Then another European war came along. We tried as before to keep out of it. We refused to believe that we could get into it. The great leader warned the country of the possibility. He was vilified, smeared, misrepresented, but kept his courage. As was inevitable we were forced into the war. The country awoke—late, but it awoke and created the greatest war production program in history under the great leader.
The country furnished Russia, Britain, China, Australia and all the allies, guns, tanks, planes, food in unheard of quantities, built, manned and fought the greatest navy in history, created the most powerful and efficient air force ever heard of, and equipped an army of 8½ million men and fought them on two fronts 12,000 miles apart and from 3,000 to 7,000 miles from the home base, created the greatest merchant marine in history in order to maintain those two battlefronts.
The collapse of the enemies of liberty came almost simultaneously in May for the eastern front and in August for the western front.
Unfortunately the great leader who had taken the nation through the peacetime and wartime emergencies passed to his great reward just one month before the German surrender. What a pity for this to happen after twelve long years of the hardest kind of work, three and a half of them in the most terrible of all wars.
My acquaintance who commanded the 75 battery of Sept. 26, 1918, took over.
The same elation filled the home people as filled them after the first world war.
They were happy to have the fighting stop and to quit worrying about their sons and daughters in the armed forces.
Then the reaction set in. Selfishness, greed, jealousy, raised their ugly heads. No wartime incentive to keep them down. Labor began to grab all it could get by fair means or foul, farmers began black-marketing food, industry hoarded inventories and the same old pacifists began to talk disarmament.
But my acquaintance tried to meet every situation and has met them up to now. Can he continue to outface the demagogues, the chiselers, the jealousies?
Time only will tell. The human animal and his emotions change not much from age to age. He must change now or he faces absolute and complete destruction and maybe the insect age or an atmosphereless planet will succeed him.
V
Harold Ickes called him “stupid.” If the world had to depend on Truman and his administration to keep it out of trouble, wrote Time, then the world had much to worry about. Not in eighty years, not since Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, had a President been the target of such abuse. He was made fun of for his mid-American mannerisms, his Missouri pals, the by now famous devotion to his mother. “Every day is Mother’s Day in the White House,” it was said with a snicker. According to one of the latest Washington jokes in the autumn of 1946, Truman was late for a Cabinet meeting because he woke up stiff in the joints from trying to put his foot in his mouth. A joke from Texas began with reflections on how Roosevelt might have handled the country’s problems, then ended with the line, “I wonder what Truman would do if he were alive.” A Chicago Sun cartoon that was reprinted widely showed him popeyed and befuddled, one hand on his aching head, asking, “What next?” In Boston, the Henry M. Frost Advertising Agency came up with an inspired two-word campaign slogan for the Republicans: “Had enough?”
Truman’s popularity had vanished. Poll results released the first week in October, a month before the congressional elections, showed only 40 percent of the country approved his performance.
On the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in what struck many as a bald play for the Jewish vote in New York, he called for admitting 100,000 Jewish refugees to the British protectorate in Palestine. But the fact was he had already made the same statement months before, and Republican Thomas E. Dewey, who was running for reelection as governor of New York, now quickly outbid him for Jewish support by demanding that several hundred thousand Jews be permitted to migrate to Palestine.
In another few weeks Truman’s standing in the polls plunged to a low of 32 percent, nearly 50 points below where it had been the year before.
The depression that everyone had so feared had not come. Employment, even with all the strikes, was high. Money was plentiful. Business was booming. But the cost of living had also leaped 6½ points just since the end of 1945 and there were still acute shortages of the things people most wanted—housing, automobiles, refrigerators, nylon stockings, sugar, coffee. And, increasingly, meat. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, fearing a Democratic debacle at the polls, complained to a friend, “This is going to be a damned ‘beefsteak election’!” As November drew closer and the meat shortage grew worse, the Republicans capitalized on a made-to-order issue. Cattle raisers staged a strike, refusing to send cattle to market. “Nothing on meat, Mr. President?” Truman was asked by reporters on October 10. “Nothing on meat,” he said.
