David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  Having stumbled into trouble, he was clumsily and obviously fabricating in a desperate effort to get himself out and get Byrnes “off the hook” in Paris. “There has been no change in the established foreign policy of our country,” he also said, which was true but did no good. “The criticism continued to mount,” wrote Ross, who had helped prepare the statement.

  Dispatches from Paris…indicated that Byrnes and his delegation felt that something more needed to be done. And, indeed, they were right. The question still remained whether Wallace was to be allowed to go on attacking in public the foreign policy line laid down by Byrnes at Paris. The press secretary’s seat became warmer and warmer. I could only reply to questions that the President and Byrnes were not in communication.

  The “Wallace episode” boiled on for days. As Wallace continued to tell reporters that he stood by his speech, Truman kept to a light schedule, saying nothing further for attribution.

  Then Ross, too, blundered badly. Hearing that columnist Drew Pearson had obtained a long private letter written by Wallace to Truman two months earlier—a letter apparently “leaked” to Pearson by someone in the State Department—Ross, without approval from Truman, agreed with Wallace that the letter should be released to the press, in order to deny Pearson the limelight. When Ross informed the President of what he had done, Truman told him to call Wallace at once and stop release of the letter. But by then it was too late, the letter was out.

  Dated July 23, it consisted of twelve single-spaced typed pages more critical even of administration policy than Wallace’s speech had been. Forcefully advocating a new approach to the Soviet Union, Wallace charged, among other things, that certain unnamed members of the U.S. military command advocated a “preventive war” before Russia had time to develop an atomic bomb.

  “I’m still having Henry Wallace trouble and it grows worse as we go along,” Truman confided plaintively to his mother on Wednesday, September 18. Wallace was expected momentarily at the White House. “I think he’ll quit today and I won’t shed any tears. Never was there such a mess and it is partly my making. But when I make a mistake it is a good one.”

  To Wallace, too, Truman said he had only himself to blame for most of what had happened. He had not known so many sleepless nights since the convention at Chicago.

  They talked alone in the Oval Office, Wallace giving no sign that he intended to quit. His mail, Wallace said, was running five to one in favor of his New York speech. “The people are afraid that the ‘get-tough-with-Russia’ policy is leading us to war,” Wallace told him. “You yourself, as Harry Truman, really believed in my speech.” He advised Truman to be far to the left when Congress was not in session, then move to the right when Congress returned. That was the Roosevelt technique, Wallace said. Roosevelt had never let his right hand know what his left hand was up to. “Henry told me during our conversation that as President I couldn’t play square,” Truman would report to Bess, “…that anything was justified so long as we stayed in power.” If Truman would only lean more in his direction, Wallace said, it could mean victory for the Democrats in Congress in November. Truman told him he thought the Congress would go Republican in any event.

  He asked Wallace to stop making foreign policy speeches—“or to agree to the policy for which I am responsible.” But Wallace would not agree.

  Still Truman refused to fire him. Indeed, he hardly dared offend him. As the last surviving New Dealer in the Cabinet, Wallace was too important symbolically—as Wallace knew, and as Wallace knew Truman knew. For countless liberal Democrats Wallace remained the rightful heir to the Roosevelt succession, while Truman was only a usurper. For Truman to have an open break with Wallace, anything like the Ickes affair, could be politically disastrous. The only agreement reached at last, after two and a half hours of talk, was that Wallace would say no more on foreign policy at least until Byrnes came home.

  In the lobby afterward, when reporters asked if everything had been straightened out, Wallace replied, “Everything’s lovely.”

  “Henry is the most peculiar fellow I ever came in contact with,” Truman informed his mother. In his diary, he was more explicit. Wallace was unsound intellectually and “100 percent” pacifist.

  He wants to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic bomb secrets and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politburo. I do not understand a “dreamer” like that…. The Reds, phonies and “parlor pinks” seem to be banded together and are becoming a national danger.

