Truman

by David McCullough

in St. Louis the Post-Dispatch warned that possibly science had “signed the mammalian world’s death warrant and deeded an earth in ruins to the ants.”

Great line

On August 9, the papers carried still more stupendous news. A million Russian troops had crossed into Manchuria—Russia was in the war against Japan—and a second atomic bomb had been dropped on the major Japanese seaport of Nagasaki.

“For the second time in four days Japan felt the stunning effect of the terrible weapon,” reported the Los Angeles Times, which like most papers implied that the end was very near. On Capitol Hill the typical reaction was, “It won’t be long now.”

What was most striking about the long course of human events, Truman had concluded from his reading of history, were its elements of continuity, including, above all, human nature, which had changed little if at all through time.

For a whole generation of Americans, fear of another Depression would never go away. It was coming “as sure as God made little green apples,” fathers warned their families at the dinner table, and next time it would be “bad enough to curl your hair.”

Cincinnatus, the legendary Roman warrior who, after saving his country, laid down his arms and returned to the farm, remained a personal hero.

There had never been a total railroad stoppage until now. Almost at once the whole country was brought virtually to a standstill. Of 24,000 freight trains normally in operation, fewer than 300 ran; of 175,000 passenger trains, all of 100 moved. Rush-hour commuters were stranded in New York and Chicago. In the West, coast-to-coast “streamliners” stopped and disgorged passengers at tiny way stations in the middle of the desert.

There were reports of fortunes in lettuce and fruit rotting in Kansas and California. Officials in Washington announced that in Europe hundreds of thousands of people would starve if grain shipments were held up as much as two weeks. Panic buying for food and gasoline broke out everywhere in the country. No one, no community was untouched.

Among the new faces in Republican ranks in the 80th Congress were Representative Richard M. Nixon of California, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts, and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Among the relative handful of new Democrats elected was Representative John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the twenty-nine-year-old son of Joe Kennedy.

For all the labor strife of the year before, the country was prospering as it never had, just as Truman declared in his State of the Union message on January 6, 1947. Food production was at a new high. The national income was higher than ever before in peacetime. “We have virtually full employment,” he said with satisfaction.

Most important was the objection of Walter Lippmann, who, though favoring aid to Greece, disapproved of the President’s tone. “A vague global policy which sounds like the tocsin of an ideological crusade, has no limits,” Lippmann warned. “It cannot be controlled. Its effects cannot be predicted.”

“I am not worried about the Communist Party taking over the government of the United States,” Truman replied, “but I am against a person, whose loyalty is not to the government of the United States, holding a government job.” At the time it seemed all the answer anyone could ask for. In another few months the FBI would begin running “name checks” on every one of the 2 million people on the federal payrolls, a monstrous, costly task. Over four years, by 1951, 3 million employees would be investigated and cleared by the Civil Service Commission, and another 14,000 by the FBI. Several thousand would resign, but only 212 would be dismissed as being of questionable loyalty. None would be indicted and no evidence of espionage would be found.

the President didn’t attach fundamental importance to the so-called Communist scare. He thought it was a lot of baloney. But political pressures were such that he had to recognize it. . . .

Writing in his memoirs years later, well after the pernicious influence of the Loyalty Program had become all too clear, Truman could say only in lame defense that it had started out to be as fair as possible “under the climate of opinion that then existed.” In private conversation with friends, however, he would concede it had been a bad mistake. “Yes, it was terrible,” he said.

And all of them, it seems, admired his sense of history, which they saw as one of his greatest strengths. “If a man is acquainted with what other people have experienced at this desk,” Truman would say sitting in the Oval Office, “it will be easier for him to go through a similar experience. It is ignorance that causes most mistakes. The man who sits here ought to know his American history, at least.” When Truman talked of presidents past—Jackson, Polk, Lincoln—it was as if he had known them personally. If ever there was a “clean break from all that had gone before,” he would say, the result would be chaos.

Lol

He would like to have been a history teacher, Truman said. “Rather teach it than make it?” Clifford asked. “Yes, I think so,” Truman replied. “It would be not nearly so much trouble.”

When Clifford urged that it be called the Truman Plan, Truman dismissed the idea at once. It would be called the Marshall Plan, he said. More than once in his presidency, Truman would be remembered saying it was remarkable how much could be accomplished if you didn’t care who received the credit. But in this case he insisted that Marshall be the one most honored because Marshall deserved no less. He also commented realistically, “Anything that is sent up to the Senate and House with my name on it will quiver a couple of times and die.”

Truman said, that if Europe went “down the drain” in a depression, the United States would follow. “And you and I have both lived through one depression, and we don’t want to have to live through another one, do we, Sam?”

he considered the idea of Eisenhower as the ideal candidate for the Democrats. He would “groom” the general to follow him, Truman said privately. But when once more he broached the subject to Eisenhower, early in 1947, Eisenhower again declined, saying he had no political ambitions—not that he was not a Democrat.

