Truman (149 page)

Of the war in Korea, he said, “We are fighting for time…for us. There is always an emphasis on the casualties in Korea…. But did it ever occur to you that [they] will be one small drop in the bucket from one of those horrible bombs of which we talk so much.

“Think—think—think,” he said, his voice low, almost shaking, “what a responsibility your President faces. If you would think, and think clearly, you would get behind me and help win this peace…. It is up to you.”

If “victory” in Korea meant risking a world war—a war of atomic bombs—Truman would settle for no victory in Korea. That was the line he had drawn. There was a substitute for victory: it was peace. And he would stand by his policy of limited war for that specific objective.

“And look at the alternatives these critics have to present,” he said in a speech at Tullahoma, Tennessee.

In the same speech, delivered June 25, almost a year to the day since his decision to go into Korea, he said, in effect, that he was ready to negotiate a settlement of the war at the 38th parallel.

Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Jacob Malik, had just proposed a Korean armistice. At Tullahoma, Truman gave the Soviets his fast answer.

“We are ready to join in a peaceful settlement in Korea now, just as we have always been.”

I
n the summer of his seventh year in office, the sixty-seven-year-old President looked the picture of health. His color was good; his clothes, impeccable as always, fit perfectly; his walk was firm and full of purpose. He saw people all day, yet seemed to have time for everyone. Visitors to the Oval Office found a man who stood immediately to greet them, shoulders back and smiling, and who, at his desk, gave them his full attention. Radiating vitality and confidence, he seemed completely at home in his job, as one could only be with experience.
Mens sana in corpore sano
was the old adage he had learned in high school Latin, “a sound mind in a sound body.” Clark Clifford, who dropped by on occasion, would say he never knew anyone of the President’s age who remained physically and psychologically so sound and solid.

He still walked two miles “most every morning,” Truman had recorded in his diary.

The morning bourbon—an ounce of Old Grandad or Wild Turkey taken after the two-mile walk and a few setting-up exercises and the rubdown that usually followed the morning walk—had also become routine. Whether the bourbon was on doctor’s orders, or a bit of old-fashioned home medicine of the kind many of his generation thought beneficial to the circulation past age sixty (“to get the engine going”), is not known. But it seemed to agree with him.

And how Harry Truman looked, how he carried himself, the timbre of his voice, his air of confidence were all subjects of increasing interest in the summer of 1951, once the MacArthur crisis had passed, as a means of divining whether he intended to carry on in the job beyond the next election. Did he or did he not plan to run again in 1952?

At a press conference, a visiting reporter from Macon, Georgia, said with a drawl, “Mr. President, this is my first conference. My impression of you is that you look a lot younger than I thought you would.” With everyone in the room, Truman laughed.

“Could you tell me if you feel like you are in better physical condition now than you were when you first became President?”

He never felt better, Truman said, looking pleased. “I am still young enough to make a good race—foot race, I mean.” And there was more laughter.

“That wouldn’t be an announcement, would it?”

“No, no.”

To those at the White House who saw him daily, at all hours and often under extremely trying circumstances, he was still the Truman of old, hardworking, cheerful, never short with them, never petty. He seemed to have some kind of added inner balance mechanism that held him steady through nearly anything, enabling him not only to uphold the fearful responsibilities of his office and keep a killing schedule, but to accept with composure the small, silly aggravations that also went with the job. It was a level of equanimity that at times left those around him hugely amused and even more fond of him.

At still another banquet at the Statler one evening, the head table waiters managed to confuse the orders they had about a special meal for Joe Short, who had ulcers. It was Truman who was served a bowl of milk toast, which he ate without complaint, thinking that perhaps Dr. Graham had requested it for him.

One day on the
Williamsburg,
Graham sat on the fantail dictating into a recording machine, his lap full of letters, mostly inquiries about the President’s health, his weight, diet, manner of exercise. Truman walked over, picked up the letters from Graham’s lap, and threw them overboard. “You constantly tell me to relax. Now you relax,” Truman said laughing.

