In November the American ambassador to China, Patrick J. Hurley, who had returned to Washington for consultation, announced unexpectedly that he was resigning because of the way the State Department was siding with the Chinese Communists. Hurley broke the news in a speech at the Press Club, barely an hour after telling Truman that all was under control in China and that he would be returning there shortly. “To me, this was an utterly inexplicable about-face, and what had caused it I cannot imagine even yet,” Truman would write years later. At the time he was more explicit. Tearing a yellow news copy from the White House ticker, he stormed into a Cabinet meeting saying, “See what a son-of-a-bitch did to me.”
Clinton Anderson, the Secretary of Agriculture, suggested that the President immediately name General Marshall as the new special ambassador to China and thus take the headlines away from Hurley. It was an inspired suggestion. From the Red Room, Truman telephoned Marshall at his home in Leesburg, Virginia.
“General, I want you to go to China for me,” he said.
“Yes, Mr. President,” Marshall replied and hung up.
Truman had hated to make the call. Marshall by then had had all of six days of retirement. Marshall said later that he had ended the call abruptly because his wife walked into the room and he wished to explain to her himself, rather than have her overhear a telephone conversation.
At a Gridiron Club dinner in December, only half in jest, Truman declared that General William Tecumseh Sherman had been wrong. “I’m telling you I find peace is hell….”
His health insurance plan was getting nowhere. Another message, and of equal importance to Truman, called for unification of the armed forces, under a single Secretary of Defense, an idea the Navy vehemently opposed and that Bob Hannegan thought politically unwise, arguing that it was foolish ever to wage an unnecessary fight that he might lose. But Truman insisted. He wanted to break up the power of the West Point and Annapolis cliques, to make the armed services more democratic—a noble aspiration, many around him agreed, but impossible, they felt. It was his duty to send the message, he said, because it represented his conviction.
To Sam Rosenman, who had grown immensely fond of Truman, the chief difference between Truman and Roosevelt was that Truman “paid much less attention to what his actions were doing towards his chances for reelection…. Truman did a great many things that Roosevelt, because he knew the effect it would have, never would have done.”
To many it appeared that the President’s easy familiarity with members of Congress—their talk of good old Harry and so forth—was proving a handicap. If his program was steadfastly in the Roosevelt tradition, they could be quite as obdurate as they had been with Roosevelt just before the war, only now without the fear that, like Roosevelt, Truman might take his case to the country with powerful effect. Truman couldn’t “awe them,” and as was said, in American politics “a fearsome respect” usually achieved better results than camaraderie.
Meantime, privately, Truman felt that Jimmy Byrnes, who was in Moscow at a Foreign Ministers’ Conference, was failing to keep him sufficiently informed. To Henry Wallace he expressed concern that the peacetime use of atomic energy might so reduce the length of the working day that people would “get into mischief.” Once, at a Cabinet meeting in December, Wallace politely but pointedly lectured him for not knowing how many atomic bombs were in stock and for saying further that he really didn’t want to know. “Mr. President, you should know,” Wallace insisted. “The President retreated in some confusion and said he guessed he should know and then covered up by saying, ‘I do know in a general way,’ ” Wallace noted in his diary.
From Byrnes and Wallace both, Truman got the distinct impression that each thought his own judgment considerably superior to that of the President.
To many of the holdovers from the Roosevelt years, as to prominent liberals elsewhere, it appeared the administration was going to pieces. In the stridently liberal New York newspaper PM, columnist Max Lerner offered a scathing assessment of the President, calling him one of history’s “wild accidents.” There had been leaders in the past who had greatness thrust upon them by circumstance, but never one who wore the mantle of great office so uneasily, wrote Lerner, who had been to Missouri and felt he now understood Truman’s strengths and defects. The President’s “first quality” was personal honesty. He was also loyal to his friends and a hard worker. The overriding problem, said Lerner, was his “middle-class mentality”:
In a crisis the middle-class mind falls back on personal virtues and personal relations. In a crisis the middle-class mind shows itself more fearful of labor and strikes and labor’s political power than of anything else. In a crisis the middle-class mind tries to assume a lofty detachment from the deep issues of the day, and tries to blink the real social cleavage and struggles.
These struggles are not reconcilable by a personal appeal for cooperation. In the end you have to choose your side and fight on it…. In the end, President Truman’s basic weakness lies in his failure to understand imaginatively the nature and greatness of the office he holds.
