Truman (114 page)

His reception when he appeared before Congress the next day was noticeably cool. (As a show of their resentment, some members did not even rise from their seats as he entered.) He called for action on an eight-point program, including civil rights—controls on consumer credit, an excess profits tax, strengthened rent control, price controls, action on housing, farm support, aid to education, an increased minimum wage, and change in the Displaced Persons Act that discriminated against Catholics and Jews—all that he had asked for before and had been denied.

From his office in Albany, Governor Dewey said nothing one way or the other, but through his campaign manager, Herbert Brownell, encouraged Republican leaders in Congress to give careful consideration to the President’s program. Taft absolutely refused, saying, “No, we’re not going to give that fellow anything.” To Taft, as to most Republicans and much of the public, the whole affair was a cheap political ploy.

The two-week session accomplished little, as Truman had anticipated, except to make his point that a Republican Congress was the great road-block to social progress for the country and to show the gulf between Republican promises and Republican performance.

“They sure are in a stew and mad as wet hens,” he told Bess. “If I can make them madder, maybe they’ll do the job the old gods used to put on the Greeks and Romans….”

On August 4 on Capitol Hill, testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the
Time
editor Whittaker Chambers charged that Alger Hiss, president of the Carnegie Foundation and once one of the “bright young men” of the New Deal, a former official in both the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, serving fourteen years in the State Department, had been his accomplice in a Communist network. “For a number of years, I, myself, served in the underground in Washington, D.C.,” said Chambers. “I knew it at its top level…. A member of this group…was Alger Hiss.” The news rocked the city. Official Washington was described as “stunned with anger and disbelief.” Speaking off the record, Sam Rayburn told a reporter, “There is political dynamite in this Communist investigation. Don’t doubt that.”

But when, at his press conference the following day, Truman was asked whether he thought the “spy scare” on Capitol Hill was only “a red herring” to divert public attention from inflation, he said he agreed. The hearings were “a ‘red herring’ to keep from doing what they ought to do…. They are slandering a lot of people that don’t deserve it.”

Could they quote him, reporters asked. Yes, Truman replied, adding further to his troubles.

A week later, with the special session of Congress ended, he was fed another line by another reporter, but this time to his benefit. Did he think it had been a “do-nothing” Congress? “Entirely,” Truman said. He thought that was quite a good name for the 80th Congress.

Upstairs at the White House the decline and fall of the old building was no longer theoretical. The floor of Margaret’s sitting room, across the hall from his study, had caved in beneath her piano. His own bathroom, the President was informed, was about to collapse. Nothing of this was disclosed, however, nor would it be until after the elections. “Can you imagine what the press would have done with this story?” Margaret would recall. “The whole mess would have been blamed on Harry Truman.”

“Margaret’s sitting room floor broke in two but didn’t fall through the family dining room ceiling,” he reported to his sister on August 10. “They propped it up and fixed it. Now my bathroom is about to fall into the Red Parlor. They won’t let me sleep in my bedroom or use the bath.”

He was sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom, in “old Abe’s bed,” he added, and finding it quite comfortable.

T
he
Ferdinand Magellan
was the only private railroad car ever fitted out for the exclusive use of the President of the United States. Eighty-three feet in length and painted the standard dark green of the Pullman Company, it had been built originally in 1928 as one of several luxury cars named for famous explorers—
Marco Polo, David Livingstone, Robert Peary
—then taken over by the government for Franklin Roosevelt’s use during wartime, in 1942, when it was completely overhauled to become a rolling fortress.

The windows were three-inch, bulletproof glass, the entire car sheathed in armor plate—sides, top, bottom, ends, and doors—with the result that it weighed a colossal 142½ tons, or as much as a locomotive, Special trucks and wheels had to be built to carry the weight.

For security reasons during the war, only the word “Pullman” appeared on the outside, and still, in 1948, the only distinguishing exterior features were the presidential seal fixed to the rear platform and three loudspeakers mounted on top of the platform roof.

Inside everything was designed for comfort. At the forward end were galley, pantry, servants’ quarters, and an oak-paneled dining room, which doubled as a conference room for the President, this furnished with china cabinets, a mahogany dining table, and six matching chairs upholstered p in gold-and-green striped damask. Beyond, down a side aisle, were four staterooms, marked A, B, C, and D, the two middle rooms, B and C, forming the Presidential Suite with joining bath and shower. Stateroom B, for the First Lady, was a pale peach color. Stateroom C, the President’s room, had blue-green walls and carpet and satin chrome fixtures.

Past the staterooms, at the rear, was the observation lounge with blue and brown chairs and a blue sofa, walls covered with an attractive light brown tufted material resembling leather, blue velvet curtains at the windows and at the door opening onto the rear platform. The carpeting was dark green.

