Richard Strout, in The New Republic, would describe election night as an experience no political writer would ever forget:
There was personal humiliation for us as a prophet, but a glowing and wonderful sense that the American people couldn’t be ticketed by polls, knew its own mind and had picked the rather unlikely but courageous figure of Truman to carry on its banner.
The feeling was widespread that so heavy a blow to the prestige of the polls could only be good for the country. As Eben Ayers wrote, “There has been a danger, it has seemed to me, that the polls would reach a point, if they continued to be right, where they could easily control the outcome of an election.”
Some of the most intense and interesting of all postmortems went on at the New York headquarters of Time Incorporated, where telegrams from readers poured in saying, “Ha, Ha, Ha!” A “burden of doubt” had been cast over Time and Life, the editors were “deeply unhappy,” said editor-in-chief Henry Luce in a confidential memorandum to his department heads. Luce blamed himself as much as anyone. “I personally paid less attention to this campaign than to any previous campaign in my lifetime,” he admitted. Reporters and editors had been deluded not just by the polls but by politicians in both parties. Everybody should have known better, everybody should have taken his job more seriously, Luce said, and worked right to the end—“like Harry Truman did!”
To Luce the main cause for Dewey’s defeat was Dewey. “His personality was against him.”
The managing editor of Time, T. S. Matthews, took the position that there was nothing new about the press being wrong on elections. The press was often out of touch with the popular will.
I think the press has been pretending to much more wisdom (or is it smartness?) than it had any right to claim, and has been getting away with murder for some time [Matthews wrote to Luce]. The plain fact now appears to be that (as far as politics is concerned, at least) the press hasn’t known what time of day it is for years.
The great mistake now would be to see Truman as a political miracle-worker. “It was not a one-man miracle—that’s too easy—but an unsuspected, overlooked, misreported national phenomenon.”
But to the managing editor of Life, Joseph J. Thorndike, Jr., the problem centered on bias. “Of course, we did not intentionally mislead our readers,” he wrote.
But I do think that we ourselves were misled by our bias. Because of that bias we did not exert ourselves enough to report the side we didn’t believe in. We were too ready to accept the evidence of pictures like the empty auditorium at Omaha and to ignore the later crowds. We were too eager to report the Truman “bobbles” and to pass over the things that were wrong about the Republican campaign: empty Dewey speeches, the bad Republican candidates, the dangers of Republican commitments to big business. I myself had many misgivings about these things but thought that what the hell, the election was already decided, we could get after the Republicans later….
Truman’s victory, said Thorndike, was “primarily a personal triumph.”
And this, as it turned out, was the conclusion of Time in its first issue after the election. “He did it all himself,” said the magazine in tribute to Truman the politician. He was the “new champion” in American politics, “the absolute boss of a resurgent Democratic party.”
“TRUMAN WORKS A POLITICAL MIRACLE,” ran the headline on the lead story in Life. Truman was now “the durable hero in shining spectacles,” “one of the fightin’est men” who ever went through a campaign.
To such staunch Truman loyalists as Sam Rayburn and George Marshall, to the weary White House staff workers who had been with him all the way, there was never any question as to why Truman won. He had done it by being himself, never forgetting who he was, and by going to the people in his own fashion.
Harry Truman deserved 90 percent of the credit, said Sam Rayburn. “You have put over the greatest one-man fight in American history,” wrote Marshall to Truman on November 4. “You did exactly what you told me and what nobody else believed possible.”
“I think that Harry Truman grew, too,” wrote Charlie Ross, “grew spiritually.” Truman had campaigned so hard, said Ross, because he genuinely believed the essential welfare of the country was at stake. He wanted peace in the world, prosperity at home, and he wanted to make the Democratic Party truly the party of the people. Also, wrote Ross, there was a “purely personal” motive. “He had been described as a little man, fumbling, inept, not measuring up to the President’s job. He had a human desire to prove his detractors wrong.”