His resilient cheerfulness was both a wonder and, to some who worked with him, disconcerting at times. It was almost as though he did not fully understand how serious his troubles were, how truly grim and menacing his horizons appeared, even with the MacArthur crisis out of the way. Only in the eyes, behind the thick glasses, could the fatigue sometimes be seen. Only on rare off moments would he say something to suggest how much else he felt.

Once, while paying a visit to the office of the engineer in charge of the White House renovation, General Glen E. Edgerton, whose desk was in a shack on the South Lawn amid a cluster of temporary buildings put up when the work began, Truman had paused to read a framed verse on the wall. Written for Edgerton by a plumbing contractor named Reuben Anderson, it so appealed to Truman that he read it aloud:

“Hurry, scurry, worry, work!” Truman sighed. “That’s the way it is.”

Another day, in September, riding in his limousine on the way to make a speech to a gathering of churchmen, he again sighed and said that sometimes he wondered if it was all worth the effort.

Though peace talks had begun in Korea, at Kaesong on July 8, the war was grinding on with unabated savagery. Joe McCarthy continued to spew charges of treason and espionage, the worst of his venom aimed now at George Marshall. Congress was stalling on a raise in taxes to pay for the war, threatening to cut foreign aid, and there were new charges of further scandal within the administration. Earlier, in the lull after the MacArthur hysteria, Herb Block, in a Washington Post cartoon titled “The tumult and the shouting dies; the captains and the kings depart,” had shown Truman working alone into the night, his desk piled with reports labeled “Korea,” “Europe,” “A-Bomb,” “H-Bomb,” “Troops,” “Planes,” “United Nations,” “Economic Program,” “Peace,” and “War.” In the time since his burdens had only increased.

By midsummer, American troops had been fighting and dying in Korea for as long nearly as Truman and his generation had fought and died in France in World War I, and the struggle in Korea had become increasingly like World War I. The seesaw swings of fortune, the sweeping end runs and pellmell retreats and advances, were past now, the fighting concentrated near or along the 38th parallel. Some of the bloodiest, most desperate battles of the war were fought for limited topographical features—a numbered hilltop or ridgeline—where often, as in France in 1918, the enemy was heavily dug in, fortified with barbed wire, mines, and elaborately camouflaged tunnels. Newspapers and news broadcasts were filled with accounts of the Battle of Hill 1179, Bloody Ridge, Heartbreak Ridge. American casualties ran sometimes as high as three thousand a week, never less than three hundred. By late August the peace talks had broken down. By summer’s end total American casualties had passed 80,000, with 13,822 dead. Losses among the ROK and other U.N. forces were greater still. What the costs had been to the enemy in dead and wounded, or to the people of Korea, were as yet undetermined.

The war Truman had never wanted or expected, but knew to be of utmost importance to the future of the world—the most important decision of his presidency, he believed—had come to overshadow his whole second term. He knew what the reality was in Korea. “I know what a soldier goes through,” he would say with feeling. He knew the anguish of families at home. But when would it end? Who could say? What could he do that he was not already doing? The worries and frustrations were incessant.

One August morning at Blair House, he read in the papers that the body of an American soldier killed in action, Sergeant John Rice, had been brought home for burial in Sioux City, Iowa, but that at the last moment, as the casket was to be lowered into the grave, officials of the Sioux City Memorial Park had stopped the ceremony because Sergeant Rice, a Winnebago Indian, was not “a member of the Caucasian race” and burial was therefore denied. Outraged, Truman picked up the phone. Within minutes, by telephone and telegram, it was arranged that Sergeant Rice would be buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors and that an Air Force plane was on the way to bring his widow and three children to Washington. That, as President, was the least he could do.

