3 PAGE ESSAY

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# Harry Truman:

One Tough Son-of-a-Bitch of a Man

DAVID McCuiLOUGH

When he learned that Roosevelt had died and that he was now president of the United

States, Truman told a group of reporters: "Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I

don't know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told

me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had

fallen on me."

He did not want to be president, and he certainly did not look like one: though cheery

and brisk and always dressed in a spotless suit "as if he had just stepped from a band-

box, " as his wife said, he was short, slight, and plain looking, wore thick spectacles,

spoke in a Missouri twang, and radiated ordinariness. But, as a friend said, behind that

plain-looking facade was "one tough son-of-a-bitch." Though not privy to Roosevelt's

war strategy and military secrets, Truman stepped into the job with alacrity and confi-

dently made decisions that led the country to victory in the Second World War.

In the postwar world, he faced a vortex of difficulties that would have daunted a lesser

man. At home, the United States had to demobilize its vast military forces and convert

wartime industry back to peacetime production. Abroad, the Allied victory proved to be a

victory without peace. For out of the muck and rubble of the Second World War

emerged a Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West that threatened the very

survival of humankind. The genesis of the Cold War, as Truman learned, went back to

the early days of the Second World War and involved control of Eastern Europe. Russia

and the Western Allies clashed over that area, and their rival strategies for the domina-

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tion of Eastern Europe influenced most of the wartime conferences among the big three

(the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union). The West hoped to establish

democratic regimes in Eastern Europe, but it proved an impossible program, for the mas-

sive Red Army overran Eastern Europe and Stalin vowed to maintain Russian su-

premacy there. He did so not to export world communism but to ensure Soviet security

from the West—to make certain no Western army could ever sweep through Poland

and invade Russia as the Germans had done. The Soviet Union had lost from 20 to

25 million people in the war against Germany; no other nation swept up in the war,

not even Germany itself, had suffered such casualties. Dominating Eastern Europe, So-

viet leaders hoped, would prevent such a catastrophe from ever happening again.

Once the Red Army occupied Eastern Europe, Roosevelt did the only thing he could

do. At the Yalta Conference of February 1945, he acknowledged Soviet hegemony in

the region but pressed Stalin to hold free elections in the countries he controlled. Mainly

to hold the wartime alliance together, Stalin promised free elections for Eastern Europe.

But obsessed as he was with Russian security, the Soviet boss never kept his promise,

instead setting up Soviet puppet states from the Baltic to the Adriatic.

The West felt betrayed. By the time Truman came to power, the United States and

many of its allies increasingly saw Stalin as a mad and devious Marxist dictator out to

spread communism across the globe. In the United States especially, a profound suspicion

of the Soviets and world communism swept over Washington and the Truman White

House. Unlike Roosevelt, who had tried to conciliate the Russians, Truman in 1.947

adopted a get-tough containment policy designed to block Soviet expansion and save the

"free world" from communism. The purpose of containment was not to overthrow the

Soviet regime or invade the Soviet sphere but to prevent the Soviets from expanding

the influence of communism. To do that, Washington poured billions of dollars in aid

into Greece, Turkey, and Western Europe and extended American military power

around the globe. American aid to Western Europe, called the Marshall Plan, rebuilt its

war-torn countries and neutralized communist parties there.

From 1947 on, containment formed the basis of United States foreign policy'. When

in 1948 the Soviets blockaded Allied-controlled West Berlin (Berlin was located in the

Russian sector of occupied Germany), Truman ordered a massive airlift by B-29s that

prevented West Berlin from falling to the Soviets. His containment policy dictated that

the United States get tough with China, too, after the Communists took over there in

1949 and drove Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Chinese into exile on Formosa (now

known as Taiwan). The fall of China whipped up a storm of outrage and fears of com-

munism in the United States. In this sinister turn of events, Americans once again saw

the evil hand of Joseph Stalin. At home, a terrible Red scare swept the land, as Ameri-

cans saw communists everywhere, from Hollywood to Washington, D.C., plotting to

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overthrow the government and hand the country over to the Soviets. Truman himself

contributed to the scare, by instituting a sweeping loyalty oath program and beginning

extensive security checks for federal employment.

The Red scare produced in 1950 a finger-pointing rabble-rouser named Joseph

McCarthy, who claimed that the State Department itself was crawling with Reds. He

even accused Truman and General George Marshall, secretary of state, of being Com-

munists. His strident accusations, which the press published with relish under black

headlines, destroyed the careers of many innocent Americans. Yet not once in his anti-

Communist crusade did McCarthy expose a single bonafide Communist.

The year, 1950, brought another shock. China's neighbor, Korea, was divided at the

3 8th parallel between a Communist regime in the north and a pro-Western government in

the south. That June, North Korean forces invaded South Korea in what Washington

viewed as an act of naked Communist aggression instigated by the Kremlin. Under the

auspices of the United Nations, Truman sent in American troops, who in afeiv months

drove the North Koreans back across the 38th parallel. By September, however, Truman

had changed the purpose of the war: instead of simply maintaining the integrity of South

Korea, he resolved to invade North Korea and liberate it from Communist rule. When

United Nations forces under General Douglas MacArthur drove to the Chinese borders,

that was enough for the Red Chinese: 260,000 of them crossed the Yalu and inflicted on

MacArthur one of the worst military defeats in American history, sending him in pell-mell

retreat back toward the 3 8th parallel. With that, Truman again changed the purpose of the

war: he gave up fighting to liberate North Korea and fell back on the original United States

goal of simply ensuring the sovereignty of South Korea. At that point, the Korean War

bogged down in stalemate. When a frustrated MacArthur issued public statements vehe-

mently criticizing Truman's policies and went on to advocate an all-out war against

China, the president relieved him of command, on the grounds that the general was trying

to force his policies on his civilian commander in chief, which violated the constitutional pro-

vision of civilian control of the military.

