“He was, as I’m sure you know, an extremely thoughtful, courteous, considerate man,” George Elsey would tell an interviewer years later. “He was a pleasure to work for…very kindly…never too busy to think about members of his staff…. He had a tremendous veneration and respect for the institution of the Presidency. He demanded at all times respect for the President of the United States….”
William J. Hopkins, an executive clerk who would serve nearly forty years in the White House, said later of Truman that no President in his experience had “set a comparable tone.” Truman, Hopkins emphasized, “liked people, he trusted people, and in turn he engendered a feeling of unqualified loyalty and devotion among his staff.”
A measure of the Truman manner and outlook was the way he conducted his regular morning meeting with the staff, one of the most important events of their day, for the information and sense of direction provided, but also for its overall atmosphere. The staff numbered thirteen, two more than in Roosevelt’s time, and Truman was his own chief of staff. The meetings were informal, yet orderly and businesslike. Truman would open the door of his office on the dot of nine o’clock and one by one they would file in and take their seats.
He was seated at his desk…the staff assembled in a semi-circle around his desk, and much of the day’s business was gone over [remembered Hopkins]. He usually started with Matt Connelly, who would bring up matters relating to presidential appointments, what was on the agenda for the day and upcoming appointments. He would also bring to the President’s attention requests for speeches throughout the country, getting the President’s reactions and (in some cases) commitments. The President would then turn to Charlie Ross and see what problems might arise during the day in his relations with the press. Many matters were discussed in terms of how to answer press questions and deal with certain problems.
Dr. Steelman, of course, was there, and Clark Clifford…and they brought up matters in their areas of responsibility. It was an opportunity to listen to the President’s philosophy and get his directions for the day.
President Truman was a prodigious reader, and each night he would carry home a portfolio, often six or eight inches thick. The next morning, he would have gone through all that material and taken such action as was needed. He had a desk folder labeled for each of his staff members, and at this staff meeting, he would pass out to them documents in their area of responsibility, or on which he wished their advice or recommendations, or on matters he wanted raised with the various departments and agencies. In this way each staff member knew basically what the others were doing, knew to whom the President had given which responsibility—whether it was to respond to a certain request, or to follow through on the preparation of an Executive Order or a speech, or things of that nature.
Truman was as tidy about his desk as he was about his clothes. The “flow of paper was probably the best I have experienced,” remembered Hopkins, whose job, as executive clerk, was to bring to the President and keep track of the immense range of documents requiring his attention or signature—enrolled bills, executive orders, proclamations, executive clemency cases, treaties, departmental directives, nominations for federal office, commissions, messages to Congress—in addition to “gleanings” from the incoming mail, which were routinely delivered to Truman’s desk twice a day, in the morning and again after lunch.
Hopkins, who was himself extremely punctual, also noted admiringly of Truman, “When he went to lunch, if he left word that he would return at 2:00 P.M., he was back without fail, not at 2:05, not at 1:15, but at 2:00 P.M.” The longer he was in office, the more conscious Truman seemed of time. On his desk now he had a total of four clocks, as well as two others elsewhere in the room and his own wristwatch.
Ross, Clifford, Elsey, could each tell his own stories of Truman’s exceptional diligence, the long hours he kept, working as hard or harder than any of them. “Lots of times I would be down there [at the White House] in the evening,” Clifford would remember, “and he’d be sitting upstairs, in the Oval Room upstairs, with an old-fashioned green eye shade on, like bookkeepers wear, and he’d be sitting there reading all this material…and we would talk together, and he took it very, very seriously. And the strain of the job was enormous.”
“He spent virtually every waking moment working at being president,” said Charles Murphy, a new man on the staff in 1947, who was Clifford’s assistant. To convey the kind of sustained effort the presidency demanded, Murphy would compare it to cramming for and taking an examination every day, year after year, with never a letup.
Murphy particularly admired Truman’s gift for simplification. “Not only could he simplify complex matters, he could also keep simple matters simple.”
The staff was continuously amazed by the President’s knowledge of the country, acquired from years of travel by automobile and from the territory covered at the time of the Truman Committee investigations. Charlie Ross claimed that Truman could look out of his plane at almost any point and name the exact region he was flying over.
They liked his sense of humor. “An economist,” he told them, “is a man who wears a watch chain with a Phi Beta Kappa key at one end and no watch at the other.” And all of them, it seems, admired his sense of history, which they saw as one of his greatest strengths. “If a man is acquainted with what other people have experienced at this desk,” Truman would say sitting in the Oval Office, “it will be easier for him to go through a similar experience. It is ignorance that causes most mistakes. The man who sits here ought to know his American history, at least.” When Truman talked of presidents past—Jackson, Polk, Lincoln—it was as if he had known them personally. If ever there was a “clean break from all that had gone before,” he would say, the result would be chaos.