The whole car was air-conditioned—to its immense weight under way were added some 6,000 pounds of ice for the cooling system—and each room had a telephone that could be hooked up to a trackside outlet whenever the train was standing at a station.

To Truman, who loved trains and loved seeing the country, it was the perfect way to travel, and one he had enjoyed frequently since becoming President. There had been the memorable night of poker with Churchill on the way to Missouri for the “iron curtain” speech, the long “nonpolitical” swing west in June. More recently, he had made a quick one-day tour of Michigan for a Labor Day speech at Detroit’s Cadillac Square, to open his campaign for reelection. Yet for all the miles covered, the days and nights spent on board the
Magellan,
these prior expeditions had been only prologue to the odyssey that began the morning of Friday, September 17, 1948, when the
Magellan,
at the end of a seventeen-car special train, stood waiting on Track 15 beneath the cavernous shed of Washington’s Union Station. In June, he had gone 9,000 miles. Now, on what was to become famous as the Whistle-stop Campaign, he would travel all told 21,928 miles, as far nearly as around the world—as far nearly as the voyage of Magellan.

The idea was his own. “I want to see the people,” he had said. There would be three major tours: first cross-country to California again, for fifteen days; then a six-day tour of the Middle West; followed by a final, hard-hitting ten days in the big population centers of the Northeast and a return trip home to Missouri.

“There were no deep-hid schemes, no devious plans,” remembered Charlie Ross, “nothing that could be called, in the language of political analysts, ‘high strategy.’ ” The President would simply take his case to the country in a grueling, no-quarter contest. Mileage meant crowds.

According to Ross, it had been Truman’s original intention to go into all forty-eight states, including those of the Deep South. “He rather relished the prospect effacing up to the Dixiecrats on their homegrounds.” (How did he expect to be received in the South, Truman was asked. “Why with courtesy, of course,” he replied.)

So for a total of thirty-three days, more than a month, the
Magellan
was to be center stage for a fast-rolling political roadshow, which, as was said, had but one act and that one act built around just one performer. “We play more towns than the World of Mirth or Brunk’s Comedians…and we work longer hours,” an accompanying reporter would write. For Truman, away from the White House, the big private car would be home, office, presidential command center, campaign headquarters, and the place where, day after day, he would somehow, bravely, almost inconceivably keep hope alive.

No President in history had ever gone so far in quest of support from the people, or with less cause for the effort, to judge by informed opinion. Nor would any presidential candidate ever again attempt such a campaign by railroad.

As a test of his skills and judgment as a professional politician, not to say his stamina and disposition at age sixty-four, it would be like no other experience in his long, often difficult career, as he himself understood perfectly. More than any other event in his public life, or in his presidency thus far, it would reveal the kind of man he was.

“It’s going to be tough on everybody,” he told the staff. “But that’s the way it’s got to be. I know I can take it. I’m only afraid that I’ll kill some of my staff—and I like you all very much and I don’t want to do that.”

The rest of the train was made up of diners, lounges, sleepers, a press car, a dynamo car for power, and a communications car (a converted baggage car operated by the Signal Corps), where radio teletype would provide continuous contact with Washington and thus the rest of the world, a point of critical importance to Truman, who had become more and more uneasy over the situation in Berlin. “I have a terrible feeling…that we are very close to war,” he had written privately the night of September 13.

Security would be a major undertaking. Every grade crossing would have to be checked in advance by the Secret Service. A pilot train—a single locomotive and one car—would run five miles ahead of the President’s train to “absorb” any possible trouble. The railroad official in charge, who had been handling presidential trips since the time of Warren G. Harding, admitted he was a nervous wreck. “Every grade crossing has to be manned when the train passes and I just can’t tell you how many switches have to be spiked until we’ve moved on,” he told a reporter. Once rolling the train would travel under the code name
“POTUS,”
for “President of the United States,” which gave it the right of way everywhere in the country.

Truman liked to move fast. Roosevelt, because of his infirmities, had preferred a smooth, easy pace of no more than 35 miles an hour when traveling in the
Magellan.
Truman liked to go about 80.

A cheer went up from the moderate-sized crowd gathered at the Union Station platform, the sound echoing under the vaulted roof as his limousine, easing through a break in the crowd, pulled right to the gate. Truman stepped out looking “positively buoyant,” Margaret close behind. Marshall and Barkley had come to see him off. The First Lady would catch up with the caravan at Des Moines.