The scourge of Joe McCarthy, that Truman had thought would end soon, was poisoning the entire political atmosphere all the while. McCarthy’s attack on Marshall from the floor of the Senate in mid-June was his most vile yet, a wild harangue lasting nearly three hours. The “mysterious, powerful” Marshall and Dean Acheson were part of a Communist conspiracy, a conspiracy of infamy so immense, said McCarthy, that it surpassed any “such venture” in history. It was Marshall who had created the disastrous China policy, Marshall whose military strategy had made the war in Korea a pointless slaughter. Harry Truman, no longer master of his house, was being guided by a “larger conspiracy, the world-wide web of which has been spun in Moscow.” In the final hour of the speech McCarthy was addressing a virtually empty chamber—all but three senators had walked out. The press deplored these “senseless and vicious charges,” but McCarthy carried on, traveling the country. He still had no evidence. He exposed not a single Communist in government. Yet none of that seemed to matter, as he shouted and threatened and waved fistfuls of so-called “documentation.”

One night in the dining room at Blair House, Truman had called a secret meeting attended by Attorney General McGrath, four Democratic senators—Anderson, Monroney, Hennings, and Sparkman—a veteran Kentucky congressman named Brent Spence, Solicitor General Philip B. Perlman, Democratic Party Chairman William Boyle, Clark Clifford, who again sat in, and the author John Hersey as a kind of witness to history. Truman wanted confidential advice. What could be done about McCarthy?

As Hersey would recall, Truman gave a “pithy and bitter” summary of McCarthy’s methods—“his hectoring and innuendo, his horrors and dirty tricks…his bully’s delight in the ruin of innocents.” All this was tearing the country apart, Truman said. But what antidote could he as President use against such poison?

Senator Clinton Anderson mentioned a “devastating” dossier that had been assembled on McCarthy, complete with details on his bedmates over the years, enough to “blow Senator McCarthy’s whole show sky high.” Suggestions were made that the material be leaked to the press. But Truman smacked the table with the flat of his hand, and as Hersey remembered, “His third-person self spoke in outrage; the President wanted no more such talk.”

Now repeatedly at press conferences when asked his views on the senator or the influence of McCarthyism, Truman, though plainly seething, would answer only, “No comment.”

Marshall, too, refused to respond, saying privately that if at this point in his life he had to explain that he was not a traitor, then it was hardly worth the effort.

To what degree the attacks by McCarthy influenced Marshall’s decision to retire is not clear. But on September 12, with great reluctance, Truman announced that the Secretary of Defense was stepping down for the final time, the extraordinary career was over. No man, said Truman, had ever given his country more distinguished and patriotic service.

There was a gathering sense of strong, central figures leaving the stage. Arthur Vandenberg had died of cancer in the spring. Admiral Forrest Sherman, Chief of Naval Operations and one of the keenest and best of Truman’s military advisers, dropped dead of a heart attack in August. Now Marshall, Truman’s “strong tower,” was departing.

Nor were Truman’s days in the West Wing quite the same without Charlie Ross. Press secretary Joe Short was highly professional, but a taut, intense man, very different from the gentle, wise Ross. The only one left on the staff who came close to filling Ross’s place in Truman’s affections was Bill Hassett, the correspondence secretary, who was of the same generation as Truman, and whose kind-hearted outlook, interest in history, and sense of humor greatly appealed to Truman. Hassett would bring him funny items clipped from magazines, joke with him about the endless obligatory letters that had to be cranked out to every conceivable kind of organization, the absurd proclamations that were called for. And from years of experience as a Vermont newspaperman and working for Roosevelt, Hassett had his own kind of wisdom to contribute. But Hassett was seventy-one years old and an alcoholic, as Truman knew.

With charges of scandal—mounting evidence of favoritism, outright corruption—filling the headlines again, the whole atmosphere in the West Wing grew increasingly strained. Joe Short, Roger Tubby, George Elsey, and Bill Hassett were seething with indignation over the damage done by the “chiselers” within. They saw the President being used by so-called loyal associates for their own pernicious ends, and his continuing tolerance of them could only mean shame and trouble ahead, not just for Truman but for the Democratic Party.

“My house is always clean,” Truman had said at a press conference in March. Somehow, he seemed incapable of imagining any of his people doing anything illegal or dishonorable. The accusations and innuendo coming from the Hill, the reports in the papers were all exaggerated, Truman insisted.