Washington was stunned. Even the liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called it the “Declaration of World War III.” Since Stalin had decided to make military power his objective, wrote Walter Lippmann, the United States was left with no choice but to do the same.
The Red Army was still in Manchuria. The Russian garrison in Iran’s northernmost province, Azerbaijan, was still in place, in disregard of an agreement that it would be withdrawn within six months of the German surrender. On February 16, just a week after the Stalin speech, came the sensational news from Ottawa that a spy ring had been uncovered and charged with trying to steal information on the atomic bomb for the Russians, and the ring included a member of the Canadian Parliament.
But nothing so highlighted Truman’s ambivalence about relations with the Soviets as events surrounding the speech given by Winston Churchill at Fulton, Missouri, in the first week of March 1946, a speech Truman had encouraged and that he knew about in advance and approved of, despite what he later said.
Located twenty miles north of Jefferson City in rolling farm land, the little town of Fulton was the site of tiny Westminster College, a Presbyterian men’s school where Harry Vaughan had once played center on the football team. The idea to invite Churchill to speak there had been the inspiration of Dr. Franc L. McCluer, president of the college. McCluer had traveled to Washington to see Vaughan, who took him in to meet “the Boss.” Truman was immediately enthusiastic and penned a postscript to Churchill at the bottom of the invitation: “This is a wonderful school in my home state. Hope you can do it. I’ll introduce you. Best regards.”
In reply, Churchill told Truman, “Under your auspices anything I say will command some attention….”
In February, while vacationing in Florida, Churchill made a flying visit to Washington to talk with Truman about the speech. “The subject…will be the necessity for full military collaboration between Great Britain and the U.S. in order to preserve peace in the world,” Admiral Leahy recorded. On March 3, returning again to Washington from Florida, Churchill conferred still further with Leahy, this time at the British Embassy, where, propped up in bed, puffing on a huge cigar, Churchill kept scattering ashes over the manuscript pages strewn about him. Leahy found “no fault” in the speech.
The following day, Monday, March 4, riding in Roosevelt’s armored railroad car, the Ferdinand Magellan, Truman and Churchill left by special train for Missouri, accompanied by Leahy, Vaughan, Charlie Ross, Colonel Graham, and a half-dozen others from the White House staff, plus forty-three reporters and photographers. Truman’s obvious high spirits impressed everyone. He was delighted to be traveling in such good company and bringing Churchill, the most famous speaker in the world, to a college in his home state that no one ever heard of. His mood was infectious. Churchill recited Whittier’s “Barbara Fritchie” and drank five Scotches before dinner.
“Mr. President,” Churchill said later at the card table, “I think that when we are playing poker I will call you Harry.”
“All right, Winston,” Truman replied.
As the evening passed, feigning ignorance of the game, Churchill would remark, to the great amusement of the others, “Harry, what does a sequence count?” Or, “Harry, I think I’ll risk a shilling on a couple of knaves.”
He took a boy’s delight in the game [wrote Charlie Ross]. He couldn’t seem to get the hang of the joker as a wild card for aces, straights and flushes, and so at his suggestion we made the joker completely wild. We played straight poker. The President and the rest of us would have liked to introduce some wild games, but the Prime Minister thought this would be too confusing. Colonel Graham was the principal winner.
About 2:30 in the morning, in the middle of a hand, Churchill put down his cards and said wistfully that if he were born again he would wish to live in the United States, though he deplored a few of its customs. Which customs did he have in mind, the others asked. “You stop drinking with your meals,” he said.
The next morning, Tuesday, March 5, as the train raced along the banks of the Missouri River, Churchill made a few final changes in his speech, which was then mimeographed for distribution on board. It was, he said, the most important speech of his career. Truman, having read his copy, told Churchill it would “do nothing but good” and surely “make a stir.”
Pointing to the President’s seal on the wall of the car, Truman explained that he had had the eagle’s head turned to face the olive branch. Churchill said he thought the eagle’s head should be on a swivel.
The setting and reception at Fulton were all Truman could have wished for. The day was sunny, the temperature in the high sixties, the little town spruced up and looking exactly as he liked to think of Missouri. This was the America he knew best and that he wanted Churchill to see. Thousands of people, many in from the surrounding country, were waiting to cheer them as their motorcade rolled down the red-brick main thoroughfare. At a corner near the college, on the curbstone, sat a delegation of elderly gentlemen with old-fashioned high-topped shoes and canes, who waved colored balloons, and standing behind them were several sailors in uniform.
The Westminster campus, like the town, was decked with both British and American flags. Following lunch at the home of President McCluer, an academic procession started for the gymnasium, Churchill conspicuous in the scarlet robes and plush black cap of Oxford.
