Truman (102 page)
Authors: David McCullough
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Presidents & Heads of State, #Political, #Historical
In a month’s time that fall he wrote twenty-two letters to her. That he adored her as much as ever was also among his reasons for the letters. The following June, on their anniversary, he would write:
Dear Bess:
Twenty-nine years! It seems like twenty-nine days.
Detroit, Port Huron, a farm sale, the Blackstone Hotel, a shirt store. County Judge, defeat, Margie, Automobile Club membership drive, Presiding judge, Senator, V.P., now!
You still are on the pedestal where I placed you that day in Sunday school in 1890. What an old fool I am.
Except for Bess and Margaret, and his secretary, Rose Conway, few women ever had the opportunity to observe Truman close at hand or privately. There were no women on his staff in any but secretarial roles, none who sat in on staff meetings or who worked with him or accompanied him beyond the White House. But in that crucial year of 1947, a young Austrian-born artist named Greta Kempton came to the West Wing and with the help of two Secret Service agents set up her heavy wooden easel in the Cabinet Room. She was the first woman who had ever been invited to do a presidential portrait—Truman’s official White House portrait as it would turn out—and she had never met the President. In all there would be five sittings.
“I was very impressed with him,” she remembered. “He came in. I asked him to sit down. He had some papers, but I told him he couldn’t study papers. ‘Oh, no!’ I said. ‘This is the time I’m working. You are going to relax.’”
Unaware that the two who had helped her get set up were Secret Service men, she turned and said there would be nothing more, they needn’t stay. Truman, amused, nodded to them and they left.
He sat down…and I could only see a big important man and a big important portrait. I had to switch canvases. It had to be bigger….
The smaller the person, the more against posing they are, the more they feel they’re doing you a favor. Not Mr. Truman…. He never seemed irritated or annoyed…never seemed impatient. He would settle down…and [the room] seemed to take on a feeling of grandeur and peacefulness. I felt very inspired…. He was always helpful. He wanted the finished portrait to be as good as I could possibly make it.
The more he sat the more interested he became in the work, my work—the technique of painting, the canvas. He took a
serious
interest….
She had told him at the start that under no circumstances was he to see the portrait until it was finished. But once, during a break, he decided to take “a little walk” around the enormous Cabinet table, his direction, as she remembered, “easing toward the canvas.” Sensing what he was up to, she told him again there could be no peeking.
“You mean I can’t have a look at my own portrait?” he said.
She told him no, and with good grace he went back to his chair.
When she had finished and asked if he would like to take a look, he stood in front of the easel for several minutes. “Well, I certainly do like that,” he said, “but, of course, I wouldn’t really know. I’ll have to ask the Boss.”
He telephoned Bess, who came at once, looked at the picture, and heartily approved. It was exactly as she saw him herself, she said.
Against a darkening sky, he sat foursquare, unsmiling, jaw firm, hands at rest on the arms of a wooden chair—a figure of strength and determination in a dark double-breasted suit, white shirt, dark striped tie, the familiar handkerchief in place, the service pin on his lapel, and in the distance, the Capitol Dome.
Now and then, during the sittings, Greta Kempton remembered, he had seemed a little hurried. “But in general I felt he had a great confidence in himself, as if, ‘I know what I’m doing.’ But also some humbleness…. I think he was very even.”
In the summer of 1947, in the journal
Foreign Affairs,
George Kennan had published an article in which he introduced the idea of “containment,” an expression already in use at the State Department by then. Kennan recommended “a policy of firm containment [of Russia]…with unalterable counterforce at every point where the Russians show signs of encroaching”—until the Soviet Union either “mellows” or collapses. The article was signed simply “X,” but the identity of the author was known soon enough, and in another few months Walter Lippmann issued his own strong rebuttal to the concept in a book called
The Cold War,
an expression Bernard Baruch had used earlier in a speech, but that now, like the Iron Curtain, became part of the postwar vocabulary.
When and why the Cold War began—whether with announcement of the Truman Doctrine, or earlier, when Truman first confronted Molotov, or perhaps with the eventual sanction of the Marshall Plan by Congress—would be the subject of much consideration in years to come. But the clearest dividing point between what American policy toward the Soviets had been since the war and what it would now become was George Marshall’s return from Moscow. The change came on April 26, 1947, when Marshall, of all men, reported to Truman what Truman had already privately concluded, that diplomacy wasn’t going to work, that the Russians could not be dealt with, that they wanted only drift and chaos and the collapse of Europe to suit their own purposes.