Though Bess, Margaret, and Madge Wallace departed for Independence a week before Christmas, Truman remained at the White House until Christmas morning when he decided to fly home despite dreadful weather. The first snow of winter had fallen on Washington two weeks earlier. On the 19th another five inches fell in a storm that hit much of the country. Christmas morning he awoke to a driving wind, sleet and rain. National Airport was sheathed in ice, he was told. All commercial flights were canceled. But after conferring with his pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Hank Myers, Truman decided to go, and when The Sacred Cow at last appeared out of the clouds over Kansas City, it was more than an hour overdue. Newspapers and radio commentators called the trip foolhardy—“one of the most hazardous ‘sentimental journeys’ ever undertaken” by a chief of state, said The New York Times. Had anyone known the sort of welcome he received on reaching the big gray house on North Delaware Street, the journey would have seemed even more unnecessary, his position still more pathetic. For Bess had been anything but sentimental or approving. At his desk in Washington three days later, Truman would write one of the most forlorn letters of his life:
December 28, 1945
Dear Bess:
Well I’m here in the White House, the great white sepulcher of ambitions and reputations. I feel like last year’s bird’s nest which is on its second year. Not very often I admit I am not in shape. I think maybe that exasperates you, too, as a lot of other things I do and pretend to do exasperate you. But it isn’t intended for that purpose….
You can never appreciate what it means to come home as I did the other evening after doing at least one hundred things I didn’t want to do and have the only person in the world whose approval and good opinion I value look at me like I’m something the cat dragged in and tell me I’ve come in at last because I couldn’t find any reason to stay away. I wonder why we are made so that what we really think and feel we cover up?.
This head of mine should have been bigger and better proportioned. There ought to have been more brain and a larger bump of ego or something to give me an idea that there can be a No. 1 man in the world. I didn’t want to be. But, in spite of the opinions to the contrary, Life and Time say I am. [He was on the cover of Time that week as “Man of the Year.”]
If that is the case, you, Margie, and everyone else who may have any influence on my actions must give me help and assistance; because no one ever needed help and assistance as I do now. If I can get the use of the best brains in the country and a little help from those I have on a pedestal at home, the job will be done….
Kiss my baby and I love you in season and out,
Harry
But thinking better of it, he never mailed the letter. It was tucked in a desk drawer together with its unused envelope.
The grim weather held as he struggled to keep control of events, his chief aggravation now the behavior of his Secretary of State.
&nb
sp; Before returning from Independence, Truman had been notified by Charlie Ross that Byrnes, in winding up the Moscow conference, had released a communiqué in advance of any summary report to the President. To make matters worse, Byrnes, en route home, notified Ross to arrange air time on all the radio networks, so that he could report to the nation before seeing the President. Clearly, Byrnes had forgotten his manners.
Senator Vandenberg, disturbed that Byrnes had been too conciliatory with the Russians, rushed to the White House demanding to know what was going on.
This was on Friday, December 28, the day of Truman’s plaintive letter to Bess. Afterward, he left for a cruise down the Potomac on the presidential yacht, Williamsburg, again disregarding the miserable weather. When Byrnes landed in Washington the following day, Saturday the 29th, a telegram from Truman was waiting for him: “Suggest you come down today or tomorrow to report your mission…. We can then discuss among other things the advisability of a broadcast by you….”
The relationship between the two men had never been easy or entirely candid. Byrnes did indeed consider himself better equipped and more deserving than Truman to be President and he was not always successful in concealing that. Though Truman considered Byrnes extremely bright, his experience in government unequaled, he had never felt he could entirely trust him. En route to Potsdam, Truman had referred to him in a diary entry as his “able and conniving” Secretary of State. “My but he has a keen mind,” Truman wrote. “And he is honest. But all country politicians are alike. They are sure all other politicians are circuitous in their dealings.”
After a hurried flight by special plane, Byrnes went aboard the Williamsburg at Quantico, Virginia, and met with Truman privately in Truman’s stateroom. A cold rain was falling on the river. Everything outside was gray and forbidding.
By Truman’s account, written much later, he closed the door and gave Byrnes a sharp dressing down:
I told him I did not like the way in which I had been left in the dark about the Moscow conference. I told him that, as President, I intended to know what progress we were making and what we were doing in foreign negotiations. I said that it was shocking that a communiqué should be issued in Washington announcing a foreign-policy development of major importance that I had never heard of. I said I would not tolerate a repetition of such conduct.
Byrnes, however, would insist the conversation was entirely pleasant, and according to others on board, it was not so much Truman as Admiral Leahy who gave Byrnes a hard time. (Leahy, as was known, considered Byrnes “a horse’s ass.”) Dean Acheson, who was not present, but who developed an understanding of both Truman and Byrnes, later speculated that both their impressions were genuine; that Truman, in recalling such encounters, was inclined to exaggerate his “bark,” when in reality he was nearly always extremely considerate of the feelings of others; and that Byrnes, as a veteran of South Carolina politics, would never have taken as personal criticism Truman’s demand to be kept informed.
In any event, the meeting marked a change in the relationship. There was no open break, but Truman’s confidence in his Secretary of State was not to be the same again. Six days later, still steaming mad, he wrote longhand letter to “My dear Jim,” saying that while he wanted to give members of his Cabinet ample authority, he had no intention of relinquishing the authority of the President or “to forego the President’s prerogative to make the final decision.” He was intensely concerned about Russia, tired of “babying” the Soviets. “Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making. Only one language do they understand, ‘How many divisions have you?’ ”
According to an account that Truman wrote years later, he then called Byrnes to his office and read the letter aloud. But again Byrnes declared that no such scene occurred—if it had, Byrnes said, he would have resigned at once. But for the record Truman noted on the letter in his own hand at the time: “Read to the Sec. of State and discussed—not typed or mailed.” Later, in a conversation with Eben Ayers, Truman said he had most definitely read the letter to Byrnes, “right here in this office with him sitting right where you are. I told him I was not going to give him the letter but wanted to read it to him.” Byrnes’s face, said Truman, had turned “fiery red.”