In his introduction, Truman said he had never met either Churchill or Stalin until Potsdam, and that he became fond of both. Then, calling Churchill one of the outstanding men of the ages, he said, “I know he will have something constructive to say to the world….”
It was a great honor, perhaps almost unique, Churchill began, for a private visitor to be introduced to an academic audience by the President of the United States.
Amid his heavy burdens, duties, and responsibilities—unsought but not recoiled from—the President traveled a thousand miles to dignify and magnify our meeting here today and to give me an opportunity of addressing this kindred nation, as well as my own countrymen across the ocean, and perhaps some other countries too.
The President has told you that it is his wish, as I am sure it is yours, that I should have full liberty to give my true and faithful counsel in these anxious and baffling times. I shall certainly avail myself of this freedom….
He had, he said, high regard for the Russian people and for his wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin. “We welcome Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world. We welcome her flag upon the seas. Above all, we welcome constant, frequent and growing contacts between the Russian people and our own people on both sides of the Atlantic.” Still, it was his duty, Churchill said, to present “certain facts.” And thus he launched into that part of the speech that was to cause a sensation, giving his own kind of glowering, dramatic emphasis to the indisputable fact that an “iron curtain” had descended in Eastern Europe.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain had descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow….
The Soviets did not want war, but rather the fruits of war, “and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrine.” What was needed in response was a union of the Western Democracies, specifically an English-speaking union of Britain and the United States. For he knew the Russians and there was nothing they so admired as strength, nothing for which they had less respect than weakness, and military weakness most of all.
From the expression on Truman’s face, his applause at several points, it was obvious he approved, as did the audience.
The immediate reaction in the country, however, was strongly in opp
osition. Editorials accused Churchill of poisoning the already difficult relations between the United States and Russia. America had no need for alliances with any other nation, said The Wall Street Journal. Truman, declared The Nation, had been “remarkably inept” in ever associating himself with the occasion. To Walter Lippmann the speech was an “almost catastrophic blunder.” In Moscow, Stalin said it was a “call to war” with the Soviet Union.
Truman was stunned by the criticism. Returning to Washington, he quickly backed off from responsibility, telling reporters he never knew what Churchill was going to say. It was a free country, he added. Churchill had had every right to speak as he pleased. To Henry Wallace, Truman was equally disingenuous, insisting he had never seen the speech in advance, and that Churchill had “put me on the spot.” When reporters pressed him for his opinion of the speech, now that he had had time to think about it, Truman lamely pleaded “no comment.”
To placate Stalin, he wrote a letter offering to send the Missouri to bring him to the United States and promising to accompany him to the University of Missouri so that he too might speak his mind, as Churchill had. But Stalin declined the invitation.
It was a bad time for Truman. To the press and an increasing proportion of the country, he seemed bewildered and equivocating, incapable of a clear or positive policy toward the Russians. Nor did the situation appear any more focused to those in the administration who were supposedly in the know. At the same time he was disavowing Churchill’s speech, he was also telling Averell Harriman that the refusal of the Soviets to withdraw from Iran could mean war. Harriman, who had quit the Moscow Embassy and was now, at Truman’s urging, to become ambassador to Great Britain, approved wholeheartedly of what Churchill had said, as did Leahy, Forrestal, and Dean Acheson all of whom, like Harriman, would have welcomed a strong endorsement by the President, and blamed Byrnes, whom they saw as too much the compromising politician in his dealings with the Soviets.
In an 8,000-word message from the Moscow Embassy that was to become known soon as “the long telegram,” George Kennan, the scholarly chargé d’affaires, had tried to dash any hopes the administration might have of reasonable dealings with the Stalin regime. The Kremlin, wrote Kennan, had a neurotic view of the world, at the heart, of which was an age-old Russian sense of insecurity. For this reason, the Soviet regime was “committed fanatically” to the idea that in the long run there could be no “peaceful coexistence” with the United States, and further that “it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life destroyed, the international authority of our state broken….” Stripped of the “fig leaf” of Marxism, Kennan said, the Soviets would stand before history “as only the last of a long session of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced their country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security for their internally weak regimes.”
But Soviet power, he stressed, was highly sensitive “to the logic of force,” and for this reason usually backed off when faced with strength.
The message had been received at the State Department in February, two weeks before the Churchill speech. Harriman sent a copy to Forrestal, who thought Kennan’s thesis so important he had it mimeographed and circulated through the entire administration, to virtually anyone who had anything to do with foreign and military affairs. Truman, too, read it. But though its long-range influence would be considerable, it was not the immediately galvanizing document sometimes portrayed—not at the White House. On Truman in particular, it does not appear to have had any profound or immediate effect, and most likely for the reason that he had heard much the same case made by Harriman, with his talk of a “barbarian invasion of Europe” at their first meeting the year before. In any event, for attribution, he was taking no stand one way or the other.
