"Today Has Been A Historical One": Harry S Truman's Diary of the Potsdam Conference

Among the papers of Charles G. Ross at the Harry S Truman Library, unpublished and uncited, lies a unique historical document: an American president's contemporary account of one of the Second World War's Big Three Conferences. Between 16 July and 30 July 1945, Harry S Truman recorded his impressions of persons and events at Potsdam in an irregularly kept diary, which he scrawled hastily during stolen moments upon nearly twenty sheets of cheap paper.1 It provides the only record both of Truman's first conversation with Prime Minister Winston Churchill on 16 July and of his talk with Generalissimo Joseph Stalin before the second plenary meeting of the conference on 18 July.2 How the diary came to rest among Ross's papers is uncertain.

Archivists at the Truman Library speculate that the press secretary was contemplating its publication at the time of his death in 1950. The Truman who emerges from these pages is familiar, yet not wholly anticipated. His references in the third person to the “U.S.

President” testify to his modest belief, often noted by associates, that the office is not the man. Here, too, in brooding reflections upon the atomic bomb and the ruins of Berlin is that sense of history as a moralistic pageant of heroes and villains, familiar from the little homilies that were his wont.3 But of the somewhat bumptious confidence so often ascribed to the thirty-third president there is little sign, save perhaps in a reference to the United States as “the leader of the world for the common welfare.” The prevailing mood, rather, is one of pessimism. Truman clearly feared that the times were too much out of joint to be set right: “I hope for some sort of peace—but I fear that machines are ahead of morals by some centuries….” The last note is dismal: “It is a sick situation at best.”