  I am afraid they are a sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin. They can see no wrong in Russia’s four-and-a-half million armed force, in Russia’s loot of Poland, Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Manchuria. They can see no wrong in Russia’s living off the occupied countries to support the military occupation.

  At the Pentagon, at Truman’s request, Secretaries Patterson and Forrestal issued a joint statement denying they knew of any responsible Army or Navy officer who had ever advocated or even suggested a policy or plan of attacking Russia.

  From Paris, Byrnes sent Truman a long, reasoned message asking to be relieved at once:

  When the administration is divided on its own foreign policy, it cannot hope to convince the world that the American people have a foreign policy…. I do not want to ask you to do anything that would force Mr. Wallace out of the Cabinet. However, I do not think any man who professes any loyalty to you would so seriously impair your prestige and the prestige of the government with the nations of the world…. You and I spent 15 months building a bipartisan policy. We did a fine job convincing the world that it was a permanent policy upon which the world could rely. Wallace destroyed it in a day.

  At 9:30, the morning of Friday, September 20, Truman called Wallace on the phone and fired him, and, as Truman confided to Bess, Wallace was “so nice about it I almost backed out.” Then he added, “I just don’t understand the man and he doesn’t either.”

  Further, Wallace offered to return an angry, longhand letter—“not abusive, but…on a low level,” as Wallace described it—that Truman had sent him the night before. “You don’t want this thing out,” Wallace told Truman and Truman gratefully agreed. He was very happy to take it back. Later, Wallace crossed the street from his office and posed for photographers sitting peacefully on a park bench reading the comic papers.

  When at a crowded, hurriedly called press conference in his office Truman made the announcement, there were audible gasps from reporters and one long, low whistle. Once the room was cleared, Truman sat down at his desk and turning to Ross, who was standing nearby, said, “Well, the die is cast.”

  He had shown, Ross told him, that he would rather be right than President. “I would rather be anything than President,” Truman said.

  “No man in his right mind would want to come here [to the White House] of his own accord,” he had written earlier to Margaret. Now, wishing as always to shine untarnished in her eyes, he tried to excuse his handling of the Wallace affair by saying he had no gift for duplicity. To be a good President, he told her, one had to be a combination Machiavelli, Louis XI of France, Cesare Borgia, and Talleyrand, “a liar, double-crosser and unctuous religio (Richelieu), hero and whatnot,” and he didn’t have the stomach for it, “thanks be to God.”

  He was mulling history and his own life more and more. On September 26, anniversary of the start of the Argonne offensive of 1918, reflecting on the intervening years, he wrote in his diary as follows, referring to himself only as “a serviceman of my acquaintance.” The rage that filled his earlier rail strike “speech” was absent now, replaced by a kind of melancholy and disappointment, and an underlying resolve to face whatever he must:

  Sept. 26, 1918, a few minutes before 4 A.M. a serviceman of my acquaintance was standing behind a battery of French 75’s at a little town called Neuville to the right of the Argonne Forest. A barrage was to be fired by all the guns on the Allied front from Belgium to the Swiss border.

  At 4 A.M. that barrage started, at 5 A.M. the infan
try in front of my acquaintance’s battery went over. At 8 A.M. the artillery including the 75 battery referred to moved forward. That forward movement did not stop until Nov. 11, 1918.

  My acquaintance came home, was banqueted and treated as returned soldiers are usually treated by the home people immediately after the tension of war is relieved.

  The home people forgot the war. Two years later, turned out the Administration which had successfully conducted our part of the war and turned the clock back.

  They began to talk of disarmament. They did disarm themselves, to the point of helplessness. They became fat and rich, special privilege ran the country—ran it to a fall. In 1932 a great leader came forward and rescued the country from chaos and restored the confidence of the people in their government and their institutions.

  Then another European war came along. We tried as before to keep out of it. We refused to believe that we could get into it. The great leader warned the country of the possibility. He was vilified, smeared, misrepresented, but kept his courage. As was inevitable we were forced into the war. The country awoke—late, but it awoke and created the greatest war production program in history under the great leader.