In the following selection, David McCullough, Truman's foremost biographer and

winner of the Pulitzer Prize, brings the tough little man from Missouri brilliantly alive

in a.warm and sympathetic portrait. McCullough shows us how Truman's personality

and character—his no-nonsense bluntness, honesty, determination, courage, sense of

history, and love of people — affected his postwar decisions and made him an extremely

effective president despite his flaws and mistakes.

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22 HARRY TRUMAN: "ONE TOUGH SON-OF-A-BITCH OF A MAN"

GLOSSARY

ACHESON, DEAN Truman's third secretary of state (1949—1953); he was the principal force behind the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which allied the Western democracies against the Soviet Union and its Eastern bloc. Acheson implemented Truman's decision to send United States troops to South Korea, which had been invaded by Communist North Korea. Though Acheson was diehard anti-Communist, Republicans accused him of being soft on communism and blamed him for the Communist takeover of China in 1949.

BYRNES, JIMMY A conservative Democrat and "avowed segregationist," he was Truman's friend and adviser and served as his secretary of state from 1945 to 1947. He was one of the most vigorous advocates of dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. After the war, he tried to reconcile the United States and the Soviet Union but then became a harsh critic of Soviet designs.

CLIFFORD, CLARK Truman's special adviser from 1945 to 1950, he helped to formulate Truman's policy of containment and to create the Department of Defense.

DEWEY, THOMAS E. Republican nominee for president in 1948; he was universally expected to defeat Truman, so much so that before all the votes were counted, one newspaper ran a front-page headline: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. As it turned out, Truman won the election, defying the pollsters and the odds.

FORRESTAL, JAMES Served as secretary of the navy from 1944 to 1947 and became the first secretary of defense when the Truman administration established the Department of Defense in 1947. He advocated a powerful military to contain Soviet aggression and persuaded the federal government to institute a peacetime draft.

HARRIMAN, W. AVERELL American businessman turned statesman; he served as United States ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1943 to

1946 and as Truman's secretary of commerce from 1946 to 1948.

KENNAN, GEORGE Historian and diplomat who helped formulate Truman's policy of containment toward the Soviet Union; he served as United States ambassador to Moscow until the Soviets demanded his removal.

LILIENTHAL, DAVID A long-time director of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which provided hydroelectric power for the Tennessee Valley. In 1946, Truman appointed him to chair of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, which stressed "civilian control and government monopoly of atomic energy."

LOVETT, ROBERT Influential undersecretary of state during Truman's presidency.

MARSHALL PLAN Also known as the European Recovery Program, it was the brainchild of George C. Marshall, Truman's second secretary of state (1947-1949) and former army chief of staff. The program distributed $12 billion in American aid that helped rebuild war-ravaged Western Europe.

MCCARTHY, JOSEPH Republican senator from Wisconsin who earned his reputation by making fantastic accusations of Communist infiltration into the federal government, particularly the State Department. The cartoonist Herblock coined the term McCarthyism to describe the senator's Cold War witch-hunt to ferret out alleged Communists.

MUNICH, LESSON OF In 1938, in Munich, Germany-, the British and the French reached an accord with Adolf Hitler allowing Germany to possess an area of Czechoslovakia called the Sudentenland in exchange for Hitler's promise not to seize any more European territory. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew home to London, where he proclaimed that the Munich Pact had achieved "peace in our time." It had done nothing of the kind. A year later, Hitler's mighty mechanized army invaded Poland, thus setting off the Second World War. The "lesson of Munich" was that aggressors must never be appeased.

I

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FIGURES IN THE COLD WAR

PENDERGAST, TOM Boss of Missouri's Democratic political machine, through "which Truman rose from judge of a county court to the United States Senate.

I VAUGHAN, HARRY Lifelong friend of Harry Truman's who furnished him "comic relief." He was "Truman's Falstaff" — FalstafF being the bawdy, brazen, good-natured rascal in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and The Merry Wives of Windsor.

H arry Truman was President of the UnitedStates for not quite eight years. Lookingback now we see him standing there in the presidential line, all of five foot nine, in a double-breasted suit, between two heroic figures of the century, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. It's hard to convey today the feeling Americans had about General Eisenhower, the aura of the man, after World War II. He was charismatic, truly, if anyone ever was. Truman was not like that, not glamorous, not photogenic. And from the April afternoon when Truman took office, following the death of Franklin Roosevelt, he would feel the long shadow of Roosevelt, the most colossal figure in the White House in this century. He had none of Roo- sevelt's gifts — no beautiful speaking voice, no in- herited wealth or social standing, no connections. He is the only president of our century who never went to college, and along with his clipped Missouri twang and eyeglasses thick as the bottom of a Coke bottle, he had a middlewestern plainness of manner, that, at first glance, made him seem "ordinary."

