Truman (144 page)

It was the timing of the review in the
Post,
more than what Paul Hume had said, that caused Truman to explode. If it hadn’t been the review, it might have been something else, given the stress he was under and his grief.

In the Blair House study, on a White House memo pad, he began what was to be his most notorious “longhand spasm” of all, a seething 150-word letter to Hume that he sealed in an envelope, addressed, fixed with a 3-cent stamp, and carried with him over to the White House.

To an elderly White House messenger named Samuel Mitchell, Truman asked if it was not an especially pleasant day. When Mitchell agreed, Truman suggested that he might like to take a stroll outside and on his way drop a letter in a mailbox on the street.

Had Charlie Ross still been on duty, the letter might have been stopped in time. Seeing the review, Ross would have known at once what Truman’s response would be. “Charlie Ross would
never
have let the Paul Hume letter get out,” George Elsey would say. “Charlie was…a calming fine influence on Truman, a tempering influence…
much
more than a press secretary.”

Though Hume and his editor at the
Post
decided to do nothing about the President’s letter, copies were apparently made and in short order it appeared in full on page 1 of the tabloid Washington
News.

Margaret, who was by then in Nashville continuing her tour, refused to accept the news. She was positive, she said, that her father would not use such language. “In the first place, he wouldn’t write a letter to Mr. Hume. My father wouldn’t have time to write a letter.” It was not hard to get hold of White House notepaper, she added, though she didn’t know why anyone would do such a thing and sign her father’s name.

Privately, Truman agreed he should never have written the letter, but now that he had, he would stand by it. To Margaret he said he had the right to be two people, the President and himself. It was Harry S. Truman the human being who wrote the letter, he told her.

But to the devoted White House staff, this inclination to see himself as both Truman the President and Truman the human being was not entirely a virtue or necessarily an admirable characteristic. Truman, remembered George Elsey, would forget that the rest of the country might not make such a differentiation. “When he would write a boiling hot letter to a music critic or would call Drew Pearson a son-of-a-bitch…behaving as Harry S. Truman, not as President of the United States…this caused embarrassment to him and I think reflected on the office, which, of course, was the last thing in the world he wanted to have happen.”

Earlier embarrassing outbursts had included the angry letter to Bernard Baruch during the 1948 campaign that caused Baruch to call Truman a “rude, uncouth, ignorant man,” and a letter in which Truman had said he wouldn’t appoint John L. Lewis dog-catcher. In another, a letter to a congressman written the previous summer, he had called the Marine Corps “the Navy’s Police Force” and accused the Marines of having “a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s,” a charge for which he had publicly apologized. But nothing equaled the furor that erupted now over the Hume letter.

Hume himself, who greatly regretted that the letter had ever been made public, told reporters he was entirely sympathetic to the President. “I can only say that a man suffering the loss of a friend and carrying the burden of the present world crisis ought to be indulged in an occasional outburst of temper.” But the gesture had little dampening effect.

The Chicago
Tribune
put the American people on notice that their President’s “mental competence and emotional stability” were in question. A flood of letters-to-the-editor in papers across the country expressed shock over the President’s “uncouthness,” his lack of self-control. “It cuts to the quick to realize that we have a President who isn’t even a gentleman,” read one of hundreds of letters to the White House, and this from an “out-and-out” Democrat. “Truly we have chosen a ‘common’ man President. Yes—very common.” There were suggestions also that Truman might begin to take himself and his daughter a bit less seriously. “My sympathy is with you about Margaret,” wrote one man. “My four children cannot sing either.”

While some who wrote took Truman’s side, saying he had done only what any loyal, loving father worth his salt would have under the circumstances, such sentiments were in the minority. White House letters and telegrams ran nearly two to one against him and many, from mothers and fathers for whom the incident could only be seen in the context of the tragedy in Korea, voiced a deep-seated outrage that had to have touched Truman more than he ever let on.

How many of these Truman actually saw is not known. But one letter from a Mr. and Mrs. William Banning of New Canaan, Connecticut, he both saw and held on to. It had been mailed with a Purple Heart enclosed.

Truman put the letter in his desk drawer, keeping it at hand for several years.

It was Harry Truman’s longstanding conviction that if you did your best in life, did your “damndest” always, then whatever happened you would at least know it was not for lack of trying. But he was a great believer also in the parts played by luck and personality, forces quite beyond effort or determination. And though few presidents had ever worked so hard, or taken their responsibilities so to heart in time of crisis as Truman had since the start of the war in Korea, it was luck, good and bad, and the large influence of personality, that determined the course of events time and again, and never more so than in late December 1950, in the midst of his darkest passage.

