McGrath appreciated particularly the political importance of foreign-born Americans—it was with their support that he had been elected governor three times in Rhode Island—and he understood how greatly the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, as well as Truman’s policy on immigration, mattered to such groups, that for no other reason than his stand on foreign policy, Truman had an excellent chance of winning their support.
It was arranged for the President to have his portrait painted by a beloved Polish artist, Tadé Styka, who, though an avowed Republican, became an immediate convert after hearing Truman speak to a group of Polish editors about the problems of the world as they affected Poland. (“Another hell of a day. I’m sitting for an old Polish painter, and I don’t like to pose—but it’s also part of the trial of being President,” Truman had written in his diary on September 14. “He’s painted a nice stuffed-shirt picture.”) In October, after Styka presented the portrait at a formal ceremony at the White House, all seventy-two Polish papers in the country ran a picture of the painting, as well as Styka’s personal praise for the President. To publicist Redding, it was a “political triumph.”
Meantime, for the amusement of the press, a selection of the platitudes and banalities of the Dewey speeches was prepared and distributed:
“Our streams abound with fish.”
“The miners in our country are vital to our welfare.”
“Everybody that rides in a car or bus uses gasoline and oil.”
“Ours is a magnificent land. Every part of it.”
A sixteen-page, four-color comic-book biography was produced, The Story of Harry Truman, which, panel-by-panel, portrayed the Independence boyhood, the courtship of Bess Wallace, Truman’s time on the farm, and how the neighbors judged him (“By crackies, in spite of Harry Truman’s newfangled ideas about farmin’, he’s a durned good ‘un!”). His part in the war took up two and a half pages, followed by his business failure (“You’d think the Republican Administration would do something to help small businessmen”), and the high points of his public service, including the presidency. To many the comic-book format seemed highly unfitting for a President. Several at the White House complained that it should never have been permitted without Truman’s knowledge. But he had known and approved, and the book was a success. Three million copies quickly disappeared. In some places schools permitted distribution among students, who took the books home. Time, in a special feature, hailed it as “something new in ‘campaign literature’,” while regretting that it made no mention of “the late, great-bellied” Tom Pendergast.
Even more important and effective was a ten-minute Truman film, a “short” to be shown in movie theaters. (With approximately 20,000 theaters in the country, the weekly movie audience in 1948 was about 65 million.) Hearing that a Dewey film was being produced and paid for by the Republicans, Jack Redding, with no money available for films, threatened to have theaters picketed as unfair unless a “balancing” Truman story were made available. In response, the movie industry decided to produce a Truman film for nothing—Universal Newsreels lost the flip of a coin and did the work. With so little time left, and to keep costs to a minimum, The Truman Story was put together almost entirely from available newsreel footage, with the result that the finished production had a feeling of authenticity missing in the Dewey film, most of which had been staged. The candidate was seen as “neighbor Truman,” shaking hands with people on the streets of Independence (including a black man in bib overalls). He was shown visiting Eddie Jacobson in his store, at Grandview with his mother, but above all as the President, signing the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, addressing Congress, reviewing troops, conferring with Secretary Marshall beside the large globe in the Oval Office.
The two-reel film that had cost the Truman campaign nothing and was considered much more effective than its counterpart on Dewey would, in the final week before the election, play in theaters in every part of the country. “Thus, during the last six days of the campaign no one could go to the movies anywhere in the United States without seeing the story of the President,” boasted Redding, who considered it the most important publicity break of the campaign.
