Like Roosevelt before him, Truman had strongly endorsed universal military training. Now hope for it evaporated overnight. Instead there was grave doubt that the military establishment could maintain a skeletal force abroad. Armed strength was already down 80 percent. What had been the mightiest air force in the world had dwindled from 2,385,000 men to 165,000. The Navy was discharging 245,000 sailors each month; Nimitz warned that not a single squadron was fit for combat. With the draft due to expire on May 15, the Joint Chiefs were contemplating a withdrawal of all occupation troops from Korea. Already five million trained soldiers were back in mufti. Generals were contemplating grim arithmetic. At the very least they needed 350,000 troops in Germany, 375,000 in the Pacific, and between 725,000 (Eisenhower’s estimate) and 1,375,000 (Truman’s) elsewhere. But only 400,000 soldiers were volunteers. With reenlistments declining, General Eisenhower told congressional leaders, there was very real danger that the United States would “run out of Army.”
The general met the leadership in an unused room in the rear of the Congressional Library. Open testimony was out of the question. The political fires were too high. He had approached the Hill by side streets, uncomfortably aware that GIs chanting “We like Ike!” in new disturbances were endorsing his hazy comment as an endorsement of their insurgency. He told the congressmen that he had to have 1,550,000 men, and he quoted the Eighth Army chief of staff in Japan: “If any Japanese decided the time was ripe for revolt they would certainly pick a time when they believed there was dissatisfaction in the American Army. It appears that subversive forces are deliberately at work, for obscure reasons, to undermine the morale of our Army.” Eisenhower added that in his opinion it might become necessary to let U.S. influence in Europe “go by default” to “some other country.”
The other country was unnamed. In those months after the Japanese surrender it was unfashionable to speak of any nation as a potential enemy, but only one adversary was strong enough to challenge the United States. At the end of the war there had been ten million men in the Red Army, and ten million were still there. Russian soldiers stationed outside the Soviet Union staged no Wanna-Go-Home riots. Stalin could move at will through eastern Europe. Because Congress listened to its constituents instead of Eisenhower and Truman, by the summer of 1946 American military power had dwindled to two and a half divisions, largely replacements, with a combat efficiency at about 50 percent of the Army’s wartime peak. After Churchill had called attention to the Iron Curtain running from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, a large block of public opinion turned savagely on Truman. The ex-soldiers who had demonstrated, and the wives who had sent congressmen bootees, blamed the President, the State Department, intellectuals, and fellow travelers for the situation abroad. So far as is known, none of them looked in a mirror.
***
Sir William Hayter once compared negotiations with the Kremlin to a confrontation with an old-fashioned slot machine: you rarely got what you wanted, but you usually got something; you could “sometimes expedite the process by shaking the machine,” but it was “useless to talk to it.” Roosevelt had talked to it at Yalta, and he had hardly told Congress about Soviet promises before the Russians were openly flouting them. Stalin thought it magnanimous of him to treat with the western allies at all. Britain had provided time for the victory over Hitler, he said, and the United States contributed supplies, but Russia, with six million battle deaths, had “paid in blood.” From Moscow Truman looked like a weakling and the United States like a disintegrating nation; Soviet economists had assured their leader that America was about to collapse into depression and chaos. Therefore Stalin demanded control of the Dardanelles, a slice of Turkish territory, a fixed share of Middle East oil, Caspian territory to shield his Baku oil fields, a Titoist Trieste, an Austrian Carinthia, a role in the occupation of Japan, and a physical presence in the Ruhr.