Chip Bohlen, who had been witness to so much—Molotov’s first call on Truman in the Oval Office, the meetings at Potsdam, Marshall’s pivotal session with Stalin at the Kremlin—said the Cold War could really be traced to the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in 1917. It had begun then, thirty years before.
Truman, looking back on his first years in office and the decisions he had made, would regret especially that he had been unable to stop wholesale demobilization after the war ended. It had been a grave mistake, he felt.
The Cold War was an expression he never much cared for and seldom used. He called it “the war of nerves.”
In later years, he would be charged with acting too impulsively and harshly with the Russians, with making snap judgments as a new President, without the benefit of experience or understanding. But “patience, I think, must be our watchword if we are to have world peace,” he had written to Eleanor Roosevelt less than a month after assuming office, and, in fact, it had taken two years to arrive at a policy toward the Soviets. He had moved slowly, perhaps too slowly, and always with the close counsel of the same people Franklin Roosevelt too had counted on, and particularly George Marshall.
In September, Truman received a handwritten note from Churchill, to say “how much I admire the policy into wh[ich] you have guided y[ou]r g[rea]t country; and to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all you are doing to save the world from Famine and War.”
In a note of thanks, Truman said no man could carry the burden of the presidency and do it all right, but that he had good men around him now.
In mid-October, at an informal meeting in his office with newspaper editorial writers from around the country, he spent most of the time expounding on the vital need for the Marshall Plan. At the end, he was asked whether the United States would ever “get any credit…for sending this stuff to Europe?”
“I’m not doing this for credit,” Truman answered. “I am doing it because it’s right, I am doing it because it’s necessary to be done, if we are going to survive ourselves.”
The Marshall Plan was voted on by Congress in April 1948, almost a year after Marshall’s speech at Harvard, and passed by overwhelming majorities in both houses. It was a singular triumph for the administration, “the central gem in the cluster of great and fruitful decisions made by President Truman,” as Arthur Krock would write. Indeed, it was to be one of the great American achievements of the century, as nearly everyone eventually saw.
“In all the history of the world,” Truman wrote privately a few days after final passage of the program, “we are the first great nation to feed and support the conquered. We are the first great nation to create independent republics from conquered territory, Cuba and the Philippines. Our neighbors are not afraid of us. Their borders have no forts, no soldiers, no tanks, no big guns lined up.”
The United States wanted peace in the world and the United States would be prepared “for trouble if it comes.”
The Heat in the Kitchen
If you can’t stand the heat, you better get out of the kitchen.
—a favorite Truman saying
E
xactly when Truman made up his mind to run for reelection is not known. Several times in 1947 he expressed reluctance to face another four years in the White House, “this goldfish bowl,” and again 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.
According to Secretary of the Army Kenneth C. Royall, Truman even offered to go on the ticket with Eisenhower as Vice President, if Eisenhower so desired. “Mr. Truman was a realist and from time to time doubted whether he could win in 1948,” Royall later explained. 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.
Aside from the impossible administrative burden, he has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues…. The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make ‘em behave. Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.
“President Truman did not want to run in 1948,” John Steelman later said emphatically.
Yet to others equally close day to day, it was clear the job agreed with him and they were certain he would never willingly abandon it. The whole pattern of his life had been a succession of increasingly difficult tests of his capacity to prove equal to tasks seemingly too large for him. Nor had he failed to meet this latest and greatest of tests. The feelings of inadequacy that had so troubled him after Roosevelt’s death were by now past. He liked being in charge. It showed in his face and in the way he carried himself.
He was a picture of health, his color good, his weight 175, blood pressure 120–128 over 80, which was considered excellent. He still took his daily walks and still at his old Army pace of 120 steps a minute, although lately, with the press of events, he often went in the evening instead of early morning.
He would complain at times of “the folderol” of the presidency, but unquestionably he enjoyed the power of the office and its trappings—the limousines, the yacht, the airplane, the special railroad car—as any vital, ambitious man would. The “abuse” he complained of to his sister was something he had long ago learned to live with. As Cabell Phillips of
The New York Times
would recall, Truman was “blessed with a tough hide and a secure conscience, so that he could roll with the punches…he responded with simple and exuberant delight to the flattery and deference that were showered upon him wherever he went in public life.” And he did indeed value the “reward of service” in the presidency, as in every office he had held since entering public life. A career politician, he had attained the summit of his profession, and if it was fate that put him there, then that was all the more reason to win it now on his own merits. “The greatest ambition Harry Truman had,” according to Clark Clifford, “was to get elected in his own right.”
