Truman

by David McCullough

  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 in 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 C
ommunist. “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.

  At about 9:20, the telephone rang in the hall. Dean Acheson was calling from his country house in Maryland.

  “Mr. President,” he said, “I have very serious news. The North Koreans have invaded South Korea.”

  There had been a report from John Muccio, the American ambassador in Seoul, Acheson explained. The North Koreans had crossed the 38th parallel, in what Muccio, an experienced officer, described as a heavy attack, not just a patrol foray of the kind there had been before.

  Acting on his own initiative, Acheson had already notified the Secretary General of the United Nations to call a meeting of the U.N. Security Council.

  He would leave for Washington at once, Truman said. (“My first reaction was that I must get back to the Capital,” he later wrote.) Acheson, however, advised him to wait. There was no need to take the risk of a night flight, and it might alarm the country.

  “Everything is being done that can be,” Acheson said. “If you can sleep, take it easy.” He would call tomorrow when he knew more.

  According to Margaret, her father returned from the phone in a state of extreme agitation, having already concluded the worst. “My father,” she wrote, “made it clear, from the moment he heard the news, that he feared this was the opening of World War III.” It was to be a long night for the family.

  Sunday morning, the feeling again was of full summer in Missouri, hot and humid.

  Of the seventeen churches in Independence, the first to sound its bells, at eight o’clock, was St. Mary’s, the old red-brick Catholic church on North Liberty, followed later by the new clarion at First Presbyterian, two blocks from the house, which played hymns until 10:45, by which time church bells all across town had begun their Sunday crescendo.

  Bess and Margaret would leave for services at Trinity Episcopal shortly before eleven. But Truman by then had driven off to Grandview in a Secret Service car. They were all to act as normal and unconcerned as possible, “business as usual,” he had instructed before leaving.

  He stretched his stay at Grandview through most of the morning. Chatting amiably with his brother Vivian, he looked over a new milking machine, admired a new horse, and shook hands with Vivian’s five grandchildren before moving on to see Mary Jane. To no one did he say anything about Korea, even though reports of the invasion were in the morning headlines and on the radio.

  He reached 219 North Delaware shortly before noon to find Eben Ayers waiting with a copy of Ambassador Muccio’s telegram: “IT WOULD APPEAR FROM THE NATURE OF THE ATTACK AND MANNER IN WHICH IT WAS LAUNCHED THAT IT CONSTITUTES AN ALL-OUT OFFENSIVE AGAINST THE REPUBLIC OF KOREA.”

  A swarm of reporters and photographers appeared at the front gate. On his way out, Ayers told them that naturally the President was concerned.

  Bess and Margaret had only just returned from church when Acheson’s second call came at about 12:30.

  Dad took it [Margaret recorded in her diary] and a few minutes later he went to pack and told me to call Kansas City and get Eben Ayers to call all the people who came out with him to say that he would arrive at the airport between 2:00 and 2:15.

  The departure from Kansas City was so swift and sudden that some of Truman’s own staff, as well as the White House correspondents who traveled by chartered plane, were left behind. As the Independence took off, Bess, Margaret, and Vivian Truman stood watching in silence, Bess looking much as she had the night of Franklin Roosevelt’s death.

  “Everything is extremely tense,” wrote Margaret at home that night. “Northern or Communist Korea is marching in on Southern Korea and we are going to fight.” Apparently from what she had seen and heard, she had no trouble knowing her father’s mind.

  The Independence touched down at National Airport at 7:15 that evening, Sunday, June 25. Dean Acheson, Louis Johnson, and Budget Director James Webb were waiting on the tarmac as Truman stepped from the plane looking grim and troubled. “That’s all,” he told photographers who were pressing for another shot. “We’ve got a job to do.”

  Webb would later recall Truman saying in the limousine as they sped to the city, “By God, I am going to let them have it,” and Louis Johnson, in the jump seat in front of Truman, swinging about to shake his hand.

  On the flight from Missouri, by radio, Truman had notified Acheson to summon an emergency meeting at Blair House, beginning with dinner at 7:30. His hours of privacy in the plane had provided opportunity for a lot of hard thinking, Truman later wrote. This was not the first time in his generation when the strong had attacked the weak. He had thought about Manchuria and Ethiopia.

  I remembered how each time that the democracies failed to act it encouraged the aggressors to keep going ahead…. If the Communists were permitted to force their way into the Republic of Korea without opposition from the free world, no small nation would have the courage to resist threats and aggression by stronger Communist neighbors. If this was allowed to go unchallenged, it would mean a third world war, just as similar incidents had brought on the second world war.

  The attack by North Korea had come as a total surprise. There had been incidents along the 38th parallel, Korea had been seen as a potential trouble point, but it was only one of numerous trouble points around the world and had never figured high on anyone’s list. The last American troops had recently been withdrawn from South Korea.
Describing the perimeter of American interests in the Pacific in an extemporaneous speech at the National Press Club in January, Acheson had not even included Korea. (The charge made later that the speech had thus inspired the Communist attack on South Korea would prove groundless.) Just that June, testifying on the Hill, Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Dean Rusk had said he saw no likelihood of war in Korea. Indeed, among the manifold uncertainties at the moment was whether the invasion of South Korea was only a feint, a preliminary to a larger attack elsewhere, on Yugoslavia perhaps, or Formosa, or Iran.

  As Truman had been notified en route to Washington, the U.N. Security Council had met that afternoon and adopted an American resolution calling for immediate cessation of “hostilities” and the withdrawal of North Korean forces to the 38th parallel. The vote was 9 to 0. There was no Soviet vote—no Soviet veto—because the Soviet representative, Jacob Malik, had walked out earlier in the year, when the Security Council refused to unseat Nationalist China, and he had not returned.

  Besides the President, Acheson, Johnson, and Webb, the group gathered at Blair House included ten others: three from the State Department, Dean Rusk, Philip Jessup, and John Hickerson; the three service secretaries, Frank Pace, Jr., who had replaced Kenneth Royall as Secretary of the Army, Francis P. Matthews of the Navy, and Thomas K. Finletter of the Air Force; General Omar Bradley; and the three Chiefs of Staff, General Lawton Collins, Admiral Forrest Sherman, and Air Force General Hoyt Vandenberg. That made fourteen and they arrived, reported The New York Times, “as an atmosphere of tension, unparalleled since the war days, spread over the capital.”