Eisenhower was the most popular man in America. To judge by the polls he had only to nod his head and the presidency was his.

Except for the “reward of service,” Truman told Secretary of Defense Forrestal, he had found little satisfaction in being President. Bess would “give everything” to be out of the White House, and he and Bess both regretted greatly the constrictions on Margaret’s life. No man in his right mind, Truman wrote to his sister in November 1947, would ever wish to be President if he knew what it entailed.

In the long line of Republicans who had occupied the White House, he admired but two—Lincoln, for his concern for the common man; Theodore Roosevelt, for his progressive policies.

Rowe (and subsequently Clifford in the final version of the report) proposed that Truman invite Albert Einstein to lunch at the White House, that Truman, as a matter of routine, be seen and photographed with not less than two interesting, admirable, nonpolitical figures per week.

Truman spoke of Humphrey and his followers as “crackpots” who hoped the South would bolt. But the fact was the convention that seemed so pathetically bogged down in its own gloom had now, suddenly, dramatically, pushed through the first unequivocal civil rights plank in the party’s history; and whether Truman and his people appreciated it or not, Hubert Humphrey had done more to reelect Truman than would anyone at the convention other than Truman himself.

In a red-brick auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama, two days later, a hurriedly assembled conference of states’ rights Democrats, “Dixiecrats” as they now called themselves, waved Confederate flags and cheered Alabama’s former Governor Frank M. Dixon as he denounced Truman’s civil rights program as an effort “to reduce us to the status of a mongrel, inferior race,” then unanimously chose Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina to be their candidate for President, and for Vice President, Governor Fielding L. Wright of Mississippi. The Dixiecrat platform called for “the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race.” Their hope was to deny both Truman and Dewey a majority and thus throw the election into the House of Representatives.

Asked why he was breaking with the Democratic Party now, when Roosevelt had made similar promises as Truman on civil rights, Strom Thurmond responded, “But Truman really means it.”

Lol

“I don’t either,” Truman interjected, his face expressionless. He went on. “I don’t think we ought to use this thing unless we absolutely have to. It is a terrible thing to order the use of something that . . . [and here, as Lilienthal recorded, Truman paused and looked down at his desk “rather reflectively”]—that is so terribly destructive, destructive beyond anything we have ever had. You have got to understand that this isn’t a military weapon. [“I shall never forget this particular expression,” wrote Lilienthal.] It is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses. So we have got to treat this differently from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that.” In times past Truman had spoken of the bomb as a military weapon like any other. In times past he had spoken of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as military targets. Not any more. It was an extraordinary declaration, refuting absolutely—as Lilienthal understood—any thought that Truman was insensitive to the horror of the bomb or took lightly his responsibilities as Commander in Chief.

Something happens to Republican leaders when they get control of the Government . . . Republicans in Washington have a habit of becoming curiously deaf to the voice of the people. They have a hard time hearing what the ordinary people of the country are saying. But they have no trouble at all hearing what Wall Street is saying. They are able to catch the slightest whisper from big business and the special interests.

Dewey was dignified. He spoke ill of no one, offended no one. He had no surprises, he took no risks. And the pattern prevailed, his text seldom more rousing than a civics primer. “Government must help industry and industry must cooperate with government,” he would say with a grand preacherlike sweep of the right arm. “America’s future is still ahead of us,” he also said.

Meantime, for the amusement of the press, a selection of the platitudes and banalities of the Dewey speeches was prepared and distributed: “Our streams abound with fish.” “The miners in our country are vital to our welfare.” “Everybody that rides in a car or bus uses gasoline and oil.” “Ours is a magnificent land. Every part of it.”

Black support for Truman had been overwhelming. He polled more than two thirds of the black vote, a percentage higher than ever attained by Franklin Roosevelt. In such crucial states as Ohio and Illinois it could be said that the black voter had been quite as decisive as anyone in bringing about a Truman victory. Speaking of Truman’s civil rights program and its impact on the election, J. Howard McGrath called it both honest statesmanship and politically advantageous. “It lost us three Southern states, but it won us Ohio, Illinois, would have carried New York for us if it had not been for Henry Wallace, and it was a great factor in carrying California.”

No President in history had ever taken office at a time of such prosperity and power. Industrial production outstripped any previous time in the nation’s past, and all other nations of the world. The bumper harvest of the previous fall had been the biggest on record. “There never was a country more fabulous than America,” the British historian Robert Payne would write in 1949, after an extensive tour of the country:

Until that January, Joseph R. McCarthy, Wisconsin’s forty-one-year-old junior senator, had been casting about for an issue that might lift him from obscurity. All but friendless in the Senate, recently voted the worst member of the Senate in a poll of Washington correspondents, McCarthy appeared to be a hopeless failure. Over dinner one evening at the Colony Restaurant, a Catholic priest, Father Edmund A. Walsh of Georgetown University, suggested he might sound the alarm over Communist infiltration of the government, and McCarthy, who had already made some loud, if unnotable, charges about Communist subversion, seems to have realized at once that he had found what he needed.

the precedent of two terms. Only Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and F.D.R. made the attempt to break that precedent. F.D.R. succeeded.