He had arrived first in Washington in the 1930s as a senator notable mainly for his background in the notorious Pendergast machine of Kansas City. He •was of Scotch-Irish descent, and like many of Scotch- Irish descent — and I know something of this from my own background — he could be narrow, clan- nish, short-tempered, stubborn to a fault. But he could also be intensely loyal and courageous. And deeply patriotic. He was one of us, Americans said, just as they also said, "To err is Truman."

He was back in the news again after the Republi- can sweep in November 1994, the first such Repub- lican triumph since 1946, and so naturally compar-

Originally titled, "Harry S. Truman: 1945-1953," in Robert A. Wilson (ed.), Character Above All: Ten Presidents from FDR to George Bush (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), pp. 39-59. Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster from Truman by David McCullough. Copyright © 1992 by David McCullough.

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HARRY TRUMAN: "ONE TOUGH SON-OF-A-BITCH OF A MAN"

President Harry Truman, the tough little man from Missouri who

made the decision to use atomic bombs against Japan, put forth

the Truman doctrine to contain the spread of Communism, and

sent American troops into the Korean War. Gruff and direct

though he was, Truman also had "a resilient sense of humor"

and particularly enjoyed "the good stories of politics." (Stock

Montage)

I

isons were drawn. Like Bill Clinton, Trurnan had been humiliated in his mid-term election of 1946, treated with open scorn and belittlement by Repub- licans, and seldom defended by his fellow Demo- crats. He was •written oft.

But how Truman responded is extremely interest- ing and bears directly on our subject, character in the presidency. It was as if he had been liberated from the shadow of Roosevelt. "I'm doing as I damn please for the next two years and to hell with all of them," he told his wife, Bess. And what's so remark- able and fascinating is that the next two years were the best of Truman's presidency. The years 1947 and

1948 contained most of the landmark achievements of his time in office: the first civil rights message ever sent to Congress, his executive order to end segrega- tion in the armed forces, the Truman Doctrine, the recognition of Israel, the Berlin Airlift, and the Mar- shall Plan, which saved Western Europe from eco- nomic and political ruin and stands today as one of the great American achievements of the century.

He showed again and again that he understood the office, how the government works, and that he understood himself. He knew who he was, he liked who he was. He liked Harry Truman. He enjoyed being Harry Truman. He was grounded, as is said.

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FIGURES IN THE COLD WAR

He stressed, "I tried never to forget who I was, where I came from, and where I -would go back to." And again and again, as I hope I will be able to demonstrate, he could reach down inside himself and come up with something very good and strong. He is the seemingly ordinary American who when put to the test, rises to the occasion and does the extraordinary.

Now by saying he knew himself and understood

himself and liked himself, I don't mean vanity or conceit. I'm talking about self-respect, self-under- standing. To an exceptional degree, power never went to his head, nor did he ever grow cynical, for all the time he spent in Washington. He was never inclined to irony or to grappling with abstract thoughts. He read a great deal, enjoyed good bour- bon — Wild Turkey preferably — he was a good lis- tener. His physical, mental, and emotional stamina were phenomenal. . . . There's much to be seen about people in how they stand, how they walk. Look at the photographs of Harry Truman, the newsreels — backbone American.

In the spring of 1945, the new untested President of the United States sat in the Oval Office. Across the desk, in the visitor's chair, sat a grim-looking old friend, Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House. They were alone in the room, just the two of them, and they were, in many ways, two of a kind. Ray- burn knew he could talk straight from the shoulder to Truman, -who had been in office only a few days.

"You have got many great hazards and one of them is in this White House. I've been watching this thing a long time," Rayburn began. "I've seen peo- ple in the White House try to build a fence around the White House and keep the very'people away from the president that he should see. That is one of your hazards, the special interests and the sycophants who will stand in the rain a week to see you and will treat you like a king. They'll come sliding in and tell you you're the greatest man alive. But you know, and I know, you ain't."

Truman knew he wasn't Hercules, he knew he

wasn't a glamour boy, he knew he didn't have — and this is so important — the capacity to move the country with words, with eloquence. He had none of the inspirational magic of his predecessor. If Roo- sevelt was Prospero, Truman was Horatio.

. . . Character counts in the presidency more than any other single quality. It is more important than how much the President knows of foreign policy or economics, or even about politics. When the chips are down — and the chips are nearly always down in the presidency—-how do you decide? Which way do you go? What kind of courage is called upon? Talking of his hero Andrew Jackson, Truman once said, it takes one kind of courage to face a duelist, but it's nothing like the courage it takes-to tell a friend, no.

In making his decision to recognize Israel, Tru- man had to tell the man he admired above all others, no — but more on that shortly.

Truman had seen a lot of life long before he came to Washington. He was bom in 1884. He -was a full- grown, mature, nearly middle-aged man by the time of the Great War, as his generation called World War I, which was the real dividing line between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries and the turn- ing point in his life. Everything changed in the pe- riod after World War I, which in retrospect may be seen as the first, hideous installment of a two-part world catastrophe. Even the same .characters — Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman,' Mac Arthur, Marshall — reappear in World War II. Growing up in Victorian middle America, Truman came to ma- turity with much of the outlook, good and bad, of that very different time.

At heart he remained a nineteenth-century man. He never liked air-conditioning, hated talking by telephone. (And thank goodness, for he wrote letters instead, thousands as time went on, and as a result it is possible to get inside his life, to know what he thought and felt, in a way rarely possible with public figures, and presidents in particular.) He disliked Daylight

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22 HARRY TRUMAN: "ONE TOUGH SON-OF-A-BITCH OF A MAN"

Saving Time and time zones. (He liked wearing two watches, one set on Eastern Standard Time, the other on Missouri time "real time," as he called it.)

