Truman (95 page)

But in an interview with the journalist Carl Bernstein, Clifford was considerably more blunt:

(To Bernstein, this was a particularly chilling revelation, since his own parents had been among victims of the Loyalty Program.)

And politically the effect of Executive Order No. 9835 was indeed pronounced, for the moment at least, as
Time
’s Capitol Hill correspondent, Frank McNaughton, described in a confidential report to his editors:

That Truman’s concern over J. Edgar Hoover continued to trouble him there is no question. “If I can prevent [it], there’ll be no NKVD [Soviet Secret Police] or Gestapo in this country,” he wrote privately to Bess. “Edgar Hoover’s organization would make a good start toward a citizen spy system. Not for me….”

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.

On April 22, 1947, the Senate overwhelmingly approved aid to Greece and Turkey by a vote of 67 to 23. On May 9, the House, like the Senate, passed the bill by a margin of nearly three to one, 287 to 107. On May 22, while visiting his mother in Grandview, Truman sat at the Mission oak table in her small parlor and signed the $400 million aid package. The Truman Doctrine had been sanctioned.

Though it seemed so at the time, and would often be so presented in later accounts, the Truman Doctrine was not an abrupt, dramatic turn in American policy, but a declaration of principle. It was a continuation of a policy that had been evolving since Potsdam, its essence to be found in Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and in the more emphatic Clifford-Elsey Report. It could even be said that it began with Averell Harriman’s first meeting with Truman before Potsdam.

But, be that as it may, the Truman Doctrine would guide the foreign policy of the United States for another generation and more, for better or worse, despite any of the assurances by Acheson and Vandenberg that this was not the intent.

It could not have been a more exciting or important time, Clark Clifford would say, recalling events of 1947 and ‘48. “I think it’s one of the proudest moments in American history. What happened during that period was that Harry Truman and the United States saved the free world.”

Others felt the same. A young economic adviser at the State Department, Paul Nitze, would reflect after a long, eventful career in public service that nothing had given him such satisfaction as the work accomplished then. Dean Acheson, Speaking for all of them, would write that they had been “present at the creation.”

Their exhilaration derived in part from the tremendous urgency of the moment. Events moved rapidly. “There was much to be done and little time to do it,” Truman would remember. Plans had to be conceived and clarified with minimum delay, imagination applied, decisions reached, and always with the realities and imponderables of politics weighed in the balance. The pressure was unrelenting. “You don’t sit down and take time to think through and debate ad nauseam all the points,” George Elsey would say, in response to latter-day critics. “You don’t have time. Later somebody can sit around for days and weeks and figure out how things might have been done differently. This is all very well and very interesting and quite irrelevant.”

With the stress of deadlines and long hours, emotions often ran high. The struggle to draw up a preliminary report for what would become the Marshall Plan was for George Kennan “an intellectual agony” greater than any he had known. So intense did a debate with his associates become one harried night at the State Department that Kennan had to leave the room and go outside, where he walked, weeping, around the entire building.

What they were attempting was, besides, different from what had gone before. They were pioneering, the state of the world being, as Acheson said, “wholly novel within the experience of those who had to deal with it.”

Of great importance also to everyone’s morale in the spring of 1947 was the changed outlook of the President, a subject which by now had drawn much attention. Dozens of articles appeared describing the “new” Truman, and for the reason that the change was truly striking. He was in “top spirits,” reported
The New York Times
; the whole “political picture has changed in Washington.” The President was “very different” now, “calm and forceful,” wrote Alden Hatch in
Liberty
magazine. “The recent change in Harry Truman has been variously ascribed to new advisers, a difference of political climate, or a change in his nature. The fact is that it is not change, but growth.” His voice, his whole manner had a “new authority,” said
Collier’s
. He was no longer Roosevelt’s “stand in.” Noting that Truman’s public approval rating was up sharply, to 60 percent,
Time
lauded his “new sense of the dignity of his office.” The President, said
Time
, had acquired “a new confidence and a new formula: be natural.”

On an afternoon in mid-April, speaking extemporaneously to several hundred members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors who crowded into his office, Truman was as impressive as he had ever been before such a group-relaxed, sure of himself, convincing in a way that seemed to take many of them by surprise. The Truman Doctrine, he said, was no “sudden” turn in policy, and he traced the history of relations with Russia from the time of his first meeting with Molotov there in the same room two years before. He was sure a solution to the problems with the Soviets would be found and that a long era of peace was in store. “I believe that as sincerely as I am standing here.” It was essential “to stand for what we believe is right,” hard as the Russians were to negotiate with. “They deal from day to day, and what’s done yesterday has no bearing on what’s done today or tomorrow. We have to make up our mind what our policy is.”