At a Cabinet meeting on March 22, Truman expressed surprise over the fact that the Navy was inviting some sixty members of Congress to witness the series of atomic bomb tests scheduled to be held soon on the tiny Pacific atoll of Bikini. He didn’t care how many went after July 1, Truman said, but until then Congress had business to attend. Byrnes questioned the wisdom of such tests, calling them “extremely ill-advised at this time” and warning of detrimental effect on relations with the Soviets. Vice Admiral William Blandy, who was in charge of the operation, reported that 37,000 men were already assigned to take part. When Truman said a decision was needed “here and now,” Byrnes declared he would prefer no tests, but that later would be better. Wallace concurred. Truman said that if the tests were canceled, $100 million would be wasted. He decided the tests would be put off until summer.
The next night Charlie Ross went to the President’s private quarters at the White House to see Truman about a statement announcing the postponement. “He was in his study, working…Mrs. Truman was away and he was waiting for Margaret to come in,” wrote Ross. “We had a drink together. He seemed lonesome.” To Ross, in confidence, Truman said he was less worried about Russia than were most other people.
When reporters questioned whether he shared Harriman’s view of the Russian threat, Truman replied, “I have nothing to say about it.” The easy camaraderie of his earlier press conferences had given way to an atmosphere of greater caution and tension. His sister Mary Jane, who had delighted in sitting in on several of his sessions with reporters during her stay at the White House the previous year, would describe how the questions then had come “thick and fast.” To her it was a wonder that Harry could answer so quickly. “It just didn’t seem to me that they gave him any time at all,” she said, “and all of them got a big bang out of it.” Everybody had seemed to be enjoying every moment. “Once in a while he got a kind of a smarty question,” she remembered. “But…[he] had just as smarty an answer.” Now the smarty answers were to be avoided. Increasingly at press conferences, on the advice of Ross and others on the staff, Truman’s response was “No comment,” or, “Your guess is as good as mine,” or, “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
On April 1, April Fool’s Day, John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers called a nationwide coal strike. For hundreds of thousands of miners Lewis was a leader such as had only been dreamed of in years past. As he once told them, “I have pleaded your case not in the quavering tones of a mendicant asking alms, but in the thundering voice of the captain of a mighty host, demanding the rights to which free men are entitled.” Understandably, their loyalty to him was unswerving. If he said it was time to strike, they struck. And in the weeks following, on the anniversary of Truman’s first year in office, a flurry of newspaper and magazine articles appeared, appraising his performance as President to date. Truman, who still began the day with four or five morning papers and regularly saw a half-dozen different magazines, probably read them all.
The Saturday Evening Post said charitably that perhaps every President had to learn the hard way. (Truman might have added that that was about the only way he had ever learned anything in his life.) To reporters Bert Andrews and Jack Steele, writing in the New York Herald-Tribune, the central question was whether the President would grow in office. “New Dealers are still unhappy, conservatives are critical, middle-of-the-roaders uncertain. They still find it impossible to decide which way Truman is going.”
Noel F. Busch, in an article in Life, noted a curious quality to be observed often again as time passed. Showing visitors about the presidential yacht, Truman would point out the lounge, the galley, and, guest rooms, then say, “And this is the President’s suite,” as though the President were not aboard and he himself were merely an aide or guide.
Such remarks [wrote Busch] may serve as evidence of tact or humility or both. Taken in conjunction with many other traits of speech and behavior on Truman’s part, they also show a curious reluctance or even inability to think of himself as President without a conscious effort of will.
To the editors of Life’s more overtly Republican sister publication, Ti
me, it was by now quite clear that Truman was a mediocre man, the job too big for him.
A current Washington wisecrack was, “I’m just mild about Harry.” Truman, went another joke, was the weakest President since Pierce. “What did Pierce ever do?” the listener was supposed to ask. “That’s the point!” the teller would exclaim.
To Mrs. Robert A. Taft, wife of the conservative Republican senator from Ohio, was attributed the line, “To err is Truman.”
Some observers, however, were not so quick to dismiss him! “Here is to be seen no flaming leadership,” wrote Arthur Krock, chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, “little of what could be called scholarship and no more that is profound. But it is very good and human and courageous. Common sense shines out….”
III
Even without the coal strike it had become the longest, most costly siege of labor trouble in the nation’s history. At one point more than a million workers were out on strike, and though the most crippling shutdown thus far, in the steel industry, was by now settled, the solution had been to grant not just higher wages but an increase in steel prices, all of which was certain to spur further inflation. Nor had its settlement of the steel strike done anything to improve the standing of the administration. Truman’s offer of an 18½ cent increase to the steel workers’ hourly wage had been made without even waiting for his own fact-finding board to report. So now an 18½ cent raise was what everyone wanted.
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