He was also a farmer, a real farmer let it be re- membered, not a photo opportunity or a gentleman farmer like FDR or Tom Dewey. With his father, he worked on the farm, facing all the perils of bad weather, failing crops, insect plagues, and debt. Tru- man & Son, of Grandview, Missouri, were never out of debt. He was there for eleven years, until he went off to war in 1917, and as he used to say, "It takes a lot of pride to run a farm." Certainly on a family farm, you don't "do your own thing." Let down your end and the whole enterprise may fall. And every morning there's your father at the foot of the stairs at five-thirty, no matter the weather, no matter the season, telling you it's time to be up and at it.

There was no running water on the Truman farm, no electricity. When his mother had to have an emergency appendectomy, she was operated on by a country doctor on the kitchen table, and it -was young Harry who stood beside her through all of it holding the lantern.

He was, as his pal Harry Vaughan, once said, "one tough son-of-a-bitch of a man. . . . And that," said Vaughan, "was part of the secret of understanding him." He could take it. He had been through so much. There's an old line, "Courage is having done it before."

It's been often said that Truman was poorly pre- pared for the presidency. He came to office not knowing any of the foreign policy establishment in Washington. He had no'friends on Wall Street, no powerful financial backers, no intellectual "brain trust." When Winston Churchill came to Washing- ton in the early 1940s and busied himself meeting everybody of known influence, no one suggested he look up the junior senator from Missouri.

But Truman had experienced as wide a range of American life as had any president, and in that sense he was. well prepared. He had grown up in a small town when the small town was the essence of Amer-

ican life. He'd been on the farm all those years, and he'd gone to war. And the war was the crucible. Captain Harry Truman returned from France in 1919 having led an artillery battery through the hor- rific Battle of the Argonne and having discovered two vitally important things about himself. First, that he had courage, plain physical courage. Until then he had never been in a fight in his life. He was the little boy forbidden by his mother to play in rough- house games because of his glasses. He was a book- worm — a sissy, as he said himself later on, using the dreaded word. But in France he'd found he could more than hold his own in the face of the horrors of battle and, second, that he was good at leading peo- ple. He liked it and he had learned that courage is contagious. If the leader shows courage, others get the idea.

Often he was scared to death. One of the most endearing of his many letters to Bess was written after his first time under fire in France, to tell her how terrified he was. It happened at night in the rain in the Vosges Mountains. The Germans had opened fire with a withering artillery barrage. Truman and his green troops thought it could be the start of a gas attack and rushed about trying frantically not only to get their own gas masks on, but to get masks on the horses as well. And then they panicked, ran. Tru- man, thrown by his horse, had been nearly crushed when the horse fell on him. Out from under, seeing the others all running, he just stood there, locked in place, and Called them back using every form of pro- fanity he'd ever heard. And back they came. This

was no Douglas MacArthur strutting the edge of a trench to inspire the troops. This was a man who carried extra eyeglasses in every pocket because without glasses he -was nearly blind. He had memo- rized the eye chart in order to get into the Army. And there he was in the sudden hell of artillery shells exploding all around, shouting, shaming his men back to do what they were supposed to do.

Now flash forward to a night thirty years later, in 1948, at the Democratic National Convention in

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Philadelphia, when Democrats on the left and Dem- ocrats on the right had been doing everything possi- ble to get rid of President Harry Truman for another candidate. The Dixiecrats had marched out of the convention. The liberals, who had tried to draft General Eisenhower, were down in the dumps as never before, convinced, after Truman was nomi- nated, that all was lost. Truman was kept waiting backstage hour after hour. It was not until nearly two in the morning that he came on stage to accept the nomination. That was the year when the con- ventions were covered by television for the first time and the huge lights made even worse the summer furnace of Philadelphia. The crowd was drenched in perspiration, exhausted. For all the speeches there had been, nobody had said a word about winning.

Truman, in a white linen suit, walked out into the floodlights and did just what he did in the Vosges Mountains. He gave them hell. He told them, in ef- fect, to soldier up — and that they were going to win. It was astounding. He brought the whole hall to its feet. He brought them up cheering. Old-hand reporters, even the most diehard liberals who had so little hope for him, agreed it was one of the greatest moments they had ever witnessed in American politics.

So there we have it, courage, determination, call it as you will. Dean Acheson, his Secretary of State, much later, searching for a way to describe the effect Truman could have on those around him, and why they felt as they did about him, quoted the lines from Shakespeare's Henry V, when King Henry — King Harry1—walks among the terrified, dispirited troops the night before the Battle of Agincourt:

. . . every wretch, pining and pale before,

Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks

His liberal eye doth give to every one . . .

A little touch of Harry in the night.

Acheson was remembering one of the darkest times of the Truman years, -when unexpectedly

260,000 Chinese Communist troops came storming into the Korean War. Through it all, as Acheson and others saw at close hand, Truman never lost confi- dence, never lost his essential good cheer, never lost his fundamental civility and decency toward those who worked with him. He was never known to dress down a subordinate. "Give 'em hell, Harry" never gave anybody hell behind the scenes, on the job.