Once, that spring, at lunch on the Williamsburg, during a brief cruise down the Potomac, Truman and Bill Hassett, the correspondence secretary, began talking about the Civil War. As the others at the table listened, the conversation ranged over several battles and the abilities and flaws of various Union and Confederate generals, Truman, as often before, impressing everyone with how much he had read and remembered.
He would like to have been a history teacher, Truman said.
“Rather teach it than make it?” Clifford asked.
“Yes, I think so,” Truman replied. “It would be not nearly so much trouble.”
Clifford had, become particularly important to Truman, in much the way Harry Hopkins had been to Roosevelt, and it was vital, they both knew, that Clifford understand Truman and what he was trying to accomplish in the long run. He did not want an administration like Roosevelt’s, Truman said. Too many of those around Roosevelt had been “crackpots,” he thought. “I want to keep my feet on the ground, don’t feel comfortable unless I know where I’m going. I don’t want any experiments. The American people have been through a lot of experiments and they want a rest from experiments.” He disliked the terms “progressive” and “liberal.” What he wanted was a “forward-looking program.” That was it, a “forward-looking program.”
Perhaps more than Truman knew, they all appreciated the respect he showed them. Charles Murphy, a shy man who spoke only when spoken to, would later remark, “In many ways President Truman really was as tough as a boot, but with his personal staff he was extremely gentle…and his staff returned his kindness with an extraordinary amount of hard work, voluntary overtime, and wholehearted, single-minded devotion.”
By later presidential standards the staff was small and unlike the White House staffs of some later presidencies, those serving Truman made no policy decisions. As George Elsey would remember, no one on Truman’s staff would have dreamed of making policy or making decisions on fundamental economic or political issues, “or any other kind of issue.”
It just has to be said over and over again [Elsey would comment in an interview years later]. There was no vast foreign policy machinery at the White House. There was no vast machinery on any subject at the White House�
��. [And no one trying to] make their reputations by undercutting…by slitting the throat of a Secretary of State…by proving to the President, by trying to prove to the President, that they’re smarter and more brilliant and their ideas are better [than the Secretary of State]…. None of that existed. Had anybody at the White House tried to behave that way, he would have been out of there in thirty seconds flat.
The loyalty of those around Truman was total and would never falter. In years to come not one member of the Truman White House would ever speak or write scathingly of him or belittle him in any fashion. There would be no vindictive “inside” books or articles written about this President by those who worked closest to him. They all thought the world of Harry Truman then and for the rest of their lives, and would welcome the chance to say so.
For Charlie Ross, the senior member of the staff and the one who had known Truman the longest—longer than anyone in the administration—serving with him, for all the strain of the job and the drastic cut in income it had meant, was the privilege of a lifetime, as Ross would write privately to Truman later that year, on Christmas Day, 1947:
Dear Mr. President:
There is nothing in life, I think, more satisfying than friendship, and to have yours is a rare satisfaction indeed.
Two and a half years ago you “put my feet to the fire,” as you said. I am happy that you did. They have been the most rewarding years of my life. Your faith in me, the generous manifestations of your friendship, the association with the fine people around you—your good “team”—all these have been an inspiration.
But the greatest inspiration, Mr. President, has been the character of you—you as President, you as a human being. Perhaps I can say best what is in my heart by telling you that my admiration for you, and my deep affection, have grown steadily since the day you honored me with your trust.
Truman had rarely received a letter that meant so much to him.
To Dean Acheson it was Truman’s “priceless gift of vitality, the life force itself,” that was his strongest, most inspiriting quality, and always in the darkest, most difficult of times. The President’s supply of vitality and good spirits seemed inexhaustible, wrote Acheson, who, to make his point, would quote from Shakespeare’s Henry V the lines delivered the night before Agincourt:
…every wretch, pining and pale before,
Beholding him, plucks comfort from his looks…
His liberal eye doth give to every one…
A little touch of Harry in the night.
It was this “little touch of Harry” that “kept all of us going,” Acheson would remember.
In addition, there was the example of General Marshall, who lent everyone confidence and raised morale not just at the State Department but throughout the administration. “Gentlemen, enlisted men may be entitled to morale problems, but officers are not,” Marshall would tell those who served with him. “I expect all officers in this department to take care of their own morale. No one is taking care of my morale.” Morale improved steadily.
As Acheson would stress, he and others at the State Department felt they were being led by two men of rare quality, the President and the Secretary. On Capitol Hill, in his speech in support of the Truman Doctrine, Sam Rayburn had said the nation “again has leaders asking for certain action,” and his emphasis on leaders in the plural did not go unnoticed.
Marshall’s entire personality inspired confidence, Truman would write. It was Truman’s long-held conviction that men make history. Clearly in the spring of 1947, with the Marshall Plan following on the heels of the Truman Doctrine, things of immense importance happened principally because a relative handful of men made them happen, almost entirely on their own, against great odds, and in amazingly little time.