Truman’s tongue-lashing of Molotov on April 23, 1945, had been the first intimation that the new President wasn’t going to yield on any of them. The Russian, shaken, extended a formal invitation to Potsdam. As originally conceived, the conference there was to have implemented the decisions made at Yalta. Truman had misgivings about going, but there were many reasons he should, “the most urgent to my mind,” as he wrote, being “to get from Stalin a personal reaffirmation of Russia’s entry into the war against Japan, a matter our military chiefs were most anxious to clinch.” The only part he really looked forward to was the ocean voyage aboard the U.S.S. Augusta. It was his first trip abroad since World War I, and his gossipy letters to Dear Mamma and Mary convey a delightful picture of Harry, wearing a sport shirt and white sailor hat, running all over the ship to inspect every corner of it, finding a distant cousin in the crew, and snubbing the officers to eat with the enlisted men. After that: Potsdam. The meeting was instructive but depressing. He now knew beyond doubt that “Force is the only thing the Russians understand” and the Russians were “planning world conquest.” Afterward he was “glad to be on my way home.”
Potsdam left the future of the former Axis satellites unchanged; that is, papered over with ambiguities and occupied by Russians. The conference had been as pointless as Truman had thought it would be. He was so disheartened during it that at one moment—one of those fascinating moments which tempt the historian to speculate—he offered General Eisenhower the White House. The two of them were touring bombed Berlin, looking at rubble, when the President suddenly turned and said, “General, there is nothing you may want that I won’t try to help you get. That definitely and specifically includes the Presidency in 1948.” Eisenhower didn’t know what to do, so he decided to treat the offer as a splendid joke. “Mr. President, I don’t know who your opponent will be,” he said, “but it will not be I.”
As the months passed, Russian manners deteriorated. American scientists led by Oppenheimer toiled to perfect a sensible plan for the control of atomic armaments; when they had finished, Andrei Gromyko curtly rejected it out of hand. The behavior of the many Soviet front groups was, if possible, worse. Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson left a desk groaning with work to address the National Council of Soviet-American Friendship in Madison Square Garden. He expressed the hope that nations could reconcile their differences short of the point when “a knock on the door at night strikes terror into men and women.” For this he was driven from the hall with boos and catcalls. “I have often wondered,” he said, “who convinced the foreign offices of Communist countries that bad manners were a basic requirement for the conduct of international relations. Marx or Engels? Whoever did so, it was a great pity.”2
The only member of the administration who retained his illusions about the Soviet Union was Secretary of Commerce Wallace. A visionary and a dreamer, Henry Wallace had long been suspicious of U.S. chauvinists; when Henry Luce hailed the coming century as the “American Century,” Wallace had retorted that the postwar years “can and must be the century of the common man.” Now, sitting in cabinet meetings and watching Harry Truman with hooded eyes, Secretary Wallace reached the conclusion that the President was an out-and-out warmonger. Something must be done about him, he decided. The people must be warned. He would warn them.
In retrospect, Wallace’s defiant challenge of American foreign policy is less surprising than the fact that he had remained a member of the government that long. With Byrnes at State and Wallace at Commerce, there were two members of Truman’s cabinet who thought they should be sitting in his chair. If Truman had possessed the charm of Franklin Roosevelt, he might have overridden the differences between personalities. Utterly lacking in wiles, he was fated instead to cross one New Dealer after another. Byrnes had run afoul of him early. Leaving a Moscow conference, he had cabled the White House that he expected to broadcast a complete report to the people with a fireside chat as soon as he returned. Truman had reminded him that it was his first duty to report to the President, who would then make the chat, if any. Soon afterward Truman became embroiled with Harold Ickes
in a struggle over patronage. On February 12, 1946, Ickes submitted his resignation, suggesting that it become effective March 31. Truman tartly made it February 15; Ickes then publicly charged him with collecting “a nondescript band of political Lilliputians” in the White House, and reporters observed that seldom had Washington seen such a sharp exchange between a cabinet member and his President.
It was repeated before the year was out. On March 5 Churchill, as a token of esteem for Truman, delivered his Iron Curtain speech on the campus of little Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. His criticism of Soviet foreign policy was not well received; he was, as so often before, ahead of his time. The angriest sounds in Washington came from the Secretary of Commerce. Wallace resolved to put all Russophobes in their place when the moment came. It came in September, when Byrnes was in Paris for a crucial meeting of foreign ministers. On September 10 Wallace brought the President the final draft of a speech he meant to deliver before a U.S.-Soviet friendship rally. Truman didn’t have time to read it; he thumbed through the manuscript while Wallace gave him the gist of it—he would, he said, take a more critical view of the Russians than he had in the past. Preoccupied, the President nodded casually and said he hoped the address would boost the prospects of liberal and left-wing congressional candidates and the Democratic state ticket in New York. In the lobby outside, reporters asked Wallace what he and the President had discussed. He suggested they listen to his speech.