His decision to go into Korea in June 1950 was the most difficult of his presidency, he said. And he felt it was the most important decision of his presi- dency — more difficult and important than the deci- sion to use the atomic bomb, because he feared he might be taking the country into another still more horrible world war, a nuclear •war. Yet at the time, it was a very popular decision, a point often forgotten. The country was waiting for the President to say we would go to the rescue of the South Koreans, who were being overrun by the Communist North Ko- rean blitzkrieg. The lesson of Munich weighed heavily on everyone. In Congress, the President had strong support on both sides of the aisle, at the start at least. He was applauded by the press across the country. It was only later that summer of 1950 when the war went so sour that it became "Truman's War."

But you see, there was no corollary between pop- ularity and the ease or difficulty of the decision. His most popular decision was, for him, his most difficult decision, while his least popular decision was, he said, not difficult at all. That was the firing of Gen- eral Douglas MacArthur, by far the most unpopular, controversial act of his presidency. Attacked by all sides, torn to shreds in editorials and by radio com- mentators, a potent force then as today, Truman went on with his work as usual, just riding it out. He seemed to have a sort of inner gyroscope for such times. Those around him wondered how it was pos- sible. He said he was sure that in the long run the country would judge him to have done the right thing. Besides, he had only done his duty. The Con-

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22 HARRY TRUMAN: "ONE TOUGH SON-OF-A-BITCH OF A MAN"

stitution stated clearly that there will be civilian con- trol over the military and he had taken an oath to uphold the Constitution. "It wasn't difficult for me

at all," he insisted.

Truman's profound sense of history was an impor- tant part of his makeup. He believed every president

should know American history at the least, and world history, ideally. A president with a sense of history is less prone to hubris. He knows he is but one link in the long chain going all the way back to the first president and that presumably will extend far into the future. He knows he has only a limited time in office and that history •will be the final judge of his performance. What he does must stand the test of time. If he is blasted by the press, if his polls are plummeting as Truman's did during the Korean War, these are not the first concerns. What matters — or ought to matter — is what's best for the coun- try and the •world in the long run.

Truman probably understood the history of the presidency as well as or better than any president of this century with the exception of Woodrow Wil- son, and in his first years in the White House he felt acutely the presence of the predecessors. He was sure the White House was haunted. This was before restoration of the old place, when it creaked and groaned at night with the change of temperature. Sometimes doors would fly open on their own. Alone at night, his family back in Missouri, he would walk the upstairs halls, poke about in closets, wind the clocks. He imagined his predecessors argu- ing over how this fellow Truman was doing so far.

His reputation seems to grow and will, I believe, continue to grow for the reason that he not only faced difficult decisions and faced them squarely, if not always correctly, but that the decisions were so often unprecedented. There were no prior examples to go by. In his first months in office, he made more difficult and far-reaching decisions than any presi- dent in our history, including Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. This much belittled, supposed

backwater political hack, who seemed to have none or certainly very few of the requisite qualities of high office, turned out to do an extremely good job. And it is quite mistaken to imagine that nobody saw this at the time. Many did, and the closer they were to him, the more clearly they saw. Churchill, Marshall, and especially, I would say, Acheson, who was about as different from Harry Truman in background and manner as anyone could be. Acheson once remarked that he had great respect for Franklin Roosevelt, but that he reserved his love for another president, meaning Harry Truman. Acheson didn't much like Roosevelt, I suspect, because Roosevelt was conde- scending toward him. I imagine that if Acheson were to tolerate condescension, it would have to be Acheson being condescending toward someone else.

In the course of more than one hundred inter- views for my biography of Truman, I found no one who had •worked with him, no one who was on the White House staff, or the White House domestic staff, or his Secret Service detail, who did not like him. He knew everybody by name on the White House staff and in the mansion itself. He knew all the Secret Service people by name. He knew all about their families — and this wasn't just a politi- cian's trick. If he could have picked his own father, one former Secret Service man told me, it would have been Truman.

John Gunther, in a wonderful interview with Truman when Truman was Vice President, asked him "what he was-most interested in. "People," Tru- man said without hesitation.

He had a further quality, also greatly needed in the presidency: a healthy, resilient sense of humor. He loved especially the intrinsic humor of politics, the good stories of politics. Campaigning in Texas by train in 1948, he had nothing but blue skies and huge, •warm crowds everywhere he stopped. It was the first time a Democratic candidate for President had ever come to Texas to campaign. That had never been necessary before. The reason now was his civil rights program, which was anything but popular in Texas.

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There had been warnings even of serious trouble if ever he were to show his face in Texas. But his recep- tion was good-natured and approving the whole way across the state and Truman loved every moment. It was probably his happiest time of the whole 1948 whisde-stop odyssey. On board the train were Sam Rayburn and young Lyndon Johnson, who was run- ning for the Senate, as well as Governor Beaufort Jester, who had earlier called Truman's civil rights program a stab in the back.

But all that was forgotten in the warmth of the days and the warmth of the crowds, and at the last stop, Rayburn's home town of Bonham, Rayburn invited the President.to come by his little house on the highway, outside of the town. When the motor- cade arrived, hundreds of people were on the front lawn. Rayburn told them to form a line and he would see they met the President. The Secret Serv- ice immediately objected, saying they had no identi- fications for anyone. Rayburn was furious. He knew every man, woman, and child on that lawn, he said, and could vouch for each and every one. So the line started for the house where Governor Jester offered greetings at the door and the President, a surrepti- tious bourbon within reach, shook hands with "the customers," as he called them. All was going well until Rayburn, who never took his eye off the line, shouted, "Shut the door, Beaufort, they're coming through twice."