On Saturday, April 26, 1947, Secretary Marshall returned to Washington from Moscow gravely worried and upset. His sessions with Molotov had been an ordeal, dragging on day after day with little purpose, Molotov acting all the while as if time and the frustrations of the Western Allies were of no concern. Marshall wanted an agreement on the future of Germany. Hoping he might do better dealing directly with Stalin, he made a courtesy call at the Kremlin. But Stalin had asked what difference it made if there was no agreement. “We may agree the next time, or if not then, the time after,” Stalin said, as he idly doodled wolves’ heads with a red pencil.
Stalin’s indifference made a profound impression on Marshall. The Soviets, it seemed, were quite content to see uncertainty and chaos prevail in Europe. It served their purposes to let matters drift. Particularly, they had no wish for a return of order and stability in Germany, let alone a revived prosperity there. Marshall had thought the Russians could be negotiated with, but at Moscow he decided he had been mistaken.
Before leaving Washington, he received an urgent memo from Under Secretary for Economic Affairs Will Clayton warning that conditions in Western Europe were more serious than generally understood. During stops in Paris and Berlin, while going to and from Moscow, Marshall was stunned by what he saw and heard. On the plane back to Washington, he talked of little else but what could be done to save Western Europe.
Time was of the essence, Marshall stressed to Truman. “The patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate,” he told the nation in a radio broadcast, April 28.
The next day Marshall summoned George Kennan, instructed him to assemble a special staff “immediately,” and to report “without delay” on what should be done to save Europe. As Kennan later recalled, Marshall had only one piece of advice: “Avoid trivia.”
The idea of economic aid to Europe had been on Truman’s mind for some while. Two years past, in one of their earliest conversations in the Oval Office, Henry Stimson had pointedly told him that an economically strong, productive Germany was essential to the future stability of Europe, a concept Truman readily accepted. In his own State of the Union message in January, Truman had struck the theme of sharing American bounty with war-stricken peoples, as a means of spreading “the faith” of freedom and democracy, and on March 6, even before announcement of the Truman Doctrine, he had said in a speech at Baylor University, “We are the giant of the economic world. Whether we like it or not, the future pattern of economic relations depends upon us.”
Early in May, Truman sent Dean Acheson to fill in for him with a foreign policy speech in a remote little town in Mississippi called Cleveland, at the Delta State Teachers’ College. Kennan and his special staff had as yet to make their report, but Truman had already made up his mind, from what Marshall had said after returning from Moscow, that Europe had to be rescued and quickly. The speech Acheson made was the alarm bell that Truman wanted sounded. The stricken countries of Europe needed everything and could afford to buy nothing. Financial help was imperative, but, as Acheson stressed, the objective was not relief, it was the revival of industry, agriculture, and trade. The margin of survival was so close in Europe that the savage winter just past had been nearly disastrous. Massive funding was needed if Europe was to be saved. “It is necessary if we are to preserve our own freedoms…necessary for our national security. And it is our duty and privilege as human beings.”
What was Europe now, Winston Churchill asked rhetorically in a speech in London on May 14. “It is a rubble-heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate.”
The Kennan Report, “Certain Aspects of the European Recovery Problem from the United States Standpoint,” was delivered to Marshall on May 25. American response to world problems must be more than defensive reaction to Communist pressure, it said. An American aid effort in Europe “should be directed not to combating Communism as such but to the restoration of the economic Health and vigor of European society.” Two days later, Under Secretary Clayton, having just completed an inspection tour of Europe, sent another urgent memo. The situation was worse than anyone supposed. Millions of people were slowly starving. A collapse in Europe would mean revolution and a tailspin for the American economy.
Lon
g sessions followed at the State Department and around the President’s desk. With Truman’s approval, Marshall decided to make a speech at Harvard, where he had been invited to receive an honorary degree at commencement exercises on Thursday, June 5, an idea Acheson opposed for the reason that no one ever listened to commencement speeches. When the moment came, at the podium in the sunshine of Harvard Yard, before an audience of seven thousand, Marshall read his remarks in a soft voice, his head down, as though he did not care especially if they were listening.
The speech had been written by Bohlen in about two days, drawing heavily on the Kennan Report. Whether Truman saw a copy in advance is not recorded, but given Marshall’s extreme care to keep the President always informed, it is almost certain they discussed the matter.
As Marshall wanted, there were no oratorical flourishes. Nor was there any strident anti-Communist language.
Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.
Two ideas were new and distinguishing. He was calling on the Europeans to get together, and, with American help, work out their own programs. And, by inference, he was leaving the door open to the Soviets and their satellite countries to take part.
It would be neither fitting nor efficacious for this Government to undertake to draw up unilaterally a program designed to place Europe on its feet economically. That is the business of the Europeans. The initiative, I think, must come from Europe. The role of this country should consist of friendly aid in the drafting of a European program and of later support for such a program so far as it is practical for us to do so. The program should be a joint one, agreed to by a number, if not all, European nations.
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