Two days before Christmas, on an icy highway north of Seoul, General Walton Walker, commander of the Eighth Army, was killed when his jeep ran head on into an ROK Army truck. Walker’s replacement—as requested by MacArthur and approved immediately by Truman—was Matthew Ridgway, who left Washington at once, arriving in Tokyo on Christmas Day. At his meeting with MacArthur the next morning, Ridgway was told to use his own judgment at the front. “The Eighth Army is yours, Matt. Do what you think best.” MacArthur, wrote Dean Acheson later, “never uttered wiser words.”

That afternoon, Ridgway landed at Taegu, and in the weeks following came a transformation no one had thought possible. Rarely has one individual made so marked a difference in so little time. With what Omar Bradley called “brilliant, driving, uncompromising leadership,” Ridgway restored the fighting spirit of the Eighth Army and turned the tide of war as have few commanders in history.

Since the Chinese onslaught of November 28, the Eighth Army had fallen back nearly 300 miles, to a point just below the 38th parallel, and for a while, Ridgway had no choice but to continue the retreat. Press reports described U.N. forces rolling back down the two main roads through Seoul as a continuous flow morning until night. “The retreating ROK soldiers were the most miserable troops I ever saw,” wrote one correspondent. Millions of Korean refugees had also taken to the roads. “What are you going to do when the enemy doesn’t care how many men he loses?” an American officer was quoted. Seoul was in flames again. President Rhee and his government had fled to Pusan. Abandoning Seoul, Ridgway withdrew as far as Oswan, near the very point where the first green American troops had gone into action in July. Now, instead of the murderous heat of summer, they fought in murderous cold.

The mood in Washington remained bleak. MacArthur continued to urge a widening of the war—again he proposed bombing and blockading China and utilizing the troops of Chiang Kai-shek—and as before his proposals were rejected. Dire consequences would follow, he implied, unless policy were changed.

Truman found such messages “deeply disturbing.” When a general complained about the morale of his troops, observed George Marshall, the time had come for the general to look to his own morale.

The CIA was advising that it would be “infeasible under existing conditions…to hold for a protracted period a position in Korea.” The best hope was an armistice. His primary consideration, MacArthur was told, was the safety of his troops and the defense of Japan.

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.

Truman also still refused to reprimand MacArthur. Rather he treated MacArthur with what Acheson considered “infinite patience”—too much infinite patience, Acheson thought, having by now concluded that the general was “incurably recalcitrant” and fundamentally disloyal to the purposes of his Commander in Chief. On January 13, 1951, Truman sent MacArthur a long, thoughtful telegram, generously praising him for his “splendid leadership” and stressing again the great importance of the whole costly effort in Korea as a means “to demonstrate that aggression will not be accepted by us or by the United Nations.” But “great prudence” must be exercised, Truman stated.

Truman had by now declared a national emergency, announced emergency controls on prices and wages, and still greater defense spending—to the amount of $50 billion, more than four times the defense budget at the start of the year. He had put Charles E. Wilson, head of the General Electric Company, in charge of a new Office of Defense Mobilization, appointed General Eisenhower as Supreme Commander of NATO, and in a radio and television address to the nation on December 15, called on every citizen “to put aside his personal interests for the good of the country.” So while doing all he could to avoid a wider war, he was clearly preparing for one.

As General Marshall later attested, “We were at our lowest point.”

But then the morning of Wednesday, January 17, Marshall telephoned Truman to read an astonishing report just in from General Joe Collins, who had flown to Korea for talks with Ridgway. “Eighth Army in good shape and improving daily under Ridgway’s leadership,” Marshall read. “Morale very satisfactory…Ridgway confident he can obtain two to three months’ delay before having to initiate evacuation…. On the whole Eighth Army now in position and prepared to punish severely any mass attack.”

Plainly MacArthur’s bleak assessment of the situation, his forecasts of doom, had been wrong and the effect of this realization was electrifying. As the word spread through the upper levels of government that day, it would be remembered, one could almost hear the sighs of relief. The long retreat of the Eighth Army—the longest retreat in American military history—had ended. On January 25, 1951, less than a month after Ridgway’s arrival, the Eighth Army began “rolling forward,” as he said.