Seventy-one-year-old Alben Barkley, meantime, was crisscrossing the country in a chartered DC-3 called The Bluegrass. In contrast to his much younger Republican counterpart and rival, Earl Warren, who was touring by train, Barkley had initiated what he called history’s first “prop-stop” campaign. He flew 150,000 miles and delivered 250 speeches, mostly in small cities, farm towns, coal and railroad towns, labor halls, and small hotel dining rooms, his audiences sometimes numbering only in the hundreds. The press called him “the poor man’s candidate,” and Barkley enjoyed himself hugely, telling stories, speaking extemporaneously at almost any length, and giving no sign of wanting anything for himself, only to help the President and any number of local Democratic candidates. His own best help, he liked to say, came from the Republicans. Dewey’s speeches reminded him, Barkley said, of an old Tennessee politician known as “Fiddlin’ Bob” Taylor, who, in the era of the free silver issue, ran for governor by playing a violin and using his magnificent speaking voice to say as little as possible about anything specific, until finally he was pressed to state where he stood on the money question. “He paused dramatically,” Barkley would say, savoring the story, “and he said, ‘Here is where I stand. I am for a little more gold, a little more silver, a little more greenback—and a sprinkling of counterfeit.’ ”
When a reporter in New Haven, Connecticut, asked Barkley if he honestly thought the Democrats had a chance, Barkley replied, “Certainly. What do you think I’m running around for?”
One idea hatched behind the scenes by two of the new speechwriters proved a major embarrassment. David Noyes and Albert Carr, who were partial to the dramatic phrase or gesture—it was they who contributed the “pitchfork-in-the-back” line at Dexter—had concluded that the President needed to announce a bold move to dramatize his desire for world peace, and soon.
They proposed he send the Chief Justice, Fred Vinson, on a special mission to Moscow to see Stalin. That Vinson, as a member of the Supreme Court, had no connection with the diplomatic role of the executive branch, that Vinson knew nothing of the crisis in Berlin beyond what was in the papers, or had any experience in Soviet affairs, or in dealing with Stalin, were apparently not considered serious drawbacks.
Truman agreed to the scheme—a decision that suggested as nothing else would that for all his show of confidence he knew perfectly how desperate his situation was and was therefore willing to try almost anything. Undoubtedly, too, he hoped that so daring and unorthodox an approach might just give Stalin the chance to “open up,” as he later wrote. He still thought Stalin could be reached, reasoned with, man-to-man. “If we could only get Stalin to unburden himself to someone on our side he felt he could trust fully, I thought perhaps we could get somewhere.”
On his second day back at the White House, Sunday, October 3, without notifying George Marshall, who was at a United Nations General Assembly meeting in Paris trying to deal with the Berlin crisis, Truman called the Chief Justice to his office and asked him to make the trip.
Vinson was astonished. Members of the Court, he said, should confine themselves to their Court duties, and especially in an election year. But then, dutifully, Vinson consented to go.
The plan was for Truman to announce the mission on a special radio broadcast to the nation. Charlie Ross was instructed to arrange with the networks for a free, nonpolitical half-hour, for a statement of “major importance.” The State Department was alerted, to make the necessary clearances with Stalin. Truman would remember requesting also that “every possible precaution” be taken against premature leaks.
The atmosphere at the White House was extremely uneasy. Nerves were on edge. Those of the staff who had been traveling with the President were still exhausted, while a number of those who had remained behind felt overworked and unappreciated. “There is much c
onfusion and taut nerves [recorded the faithful diarist Eben Ayers], due to…the belief that the President is going to be defeated. There are a few optimists in the place. There are jealousies and undercurrents all through the staff.”
The proposed “Vinson Mission” made tensions still worse. Clifford and Elsey argued vehemently against it, “almost violently,” Elsey remembered.
But when Truman met with his advisers in the Cabinet Room on Tuesday, October 5, the majority view was that only a dramatic, “even desperate” measure could save the campaign.
Excusing himself from the meeting, Truman went to the Map Room to inform Marshall by teletype. But Marshall, appalled by the very idea of the Vinson scheme, vehemently objected, with the result that Truman immediately called the whole thing off.
When he returned to the Cabinet Room to report his decision, several at the table, including Jonathan Daniels, addressed him in no uncertain terms, arguing that the mission was his last, best chance. But Truman cut them off. “We won’t do it,” he said.