Like others, Clark Clifford thought Dewey’s people had done a poor job. “I think Dewey’s whole campaign was a mistake…. They were greedy and dumb, and anxious to get back to power.” But that was not the explanation for Truman’s success. Nor did Clifford think it was due to extraordinary political acumen on Truman’s part.
It wasn’t in my opinion because he was a skilled politician that he won. He was a good politician…a sensible politician…. But that wasn’t why he was elected President…. It was the remarkable courage in the man—his refusal to be discouraged, his willingness to go through the suffering of that campaign, the fatigue, the will to fight every step of the way, the will to win….
It wasn’t Harry Truman the politician who won, it was Harry Truman the man.
Early the morning of Thursday, November 4, as Truman stepped out onto the rear platform of the Ferdinand Magellan during a brief stop in St. Louis, photographers snapped the picture that would be remembered and enjoyed more than any other of the campaign. Truman was smiling, chatting with reporters, when someone handed him a copy of the Chicago Tribune, his least favorite newspaper, across the front of which ran the huge, soon-to-be famous headline: “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.” Holding the paper aloft with both hands, grinning from ear to ear, the man who had been given no better than a fighting chance seemed to be saying not only, “Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,” but that in America it is still the people who decide.
Like some other photographs of other presidents—of Theodore Roosevelt in a white linen suit at the controls of a steam shovel in Panama, or Woodrow Wilson at Versailles, or Franklin Roosevelt, chin up, singing an old hymn beside Winston Churchill on board the Prince of Wales in the dark summer of 1941—this of Harry Truman in 1948 would convey the spirit of both the man and the moment as almost nothing else would.
On Friday, November 5, Truman returned to Washington in triumph. The welcome was the biggest, most enthusiastic outpouring for a President in the history of the capital. So great had been the excitement in the city the day before that the papers had forecast crowds of perhaps half a million people. But at least 750,000—two thirds of the city—lined his route from Union Station to the White House.
The day was warm, sunny, perfect. Truman, Bess, Margaret, Vice President-elect Barkley and his daughter, Mrs. Max Truitt, and Howard McGrath rode in a huge, seven-passenger open Lincoln, with two Secret Service men standing on the rear bumper. Truman and Barkley sat up on the back of the rear seat.
Passing the stone-fronted offices of the Washington Post, Truman looked up to see a big sign strung across the second floor: WELCOME HOME FROM CROW-EATERS.
The day after the election, the staff of the Post had sent a telegram asking him to attend a “Crow Banquet,” to which all newspaper editorial writers, political reporters, pollsters, radio commentators, and columnists would be invited. The main course was to be old crow en glâce. Truman alone would be served turkey. Dress for the guest of honor would be white tie, for the others, sackcloth. In response Truman had written that he had “no desire to crow over anybody or to see anybody eat crow figuratively or otherwise. We should all get together now and make a country in which everybody can eat turkey whenever he pleases.”
Confetti showered down. A band played “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” Truman waved his hat and smiled.
At the White House, he stepped to a microphone on the North Portico to say thank you. The whole stretch of
Pennsylvania Avenue, all of Lafayette Square, everywhere, as far as he could see, there were people, waving, cheering, calling out to him.
Part Five
Weight of the World
15
Iron Man
Clearly he was conscious of the terrible responsibility his victory had won him. His would be decisions affecting, possibly, the very future of mankind. Ahead of Harry Truman’s America, nameless, half-imagined dangers lurked in every shadow. None knew this better than he.
—Washington Evening Star, Inauguration Day, 1949
I
Thursday, January 20, 1949, was chill and dazzling in Washington, with a stiff wind out of the north and “100 percent” sunshine, as the National Weather Bureau reported. The cloudless sky over the city was a vivid sea blue. Colors everywhere stood out in the sparkling winter atmosphere. Everything gleamed in sunlight—white marble, band instruments, scarlet tunics, brass buttons, long lines of polished black official cars. From Capitol Hill to the White House, along the whole length of Pennsylvania Avenue, hundreds of flags whipped in the wind like the flags in patriotic films.
