I
Risk
As each man entered the Oval Office, his eyes instinctively swept the room in search of a place to sit. There was no large sofa welcoming visitors, like there is today—only a few chairs along the wall, which were available to the quick, the clever or the brave. Of course, President Truman was ensured a seat, and surely the two chairs that flanked his desk would be claimed by George Marshall and Clark Clifford, who were, in effect, the guests of honor.
Undersecretary of State Robert Lovett must have been well acquainted with the pre-meeting dance that attended gatherings in the Oval Office and undoubtedly imagined where he would sit well before entering the room, but the four “backbenchers” who were also asked to attend—Robert McClintock and Fraser Wilkins from the State Department and White House staffers David Niles and Matthew Connelly—might have hung back sheepishly at the door, waiting to see how things played out. When the music stopped, Marshall and Lovett were seated at Truman’s left, Clifford sat directly in front of the president and Connelly and Niles settled at Clifford’s side.
The mood was tense and, for Clifford, fraught with danger. Marshall, the regal US secretary of state, was to be for the next thirty minutes his opponent in a contest in which there might not be a winner, but there would certainly be a loser. Marshall was there to be disciplined for the way he was handling the “Israel issue,” but President Truman feared offending him too much to deliver the blow himself.
Only days before, Marshall had brought Truman to tears with his touching toast at the president’s private birthday celebration. The room sat in a stunned silence as Marshall, a man not given to praise, expressed his genuine respect for Truman, thanking him for his integrity, courage and leadership in a time of great crisis. Truman rose to respond3 but could not find the words. Struggling to hold back tears, all he could do was stand with his arms outstretched toward Marshall. It is no wonder that he did not wish to confront Marshall on the Israel issue and passed the hatchet to Clifford.
The fact that Marshall was in the wrong did nothing to calm Clifford’s nerves. The stakes are always high at the White House, but it’s not every day that a staffer and relative political novice is expected to go toe to toe with someone of Marshall’s stature. The secretary of state was no ordinary man. Even among extraordinary men he stood out. If after World War II an award could have been given to the one person most responsible for securing the Allied victory, the name embossed in gold letters on the front would have been Marshall’s. He might have been the most admired American on the planet. Marshall knew this, and so did Clifford.
Everyone has a sweat signature. Like a fingerprint—it is unique. Though the physiology of perspiration is the same for us all when we are nervous—the heart beats a little faster, the capillaries swell and the blood flows more liberally, elevating the body’s temperature and raising pearls of moisture to the skin’s surface—where and how much we perspire varies from person to person. For some people, sweat pools on their upper lip. For others, it collects on their chin or in the small of their back. Rolling Clark Clifford in tissue paper as he waited anxiously to face off against Marshall would have revealed a Rorschach image that he alone would recognize.
This was a meeting President Truman had hoped to avoid, but the unacceptable and possibly insubordinate actions of his secretary of state had made it necessary. Truman had decided to officially recognize the new state of Israel, but Marshall and other State Department officials disagreed publicly with the decision, making the administration appear embarrassingly out of sync.
Marshall was visibly agitated by Clifford’s presence at the meeting. He had counseled the president strongly against recognizing Israel too early, and the presence of Truman’s counsel4 only confirmed to Marshall that the president was pursuing recognition not for geostrategic reasons but simply to score political points with Jewish voters in the upcoming elections. Marshall arrived at the meeting with his Mideast experts in tow, hoping to convince the president that recognition would be a grave foreign-policy mistake, but Truman was not there to be persuaded.
When the room settled, the president made a few opening remarks and then gave Marshall the floor. The secretary of state began with a brief description of battle conditions on the ground in Palestine, including which territories were held by Arab forces and which were held by Israelis. He then deferred to Undersecretary Lovett, who presented the consensus of the Defense Department, the State Department and the CIA that the US should not recognize Israel.
Lovett argued that there was no need to rush toward recognition. A truce between the Israelis and Palestinians, he thought, was still possible. He described the dangers of prematurely supporting Israel. He explained that the Arabs, and especially the Saudis, would not receive the news of American recognition well and that US access to oil in the region and its own strategic ambitions in the Middle East might be permanently damaged if the US did not tread carefully. He summarized the latest intelligence reports that showed that the Arabs were better armed than the Israeli soldiers and held better-established and reinforced positions on the battlefield. The Arab troops, having been trained by the British, he said, were better equipped and prepared than the Israeli forces, which were composed mostly of unseasoned volunteers.
