“Truman Proposes ‘Fair Deal’ Plan for the World,” said the headline in the Washington Post. Moreover, he had been eloquent and moving, as he had seldom ever been. Many thought it the finest speech he had ever made. Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln would all have approved and joined in the applause, said The New York Times.
Before the parade, in the interlude during which the President was to be received at lunch in the Capitol, a giant air armada like none ever seen over Washington roared across the sky, some seven hundred planes, including transports like those supplying Berlin and five gigantic new six-engined B-36 bombers that had flown, nonstop, 2,000 miles from Texas.
As the last of the planes passed, the grim President of the inaugural platform, the man with the weight of the world on him, became radiant Harry Truman once more, as he and Barkley, bundled again in overcoats and grinning broadly under their high silk hats, pulled away in the open Lincoln and started slowly back down Pennsylvania Avenue.
To either side now marched the Battery D honor guard, two lines of somewhat portly, gray-haired middle Americans swinging white ash walking canes, keeping pace with the big car rather smartly and all more or less in step as the delighted crowd cheered them on. (Only two would drop out in the mile-and-a-quarter route to the White House.)
The whole pageant struck countless viewers, including many who had witnessed numerous inaugurations, as profoundly stirring. It was a day of dedication for the democratic spirit, with all elements large and small momentarily in harmony.
The clear sunlight, the President’s evident high spirits [said The New York Times], the patience and cheerfulness of the great crowds, such moving episodes as the presence of a guard of honor of Mr. Truman’s comrades of the First World War…the slowly moving masses of men and vehicles coming down the Avenue from the seat of the national legislative power to the seat of its executive power, the booming of the Presidential salute, the planes overhead, the whole mood of the occasion—all these things seemed to speak of a confident and even exultant Americanism…. It was democracy looking homeward across a great continent, but also looking outward toward the world in which democracy will never again be impotent or ashamed or apologetic.
Behind the President, the procession stretched seven miles and would take, in all, three hours to pass. Truman, on reaching the White House, watched the show from a glass-enclosed reviewing stand and he missed none of it. West Point cadets, midshipmen from Annapolis, the Marine Band, the United States Army Band, all came swinging by, companies of WACS, WAVES, the Richmond Blues wearing white-plumed helmets, high school bands, police bands, drum majorettes, beauty queens, trick riders, state governors in open cars, a mounted posse of Kansas City “cowboys”—15,153 men, women, and children in costume, uniform, and civilian dress, more than 40 bands, 55 floats, trucks, jeeps, armored cars, more than 100 horses, 4 mules from Lamar, Missouri, and an old-time circus calliope tooting “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” With Barkley beside him, Truman clapped his gloved hands, waved, chatted, laughed out loud, beat time to the Marine Hymn, swayed his head to the strains of “Dixie,” bounced up and down on the balls of his feet to keep warm while sipping from a white paper cup of what was reportedly coffee but assuredly was not. “Like the honest Missouri extrovert that he is,” wrote Roger Butter-field for Life, “he did not try to hide his moods—the crowds and the cameras saw them all.”
Governor Adlai Stevenson passed by in advance of the Illinois float. General Eisenhower, in a spontaneous tribute that the crowd adored, stood in the back of his open car and saluted the President. Truman beamed and waved his top hat. When a Plymouth Rock float passed by, its cast of Pilgrims suddenly broke out cameras and began snapping pictures of him.
Every state, every size, shape, and color of American democracy, passed in review in the chilly afternoon sunshine. The last inaugural parade, eight years before, in 1941, when the country was arming for war, had been a grim procession of military might. The mood now was different. The crowd in the grandstand opposite the President, people in bright scarfs and winter coats, some wrapped in blankets, was a happy crowd; just as it was now a larger, more plentiful America by far. Harry Truman was President of a nation of 147 million people, an increase in population of more than 15 million since the census of 1940. No President in history had ever taken office at a time of such prosperity and power. Industrial production outstripped any previous time in the nation’s past, and all other nations of the world. The bumper harvest of the previous fall had been the biggest on record. “There never was a country more fabulous than America,” the British historian Robert Payne would write in 1949, after an extensive tour of the country:
She bestrides the world like a Colossus: no other power at any time in the world’s history has possessed so varied or so great an influence on other nations…. It is already an axiom that the decisions of the American government affect the lives and livelihood of the remotest people. Half the wealth of the world, more than half the productivity, nearly two-thirds of the world’s machines are concentrated in American hands….
“The parade was the most fun I have ever had at a parade,” wrote David Lilienthal. But the President, as the papers said, was “the fellow who was having the best time of anyone.”
Only twice did he seem to register disapproval. When the Dixiecrat candidate, Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, rode by waving happily, Truman gave him a cold stare. Then as Governor Herman Talmadge of Georgia, another champion of white supremacy, approached, Truman turned his back. But the only real snub was of Thurmond. Truman had turned as Talmadge passed because an electric heater beneath his feet had short-circuited, sending up smoke, and he was trying to put out the fire.
As the sun fell behind the Old State Department Building and the afternoon grew colder, a Texas delegation appeared, led by a car with a banner on its side: “Lieutenant Governor Shivers.” The crowd and the President roared.
Truman stayed to the end, and at the inaugural ball that night at the armory, he was still going strong at nearly two in the morning. No dancer, he watched and waved from a balcony to a crowd of some five thousand people. He was dressed in white tie and tails, while Bess, “smiling and vivacious,” wore a shimmering, full-length gown of silver lamé. With them were Mary Jane Truman, J. Vivian Truman and his daughter Martha Ann, Frank and Natalie Wallace, George and May Wallace, Nellie and Ethel Noland.
“Everybody looked wonderful,” wrote Margaret, who wore pink tulle and spent most of the night on the dance floor. Happiest of all was her father, “whose face was shining like a new moon.”
II
In contrast to his first years in office, and so much to follow, the first six months of the new term were a breather for Truman. Until midsummer 1949, things went well on the whole, the outlook remained hopeful. No calamitous domestic issues erupted. There were no sudden international crises to contend with. Greece and Turkey did not fall to Communist takeovers, nor would they. Nor would France or Italy. Best of all was a decided easing of tension over Berlin that began just days after the inauguration.
Realizing that the airlift was an established success, and that in fact the blockade had backfired on them, the Russians signaled “a change in attitude.” Stalin was backing down. For the first time since Potsdam, the tide seemed to be turning. Secret negotiations followed—“It can almost be stated as a principle that when the Soviets are serious about something they do it in secret,” Chip Bohlen observed—and on May 12, 1949, the blockade ended: The lights of Berlin came on again. The airlift was over, after a year and two months, 277,804 flights, and the delivery of 2,325,809 tons of food and supplies.
For Truman it was a momentous victory. Firmness and patience had prevailed without resorting to force. War had been averted.
On May 12 also, the Allied powers approved establishment of a new German Federated Republic, whereby the West Germans were to rule themselves with their own government at Bonn.
Things overall looked “fifty percent better” than a year ago, Truman confided to Lilienthal. Not even the advance of Communist forces in China seemed to discourage him. At Potsdam, Stalin had told him the people of North China would never be Communists and Truman thought that was “about right.” The dragon was going to “turn over,” he said, “and after that perhaps some advances can be made of it.” With what Lilienthal described as a “big grin and a large dose of his particular brand of charm, which is not inconsiderable,” Truman talked enthusiastically of what a program like TVA could mean for a country like China, “to put it on its feet.”
By then, too, the North Atlantic Treaty had been signed in Washington on April 4, after much hard, skillful negotiation by Secretary of State Acheson. The United States, Canada, and ten Western European countries joined in a defense pact whereby an attack on any one would be taken as an attack on all: For the United States, it marked a radical departure with tradition—the first peacetime military alliance since the signing of the Constitution—but had such an agreement existed in 1914 and 1939, Truman was convinced, the world would have been spared two terrible wars. He ranked NATO with the Marshall Plan, as one of the proudest achievements of his presidency, and was certain that time would prove him right. And though Acheson and British Foreign Secretary Bevin had done most of the work, it was Truman who provided the commitment, unreservedly, just as he had with the Marshall Plan. His first major act after the election in November had been to instruct the State Department to open negotiations for the new alliance, and he rightly considered it his treaty. “We have really passed a milestone in history,” he said in his toast at the state dinner at the Carlton Hotel, following the signing ceremony.
Objections in the Senate, among conservative Republicans, might be fierce, but he had no doubt the treaty would be approved. As it turned out, opposition in the Senate and the press was unexpectedly mild, approval broad. On July 21, the Senate voted ratification by a vote of 82 to 13.
The establishment of NATO, the success of the Berlin Airlift, the prospect of a prosperous, self-governing West Germany as part of the Western Alliance, all made for a greatly improved atmosphere for Truman. “He looks more relaxed…those drawn lines from his eyes across his cheekbones seemed to be considerably modified,” Lilienthal noted.
In March he had taken off again for Key West, for another “working vacation,” his sixth at Key West since becoming President. The place appealed to him as nowhere else. He loved the warm sea bathing and balmy tropical nights, as perhaps only an inland North American can. His quarters were in what had been the commandant’s residence at the Key West naval base, a modest-sized white frame house in the West Indian, style with jalousied porches, simply but comfortably furnished. Hibiscus and bougainvillaea bloomed in the garden. The cares, the pressures, the formality of the presidency, all began to subside almost from the moment he arrived.
He put on bright patterned sports shirts—“Harry Truman shirts,” as they became known—and set off on his early morning walks through the picturesque old town of Key West, stopping sometimes for a cup of coffee at a local lunch counter. The White House pouch arrived daily; members of the Cabinet, congressional leaders, the Joint Chiefs, flew in and out for meetings, and some days he was on the phone far more than he liked; but he enjoyed a daily swim, or rather churning the turquoise water in his self-styled sidestroke, head up to keep his glasses dry, while one or two Navy boats stood guard, to keep other boats at a distance and to watch for barracudas. He loafed in the sun with members of the staff, joked, swapped stories, read, listened to classical music on the phonograph, took an afternoon nap, played poker on the porch nearly every evening, slept soundly, and started off each new day, before his walk with a shot of bourbon.
His privacy on the base was complete. Nor was security ever a problem, which pleased the Secret Service. The staff all enjoyed themselves, as did the thirty-odd reporters who usually made the trip and who had little else to do but enjoy themselves. And with everyone so obviously pleased with his choice of vacation spot, so pleased to be included, pleased to be with him, Truman enjoyed himself that much more. “He was great down in Key West!” remembered Jim Rowley, by then head of the Secret Service detail.
Soon they were all sporting Harry Truman shirts. To Truman’s great delight, even Sam Rayburn, during a visit in November, had put on one printed with flocks of cranes and swaying palm trees.
Back in Washington on May 8, at a party celebrating his sixty-fifth birthday in the ballroom of the palatial Larz Anderson House on Embassy Row, as toasts were raised, Truman looked better by far than he had since 1945, “like a man who had few qualms about the future,” according to one account. “The President,” said his physician, Wallace Graham, “is as close to being an iron man as anyone I know at his age.”
The one distinct shadow on these “first sunny months” of 1949 was the tragic fate of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, who as far back as the previous summer had begun looking weary and troubled and who, since the election, had been acting quite strangely. An intense, introverted, extremely dedicated man by nature, Forrestal had worked himself to a state of near collapse, yet wished only to hold on and work harder.
Truman had begun losing confidence in Forrestal even before the fall campaign. Struggling to bring about the reorganization of the military services—an unprecedented, killing task—Forrestal had become increasingly indecisive and absorbed in details. “He won’t take hold,” Truman complained. At one point, exasperated with Forrestal’s handling of a problem, Truman had sent an uncharacteristically curt note saying, “This is your responsibility.” Then, with the campaign under way, there had been suspicions about Forrestal’s loyalty, whether his meetings with Thomas E. Dewey really concerned defense matters, as Forrestal said, or were arranged in the hope of staying on in the Dewey administration. Drew Pearson called it an open secret that Forrestal wanted to hold on to his job regardless of the outcome in November, and several of those closest to Truman grew convinced that politically the Secretary of Defense was no longer to be trusted.
Forrestal had also been one of the few members of the Cabinet since the departure of Henry Wallace to disagree with the President over policy—over Palestine and civilian control of the atomic bomb most notably—and now he was adamantly opposed to Truman’s position on defense spending. To achieve a balanced budget, Truman insisted on a defense ceiling of $15 billion, a sum equal to more than a third of the entire federal budget, but that Forrestal thought dangerously low given the scale of the Soviet menace.
Criticism of Forrestal by the press had grown steadily since his unpopular stand on the Palestine issue, with Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell leading the attack in their columns and radio broadcasts. And for Forrestal who had long courted the press, this was all extremely painful. He was called a tool of Wall Street and the oil companies, an imperialist, an anti-Semite. Pearson and Winchell tried to create doubt about his personal courage, with a trumped-up account of how years before, Forrestal had fled out the back door of his New York City home as jewel thieves accosted his wife. On an NBC Radio broadcast in January, a guest claimed that the I. G. Farben works in Frankfurt had not been bombed during the war because Forrestal owned I. G. Farben stock—a totally false charge that NBC later retracted.
The more amplified the attacks became, the more Truman, who hated to dismiss anyone under almost any circumstances, was inclined to keep Forrestal where he was. Truman would not have him leave “under fire.” In February, Drew Pearson had attacked Harry Vaughan for accepting a decoration from the Argentine dictator Juan Perón, a decoration that several others, including Generals Eisenhower and Bradley, had received earlier, but about which nothing had been said. Pearson had called for Vaughan’s immediate dismissal and Truman publicly responded by calling Pearson an “S.O.B.,” which raised a new storm of adverse comment and gave Truman a great deal of satisfaction. “No commentator or columnist names any members of my Cabinet, or my staff,” he said.
“I name them myself And when it is time for them to be moved on, I do the moving—nobody else.” It was a sentiment that had been felt by other presidents before him and would be often again by more who followed in his place, but that none stated so openly in so many words.
Forrestal, as he told a friend, felt that Truman had always been very fair with him. Truman was “the best boss I have ever known.” To another friend he wrote that the American people were fortunate to have in the highest office “a man who, while he reflects the liberal forces both in this country and throughout the world, is nevertheless conservative in the real sense of that word—a conserver of the things we hope to keep.”
Forrestal was still greatly admired by several of those whose judgment Truman particularly valued. Eisenhower, whom Truman had recently asked to serve as an informal “presiding officer” of the Joint Chiefs, considered Forrestal one of the best men in public life and, as Eisenhower recorded privately, more perceptive than Truman concerning “the mess we are in due to neglect of our armed forces.”
Except for my liking, admiration, and respect for his [Forrestal’s] great qualities I’d not go near Washington, even if I had to resign my commission completely [Eisenhower wrote in his diary in January 1949]. To a certain extent these same feelings apply to H.S.T., but he does not see the problems so clearly as does Jim, and does not suffer so much due to the failure to solve the problems. I like them both.
But Forrestal, as Eisenhower also noted, was “looking badly…. He gives his mind no recess, and he works hours that would kill a horse.”
(Eisenhower would himself soon find the bickering between the services all but intolerable. He was smoking four packs of cigarettes a day and worrying about his blood pressure. By mid-March he was suffering from severe stomach cramps, and Truman sent him off to recuperate for three weeks at the Little White House in Key West.)
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 509