Yet for all that it is mistaken to picture Harry Truman as just a down-home politician of the old stamp. The Harry Truman of Merle Miller's Plain Speaking, or of the play Give-em Hell, Harry, is enter- taining and picturesque, but that wasn't the man who was President of the United States. He wasn't just some kind of cosmic hick.

Now he did make mistakes. He was not without flaw. He could be intemperate, profane, touchy, too quick with simplistic answers. In private conversa- tion, he could use racial and religious slurs, old habits of the mouth. In many ways his part of Missouri was

more like the Old South than the Middle West, and he grew up among people who in so-called polite society commonly used words like "nigger" and "coon."

Yet here is the man who initiated the first civil rights message ever and ordered the armed services desegregated. And let's remember, that was in 1948, long before Martin Luther King, Jr., or Broum v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court de- cision on the desegregation of schools, or the civil rights movement. When friends and advisers warned him that he was certain to lose the election in 1948 if he persisted with the civil rights program, he said if he lost for that, it would be for a good cause. Princi- ple mattered more than his own political hide. His courage was the courage of his convictions.

Truman's greatest single mistake was the loyalty oath program, requiring a so-called loyalty check of every federal employee. It was uncalled for, expen- sive, it contributed substantially to the mounting bu- reaucracy of Washington and damaged the reputa- tions and lives of numbers of people who should never have had any such thing happen to them. He did it on the advice that it was good politics. He let his better nature be overcome by that argument. It was thought such a move could head off the rising right-wing cry of Communists in government, the McCarthy craze then in its early stages. But it didn't work. It was shameful.

His Supreme Court appointments weren't partic- ularly distinguished. His seizure of the steel industry during the Korean War to avert a nationwide strike was high-handed and righdy judged unconstitu- tional, though his motives were understandable. We were at war and a prolonged shutdown of produc- tion of steel threatened the very lives of our fighting forces in Korea.

He himself thought one of his worst mistakes was to have allowed the pell-mell demobilization that followed World War II. Almost overnight American military might had all but vanished. When we inter- vened in Korea, we had little to fight with, except

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22 MARRY TRUMAN: "ONE TOUGH SON-OF-A-BITCH OF A MAN"

for the atomic bomb. That Truman refused to use the atomic bomb in Korea, despite tremendous pres- sure from General MacArthur and others, stands as one of his most important decisions and one for

which he has been given little credit. The idea that Harry Truman made the decision to

use the bomb against Japan and then went upstairs and went to sleep is an unfortunate myth for which he is largely accountable. I think he gave that im- pression because he came from a time and place in America where you were not supposed to talk about your troubles. "How are you?" "I'm fine." You might be dying of some terrible disease — "I'm fine. And you?" He refused ever to talk of the weight of the decision except to say that he made it and that it was his responsibility. .. .

With the return of peace, Truman's political trou- bles began. The year 1946 was particularly rough. He seemed hopelessly ineffectual. He seemed to be trying to please everybody at once, willing to say to almost anybody whatever they most wanted to hear. He wasn't at all like the Harry Truman I've been de- scribing. He had never wanted the job and for some time appeared willing to give it up as soon as possi- ble. He tried twice to get General Eisenhower to agree to run as a Democrat in the next election, say- ing he would gladly step aside. According to one ac- count, he even offered to run as Vice President with Ike at the head of the ticket. But then after the set- back in the '46 congressional elections, he became a different man.

Fire-in-the-belly for presidential glory was never part of his nature. He wasn't in the job to enlarge his

- estimate of himself. He didn't need that. He didn't need the limelight or fawning people around him in order to feel good about being Harry Truman.

On that note, it is interesting to see whom he did choose to have around him, as a measure of his char- acter. There were Omar Bradley and Matthew Ridgway at the Pentagon, Eisenhower at the head of NATO. George C. Marshall served as Secretary of

State and later as Secretary of Defense. There were Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, George Kennan, Chip Bohlen, David Lilienthal, James Forrestal, Sam Rosenman, Clark Clifford — the list is long and very impressive. That most of them had more distinguished backgrounds than he, if they were taller, handsomer, it seemed to bother him not at all. When it was suggested to him that General Marshall as Secretary of State might lead people to think Marshall would make a better presi- dent, Truman's response was that yes, of course, Marshall would make a better president, but that he, Harry Truman, was President and he wanted the best people possible around him.

As no president since Theodore Roosevelt, Tru- man had a way of saying things that was so much his own, and I would like to quote some of them:

"I wonder how far Moses would have gone, if he had taken a poll in Egypt."

"God doesn't give a damn about pomp and circumstance."

"There are more prima donnas in Washington than in all the opera companies."

He is also frequently quoted as having said, "If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog," and, "If you want to live like a Republican, vote Demo- cratic." I doubt he said the first, but the second does sound like him.

"The object and its accomplishment is my philos- ophy," he said. Let me say that again. "The object and its accomplishment is my philosophy." And no president ever worked harder in office. At times, a little discouraged, he would say, "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."

Where were his strengths and his weaknesses in conflict? In interviews with those who knew him, I would ask what they believed to have been the Pres- ident's major flaw. Almost always they would say he was too loyal to too many people to whom he

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FIGURES IN THE COLD WAR

should not have been so loyal — not as President. They were thinking mainly of the cronies — people like Harry Vaughan. Or remembering when Boss Tom Pendergast died and Vice President Harry Tru- man commandeered an Air Force bomber and flew to Kansas City for the funeral. "You don't forget a friend," was Truman's answer to the press.