Democratic Party Chairman Bob Hannegan warned Truman that if controls on meat prices were not dropped, he could expect a Republican sweep. Truman told his staff he was sure to be damned whatever he did. If he ended controls, he would be accused of caving into pressure. If he left things as they were, he would continue to be seen as cause of all the trouble.
Talk of his Pendergast connection was encouraged, as Republicans stepped up the heat. He became, again, the little machine hack from backwater Missouri. New York showman Billy Rose suggested W. C. Fields for President in 1948, saying, “If we’re going to have a comedian in the White House, let’s have a good one.” The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Congressman Carroll Reece of Tennessee, declared nothing remained of the Democratic Party but three distasteful elements: southern racists, big-city bosses, and radicals bent on “Sovietizing” the country.
Discontent over meat shortages was one thing, fear of Communist influence and infiltration was quite another and in the long run far more important. A Red scare was clearly on the rise. Edward T. Folliard of the Washington Post found “hatred of communism rampant” everywhere he traveled. Harry Truman, the. Republicans charged, was pursuing a policy of appeasing the Russians abroad and fostering communism at home. The Democratic Party, said Senator Taft, was “so divided between Communism and Americanism that its foreign policy can only be futile and contradictory and make the United States the laughing stock of the world.” John Taber, a Republican congressman from Auburn, New York, who had a voice like a bullhorn, warned of Communist infiltration of the universities, even the Army, while in California, another Republican congressional candidate, young Richard M. Nixon, castigated high officials “who front for un-American elements, wittingly or otherwise.”
Yet such attacks were hardly different in spirit from Truman’s own private anxieties over “Reds” and “parlor pinks,” and who could say, after the uncovering of the Ottawa spy ring, that there was no cause for alarm? That summer, under pressure from Attorney General Clark, Truman had secretly agreed to continuation of electronic surveillance in cases where the national defense was involved, a policy instituted by Roosevelt, although, as Clark neglected to tell Truman, Roosevelt’s original authorization in 1940 had been limited to aliens only. In a speech at San Francisco, J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI warned that no less than a hundred thousand Communists were loose in the country.
“The shrill pitch of abuse heaped upon the President continued to echo,” wrote Time. “So mild a man as Harry Truman might well wonder at the temper of his countrymen.”
Democrats were filled with despair. Bob Hannegan advised Truman that it would be best if he made no campaign appearances or political speeches, a decision Truman accepted. He kept to the White House. For days, for a portrait by Frank O. Salisbury, the British artist who had done Roosevelt, Truman posed in Charlie Ross’s office, where three windows provided ample north light. On the afternoon the Supreme Court was to make its traditional White House call, he was listening to the deciding game of the 1946 World Series—the St. Louis Cardinals vs. the Boston Red Sox—when a staff aide told him the justices would soon be arriving in formal attire. Truman hurried upstair
s and changed into striped trousers and a swallowtail coat, only to find at the reception that he alone was formally dressed.
Few campaigning Democrats even so much as mentioned the President’s name. In some congressional contests, Democratic candidates resorted to playing old recordings of Roosevelt speeches to boost their chances. Senator Harley Kilgore, a warm friend and admirer of Truman, who was running for reelection in West Virginia, found that in the back hollows and coal fields the mere mention of Truman’s name brought a chorus of boos and catcalls. “Here was a man who was actually doing an excellent job,” Kilgore would recall, “but the most you could do was to defend him in a humorous fashion by using the old Western saloon refrain: ‘Don’t shoot our piano player. He’s doing the best he can.’ ”
The capacity to smile when in trouble is a prime requirement for a politician, as Truman, a career politician, had long understood, and now, as so often before in difficult times, he revealed no sign of anger or gloom. He never complained, never acted sorry for himself, or blamed others. He was as cheerful and optimistic, as interested in others, as pleased to see them and to be with them, as ever. As Alonzo Fields, who saw him daily and close-up as only a butler could, later wrote of Truman, he “never seemed to have a problem,” at this or any other time when worries beset him. “I am sure no one in the household could tell when he was troubled.”