To Daniels, it was one of the most vivid moments of all he had witnessed in the White House. If ever there was a point when Truman seemed at his best, when he was more than large enough for the job, Daniels later wrote, it was then, and
at a time when, by all reports, he seemed smaller than ever.
He got up and went out of the glass-paned door to the terrace by the rose garden and walked alone—very much alone that day—back toward the White House itself. He was wrong, I thought, but he was strong, I knew. There were no dramatics about it. He never said he would rather be right than President. The next time I saw him he was laughing with the reporters, the politicians and the police as he got back on that long train which everyone seemed too sure was taking him nowhere.
He was gone just three days this time. A quick swing through eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and upstate New York had been decided on, as an extra effort. The “Vinson Mission,” presumably, was dead and buried, and no one the wiser. But there had been a leak. The radio networks, understandably, had insisted on knowing the nature of the “nonpolitical” announcement before relinquishing a free half hour in the middle of a presidential campaign. So Ross had told them “in confidence.”
The story of the aborted peace mission broke wide open. Editorials accused Truman of attempted appeasement, of playing politics with foreign policy. “His attempted action was shocking because it showed that he had no conception whatever of the difference between the President of the United States and a U.S. politician,” wrote Time. The campaign that had never had a chance was said to have been dealt a fatal blow. Dewey, publicly, decided to let the President’s action speak for itself. Off the record, he told reporters huffily, “If Harry Truman would just keep his hands off things for another few weeks! Particularly, if he will keep his hands off foreign policy, about which he knows considerably less than nothing.”
When Marshall flew in from Paris on Saturday, October 9, and stepped from his plane looking “ashen-faced,” it was said he had come home to resign. In fact, though Marshall was in poor health, his relations with Truman were excellent. Indeed, Marshall assumed part of the blame for what had happened, apologizing to Truman for not having kept him better informed on the progress of negotiations in Paris.
Truman was not worried about the fuss in the papers. He found it hard to believe that the American people would fault a President too harshly for wanting to achieve peace in the world. He had been encouraged also by his three-day swing. At Albany, Dewey’s own capital, ten thousand people had come down to the station in an early morning downpour to cheer and shout, “Give ‘em hell, Harry!”
On Sunday, October 10, he was back on board the train, still behind in the polls, still exuding confidence, and with just three weeks to go.
III
Were one to pick a single representative day of all the many days in Harry Truman’s drive for the presidency in 1948, a day that in spirit and content could serve as a classic passage in his whistle-stop odyssey, probably it would be Monday, October 11, when he barnstormed through central Ohio at the start of what was to prove a crucial swing into the Middle West.
Like the larger campaign; the day began in an atmosphere of gloom.
When Truman arrived in Cincinnati at 7:00 A.M., it was cold and raining. The streets from the railroad station to the Netherland Plaza Hotel, where he was to speak, were deserted. A reporter for the Des Moines Register, who had been traveling on board the Truman train for weeks, described him as looking that morning “like a man who had received bad news but felt the show must go on.”
The morning was bleak and the whole plan for the day seemed pointless. At stake were Ohio’s twenty-six electoral votes, but Ohio, the Buckeye State, was as formidable a Republican stronghold as any of the forty-eight states, with a Republican governor, nineteen Republican congressmen (as opposed to four Democrats), and two famous Republican senators, Taft and John Bricker, who had been Dewey’s running mate in 1944. Moreover, Truman had decided to spend much of the day in rural Ohio, in places where, in 1944, the vote had run as much as 70 percent for Dewey.
It had been Bill Boyle who had urged Truman to campaign in Ohio and whose political sagacity Truman had decided to bank on. Boyle, who was still in charge of Truman’s itinerary, was directing things now from an office at Democratic headquarters in Washington.