“The whole success,” Truman read in the concluding paragraph, “hangs ultimately on recognition by this government, the American people and all the peoples that the Cold War is in fact a real war in which the survival of the world is at stake.”

“My father,” she wrote, “made it clear, from the moment he heard the news, that he feared this was the opening of World War III.” It was to be a long night for the family.

The United States, said Rusk, had occupied South Korea for five years and had therefore a particular responsibility for South Korea, which, if absorbed by the Communists, would be “a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan.” Bradley, who with Louis Johnson had just returned from Japan, and was feeling so ill he barely made it through the evening, said, “We must draw the line somewhere” and Korea was as good a place as any. (Acheson, some months later, was to say that if the best minds in the world had set out to find the worst possible location to fight “this damnable war,” the unanimous choice would have been Korea.) Russia, in Bradley’s view, was not ready for war, only “testing us.”

There was no dissenting response. Nor did anyone present have the least doubt that what was happening in Korea was being directed from Moscow.

Eisenhower believed, “We’ll have a dozen Koreas soon if we don’t take a firm stand.”

Later he would say that committing American troops to combat in Korea was the most difficult decision of his presidency, more so than the decision to use the atomic bomb. He did not want to start another world war, he had been heard to say privately more than once during that most crucial week.

“Korea is a small country thousands of miles away, but what is happening there is important to every American,” he told the nation, standing stone-faced in the heat of the television lights, a tangle of wires and cables at his feet. By their “act of raw aggression . . . I repeat, it was raw aggression,” the North Koreans had violated the U.N. Charter, and though American forces were making the “principal effort” to save the Republic of South Korea, they were fighting under a U.N. command and a U.N. flag, and this was a “landmark in mankind’s long search for a rule of law among nations.”

By diplomatic channels came warnings from the foreign minister of the People’s Republic of China, Chou En-lai, that if U.N. forces crossed the 38th parallel, China would send troops in support of North Korea. In Washington—at the State Department, the Pentagon, the White House—such warnings were judged to be largely bluff.

MacArthur said. “If you have a general running against you, his name will be Eisenhower, not MacArthur.” Truman laughed. He liked and admired Eisenhower, considered him a friend, but, said Truman, “Eisenhower doesn’t know the first thing about politics.”

Truman believed and often said that how a person stood in history had a lot to do with the timing of his death. Had he or MacArthur died then or shortly after—had one of their planes gone down, or either succumbed to heart failure—their place in history and their record of achievement would have looked quite different from what would follow.

For it was there and then in effect, with Truman presiding, that the decision was made not to let the crisis in Korea, however horrible, flare into a world war. It was a decision as fateful as the one to go into Korea in the first place, and stands among the triumphs of the Truman administration, considering how things might have gone otherwise.

“Remember, photographers are working people who sell pictures,” he once advised Margaret. “Help them sell them. Reporters are people who sell stories—help them sell stories.” And in turn reporters liked and respected him more perhaps than he realized. When he stepped before them in the Indian Treaty Room, at his press conference the day after the assassination attempt, the long applause they gave him was from the heart. “No President of the last 50 years was so widely and warmly liked by reporters as Mr. Truman,” Cabell Phillips would write.

“I’ve had conference after conference on the jittery situation facing this country,” he wrote in his diary. “Attlee, Formosa, Communist China, Chiang Kai-shek, Japan, Germany, France, India, etc. I’ve worked for peace for five years and six months and it looks like World War III is here. I hope not—but we must meet whatever comes—and we will.”

Miss Truman has not improved in the years we have heard her . . . she still cannot sing with anything approaching professional finish. She communicates almost nothing of the music she presents. . . . And still the public goes and pays the same price it would for the world’s finest singers. . . . It is an extremely unpleasant duty to record such unhappy facts about so honestly appealing a person.

Mr. Truman: As you have been directly responsible for the loss of our son’s life in Korea, you might just as well keep this emblem on display in your trophy room, as a memory of one of your historic deeds. One major regret at this time is that your daughter was not there to receive the same treatment as our son received in Korea. Truman put the letter in his desk drawer, keeping it at hand for several years.

MacArthur called on the administration to recognize the “state of war” imposed by the Chinese, then to drop thirty to fifty atomic bombs on Manchuria and the mainland cities of China. The Joint Chiefs, too, told Truman that mass destruction of Chinese cities with nuclear weapons was the only way to affect the situation in Korea. But that choice was never seriously considered. Truman simply refused to “go down that trail,” in Dean Rusk’s words.