  The country furnished Russia, Britain, China, Australia and all the allies, guns, tanks, planes, food in unheard of quantities, built, manned and fought the greatest navy in history, created the most powerful and efficient air force ever heard of, and equipped an army of 8½ million men and fought them on two fronts 12,000 miles apart and from 3,000 to 7,000 miles from the home base, created the greatest merchant marine in history in order to maintain those two battlefronts.

  The collapse of the enemies of liberty came almost simultaneously in May for the eastern front and in August for the western front.

  Unfortunately the great leader who had taken the nation through the peacetime and wartime emergencies passed to his great reward just one month before the German surrender. What a pity for this to happen after twelve long years of the hardest kind of work, three and a half of them in the most terrible of all wars.

  My acquaintance who commanded the 75 battery of Sept. 26, 1918, took over.

  The same elation filled the home people as filled them after the first world war.

  They were happy to have the fighting stop and to quit worrying about their sons and daughters in the armed forces.

  Then the reaction set in. Selfishness, greed, jealousy, raised their ugly heads. No wartime incentive to keep them down. Labor began to grab all it could get by fair means or foul, farmers began black-marketing food, industry hoarded inventories and the same old pacifists began to talk disarmament.

  But my acquaintance tried to meet every situation and has met them up to now. Can he continue to outface the demagogues, the chiselers, the jealousies?

  Time only will tell. The human animal and his emotions change not much from age to age. He must change now or he faces absolute and complete destruction and maybe the insect age or an atmosphereless planet will succeed him.

  V

  Harold Ickes called him “stupid.” If the world had to depend on Truman and his administration to keep it out of trouble, wrote Time, then the world had much to worry about. Not in eighty years, not since Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, had a President been the target of such abuse. He was made fun of for his mid-American mannerisms, his Missouri pals, the by now famous devotion to his mother. “Every day is Mother’s Day in the White House,” it was said with a snicker. According to one of the latest Washington jokes in the autumn of 1946, Truman was late for a Cabinet meeting because he woke up stiff in the joints from trying to put his foot in his mouth. A joke from Texas began with reflections on how Roosevelt might have handled the country’s problems, then ended with the line, “I wonder what Truman would do if he were alive.” A Chicago Sun cartoon that was reprinted widely showed him popeyed and befuddled, one hand on his aching head, asking, “What next?” In Boston, the Henry M. Frost Advertising Agency came up with an inspired two-word campaign slogan for the Republicans: “Had enough?”

  Truman’s popularity had vanished. Poll results released the first week in October, a month before the congressional elections, showed only 40 percent of the country approved his performance.

  On the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in what struck many as a bald play for the Jewish vote in New York, he called for admitting 100,000 Jewish refugees to the British protectorate in Palestine. But the fact was he had already made the same statement months before, and Republican Thomas E. Dewey, who was running for reelection as governor of New York, now quickly outbid him for Jewish support by demanding that several hundred thousand Jews be permitted to migrate to Palestine.

  In another few weeks Truman’s standing in the polls plunged to a low of 32 percent, nearly 50 points below where it had been the year before.

  The depression that everyone had so feared had not come. Employment, even with all the strikes, was high. Money was plentiful. Business was booming. But the cost of living had also leaped 6½ points just since the end of 1945 and there were still acute shortages of the things people most wanted—housing, automobiles, refrigerators, nylon stockings, sugar, coffee. And, increasingly, meat. Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, fearing a Democratic debacle at the polls, complained to a friend, “This is going to be a damned ‘beefsteak election’!” As November drew closer and the meat shortage grew worse, the Republicans capitalized on a made-to-order issue. Cattle raisers staged a strike, refusing to send cattle to market. “Nothing on meat, Mr. President?” Truman was asked by reporters on October 10. “Nothing on meat,” he said.