Tom Pendergast had made Truman, and the Pen- dergast machine, though colorful and not without redeeming virtues, was pretty unsavory altogether.

But Truman was also, let us understand, the prod- uct of the smoke-filled room in more than just the Kansas City way. He was picked at the 1944 Demo- cratic Convention in Chicago in a room at the Blackstone Hotel thick with smoke. He was tapped as Roosevelt's running mate and almost certain suc- cessor by the party's big-city bosses, the professional pols, who didn't want Henry Wallace, then the Vice President, because Wallace •was too left wing, an didn't want Jimmy Byrnes, another Roosevelt favorite, because Byrnes was too conservative, an avowed segregationist and a lapsed Roman Catholic. They wanted Harry Truman, so Truman it was. They knew their man. They knew what stuff he was made of. And remember, this was all in a tradition of long standing. Theodore Roosevelt had been picked by a Republican machine in New York, Woodrow Wilson by the Democratic machine in New Jersey. For Franklin Roosevelt, such "good friends" as Ed Kelly of Chicago, Boss Crump of Memphis, Ed Flynn of the Bronx were indispensable. And because a candidate had the endorsement of a machine, or as in Truman's case owed his rise in politics to a cor- rupt organization, it didn't necessarily follow that he himself was corrupt. John Hersey, who did one of the best of all pieces ever "written about Harry Tru- man, for "Die New Yorker, said he found no trace of corruption in Truman's record. Nor did I. Nor did the FBI when it combed through Truman's past at the time Pendergast was convicted for an insurance fraud and sent to prison. Nor did all the Republicans

302

who ran against him in all the elections in his long political career.

I think he was almost honest to a fault. Still he un- derstood, and felt acutely, the bargain he made with loyalty to the likes of Pendergast, and he understood why he was so often taken to task by the Republi- cans or the press or just ordinary citizens who didn't care for the kind of political company he kept.

Harry Vaughan was for comic relief, Truman's Falstaff. Among the delights of Truman as a bio- graphical subject is that he enjoyed both Vaughan and Mozart. He loved a night of poker with "the boys," and he loved the National Symphony, which he attended as often as possible. If the program in- cluded Mozart or Chopin, he would frequently take the score with him.

This same Harry Truman, who adored classical music, who read Shakespeare and Cicero and Don Quixote, comes out of a political background about as steamy and raw as they get. And at times, this •would get to him and he would escape to the pri- vacy of a downtown Kansas City hotel room. There he would pour himself out on paper, an innermost anguish in long memoranda to himself, and these amazing documents survive in the files of the Tru- man Library in Independence, Missouri, along with thousands of his letters and private diaries.

Here is a striking example written when Truman was a county judge (a county commissioner really) and one of his fellow commissioners had made off with $10,000 from the county till:

This sweet associate of mine, my friend, who was sup-

posed to back me, had already made a deal with a former

crooked contractor, a friend of the Boss's . . . I had to

compromise in order to get the voted road system carried

out . . . I had to let a former saloonkeeper and murderer, a

friend of the Boss's, steal about $10,000 from the general

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22 HARRY TRUMAN: "ONE TOUGH SON-OF-A-BITCH OF A MAN"

He is not exaggerating with the million-dollar fig- ure. When the Pendergast organization collapsed and its ways of operation were revealed, a million dollars was found to be about standard. But then, impor-

tantly, Truman goes on:

Was I right or did I compound a felony? I don't know. . ..

Anyway I've got the $6,500,000 worth of roads on the

ground and at a figure that makes the crooks tear their

hair. The hospital is up at less cost than any similar institu-

tion in spite of my drunken brother-in-law [Fred Wal-

lace], whom I'd had to employ on the job to keep peace in

the family. I've had to run the hospital job myself and pay

him for it. ... Am I an administrator or not? Or am I just a

crook to compromise in order to get the job done? You

judge it, I can't.

This is all very painful for him. He writes of being raised at his mother's knee to believe in honor, ethics, and "right living." Not only is he disgusted by the immorality he sees behind the scenes, he

doesn't understand it. But let me return to 1948, where I think we see

Truman, the President, at his best. Consider first the crisis over Berlin. That spring the Russians had sud- denly clamped a blockade around the city, which was then under Allied control though within the Russian zone of East Germany. Overnight, without warning, Berlin was cut off. Other than by air, there was no way to supply it. Two and a half million people were going to be without food, fuel, medical supplies. Clearly.Stalin was attempting to drive the Allies out. The situation was extremely dangerous.

At an emergency meeting in the Oval Office, it was proposed that the Allies break through with an ar- mored convoy. It looked as though World War III might be about to start. It •was suggested that Berlin be abandoned. Nobody knew quite what to do. Truman said, "We stay in Berlin, period." He didn't know how that could be done any more than anyone else, but he said, "We stay in Berlin." Backbone.

An airlift had already begun as temporary measure. Truman ordered it stepped up to the maximum. It was said by experts, including the mayor of Berlin, that to supply the city by air would be impossible, given the size of the planes and the calculated num- ber of landings .possible per day. The whole world was on edge.

"We'll stay in Berlin," Truman said again, "come what may." The supposedly insoluble problem of the limit .of the plane landings per day was nicely solved: they built another airport. The airlift worked. The Russians gave up the blockade. The crisis passed.

