Eagles

Eagles recur in the book not as independent creatures but as a political emblem: the eagle on Harry S. Truman’s redesigned presidential flag and seal. Its changed gaze was meant to express a nation moving forward while dedicated to peace. Reappearing against scenes of military spectacle and in a conversation with Winston Churchill, the image gathers a more complicated meaning, holding peaceful intention beside the power and danger represented by the eagle’s arrows.

Redesigning the Emblem

For the first time since the years of Woodrow Wilson, both the presidential flag and the presidential seal were redesigned. Truman presented the new flag to reporters and explained that its eagle faced toward the staff, as if looking forward on the march, and toward the olive branch rather than the arrows of war. The orientation was deliberate: the bird was to signify not simply national strength, but forward movement joined to a commitment to peace.

That explanation made the emblem an argument in miniature. The eagle remained, but the direction of its gaze altered the emphasis. Its traditional association with force was not removed; instead, the olive branch was placed in the line of sight, expressing the administration’s preferred relation between power and peace.

Military Spectacle and Its Limits

On October 26, 1945, Truman went to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to commission the aircraft carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt. From the deck of the battleship Missouri, he later reviewed fifty warships in the Hudson River as twelve hundred Navy planes passed overhead. The display gave physical scale to the military power implicit in the eagle and its arrows. Yet the scene stood against the rapid demobilization then under way: the country wanted its service members home, and Truman later described the process not as demobilization but as disintegration.

The contrast complicates the flag’s peaceful symbolism. A turned eagle’s head could declare an intention, but it could not preserve the wartime force displayed on the river—or settle how much military power a postwar nation should retain. The emblem’s promise of peace therefore appears alongside, rather than in place of, the material spectacle of armed strength.

Churchill’s Reply

The eagle returned in conversation with Churchill aboard the presidential train on the way to Fulton. Truman pointed to the presidential seal and explained that he had turned the bird’s head toward the olive branch. Churchill replied that he thought the eagle’s head should be on a swivel. The joke gave the fixed emblem a pointed flexibility: the bird might face peace, but its posture could also turn toward the arrows.

Across these appearances, the eagle links a formal redesign, a public display of naval power, and an exchange between two political leaders. Its significance lies in that unresolved pairing. The olive branch signals the peace Truman wanted the emblem to represent; the arrows, and Churchill’s imagined swivel, keep the possibility of force within the frame.