  Democratic Party Chairman Bob Hannegan warned Truman that if controls on meat prices were not dropped, he could expect a Republican sweep. Truman told his staff he was sure to be damned whatever he did. If he ended controls, he would be accused of caving into pressure. If he left things as they were, he would continue to be seen as cause of all the trouble.

  Talk of his Pendergast connection was encouraged, as Republicans stepped up the heat. He became, again, the little machine hack from backwater Missouri. New York showman Billy Rose suggested W. C. Fields for President in 1948, saying, “If we’re going to have a comedian in the White House, let’s have a good one.” The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Congressman Carroll Reece of Tennessee, declared nothing remained of the Democratic Party but three distasteful elements: southern racists, big-city bosses, and radicals bent on “Sovietizing” the country.

  Discontent over meat shortages was one thing, fear of Communist influence and infiltration was quite another and in the long run far more important. A Red scare was clearly on the rise. Edward T. Folliard of the Washington Post found “hatred of communism rampant” everywhere he traveled. Harry Truman, the. Republicans charged, was pursuing a policy of appeasing the Russians abroad and fostering communism at home. The Democratic Party, said Senator Taft, was “so divided between Communism and Americanism that its foreign policy can only be futile and contradictory and make the United States the laughing stock of the world.” John Taber, a Republican congressman from Auburn, New York, who had a voice like a bullhorn, warned of Communist infiltration of the universities, even the Army, while in California, another Republican congressional candidate, young Richard M. Nixon, castigated high officials “who front for un-American elements, wittingly or otherwise.”

  Yet such attacks were hardly different in spirit from Truman’s own private anxieties over “Reds” and “parlor pinks,” and who could say, after the uncovering of the Ottawa spy ring, that there was no cause for alarm? That summer, under pressure from Attorney General Clark, Truman had secretly agreed to continuation of electronic surveillance in cases where the national defense was involved, a policy instituted by Roosevelt, although, as Clark neglected to tell Truman, Roosevelt’s original authorization in 1940 had been limited to aliens only. In a speech at San Francisco, J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI warned that no less than a hundred thousand Communists were loose in the countr
y.

  “The shrill pitch of abuse heaped upon the President continued to echo,” wrote Time. “So mild a man as Harry Truman might well wonder at the temper of his countrymen.”

  Democrats were filled with despair. Bob Hannegan advised Truman that it would be best if he made no campaign appearances or political speeches, a decision Truman accepted. He kept to the White House. For days, for a portrait by Frank O. Salisbury, the British artist who had done Roosevelt, Truman posed in Charlie Ross’s office, where three windows provided ample north light. On the afternoon the Supreme Court was to make its traditional White House call, he was listening to the deciding game of the 1946 World Series—the St. Louis Cardinals vs. the Boston Red Sox—when a staff aide told him the justices would soon be arriving in formal attire. Truman hurried upstairs and changed into striped trousers and a swallowtail coat, only to find at the reception that he alone was formally dressed.

  Few campaigning Democrats even so much as mentioned the President’s name. In some congressional contests, Democratic candidates resorted to playing old recordings of Roosevelt speeches to boost their chances. Senator Harley Kilgore, a warm friend and admirer of Truman, who was running for reelection in West Virginia, found that in the back hollows and coal fields the mere mention of Truman’s name brought a chorus of boos and catcalls. “Here was a man who was actually doing an excellent job,” Kilgore would recall, “but the most you could do was to defend him in a humorous fashion by using the old Western saloon refrain: ‘Don’t shoot our piano player. He’s doing the best he can.’ ”

  The capacity to smile when in trouble is a prime requirement for a politician, as Truman, a career politician, had long understood, and now, as so often before in difficult times, he revealed no sign of anger or gloom. He never complained, never acted sorry for himself, or blamed others. He was as cheerful and optimistic, as interested in others, as pleased to see them and to be with them, as ever. As Alonzo Fields, who saw him daily and close-up as only a butler could, later wrote of Truman, he “never seemed to have a problem,” at this or any other time when worries beset him. “I am sure no one in the household could tell when he was troubled.”