On October 14, three weeks before the election, Truman went on the radio to announce that reluctantly he was lifting price controls on meat. On October 23, he flew to New York to address the General Assembly of the United Nations at Flushing Meadow. “The course of history,” he said in a well-reasoned speech, “has made us one of the stronger nations of the world. It has therefore placed upon us special responsibilities to conserve our strength and to use it rightly in a world so interdependent as our world today.” Even the Russians complimented him.
“We went to the Waldorf [afterward],” he wrote Margaret. “Your Ma put on her best bib and tucker and we went down to the ballroom for a reception. Shook hands with 835 people in one hour flat….”
Still he kept silent on politics. Traveling home by train to Independence to vote, he was greeted at Jefferson City by a crowd of cheering schoolchildren who set up a chant: “Make a two-hour speech; make it a full holiday.” But Truman, all smiles, only waved and shook his head, then clamped one hand over his mouth.
The Republicans swept the election, carrying both houses of Congress for the first time since before the Depression, an era so distant to most people that it seemed another world. The margin in the House was 246 Republicans to 188 Democrats, in the Senate, 51 to 45. The Republicans took a majority of the state governorships as well, including New York, where Thomas E. Dewey was reelected by the largest margin ever recorded. In one city after another—Chicago, Detroit, Jersey City, New York—Democratic machines went down to defeat. In Kansas City, Truman’s own handpicked candidate for Congress, Enos Axtell, lost to his Republican opponent by 6,000 votes, which Margaret Truman remembered as “mortifying” for her father.
The Chicago Tribune hailed the Republican triumph as the greatest victory for the country since Appomattox. The New Deal had been finally put to flight, the grip of the Democrats in Washington broken at last. Harry Truman, the “accidental” President, was now also a “minority” President. A young Democratic congressman from Arkansas, J. William Fulbright, was so distressed by the Republican landslide and the likelihood of a two-year stalemate in Washington that he proposed Truman appoint Arthur Vandenberg Secretary of State, then resign, and thus make Vandenberg President—an idea that led Truman to refer to Fulbright thereafter as “Halfbright.”
Truman and his family started back to Washington on election day without waiting for the polls to close. By arrangement, however, the election returns were to be put on board the train every hundred miles or so.
That night, Charlie Ross came through the train to invite several Washington reporters to join the President in his private car for a poker game. “The game was hot and heavy until about 2 A.M.,” remembered Merriman Smith of United Press. “The returns had been arriving in a steady stream since 9 P.M. Not once did Truman look at them, nor did he refer to the elections.”
At one point Margaret interrupted to say the results from Independence had come in. Truman, glancing at the slip of paper, shook his head and smiled up at her.
“Why bother with this sort of thing?” he said. “Don’t worry about me—I know how things will turn out and they’ll be all right.”
“Probably no President since Andrew Johnson had run out of prestige and leadership more thoroughly than had Harry Truman when he returned almost unnoticed to Washington on that bleak, misty November morning in 1946,” wrote Cabell Phillips. At Union Station Truman stepped from his car silent but smiling, a book under his arm.
12
Turning Point
This is a serious course upon which we embark…
—Truman to congress, 1947
I
Was Harry Truman an ordinary provincial American sadly miscast in the presidency? Or was he a man of above-average, even exceptional qualities and character, who had the makings of greatness?
“What a test of democracy if it works!” Roy Roberts of the Kansas City Star had written on Truman’s first day in office. Now, less than two years later, Walter Lippmann, like a great many others, was convinced the test had not worked. To Lippmann, regarded as the most thoughtful, authoritative political commentator of the time, Truman was an embarrassment. His bravado and quick decisions, Lippmann thought, were a facade for an essentially insecure man filled with anxieties. How could the affairs of the country be conducted by a President who not only had lost the support of his party, but was no longer in command of his administration?