It was a letter like others to come in Truman’s presidency. He called them his “longhand spasms,” and there appears indeed to have been something sudden and involuntary about them. They seemed to serve some deep psychological need, as a vent for his anger, and were seldom intended for anyone to see. They cleared the air for him. He felt better almost immediately and, unsent, they did no one any harm. Yet in tone and content they bore little or no resemblance to the way he was ordinarily with people. “I have never heard him say, or heard of him saying a harsh, bitter, or sarcastic word to anyone, whatever the offense or failure,” Dean Acheson would write.
II
With the new year under way, there was little time for brooding, seldom time enough for anything. A steel strike loomed, threatening the whole economy. Hurried meetings were held. Official cars came and went in the White House drive. “1946 is our year of decision,” Truman had told the country in a radio broadcast. “This year we lay the foundation for our economic structure which will have to serve for generations.”
The steel workers’ union, headed by Phil Murray, called for a wage increase of 19½ cents an hour. The steel companies, represented by Benjamin Fairless of U.S. Steel, offered 15 cents. At the conclusion of a long, arduous session at the White House on January 12, Truman was able to announce that Murray had agreed to postpone the strike for one week. After another session on the 17th, and still no agreement, Truman proposed that the steel companies grant an increase of 18½ cents. Both sides wanted time to consider and were told that they had until noon the following day.
Murray accepted the President’s proposal, but Fairless refused. On January 19, 1946, at more than 1,000 mills across the country, 800,000 steel workers walked off the job in the biggest strike in history.
The whole country was in the grip of strikes. Some 200,000 meatpackers had struck by now. There was a glass workers’ strike, a telephone strike, a coffinmakers’ strike, a huge strike at General Electric. In Pittsburgh a strike of 3,500 electric company employees caused plant closings that affected 100,000 other workers. Streetcars stopped running, office buildings closed. “This is a disaster,” said Pittsburgh’s Mayor David Lawrence in a radio plea to the strikers to go back to their jobs—and Mayor Lawrence, a Democrat, was long considered a solid friend of labor.
Pressed for a statement about the steel strike at his next press conference., Truman replied, “I personally think there is too much power on each side, and I think it is necessary that the government assert the fact that it is the power of the people.”
But how would the government assert itself?
“We are doing everything we possibly can,” he answered, giving no one much hope.
A week later, he could say only, “We have been working on it all the time.”
No one who had never had the responsibility could possibly understand what it was like to be President, Truman would write later, not even his closest aides or members of his family. There was no end to the “chain of responsibility that binds him, and he is never allowed to forget that he is President.” Problems and decisions of every conceivable variety wound up on his desk, as did criticism and blame. In the fall, Fred Canfil had given him a small sign for the desk. “The Buck Stops Here,” it said. Canfil had seen one like it in the head office of a federal reformatory in El Reno, Oklahoma, and asked the warden if a copy might be made for his friend the President, and though Truman kept it on his desk only a short time, the message would stay with him permanently.
What sustained him, Truman said, was the belief that there was more good than evil in human beings. Now even that was being put severely to the test. Congress and labor had let him down. Mrs. Roosevelt was telling friends he had the wrong sort of peop
le around him, a theme struck also by columnist Walter Lippmann. The “blunt truth,” wrote Lippmann, was that the men nearest the President did “not have the brains, and have practically none of the wisdom from experience and education to help him be President….” A cartoon in the arch-conservative Chicago Tribune pictured the President as Little Lord Fauntleroy being baited and knocked about by a gang of tough street urchins labeled “Labor,” “Management,” “Party Radical,” “Party Conservative,” and “Foreign Diplomacy.” The caption was in verse:
Little Truman Fauntleroy “
Famous as “that model boy”
Always trying to do good
In the name of brotherhood
Was the leader of his class
Temporarily—alas.
Look at little Truman now.
Muddy, battered, bruised-and how!
Victim of his misplaced trust,
He has learned what good boys must.
In the alley after school,
There just ain’t no golden rule.
The Saturday Evening Post, which claimed to represent the views and values of middle America, said the Truman administration, after ten months in office, could be labeled “at best, undistinguished.” Some Washington journalists, who admired the President’s fundamental decency and determination, felt sorry for him. “It was a cruel time to put inexperience in power,” wrote Richard Rovere.
In the new hit movie The Best Years of Our Lives, which had been written by Roosevelt’s former speechwriter, Robert Sherwood, and was to win nine Academy Awards, actor Fredric March, playing one of the three heroes of the story, three returning veterans of the war, declared bitterly, “Last year it was kill Japs, this year it’s make money,” while at another point his teenage son voiced his fear of the future—of atomic bombs, guided missiles, “and everything.”