Charlie Ross, Clark Clifford, Matt Connelly, George Elsey, Charlie Murphy, White House physician Wallace Graham, and Rose Conway, the President’s secretary, were all present and waiting to go on board, in addition to several White House stenographers, Jonathan Daniels, who would help with speeches, and three new speechwriters, David M. Noyes, Albert Z. Carr, and John Franklin Carter. Bill Boyle of Kansas City, an old Truman friend and aid who had served on the Truman Committee, would, like Matt Connelly, be handling political chores.

Counting the whole staff, the Secret Service detail, forty-four reporters and five photographers, the complete entourage numbered some seventy people. The one notable, absentee was Harry Vaughan, who would remain out of sight—and out of contact with the press—for the duration of the campaign, at Truman’s request.

With everything ready, Truman and Barkley posed together on the rear platform for a few last pictures.

“Mow ‘em down, Harry,” Barkley exhorted.

“I’m going to fight hard. I’m going to give ‘em hell,” said Truman, setting the theme at the start.

The odds against him looked insurmountable. The handicaps of the Truman campaign, wrote columnist Marquis Childs, one of the writers on board, “loomed large as the Rocky Mountains.” Henry Wallace and the Dixiecrats had split the Democratic Party three ways. Conceivably, New York and the South were already lost to Truman. The victory of the Republicans in the elections of 1946 had been resounding, and ever since the Civil War, the party winning the off-year election had always gone on to win the presidency in the next election. At Washington dinner parties, as Bess Truman had heard, the talk was of who would be in the Dewey Cabinet. Some prominent Democrats in Washington were already offering their homes for sale. Even the President’s mother-in-law thought Dewey would win.

In the West, where Truman had made an all-out effort in June, predictions were that at best he might win 19 of the 71 electoral votes at stake. Only Arizona, with 4 votes, looked safe for Truman. And the West was essential.

A Gallup Poll of farm voters gave Dewey 48 percent, Truman 38. And the farm vote, too, was essential.

On September 9, a full week before Truman’s train departed Washington, Elmo Roper, a widely respected sampler of public opinion, had announced his organization would discontinue polling since the outcome was already so obvious. “My whole inclination,” Roper said, “is to predict the election of Thomas E. Dewey by a heavy margin and devote my time and efforts to other things.” The latest Roper Poll showed Dewey leading by an “unbeatable” 44 to 31 percent. More important, said Roper, such elections were decided early.

The idea that the campaign was “largely ritualistic,” a formality only, became commonplace.
Life,
in its latest issue, carried a picture of Governor Dewey and his staff under the headline: “Albany Provides Preview of Dewey Administration.”

Yet, inexplicably, Truman had drawn tremendous crowds in Michigan on Labor Day. A hundred thousand people had filled Cadillac Square. By train and motorcade he rolled through Grand Rapids, Lansing, Hamtramck, Pontiac, and Flint, where to Truman and his staff the crowds were even more impressive. “Cadillac Square…that was
organized,
” remembered Matt Connelly. “But we rode from there up to Pontiac…[and] from Detroit to Pontiac I’d see people along the highway. This was not organized and there were a lot of them out there!” According to police estimates the turnout at Truman’s six stops in Michigan totaled more than half a million people.

Often, in later years, the big Truman crowds would be remembered as a phenomenon of the final weeks of the campaign. But this was a misconception. They were there from the start, in Michigan and in traditionally Republican Iowa—in Davenport, Iowa City, Grinnell, Des Moines—beginning September 18, his first full day heading west.

“Newsmen were nonplused,” reported
Time.
“All across Republican Iowa large crowds turned out…a good deal of the cheering was enthusiastic.”

The main event of the day was the National Plowing Contest at Dexter, forty miles west of Des Moines, where Truman spoke at noon, in blazing sunshine, standing front and center on a high, broad platform, a sea of faces before him, a giant plowing scoreboard behind. The crowd numbered ninety thousand.

The long horizons were rimmed with ripening corn. The atmosphere was of a vast county fair in good times, with throngs of healthy, well-fed, sun-baked and obviously prospering people enjoying the day, as dust swirled in a steady wind and more families arrived in new trucks and automobiles. Lined up in an adjoining field, their bright colors gleaming in the sun, were perhaps fifty private airplanes.

It was a Republican crowd. Iowa had a Republican governor. All eight Iowa representatives in Congress, and both senators, were Republicans. In the last presidential election Iowa’s ten electoral votes had gone to Dewey. But more important to Truman, nearly all his audience were farmers and in the Depression, he knew, Iowa farmers had voted for Roosevelt.

Years before, in 1934, when he had been running for the Senate the first time, a St. Louis reporter had written, “In a fight this quiet man can and does hurl devastating fire.” Now at Dexter he ripped into the Republican “gluttons of privilege…cold men…cunning men,” in a way no one had heard a presidential candidate speak since the days of William Jennings Bryan. The difference between Republicans and Democrats was a difference in “attitude”: