David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  David Lilienthal, who came to the Oval Office on February 14 for a final farewell meeting with the President, described it later as “one of the happiest sessions I’ve ever had with him.”

  “About these scientists,” Truman said, “we need men with great intellects, need their ideas. But we need to balance them with other kinds of people, too.”

  Lilienthal, perhaps as much as anyone, knew the weight of the burdens Truman carried. Yet Truman looked “tip-top…his eye clear.” Studying him, listening to him talk, Lilienthal was amazed. As he later wrote, “My admiration and wonder at his relaxed way of looking at things, and his obvious good health…reached a new high.”

  But his wife of thirty years knew differently, and to her alone, he portrayed himself differently. She grew increasingly concerned about his health, the stress the McCarthy attacks put on him. His headaches had returned. In mid-March Bess urged another retreat to Florida, to recover his strength. “You see everybody shoots at me, if not directly, then at some of the staff closest to me,” he wrote to her from Key West.

  In the Senate, Republican Styles Bridges had now joined McCarthy and stepped up the attack. Truman had liked Bridges, long considered him a friend. John Snyder had become a target lately. Rumors were Snyder was drinking too much.

  Caustic comments in the press about Harry Vaughan, the almost constant abuse of Dean Acheson, and belittling comments on his own performance, all that he seemed impervious to, in fact bothered Truman greatly and he was feeling not just a little sorry for himself.

  The general trend of the pieces [he wrote to Bess] is that I’m a very small man in a very large place and when some one I trust joins the critical side—well it hurts. I’m much older and very tired and I need support as no man ever did.

  What has made me so jittery—they started on Snyder and have almost broken him, then Vaughan, whose mental condition is very bad. Now they are after my top brain man in the Cabinet. The whole foreign policy is at stake just as we are on the road to a possible solution…. I’m telling you so you may understand how badly I need your help and support now.

  McCarthy, he felt, was a temporary aberration, “a ballyhoo artist who has to cover up his shortcomings by wild charges.” Even so he had had enough. On March 30, midway through his Key West stay, Truman decided to speak out. By then, according to the polls, half the American people held a “favorable opinion” of the senator and thought he was helping the country. Truman’s own standing, by stark contrast, had plunged to 37 percent, nearly as low as in the spring of 1948.

  He called a rare press conference on the lawn beside the Little White House, where with sunny skies overhead and a breeze stirring the palms, talk of the junior senator from Wisconsin seemed strangely incongruous. Looking well tanned and fit in a light linen suit and open shirt, Truman sat in a white wicker chair, with reporters gathered about him in a circle.

  Did he expect Senator McCarthy to turn up any disloyalty in the State Department?

  “I think,” he said with a hard look, “the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy.”

  And there were others, he said—Wherry and Bridges. The Republicans had been searching in vain for an issue for the fall elections. They had tried “statism,” the “welfare state,” “socialism.” Some were even trying to dig up “that old malodorous dead horse called ‘isolationism.’” He was furious. This “fiasco” going on in the Senate, he said, jabbing a finger in the air, was an attempt to sabotage bipartisan foreign policy. It was a dangerous situation, and it had to be stopped. Dean Acheson, he added emphatically, would go down in history as one of the great secretaries of state. There was no question about that.

  Was Owen Lattimore a Russian spy?

  “Why of course not. It’s silly on the face of it.”

  It was a dramatic moment, a performance, reporters thought, that equaled Franklin Roosevelt at his angry best.

  Taft accused Truman of having libeled McCarthy. “Do you think that’s possible?” Truman responded, when a reporter raised the question at the next press conference, back in Washington.

  To a gathering of the Federal Bar Association, he gave his assurance that no known instance of Communist subversion, or subversion of any kind, had gone uninvestigated by the FBI or as a result of his own Loyalty Program. “There is no area of American life in which the Communist Party is making headway, except maybe in the minds of some people….” That his own Loyalty Program might have contributed to the overall atmosphere that gave rise to McCarthy is a thought he seems not to have entertained—not then at least.

  “I think our friend McCarthy will eventually get all that is coming to him. He has no sense of decency or honor,” Truman wrote to Owen Lattimore’s sister.

  You can understand, I imagine, what the President has to stand—every day in the week he’s under a constant barrage of people who have no respect for the truth and whose objective is to belittle and discredit him. While they are not successful in these attacks they are never pleasant so I know just how you feel about the attack on your brother. The best thing to do is to face it and the truth will come out.

  Yet nothing Truman or anyone else said seemed to diminish McCarthy or the fear he spread in the government and the nation. When Truman, who had first refused to turn security files over to the Tydings Committee as a matter of principle, decided to let Tydings and the committee come to the White House to look at the files of the eighty-one people accused by McCarthy—in an effort to help Tydings discredit McCarthy and answer a Republican charge that he, Truman, was “covering up” evidence—it proved a bad decision. Now even the President appeared to be caving in to Joe McCarthy.

  Tydings, in a state of near panic, was on the phone to the White House three and four times a day. Truman’s staff grew extremely worried and on edge. Truman told them to stay calm. McCarthy would destroy himself, he said. The man was a liar. He would be found out and expelled from the Senate. That was how these things worked, and that was how it should be handled. Truman wondered only if there was anyone in the Senate with backbone enough to do the job.

  When, in the first week of June, the senator with backbone turned out to be a Republican and the Senate’s only woman, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who declared she did not want to see the Republican Party “ride to victory on the four horsemen of calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear,” Truman told his staff she had done “a fine thing,” though he thought she should have been tougher still and more specific.

  It was on a particularly glorious day that spring, on Sunday, April 9, 1950, with lilacs and azaleas blooming in profusion and the cherry blossoms coming full around the Tidal Basin, that Truman drafted a statement in his own hand that he planned to make public two years hence. April 11 marked the end of his fifth year in office, and he had decided not to run for another term.

  In 1947, as a rebuke to the memory of Franklin Roosevelt and his four terms, the Republicans of the 80th Congress had passed the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution, an amendment Truman opposed, limiting presidents to two terms. With ratification by the states, it would become law in 1951. But since it had been worded not to include Truman, he was free to run again in 1952, as many if not most people assumed he would.

  He had been thinking about the “lure in power,” and the example set by his hero Cincinnatus, the Roman general who had turned away from power. He was neither discouraged nor angry over the course of events. He remained in many ways a man of iron, as Wallace Graham said, and more, “a happy man,” in the words of one White House reporter, “and as far as the observer could tell boundlessly sure of himself.” But quietly on his own, without discussion with anyone other than his wife, he had decided he would announce his retirement in the spring of 1952, when he would be sixty-eight:

  I am not a candidate for nomination by the Democratic Convention.

  My first election to public office took place in November 1922. I served two years in the armed forces in World War I, ten years i
n the Senate, two months and 20 days as Vice President and President of the Senate. I have been in public service well over thirty years, having been President of the United States almost two complete terms.

  Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Madison, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson, as well as Calvin Coolidge stood by the precedent of two terms. Only Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and F.D.R. made the attempt to break that precedent. F.D.R. succeeded.

  In my opinion eight years as President is enough and sometimes too much for any man to serve in this capacity.

  There is a lure in power. It can get into a man’s blood just as gambling and lust for money have been known to do.

  This is a Republic. The greatest in the history of the world. I want the country to continue as a Republic. Cincinnatus and Washington pointed the way. When Rome forgot Cincinnatus its downfall began. When we forget the examples of such men as Washington, Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson, all of whom could have had a continuation in the office, then we will start down the road to dictatorship and ruin. I know I could be elected again and continue to break the old precedent as it was broken by F.D.R. It should not be done. That precedent should continue—not by Constitutional amendment but by custom based on the honor of the man in office.

  Therefore to reestablish that custom, although by a quibble I could say I have only had one term, I am not a candidate and will not accept the nomination for another term.

  The tone, to be sure, was a bit self-congratulatory, and whether his confidence in reelection was altogether sincere or an added touch for the record—lest anyone see him retiring from the field in fear—is hard to say. The implied charge that Franklin Roosevelt had been something less than a man of honor by choosing to run more than twice was in keeping with his own position on the issue in 1940, but not in 1944, when he was the running mate. Still, it was a statement of conviction like none written by an American President. Nor is there any doubt of his devotion to the Cincinnatus ideal. As events would verify, this was no whim of the moment.

  He said nothing on the matter. The two handwritten pages were quietly put away.

  The explosive secret report on the country’s military strength known as NSC-68 (Paper No. 68 of the National Security Council) was ready by the end of the first week in April. Produced primarily by Paul Nitze, under the direction of Dean Acheson and with the participation of the Defense Department, it was delivered to Truman on April 7 and discussed with him for the first time at a White House meeting of the National Security Council on Tuesday, April 25. Like the Clifford-Elsey memorandum of an earlier day, it was intended to shock. Charlie Murphy, who had replaced Clark Clifford as special counsel to the President, would remember being so frightened by what he saw in an early draft that he spent a whole day reading it over and over.

  An apocalyptic theme was struck at the start: “This Republic and its citizens, in the ascendancy of their strength, stand in their deepest peril….” The American colossus, the report said in effect, was sadly wanting in real military might. Its policy of “containment,” as advanced by George Kennan, was no better than a policy of bluff without the “superior aggregate military strength”—the conventional forces—to back it up. Nuclear weapons were insufficient and, in any event, the Soviets would probably achieve nuclear equality by 1954.

  A massive military buildup was called for. This would put “heavy demands on our courage and intelligence.” The financial burden would be extreme. Though no cost estimates were included, the figures discussed with Truman ranged from $40 to $50 billion a year, at least three times the current military budget.

  “The whole success,” Truman read in the concluding paragraph, “hangs ultimately on recognition by this government, the American people and all the peoples that the Cold War is in fact a real war in which the survival of the world is at stake.”

  So, while Albert Einstein was warning that annihilation beckoned, the Secretary of State and his associates, as well as the Defense Department, were saying anything short of a massive military buildup, including nuclear arms, was to put survival at risk.