He had just been talking with a pilot who had flown around the world in sixty-eight hours, he told them. “We must catch up morally and internationally with the machine age. We must catch up with it…in such a way as to create peace in the world, or it will destroy us and everybody else. And that we don’t dare contemplate.”

To his staff it was an inspiring performance, a long way from the fumbling press conferences of the previous year.

The morale of the staff had never been higher. Truman spoke of them proudly and affectionately as his “team.” They were devoted to him, and increasingly as time went on, the better they knew him, quite as much as those who had served with him in the Army. They liked him as a man, greatly respected him as a leader, admiring his courage, decisiveness, and fundamental honesty. The President they worked for, the Harry Truman they saw day to day, bore almost no resemblance to the stereotype Harry Truman, the cocky, profane, “feisty little guy.” Rather it was a quiet-spoken, even-tempered and uncommonly kind-hearted person, whose respect for the office he held enlarged their appreciation not only of him but of their own responsibilities.

“He was, as I’m sure you know, an extremely thoughtful, courteous, considerate man,” George Elsey would tell an interviewer years later. “He was a pleasure to work for…very kindly…never too busy to think about members of his staff…. He had a tremendous veneration and respect for the institution of the Presidency. He demanded at all times respect for the President of the United States….”

William J. Hopkins, an executive clerk who would serve nearly forty years in the White House, said later of Truman that no President in his experience had “set a comparable tone.” Truman, Hopkins emphasized, “liked people, he trusted people, and in turn he engendered a feeling of unqualified loyalty and devotion among his staff.”

A measure of the Truman manner and outlook was the way he conducted his regular morning meeting with the staff, one of the most important events of their day, for the information and sense of direction provided, but also for its overall atmosphere. The staff numbered thirteen, two more than in Roosevelt’s time, and Truman was his own chief of staff. The meetings were informal, yet orderly and businesslike. Truman would open the door of his office on the dot of nine o’clock and one by one they would file in and take their seats.

Truman was as tidy about his desk as he was about his clothes. The “flow of paper was probably the best I have experienced,” remembered Hopkins, whose job, as executive clerk, was to bring to the President and keep track of the immense range of documents requiring his attention or signature—enrolled bills, executive orders, proclamations, executive clemency cases, treaties, departmental directives, nominations for federal office, commissions, messages to Congress—in addition to “gleanings” from the incoming mail, which were routinely delivered to Truman’s desk twice a day, in the morning and again after lunch.

Hopkins, who was himself extremely punctual, also noted admiringly of Truman, “When he went to lunch, if he left word that he would return at 2:00
P.M.
, he was back without fail, not at 2:05, not at 1:15, but at 2:00
P.M.
” The longer he was in office, the more conscious Truman seemed of time. On his desk now he had a total of four clocks, as well as two others elsewhere in the room and his own wristwatch.

Ross, Clifford, Elsey, could each tell his own stories of Truman’s exceptional diligence, the long hours he kept, working as hard or harder than any of them. “Lots of times I would be down there [at the White House] in the evening,” Clifford would remember, “and he’d be sitting upstairs, in the Oval Room upstairs, with an old-fashioned green eye shade on, like bookkeepers wear, and he’d be sitting there reading all this material…and we would talk together, and he took it
very, very
seriously. And the strain of the job was enormous.”

“He spent virtually every waking moment working at being president,” said Charles Murphy, a new man on the staff in 1947, who was Clifford’s assistant. To convey the kind of sustained effort the presidency demanded, Murphy would compare it to cramming for and taking an examination every day, year after year, with never a letup.

Murphy particularly admired Truman’s gift for simplification. “Not only could he simplify complex matters, he could also keep simple matters simple.”

The staff was continuously amazed by the President’s knowledge of the country, acquired from years of travel by automobile and from the territory covered at the time of the Truman Committee investigations. Charlie Ross claimed that Truman could look out of his plane at almost any point and name the exact region he was flying over.

They liked his sense of humor. “An economist,” he told them, “is a man who wears a watch chain with a Phi Beta Kappa key at one end and no watch at the other.” 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.