Having kept so silent and so uncharacteristically detached during the off-year elections in 1946, only to see his party and himself humiliated, Truman now relished the prospect of taking on the Republicans in an all-out, full-scale championship fight, as he said. He was nothing if not a partisan politician and this was the fight he simply could not walk away from. He had much he wished still to accomplish. And he knew how quickly his own and New Deal programs, the liberal gains of sixteen years, could be undone by a Republican President and a Republican Congress. He felt it his duty to “get into the fight and help stem the tide of reaction,” as he later wrote. “They [the Republicans] did not understand the worker, the farmer, the everyday person…. Most of them honestly believed that prosperity actually began at the top and would trickle down in due time to benefit all the people.”
He saw himself battling as Jefferson had against the Federalists, or Jackson staging a revolution “against the forces of reaction.” 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. To Truman, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were the giants of the century, and he had no choice, he felt, but to fight for the Democratic heritage that had been passed on to him. “What I wanted to do personally for my own comfort and benefit was not important. What I could do to contribute to the welfare of the country was important. I had to enter the 1948 campaign for the presidency.”
So by late autumn 1947 it was well known within the official family that he was in the race, and by the start of the new year nearly everyone in Washington had concluded he was running and that therefore just about anything he did or said was with that in mind, starting with his State of the Union address.
The speech, an uncompromising reaffirmation of his liberal program, delivered before Congress on Wednesday, January 7, 1948, evoked little applause and little praise afterward. The Republicans, as anticipated, did not like it at all, any more than did the southern Democrats. In less than an hour at the podium, Truman called again for a national health insurance program, a massive housing program, increased support for education, increased support for farmers, the conservation of natural resources, and a raise in the minimum wage from 40 to 75 cents an hour. To compensate for rising prices, he proposed a “poor man’s” tax cut, whereby each taxpayer would be allowed to deduct $40 for himself and for each dependent from his final tax bill. (“Tom Pendergast had paid two dollars a vote,” exclaimed the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Harold Knutson, “and now Truman proposes to pay forty dollars.”) Further, Truman announced he would be sending Congress a special message on civil rights. “Our first goal,” he said, “is to secure fully the essential human rights of our citizens.” The distress among southern Democrats was considerable.
Three weeks later, on February 2, 1948, without conferring with his congressional leaders, he sent the civil rights message. Based on the findings of his own Civil Rights Commission, it was the strongest such program that had ever been proposed by a President. Indeed, until now there had never been a special message on civil rights.
Not all Americans were free of violence, it began.
Not all groups are free to live and work where they please or to improve their conditions of life by their own efforts. Not all groups enjoy the full privileges of citizenship….
The Federal Government has a clear duty to see that the Constitutional guarantees of individual liberties and of equal protection under the laws are not denied or abridged anywhere in the Union. That duty is shared by all three branches of the Government, but it can be filled only if the Congress enacts modern, comprehensive civil rights laws, adequate to the needs of the day, and demonstrating our continuing faith in the free way of life.
Truman called for a federal law against “the crime of lynching, against which I cannot speak too strongly.” He wanted more effective statutory protection of the right to vote everywhere in the country, a law against the poll taxes that prevailed in seven states of the Old South, the establishment of a Fair Employment Practices Commission with authority to stop discrimination by employers and labor unions alike, an end to discrimination in interstate travel by rail, bus, and airplane. He announced also that he had asked the Secretary of Defense to look into discrimination in the military services and to see it was stopped as soon as possible.
In a final request, he asked Congress to act on the claims made by Americans of Japanese descent who, during the war, had been forced from their homes and kept in confinement “solely because of their racial origin”—claims that would not be met until years later.
It was a brave, revolutionary declaration, given the reality of entrenched discrimination and the prevailing attitudes of white Americans nearly everywhere in the country, but especially in the South, where the social status and legal “place” of black citizens had advanced not at all in more than half a century. That Truman believed in both the spirit and the specifics of the message there is no question. Asked at a press conference a few days later what he had drawn on for background, he replied, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Whether the message was bad or good politics in the year 1948 was a matter of opinion. Clark Clifford was certain the President was doing the right thing, morally and politically. To Boss Ed Flynn of the Bronx, who was no less concerned about losing the black vote in New York than he had been in 1944, it was extremely welcome news. But the angry outcry on the Hill suggested that if Truman meant what he said, he was finished in the South and therefore in November as well. Southern congressmen lashed out in language often too raw to print. Harlem, it was said, had more influence with this administration than all the white South. Tom Connally of Texas, an old Truman ally in the Senate, called the message a lynching of the Constitution and vowed the South would not “take it lying down.” Senator Olin Johnston of South Carolina boycotted the annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner at the Statler Hotel, where Truman was the guest of honor, because, as Johnston explained to reporters, he and his wife might be seated beside a “Nigra.” (As it was, the three black Democrats attending the dinner were at a table in the rear.)