Among the most difficult and important concepts to convey in teaching or writing history is the simple fact that things never had to turn out as they did. Events past were never on a track. Nothing was foreordained any more then than now. Nobody knew at the start that the Berlin Airlift would work. It was a model, I think, of presidential decision mak- ing, and of presidential character proving decisive.

All this, I should also remind you, was taking place in an election year. Yet at no time did Truman in- clude any of his political advisers in the discussions about Berlin. Nor did he ever play on the tension of the crisis for his own benefit in the speeches he made.

With the question of whether to recognize Israel, Truman faced an equally complex situation but one greatly compounded by emotion. Of particular diffi- culty for him, personally and politically, was the po- sition of his then Secretary of State, George Mar- shall, who was gravely concerned about Middle Eastern oil supplies. If Arab anger over American support for a new Jewish state meant a cut-off of Arab oil, it would not only jeopardize the Marshall Plan and the recovery of Europe but could prove disastrous should the Berlin crisis indeed turn to war.

Marshall was thinking as a military man, deter- mined to hold to a policy that was in the best inter- est of the United States. It was by no means a matter

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FIGURES IN THE COLD WAR

of anti-Semitism, as was sometimes charged, or any lack of sympathy for the idea of a Jewish homeland. But the fact that Marshall was against an immediate recognition put Truman in an extremely difficult position. No American of the time counted higher in Truman's estimate than Marshall. He saw Marshall as the modern-day equivalent of George Washing- ton or Robert E. Lee and valued his judgment more than that of anyone in the cabinet. Further, Marshall was far and away the most widely respected member of the administration, and if Truman were to decide against him and Marshall were then to resign, it would almost certainly mean defeat for Truman in November. He could lose the respect of the man he most respected and lose the presidency.

Truman did recognize Israel—immediately, within minutes — and he never doubted he was doing the right thing. His interest in the history of the Middle East was long standing. He had been a strong supporter of a homeland for Jewish refugees from Eu- rope from the time he had been in the Senate. But he also knew George Marshall and was sure Marshall would stand by him, as of course Marshall did.

I have spent a sizable part of my writing life trying to understand Harry Truman and his story. I don't think we can ever know enough about him. If his loyalty was a flaw, it was his great strength also, as shown by his steadfast loyalty to Dean Acheson when Joe McCarthy came after Acheson or the un- flinching support he gave David Lilienthal when Lilienthal, Truman's choice to head the Atomic En- ergy Commission, was accused as a "pink," a Com- munist. Franklin Roosevelt had not been willing to stand up for Lilienthal. Truman did. And Lilienthal was approved by the Senate.

Perhaps Truman's greatest shortcoming was his unwillingness to let us know, to let the country know then, how much more there was to him than met the eye, how much more he was than just "Give 'em hell, Harry" — that he did have this love of books, this interest in history, his affection for

304

people, his kindness, his thoughtfulness to subordi- nates, the love of music, the knowledge of music, his deep and abiding love for his wife, his bedrock belief in education and learning. Though he had never gone beyond Independence High School, this was a president who enjoyed Cicero in the original Latin. We should have known that. It's good to know now, too.

A few words about the '48 campaign, which will always be part of our political lore. It's a great Amer- ican metaphor, a great American story. The fellow who hasn't got a chance comes from behind and wins. Nobody in either party, not a professional politician, not a reporter, not even his own mother- in-law doubted that Tom Dewey would be the next president. The result of a Newsweek poll of fifty top political commentators nationwide who were asked to predict the outcome was Dewey 50, Truman 0.

No president had ever campaigned so hard or so far. Truman was sixty-four years old. Younger men who were with him through it all would describe the time on the train as one of the worst ordeals of their lives. The roadbed was rough and Truman would get the train up to 80 miles an hour at night. The food was awful, the work unrelenting. One of them told me, "It's one thing to work that hard and to stay the course when you think you're going to win, but it's quite another thing when you know you're going to lose." The only reason they were there, they all said, was Harry Truman.

For Truman, I think, it was an act of faith — a heroic, .memorable American act of faith. The poll takers, the political reporters, the pundits, all the sundry prognosticators, and professional politicians — it didn't matter what they said, what they thought. Only the people decide, Truman was re- minding the country. "Here I am, here's what I stand for — here's what I'm going to do if you keep me in the job. You decide."

Was he a great president? Yes. One of the best. And a very great American. Can we ever have an- other Harry Truman? Yes, I would say so. Who

'-

22 HARRY TRUMAN: "ONE TOUGH SON-OF-A-BITCH OF A MAN"

knows, maybe somewhere in Texas she's growing up right now.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

1 Describe Truman's character. How did his char- acter affect his political career, especially his presi- dency? How was Truman's "profound sense of his- tory an important part of his makeup"? Compare him as a man to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the subject of selection 17.

2 What was the most difficult decision Truman had to make as president? What did he fear his deci- sion might lead to? What was "the lesson of Mu- nich"? What controversial move did Truman make

in order to uphold his oath to the Constitution? Why did he insist that the move was "not difficult" for him?

3 What was Truman's "greatest single mistake" as president? Why did he make it? Why did David Mc- Cullough say it was "shameful"? According to Mc- Cullough, what were some of President Truman's other mistakes?

4 What crisis showed Truman, as president, at his best? How did his character affect his decision to stand firm in that crisis?

5 How did Truman make evident America's re- solve to maintain the global status quo and yet avoid precipitating a third world war? When during his presidency did nuclear war seem probable?

305