According to Gardner, a series of discussions involving Truman and his advisors between Roosevelt's death in April 1945 and the Potsdam Conference in July show the new President facing difficult decisions concerning the forthcoming meeting with Stalin, military usage of the bomb and its subsequent control, all of which were liable to impinge on or be influenced by the terms of the Japanese surrender. If the desire to know the results of the Alamogordo bomb test, scheduled for mid-July, had prompted Truman to delay the Potsdam meeting in order to improve his negotiating position, the surrender terms added a further complication. On the one hand Truman was publicly committed to the call for Unconditional Surrender inherited from his predecessor, a stance popular with a still-vengeful Congress and American public and one around which he therefore felt compelled to build his foreign policy. If you are looking for someone to "write my essay", you should try our professional essay writing service! We are able to help you with essays! On the other, particularly from May onwards Truman recognized that Unconditional Surrender, insofar as it stiffened Tokyo's determination to resist and thereby prolong the conflict, threatened to leave post-war Japan in chaos. By postponing the Japanese capitulation, it also offered Moscow greater opportunities to benefit from its own last-minute entrance into the Far Eastern War, as provided for by the Yalta agreements – opportunities which, ironically, the President was hoping a successful Alamogordo bomb test would help him to limit at Potsdam.
If Truman was torn over the question of the surrender, however, other considerations helped him reach a decision. As Gardner emphasizes, the political milieu within which the President acted was shifting: in domestic terms, after three years of economic recovery, from a redistribution-and planning-oriented New Deal liberalism towards a growth-oriented market liberalism; in international terms, as the common enemy collapsed and new problems prompted Big Three disagreements, from a faith in the Grand Alliance towards a more unilateral approach. One of the grounds upon which Secretary of State James Byrnes continued to stand by the original demand for Unconditional Surrender was that it would serve notice, both at home and abroad, that the United States was a mature world power, one not about to repeat the mistakes of Woodrow Wilson in the wake of World War One. Tough-minded realism, in other words, would not only enable Truman to stay true to Roosevelt's original surrender terms and satisfy domestic public opinion, it would also allow him to prove, particularly to those anxious that Roosevelt in his last months had gone too far in accommodating an inflexible Stalin, that the national interest, its military security and future prosperity were in good hands. It would, in short, help Truman contain growing tensions within his domestic politico-economic coalition. Though advisors like Secretary of War Henry Stimson would continue to recommend a softening in the surrender terms to allow the Japanese to retain the Emperor, such a concession was omitted from the final Potsdam Declaration of 26 July. Custom writing paper is a professional assistance sought by students who want assistance of experienced writers online. Plagiarism free papers! When no surrender was forthcoming, Washington (not for the first time) substituted technology for diplomacy – or, more precisely, carried to its conclusion over Hiroshima and Nagasaki a strategy which for some time had been using technology to underwrite diplomacy.