Wallace kept his word in one respect. He rapped the Kremlin’s knuckles. He rapped Whitehall’s just as hard, however, and then delivered a powerful blow to the Truman-Byrnes foreign policy. Washington had no business interfering with the Russian presence in eastern Europe, he said; that was Stalin’s sphere of influence. Next he argued that the administration should distribute atomic bomb plans to all governments, regardless of political persuasion. After that, he wanted the United States to disarm—whatever the other countries were doing. He felt that the mere thought of collective security treaties with Britain and western Europe countries was, on the face of it, wicked. “To make Britain the key to our foreign policy would, in my judgment, be the height of folly,” he said. “Make no mistake about it: the British imperialist policy in the Near East alone, combined with Russian retaliation, would lead the United States straight to war.” Then came these two sentences, written in since he had left 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: “I am neither anti-British nor pro-British; neither anti-Russian nor pro-Russian. And just two days ago, when President Truman read these words, he said they represented the policy of his administration.”
Reporters who had read advance copies massed at a 4 P.M. presidential press conference, three hours before the speech was to be delivered. Truman was asked whether he had approved the Secretary of Commerce’s address, and he nodded. Did it accurately reflect administration policy? He replied that it did. Then, under the impression that Wallace would endorse established policy, he attended a stag party at Clark Clifford’s house. He was there when lightning struck. The first rumble of thunder came at 6 P.M. At that time one of the advance copies reached the State Department desk of Will Clayton, who was Acting Secretary in Byrnes’s absence. Calling Charlie Ross on the White House direct line, Clayton protested that “This will cut the ground right out from under Jimmy at Paris.” He wanted a presidential repudiation, but Ross said it was too late; Truman had already approved Wallace’s remarks. Next morning’s newspapers heralded the “about-face” of American policy in end-of-the-world type. In Paris Senator Vandenberg told a newspaperman, “I can cooperate with only one Secretary of State at a time.” Byrnes learned of the catastrophe from a British correspondent. After stewing for four days he cabled the President: “If it is not possible for you for any reason to keep Mr. Wallace, a member of your Cabinet, from speaking on foreign affairs… I must ask you to accept my resignation immediately.”
Dean Acheson felt that “President Truman was naive. This is not a serious indictment. In the first place he was still learning the awesome responsibilities of the President of the United States. It did not occur to him that Henry Wallace, a responsible and experienced high officer of government, should not make a speech he had carefully prepared.” If Truman had said that, he would have been understood. Instead he attempted to stamp out the fire with what Time called “a clumsy lie.” He called a press conference to “clarify” what he called “a natural misunderstanding.” He hadn’t endorsed the speech at all, he explained; he had merely wished to defend Wallace’s right to speak out. Above all, he had not approved the speech as “a statement of the foreign policy of this country.” In the edgy question and answer period that followed, Truman was reminded that Wallace had in fact told his audience that his own refusal to choose between London and Moscow had been commended by the President as “the policy of this administration.” This disastrous exchange followed:
THE PRESIDENT: That is correct.
Q: My question is, does that apply just to that paragraph, or to the whole speech?
THE PRESIDENT: I approved the whole speech….
Q: Mr. President, do you regard Wallace’s speech a departure from Byrnes’ policy—
THE PRESIDENT: I do not.
Q:—toward Russia?
THE PRESIDENT: They are exactly in line.