  In writing such papers, papers intended to shape national policy, Acheson would later explain, one could not approach the task as one would in writing a doctoral thesis. “Qualification must give way to simplicity of statement, nicety and nuance to bluntness, almost brutality, in carrying home a point.” In the particular instance of NSC-68, he conceded, the purpose was to “bludgeon the mass mind of ‘top government.’”

  Truman, however, was not to be bludgeoned. His response was the same as it had been with the Clifford-Elsey Report. He put it away under lock and key. NSC-68 and Life magazine might both point up in dramatic fashion the perilous state of American military strength, but he refused to rush to a decision, even if he did not dispute their claims. His approach was essentially what it had been at the time of the Berlin crisis, essentially what it was in the face of McCarthy—he would make no drastic moves until he knew more.

  Feeling the need for contact again with the American people, he set off by train in May for another “nonpolitical” cross-country tour, ostensibly to dedicate Grand Coulee Dam in Washington. Not once in two weeks of travel, never in more than fifty speeches in fifteen states, did he mention Joe McCarthy or sound a call to arms. Instead, he seemed to glow with patience and optimism. The Cold War would be “with us for a long, long time,” he lectured. “There is no quick way, no easy way to end it.” Yet even so, in the long run, there were no problems that could not be solved.

  Whether he would have attempted anything like the buildup called for in NSC-68 had events not taken the calamitous turn they did in late June, will never be known. But it seems unlikely.

  At his weekly press conference on June 1, he said he thought the world was closer to real peace than at any time in the last five years.

  V

  The silver plane of the President began its long, smooth descent over the farmland of Missouri at approximately 1:45, Central Standard Time, the afternoon of Saturday, June 24. Truman had planned a weekend at home with his family, nothing official on the schedule, “a grand visit—I hope,” as he said in a note to a friend early that morning. “I’m going from Baltimore to see Bess, Margie and my brother and sister, oversee some fence building—not political—order a new roof for the farm house….”

  He had begun his day at Blair House as customary, scanning the Post, the Baltimore Sun, The New York Times, all filled that morning with the spreading Communist scare. The University of California had fired 157 employees for refusing to sign an anti-Communist oath. At an annual convention in Boston, the NAACP had resolved to drive all known Communists from its membership. In Washington, a federal judge had denied pleas for acquittal to three screenwriters, part of the so-called “Hollywood Ten,” who had refused to tell the House Un-American Activities Committee whether they were Communists. In a photograph on page 1 of the Times, a round-faced former Army sergeant named David Greenglass was being escorted in handcuffs from a New York court where he was charged with being part of the Klaus Fuchs spy ring at Los Alamos. On page 4 of the Times, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Trygve Lie of Norway, was reported responding angrily to a reporter’s question as to whether he was, or ever had been, a Communist. “By God, there should be some respect for my integrity,” he had exploded.

  The one encouraging note for Truman was an announcement by Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., a member of the Tydings Committee, that weeks of effort at the White House, going over the files of the eighty-one “cases” charged by Senator McCarthy, had produced no evidence of consequence.

  The weather forecast, an item Truman never failed to check, called for a hot and humid day, with a high of 90 degrees and a chance of late thundershowers.

  His plane, the Independence, took off from National Airport at mid-morning and before heading west, stopped briefly at Baltimore, where Truman dedicated the city’s new Friendship Airport, with an eight-minute speech stressing peace and constructive
confidence. (“We would not build so elaborate a facility for our air commerce if we did not have faith in a peaceful future….”) Through much of the flight afterward, huge thunderheads loomed in the distance. In a violent storm earlier in the day, a Northwest Airlines plane had gone down over Lake Michigan with fifty-eight people on board, all of whom were lost in the nation’s worst air disaster. But Truman’s trip was smooth and uneventful. Landing at Kansas City at two o’clock, he came down the steps from the plane looking fresh, relaxed, even “jaunty” in the Missouri heat.

  At the house in Independence, a crowd of several hundred waited beside a new iron fence five feet high recently installed by the Secret Service. The time was now past when anyone could mingle on the Truman lawn.

  As he stepped from the car, somebody shouted that he should have been at the Eagles’ meeting the night before. “There are lots of places I’d like to go that I can’t get to,” Truman answered cheerfully with a wave, then started up the walk.

  The baking summer afternoon passed quietly, the windows of the old house open wide to what little air was moving. Bess and Margaret had gone to a wedding. Automobiles passed on Van Horne, now renamed Truman Road—a gesture by the town that had pleased Truman not at all—but the sound was faint, mild compared to the steady hubbub outside Blair House. The lazy privacy of the interlude was just what Truman needed. He had not been home since Christmas.

  Dinner was called by Vietta Garr at 6:30. Truman and Mrs. Wallace took their customary places at either end of the table. Margaret would recall a “very pleasant family dinner,” after which they moved out onto a newly expanded, screened porch off the kitchen, where they sat talking, “small talk,” until dark, when everyone moved back inside to the study.

  By nine, Truman was ready for bed. It had been a long day. The time difference between Independence and Washington was two hours, since western Missouri was not on daylight saving time.