When several southern Democrats, meeting privately with the President, suggested all would turn out well if he “softened” his views, Truman, in a written reply, said his own forebears were Confederates and he came from a part of Missouri where “Jim Crowism” still prevailed.
But my very stomach turned over when I learned that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of army trucks in Mississippi and beaten.
Whatever my inclinations as a native of Missouri might have been, as President I know this is bad. I shall fight to end evils like this.
On racial matters, Truman had not entirely outgrown his background. Old biases, old habits of speech continued, surfacing occasionally offstage, as some of his aides and Secret Service agents would later attest. Privately, he could still speak of “niggers,” as if that were the way one naturally referred to blacks. His own sister told Jonathan Daniels that Harry was no different than ever on the subject. Daniels, who had gone to Missouri to gather material for a biography of the President, recorded in his notes that as Mary Jane drove him south from Independence to Grandview one morning, she turned and said, “Harry is no more for nigger equality than any of us”—a statement Daniels, as a southerner, found reassuring.
But Mary Jane, like others, failed to understand that Truman knew now, if they did not, that as President he could no longer sit idly by and do nothing in the face of glaring injustice. The findings of his Civil Rights Commission, in a landmark report entitled
To Secure These Rights,
had been a shocking revelation. When a friend from “out home” wrote to advise him to go easy on civil rights, appealing to Truman as a fellow southerner, Truman took time to answer privately and at length:
The main difficulty with the South is that they are living eighty years behind the times and the sooner they come out of it the better it will be for the country and themselves. I am not asking for social equality, because no such things exist, but I am asking for equality of opportunity for all human beings, and, as long as I stay here, I am going to continue that fight. When the mob gangs can take four people out and shoot them in the back, and everybody in the [surrounding] country is acquainted with who did the shooting and nothing is done about it, that country is in a pretty bad fix from the law enforcement standpoint.
When a mayor and a City Marshal can take a negro Sergeant off a bus in South Carolina, beat him up and put out one of his eyes, and nothing is done about it by the State Authorities, something is radically wrong with the system.
On the Louisiana and Arkansas Railway when coal burning locomotives were used, the Negro firemen were the thing because it was a back-breaking job and a dirty one. As soon as they turned to oil as a fuel it became customary for people to take shots at Negro firemen and a number were murdered because it was thought that this was now a white-collar job and should go to a white man. I can’t approve of such goings on and I shall never approve of it, as long as I am here…. I am going to try to remedy it and if that ends up in my failure to be reelected, that failure will be in a good cause….
The murder of four blacks by mob gunfire referred to in the letter had occurred in Monroe, Georgia, in July 1946. Two men and their wives were dragged from a car and gunned down so savagely their bodies were scarcely identifiable. One of the victims, Truman knew from the report of his Commission, had been a newly returned war veteran, and this, like the account of the men dumped from the truck in Mississippi, and of the young black sergeant, Isaac Woodward, who had been pulled from a bus in Batesburg, South Carolina, and brutally beaten and blinded by police, made an everlasting impression on Truman, moving him in a way no statistics ever would have.
“The wonderful, wonderful development in those years,“ Clark Clifford would reflect long afterward, “was Harry Truman’s capacity to grow.”
Of all the President’s aides and Cabinet officers no one had done more than Clifford to push for a strong stand on civil rights, as part of a larger effort to, in Clifford’s words, “strike for new high ground” whenever confronting the Republican Congress. And it was strategy based on close study, no less than moral conviction, for Clifford did nothing without careful preparation and planning. (On the golf course he was known as someone never to play behind, if it could be avoided, since he took so many practice swings before every shot.) A special, confidential report had been prepared on “The Politics of 1948,” a document of thirty-two single-spaced typewritten pages prepared by a young Washington attorney and former Roosevelt aide named James A. Rowe, Jr., who had been talking with labor leaders, professional politicians, and newspaper people. It was a political forecast, with suggestions based, as Rowe stressed, solely on appraisal of “the politically advantageous thing to do.” Because Rowe was a law partner of Thomas Corcoran, the influential “Tommy the Cork,” whom Truman so disliked, Clifford decided not to tell Truman of Rowe’s part in the report, but to submit it as his own. And with some editing and added refinements by Clifford and George Elsey it was perceived as, if not exactly a blueprint for the Democrats in 1948, then a guide to navigation.