It was a day made to glorify the occasion, “a perfect Inaugural Day,” as the President’s daughter wrote in her diary. The temperature by noon was in the high 30s, though with the wind, it felt colder.
There had been no full-scale inaugural festivities in Washington since before the war, and this was to be the biggest, most costly inauguration on record, the parade the greatest in the city’s history. The year before, when their return to presidential power had seemed such a certainty, the Republicans who controlled the 80th Congress had voted an unprecedented $80,000 for the most lavish inaugural day ever. Now the jubilant Democrats, with delighted approval from the President, had decided to spend it all.
The size of the crowds was astonishing. More than a century before, in 1829, on a comparably bright winter day, Democrats had descended upon the city from “every point on the compass” to see Andrew Jackson take the oath in front of the East Portico of the Capitol. It was the first time the ceremony had been held there, and fifteen to twenty thousand people attended. At Jackson’s famous White House reception afterward, the mob had grown so unruly that to relieve pressure and save the building, pails of whiskey had been carried out onto the lawn. Now, to see Harry S. Truman, the modern Jacksonian, another “man of the common people” and “hero of the great political drama of 1948,” ride to the Capitol and take the same oath at the same place, more than a million people were gathered, more than ever before in history.
They had been pouring into the city for days, whole delegations in western hats, big-city politicians with their retinues, labor bosses, committeewomen, delegates from the American Legion, the NAACP, Boy Scout troops, Florida bathing beauties, and fifty extremely proud residents of Independence, Missouri, led by Mayor Roger Sermon, as well as ninety-eight veterans of Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery, with Monsignor Curtis Tiernan as their nominal leader. Entertainers and screen stars arrived—Gene Kelly, Jane Powell, Jane Froman, Lena Horne, Edgar Bergen, Abbott and Costello—and the big bands of Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton, in addition to Phil Spitalny and his All-Girl Orchestra.
Most hotels were sold out, some at triple the normal rate, and for the first time in the city’s history black guests were staying at several of the best hotels, since Truman, as no President before, had ordered that black Americans were to be as welcome as anyone at the main events of the inaugural.
The “invited guests” for the East Portico ceremony alone, those with seats beneath the inaugural stand, numbered 17,740, and another 44,000 paid $2 to $10 for seats in the wooden grandstands along the parade route.
It was also to be the first inauguration broadcast on television. As great as were the crowds on hand, another audience ten times greater would be watching—an estimated 10 million in fourteen cities connected by coaxial cable. This would make it the largest number of people ever to watch a single event until then. Indeed, more people would see Harry Truman sworn in as President on television on January 20, 1949, than had witnessed all previous presidents taking the oath since the first inauguration of George Washington. (As far away as St. Louis, the western limit of the cable, the pictures, like the day in Washington, were reported “bright and clear.”) And 100 million more would be listening by radio.
Yet, as often said afterward, there was no one who took part, no one watching the parade, no one at the dinners and dances, who had a better time than the man at the center of the spectacle, for whom, by all signs, it was the happiest day of his life, “his day of days,” as his daughter would say. “Weather permitting, I hope to be present,” Truman had written in high spirits, in answer to his own invitation to the ceremonies.
It had been two months since the Key West vacation in November, and much had transpired. Because of conditions at the White House, the President and his family were now living across the way in Blair House, at 1651 Pennsylvania Avenue. The old Executive Mansion, as Truman had been informed the day of his return to Washington after the election, was in such a “dangerous” state it could collapse any moment. Ironically, the only safe place in the building was his new balcony. (“Doesn’t that beat all!” he said.)
The facts of the situation were made public for the first time; the White House was closed to visitors. The President, the First Lady, and Margaret all departed for Key West—for Bess and Margaret it was a first visit to the “Little White House” in Florida—and with painters and decorators working night and day, Blair House was made ready, furniture moved in, in time for the family’s return at Thanksgiving.