From Cincinnati, home of the Tafts, in the southwest corner of the state, Truman would head north on the B&O Railroad to Hamilton and Dayton, then on to a string of little towns, Sidney, Lima, Ottawa, and Deshler, where the train would turn east on the main line of the B&O, to stop at Fostoria, Willard, Rittman, and finally, that night, at industrial Akron, in the northeast corner. It was a trip of 350 miles. That Truman would even bother with towns like Ottawa or Willard struck many as a waste of time. But then to many observers the whole campaign was a waste of time. Dewey, who had carried Ohio against Roosevelt in 1944, was so sure of carrying it again, he would not actively campaign there. At one point while stopped in Ohio, Dewey did not trouble himself even to step out onto the rear platform, but sat in his compartment with the blind drawn. Told there was a crowd outside hoping to catch a glimpse of him, Dewey did not bother to raise the blind.
In eleven speeches at eleven stops, in the span of a fifteen-hour day, Truman hammered away steadily and happily at his same favorite themes—the high cost of living, the need for adequate housing, the intransigence and shortsightedness of the 80th Congress, the evils of the Taft-Hartley Act, and his desire for peace. He sang the praises of Franklin Roosevelt, and in the speech at Akron, the major speech of the day, he embraced as he never quite had in so many words the “entire philosophy” of the New Deal as his own, vowing “to build upon it an always better way of life.”
There were no startling claims or announcements. He just kept pressing the attack, mindful always of where he was and to whom he was speaking. He praised the people of Hamilton for their wartime production record, a subject he knew about, he said, from his years on the Truman Committee. “I grew up on a farm and I always like to see good farming country,” he said at rural Ottawa, then spent ten minutes describing the gains and prosperity achieved by farmers in the “Democratic years” since 1932.
At Lima, home of a locomotive factory, he shouted, “I’ve worn out three locomotives and we’ll use three more before we get through, so that will make it good for business here….”
“Well, I say thank God for the whistle-stops of our country. They are the backbone of the nation,” he told the citizenry of little Fostoria.
Bess and Margaret appeared on cue from behind the blue curtain and always to the delight of the crowd. “Would you like to meet the Boss?” Truman asked at Lima, adding that most married men had bosses at home. “He’s the President,” wrote the editor of the Lima News, and yet, “he’s just an ordinary family man, proud of his wife and daughter. He has something in common with many who heard him.”
(It was shortly after th
is that Bess told the candidate that if he called her “the Boss” one more time, she would get off the train.)
After the dreary start at Cincinnati the skies had literally cleared. The rain ended, the sun broke through. A crisp autumn wind was blowing, and with the maples beginning to turn gold and red, Ohio was a calendar picture for October in small-town, rural America.
From Hamilton on, the whole way, the crowds were big and responsive and Truman’s vitality returned, as if he had been given a powerful injection. The sight of ten thousand people spilling out in all directions at Hamilton produced what the Des Moines reporter called “the most striking change in the Democratic candidate’s demeanor I have witnessed in all our trips.” Everyone was surprised by the size and mood of the crowds. Ohio’s youthful, handsome former governor, Frank Lausche, who was running a “lone wolf campaign for another try at the governorship, had come aboard at Cincinnati, not at all sure that being seen with Harry Truman was the best thing for his fortunes. But as he told Truman in dismay, he had never seen such throngs. At Dayton, where he and Truman rode in a motorcade, there were fifty thousand lining the route. Lausche, who had planned to get off the train at Dayton, decided he would stay on board.
No two of Truman’s speeches were the same. Nearly all of what he said was spontaneous, his energy and enjoyment appearing to compound as the day went on, the more miles he covered, the more he talked of “the common people,” “the American people,” or “you good people of Deshler,” or Dayton or Fostorfa or Willard. As before, he played on fear of hard times, the memory of lean years, knowing from experience what so many who turned out to see him had been through, knowing, for example, how, among farmers, recollection of the 1920s in no way resembled the cliché, good-time picture of the Jazz Age. “If you don’t want to go backward,” he said at Ottawa, “if you don’t want to slide downhill to bankruptcy and poverty the way you did in the Republican 12 years of rule back there in the 20’s, you better get out early on election day and look after your own interests.” He knew, he had been through it.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 503