In the years on the farm, when courting Bess—his first campaign—Truman himself had professed to being only a common everyday fellow. He could promise her no more. But he had written also that every farmer “thinks he’s as good as the President or perhaps a little better,” meaning that by the old Jeffersonian faith in which he had been raised, what was ordinary grass-roots American was as good as the best.
Questioned once by a reporter whether he considered himself the sublimation of the average man, Truman rejected the fancy phrase and asked in turn, “Well, what is wrong with being the average man?”
Since 1945 numbers of others had judged him as anything but ordinary. At Potsdam, Churchill immediately perceived the new President to be “a man of immense determination,” and in the fateful spring of 1947, from Chartwell, his home south of London, where he was busy with his memoirs, Churchill would write to tell “My dear Harry” how much he admired “what you have done for the peace and freedom of the world….” For Churchill, the presidency of Harry Truman had become the one cause for hope in the world.
Dean Acheson, who could be extremely hard, even contemptuous in his judgment of men he did not consider his equals, had described Truman, after Roosevelt’s death, as straightforward, decisive, honest, and if inexperienced, likely to learn fast. And in the time since, Acheson had found no reason to think differently. On the morning in November 1946 when Truman arrived at Washington’s Union Station, his political stock at an all-time low, Acheson alone of all the administration was waiting on the platform to greet him, a gesture that Truman, understandably, never forgot. Acheson looked to Truman as a leader. “The captain with the mighty heart,” Acheson would call him.
Arthur Krock of The New York Times, foremost of Washington correspondents, was another who had seen something “very good and human and courageous” in this unlikely President, and at a point when many political commentators were ready to write him off. Felix Belair, White House correspondent for the Times, had decided that while Truman might look as much like “the average guy on the streetcar” as ever, he was a man to rise to the occasion.
So testament from experienced observers that this was a President of considerable substance—and that
It would be a mistake to count him out—was already plentiful, even before the great change that came in 1947.
David E. Lilienthal, whom Truman had earlier reappointed head of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), was a trim, agreeable-looking man in his mid-forties, the son of Jewish immigrants, a graduate of DePauw University and the Harvard Law School, and regarded still as a model New Dealer. TVA was a huge success. It had built dams, created lakes, forests, new industries, new farming methods, brought electricity to some 700,000 users, and, during the war, fueled the giant uranium plants at Oak Ridge. And Lilienthal, as much as anyone, had made TVA.
Unlike so many New Dealers who had quit since Roosevelt’s death—who had fled government, as Clark Clifford said, “so fast they were falling all over each other”—Lilienthal had chosen to stay, not once, but twice. In October he had resigned from TVA to become Truman’s designated, though still unconfirmed, head of the new Atomic Energy Commission, which Truman insisted be under civilian control. It was a position potentially as important as almost any in postwar Washington and one for which Lilienthal felt himself inadequately qualified. But then who was qualified? And the President had been extremely persuasive and patient, while Lilienthal went through days of soul searching.
Hardworking, articulate, Lilienthal was an exceptionally able man, if by some people’s standards overly liberal, and his presence in the administration—like that of Byrnes, Marshall, Harriman (who had returned from London to replace Henry Wallace at the Department of Commerce), Acheson, Bohlen, and Clark Clifford—belied the whole idea that Truman had surrounded himself only with Missouri fools and mediocrities.
Lilienthal did not entirely approve of Truman’s performance thus far. As a liberal he had been so shattered by Truman’s call to draft the striking rail workers that after hearing Truman’s speech over the radio, Lilienthal walked out into his garden in Tennessee and stood in a drenching rain, hoping it might wash away his misery. Still Lilienthal had faith in Truman, faith in the man—because Truman had shown such faith in him, but also because he saw qualities of courage and candor rare in a politician. Indeed, he felt better about working for the Truman administration, Lilienthal said, than he had working for Roosevelt, because now he could get straight answers.