Privately Truman could not have been happier with the change and for the chance to make sure the White House was restored as it should be. With his love of building, love of history, he was genuinely interested in every detail of the project. “It is the President’s desire that this restoration be made so thoroughly complete that the structural condition and all principal and fixed architectural finishes will be permanent for many generations to come,” wrote Lorenzo Winslow, the architect in charge. At the time, it was thought the job would take a year.
The West Wing, built by Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, remained sound and would continue in service. So again Truman was “commuting” to the Oval Office on foot from across Pennsylvania Avenue, as he had in the first weeks after Franklin Roosevelt’s death. Flanked by Secret Service agents, he would cross the street in the morning, twice again at lunchtime, and again at day’s end. Traffic stopped, tourists gaped. Once, in early December, when a car with Virginia plates nearly ran him down, the driver, after a screeching stop, pressed his hands to his head, pondering what he had nearly wrought, but Truman walked on unconcerned. It was obvious from the President’s stride, wrote Life, reporting the incident, that he was “a new and very happy man…[who] knew where he was going….”
Shortly after Thanksgiving, Truman had made one of the most fateful decisions of his presidency. George Marshall, who was soon to undergo surgery for the removal of a kidney, had said he wished to retire, and Truman, after some deliberation, picked Dean Acheson to be the next Secretary of State, beginning with the new term. Truman had made the offer to Acheson privately at Blair House. At first speechless, Acheson had said he was not qualified to meet the demands of the office. This, responded Truman, was undoubtedly so, but then he could say the same for himself, or any man. The question was whether he would do the job?
Often in informal conversation, Truman would say there were probably a million men in the country who could make a better President than he, but that this was not the point. He, Harry Truman, was the President. “I have the job and I have to do it and the rest of you have to help me.”
The Berlin Airlift, still proceeding with great effect, was never far from his mind. China was a worry, more and more, as the forces of Mao Tse-tung won one smashing victory after another. From Tokyo, General MacArthur was warning that the “fall” of China imperiled America, while at home, the
Red scare grew worse. On December 15, Alger Hiss had been indicted for perjury.
In Independence for Christmas, Truman took his daily walks, tipped his hat to neighbors, and, as reporters noted, carefully knocked the snow from his boots before going into the house. Between Christmas and the inauguration, his days grew increasingly crowded. Up regularly before dawn, he was busy every hour, except for a brief nap after lunch. Members of Congress and the Cabinet made a steady parade in and out of his office. He approved the withdrawal of the last American troops from Korea—a decision to which no great portent was attached by anyone at the time—and, on New Year’s Day, issued a statement recognizing the new Republic of Korea. On Wednesday, January 5, 1949, he went to the Hill to deliver his State of the Union message to the new 81st Congress, calling again for the same progressive social measures he had championed the year before, except now he had a new name for his domestic program, “the Fair Deal,” a name he had coined himself; and, unlike January 1948, when almost no one was listening, everyone now paid close attention.
At a news conference on January 7, visibly moved, he announced the retirement of Marshall and Acheson’s appointment. Another day, he slipped out of the West Wing to fly to Pinehurst, North Carolina, to visit with the convalescing Marshall.
There was the new budget to present, calling for $41.9 billion, the largest ever in peacetime, half of which was to go for defense and foreign aid. There was his inaugural address to work on, meetings to prepare for, more press conferences, a Truman-Barkley Club dinner, and, the night before the inauguration, at the Mayflower Hotel ballroom, a full-dress Presidential Electors dinner, where he surprised and delighted his audience with an impromptu impersonation of H. V. Kaltenborn declaring on election night, in his hard, clipped style, that, “While the President is a million votes ahead in the popular vote…when the country vote comes in, Mr. Truman will be defeated by an overwhelming majority.” The audience exploded with laughter and applause. Truman seemed to glow with vitality and confidence.
Truman Page 97