sixty-one this morning, and I slept in the President’s room in the White House last night.” The date was May 8,1945. Truman had been president for 26 days and he had moved from Blair House across the street the night before. He chose to tell his mother and sister about that before he got to his big news.

“They have finished the painting and have some of the furniture in place,” he wrote. “I’m hoping it will all be ready for you by Friday. My expensive gold pen doesn’t work as well as it should.”

The preliminaries out of the way, the President got down to business. “This will be a historical day,” he wrote. “At 9 o’clock this morning, I must make a broadcast to the country, announcing the German surrender.

“The papers were signed yesterday morning and hostilities will cease on all fronts at midnight tonight.

Isn’t that some birthday present?” In the letter, which he included in his memoirs. Truman went on to say he had “one heck of a time” with Churchill over the timing of the announcement. Truman, Churchill, and the Soviet leader, Josef Stalin, had agreed to release the news simultaneously — at 9 a.m. in Washington, 3 p.m. in London, and 4 p.m. in Moscow. “Mr Churchill began clling me at daylight to know if we shouldn’t make an immediate release without considering the Russians,” Truman wrote. “He was refused and then he kept pushing me to talk

to Stalin. He finally had to stick to the agreed plan — but he was mad as a wet hen." Truman said things had moved "at a terrific rate" since he became President on April 12. after Franklin D. Roosevelt died. “Never a day has gone by that some momentous decision didn’t have to be made," he wrote. "So far. luck has been with me. I hope it keeps up. It can't stay with me forever, however, and I hope when the mistake comes it won’t be too great to remedy."

Then back to family business.

“We are looking forward to a grand visit with you," he wrote to his mother, aged 92. “I’m sending the safest, finest plane and all kinds of help, so please don’t disappoint me."