Something went out of the other man’s eyes. “Yes. You’re right,” he said, and Vasili breathed again. “We will be avenged. Or else we will give Russia what America gave us.” China couldn’t do that. If Russia didn’t back her up, though, she was liable to try. That would be unfortunate-for both countries.
–
Harry Truman strode into the White House press room. Behind his round-lensed glasses, his eyes narrowed against the TV lights’ glare. Those hadn’t been there when he took over for FDR. You didn’t need a girl to slap pancake makeup on you and cluck at how badly you’d shaved before you went on the radio, either.
Like it or not, though-and Truman didn’t, not very much-television was the coming thing, and plainly here to stay. If they could, people wanted to see your face when you told them something. He’d be speaking on the radio, too: there was a regular thicket of microphones hooked up to his lectern, each one crowned with a different combination of alphabet soup.
“Here you go, Mr. President.” Stephen Early, the press secretary, led Truman to that mike-festooned lectern. Early had done the job for Roosevelt, and had come out of retirement to do it again after Charlie Ross dropped dead the previous December. Truman missed Charlie the way he missed a just-pulled tooth. They’d gone back a long way together; Ross was another Independence man. But no one could say Early didn’t know the ropes.
The cameramen nodded to Truman one by one as he took his place. No reporters sat in the chairs in front of the lectern. He would be issuing a statement this morning, not taking questions. The questions would come later, but later could wait.
Almost in exact unison, red lights came on under the front lenses of all three television cameras. That meant they were sending his picture across the country, and to parts of Canada and Mexico as well.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,” Truman said, glancing down at his text. “Last night, the night of January twenty-third local time, to protect United Nations forces battling the unprovoked Red Chinese invasion of the Korean peninsula, U.S. Air Force planes used atomic weapons against several Chinese marshaling points in Manchuria.”
He didn’t say how many places had been attacked. The Chinks had hacked one of the bomb-carrying B-29s out of the sky before it could deliver its cargo. Truman hoped that atomic bomb was an unusable wreck now, but he didn’t know for sure. He also didn’t call the targets cities. Marshaling points sounded much more military.
“I took this step with great reluctance, but I did take it,” Truman went on. “The bombs were delivered at my order, and under my responsibility as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States of America. I regret the urgent military necessity that forced me to this extraordinary step. I regret it, but I did not, I could not, shrink from it. As I have told you before, the buck stops here.”
Some people would have set things up so that, if using the atomic bombs turned out not to be such a hot idea, a good chunk of the blame would stick to General MacArthur. Truman was as sure as made no difference that Roosevelt would have played it that way. He admired his predecessor’s subtle political skills without wanting to imitate them. He’d got the job done his own way for almost six years now. He wasn’t as smooth or slick as FDR, but he coped.
“We have not attacked the territory of the Soviet Union,” he said. “We have not, and we will not, provided that it refrain from any provocative response in the wake of our necessary action pertaining to Korea. We were allies against the greatest menace to freedom the world has ever seen. We do not need to fight each other now. With the weapons in our arsenals, that would be the worst tragedy in recorded history.”
He wasn’t just talking to the American people. Shortwave radio would carry his words around the world at the speed of light. Joseph Stalin would see them or hear them as soon as they could be translated. Stalin wasn’t the cuddly Uncle Joe we’d made him out to be during the war years. He was as ruthless as Hitler, if less rash. If he had any sense, he would know better than to mess with the USA.
If. Truman knew he wasn’t the only one going after Stalin’s ear now. Mao Tse-tung would be screaming into it right this minute. Mao would have been screaming into it ever since he got word that big chunks of Manchuria had just gone up in smoke. Well, too goddamn bad for Mao, Truman thought.
Aloud, he finished the statement: “We do not seek a wider war. All we want to do is restore to Korea its liberty, which came into danger when the North invaded the South without warning. We have a mandate from the United Nations to do exactly that. We serve the cause of freedom and peace, and want nothing more anywhere else in the world. Thank you, and God bless the United States of America.”
As he stepped away from the lectern, the lights under the camera’s noses went out. “That was a good speech, Mr. President,” the press secretary said. “An excellent speech.”
“Thanks, Stephen,” Truman answered. He couldn’t imagine calling the plump, dignified, gray-mustached Stephen Early Steve. Charles Ross had been Charlie for more years than he could remember. Truman couldn’t help adding, “I hope it does what I want it to do.”
“Well, that’s partly in Stalin’s court now, isn’t it?” Early said.
“Yes,” the President said, not altogether happily. “Now we find out just how good a friend of his Mao Tse-tung is. If Stalin drops bombs on France and England, the NATO treaty says that’s the same thing as dropping bombs on us. I don’t believe Russia and Red China have the same kind of formal alliance-”
“And Stalin can ignore it if he wants to,” the press secretary put in.
“He sure can,” Truman agreed. “He has more practice breaking treaties than Babe Ruth did with home-run records. But if he decides he won’t break this one…Well, we’ll do what we have to do, that’s all.”
“He respects you, sir,” Stephen Early said. “He respects the power of the United States.”
“Your old boss talked softer to the Russians than I do.” If Truman sounded proud of not being soft, well, he was.
“It was wartime,” Early replied. “He always worried that, if he got too sticky, Stalin would make a separate peace with Hitler. That would have fouled up the war effort beyond all recognition.”
“Would the Russians really have done that?” Truman hadn’t paid much attention to the ins and outs of diplomacy till he got tapped for the Vice Presidency and saw Roosevelt wasn’t likely to live out his term.
“We heard that Molotov and Ribbentrop did talk after Stalingrad,” Early said. “But Hitler wanted to keep a good-sized chunk of Russia, and Stalin insisted on the status quo ante bellum. So the war went on another two years.”
“Hitler would have done better to take whatever he could get then, the way it turned out.” Truman paused to light a cigarette. With a reminiscent chuckle, he went on, “After one of our little wrangles, Molotov told me he’d never had anyone talk to him that way in his whole life.”
“He’s a difficult man,” the veteran press secretary said. “The few times I had anything to do with him, I saw that plainly.”
“Somebody should have knocked the applesauce out of him when he was younger. He wouldn’t be such a blasted nuisance now if somebody had,” Truman said.
“Probably not. But if he wasn’t, Stalin would have found some other son of a bitch to fill that slot instead of him,” Early said.
Truman laughed. “Boy, have you got that right! If you work for Stalin and you aren’t a son of a bitch, you don’t last. Even if you are a son of a bitch, a lot of the time you don’t last. I’m not saying Molotov isn’t good at what he does. But, Lord, he’s a hard-nosed so-and-so. At the UN, Gromyko is the same way.”