James Reston wrote scathingly in next morning’s Times, “Mr. Truman seems to be the only person in the capital who thinks that Mr. Wallace’s proposals are ‘in line’ with Mr. Truman’s or Mr. Byrnes’.” While mollifying the British, the President had nettled the reporters. To make a bad situation worse, Wallace refused to climb down. Calling his own press conference on the White House lawn, he declared: “I stand on my New York speech. Feeling as I do that most Americans are concerned about and willing to work for peace… I shall within the near future speak on this subject again.”
That was too much. Confronted by the Secretary of State’s ultimatum and the Secretary of Commerce’s intransigence, Truman decided to dismiss Wallace. First he wrote him a longhand note laced with every profanity and blasphemy he could summon. Then he dispatched it to the Department of Commerce by hand. Wallace, stunned, telephoned Ross and said he thought the letter was not only unfit for publication; in his opinion it was too raw even to be filed in the National Archives as a presidential paper. After Wallace had read it over the phone, Ross agreed. The former secretary, as he had just become, sent it back to the White House, where Ross promptly burned it. That evening the President, purged of bitterness, wrote:
Dear Mama and Mary:
Well, I had to fire Henry today, and of course I hated to do it…. If Henry had stayed Sec. of Agri. in 1940 as he should have, there’d never have been all this controversy, and I would not be here, and wouldn’t that be nice?… Henry is the most peculiar fellow I ever came in contact with. I spent two hours and a half with him Wednesday afternoon arguing with him to make no more speeches on foreign policy—or to agree to the policy for which I am responsible—but he wouldn’t…. Well, now he’s out and the crackpots are having conniption fits. I’m glad they are. It convinces me I’m right….
He had been wrong, of course; he had handled things badly. Coming on top of the strikes, shortages, rising prices, the black market, and the general frustrations of reconversion, the Wallace incident contributed heavily to the erosion of Truman popularity. On the eve of his voyage to Potsdam in July 1945, Gallup had reported that 87 percent of the American people had approved of the way he was doing his job—an extraordinary vote of confidence in light of the fact that FDR’s wartime high, just after Pearl Harbor, had been 84 percent. Then came a shift. “Washington has begun to turn against him,” John Chamberlain wrote in the November 26, 1945, issue of Life. While Chamberlain’s wish may have fathered that thought, a turning point was clearly reached sometime in 1946.
It was evident in little ways. On the right came a roar from the President of the NAM: “The President lets the public freeze while his guts quiver.” On the left the liberal columnist Samuel G
rafton called Truman “an object for pity.” Even mainstream Democrats told one another, “You just sort of forget about Harry until he makes another mistake.” Ickes called upon him to unite the country by announcing that he would not be a candidate in 1948. Truman’s first eighteen months had been so inept, said Democratic freshman Congressman J. W. Fulbright of Arkansas, that in the national interest the President ought to step aside for a Republican successor. In California, Nixon was drawing heavy applause with such bromides as “I promise to preserve our sacred heritage in the name of my buddies and your loved ones, who died that these might endure.” The people were restless, fed up with the Ins and receptive to the blandishments of the Outs, whose two-word slogan, provided by the Harry M. Frost advertising agency in Boston and written large on billboards from coast to coast was, “Had enough?”
The people said yes. For the first time in eighteen years the Republicans captured both houses of Congress—the 80th Congress, as Truman would later memorialize it, the most ultra-conservative since the Fighting 69th of the 1920s. Richard Nixon and Joe McCarthy were swept into office. The Los Angeles Times saw Stassen’s star rising, and Nixon’s with it: “Mr. Nixon is a friend of Governor Stassen, and his political philosophy is along the lines advocated by Stassen.” Life jubilantly hailed the victory as a “significant shift in the government’s center of gravity.” Congress, which for years had been a “rubber stamp and whipping boy for the White House” would now, Life predicted, determine the direction of public life. A conference of Republican leaders proposed a slash of ten billion dollars from the budget, lower taxes, “abandonment of the philosophy of government interference with business and labor,” and repeal of all social and welfare legislation passed since 1932, including social security and the Wagner Act. Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire crowed that “The United States is now a Republican country.”
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 62