Marshall reinforced Lovett’s points by emphasizing the strategic challenges the Israelis would face if the conflict expanded and added that premature recognition could pull the US into a quagmire that had no real end in sight. Satisfied that he and Lovett had presented a compelling and persuasive case, Marshall ceded the floor. The president invited Clifford to respond.
Prior to leaving government service, Clifford would build an almost legendary reputation as a man of extraordinary gifts for presentation. Those who personally witnessed his performances often described their effect as mesmerizing.5 “After sitting through one of his presentations, one often paused to reflect because his delivery was so authoritative,” a colleague once said. All the elements of his delivery were painstakingly crafted to persuade the audience completely.
Before speaking, Clifford would sit silently gathering his thoughts as the room settled. When all was calm, he would begin slowly, letting the words gather momentum dramatically as he went. Sometimes for effect, he would sit erect, with his palms pressed together and his thumbs stacked as if in prayer. Words used to describe Clifford’s manner have included “deliberate,” “sonorous,” “eloquent” and “uninterruptable.” His voice was clear and deep, with the resonance of a news anchor. The experience of arguing dozens of cases in front of juries had taught him to use the acoustics of the room and fertile silences to add gravity to his delivery. He would let the carefully chosen words reverberate in his chest before freeing them to rise up and hang in the air irresistibly like the call of a bell or an echo in a cave. As he faced Secretary Marshall directly, Clifford’s first words were a quote from Deuteronomy: “Behold, I have set the land before you: go in and possess the land which the Lord swear unto your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give unto them and to their seed after them.”6
Clifford argued that the land rightfully belonged to Israel. It had been given to them by God himself and paid for with the lives of more than six million Jews. Surely every human being must feel that they deserved a home of their own. He argued that Israel would not stop fighting until the land was theirs, and, so, a Jewish state was inevitable. The Russians had been looking for an excuse to stick their claws into that part of the world for some time; not supporting Israel now, Clifford added, would give them the justification they needed.
As Clifford spoke, he could see Marshall glaring back at him angrily. He later described Marshall’s expression as “reddening with suppressed anger.”7
Clifford rejected out of hand two key assumptions held by the State Department: First, the truce between the Arabs and Jews that Marshall and Lovett believed was possible was not going to happen, because both sides had already rejected that option. Second, Clifford took issue
with Marshall’s belief that Palestine could be turned over to the United Nations and governed under a trusteeship. He felt that this was a flawed assumption because it presupposed the existence of a single state to govern. Given that the Arabs and Jews had already begun dividing up the territory, a trusteeship obviously could not work.
Clifford concluded by insisting that recognizing Israel was consistent with long-established White House policy and that it would be an act of humanity in keeping with American values. In total, Clifford spoke uninterrupted for almost fifteen minutes.
In what Clifford later described as “barely contained rage and more than a hint of self-righteousness,”8 Marshall released the anger that had been welling up inside him: “Mr. President, I thought this meeting was called to consider an important and complicated problem in foreign policy. I don’t even know why Clifford is here. He is a domestic adviser, and this is a foreign policy matter. I fear that the only reason Clifford is here is that he is pressing a political consideration with regard to this issue.”9
Hoping to ease the rising tension, Lovett jumped in to say that even a delayed recognition of Israel might not be necessarily in US interests. He cited intelligence reports that many of the Jewish immigrants arriving to the new state would be communist and Soviet sympathizers, to suggest that the US would ultimately be doing itself a disservice by supporting what might end up being a pro-Soviet state.
Despite what Marshall viewed to be an unimpeachable argument against recognition, he saw that Lovett’s remarks were not convincing the president. Thinking that only a political argument would work, Marshall added one final point to punctuate Lovett’s comments—and it sucked all the air out of the room: “Mr. President, Mr. Clifford’s recommendations are wrong. If you follow his advice and I was to vote in the next election, I would vote against you.”10
This was no common threat. Coming from perhaps the most trusted American in the world, these words carried immense weight. If Marshall were to make his threat known publicly, it could sink Truman’s chances of holding on to the presidency. Truman abruptly called the meeting to a close, rushing Marshall and his staff toward the door without resolving the matter. As Marshall and Lovett left the room, it was clear to Truman and Clifford that they would have to take matters into their own hands. If Marshall thought the issue was closed, he did not know Truman.
When Harry Truman was a child, he dreamed of becoming a concert pianist. For a boy growing up in rough-and-tumble Independence, Missouri, in the late 1890s, such an aspiration was highly unusual. When asked years later what he had been like as a child, Truman replied, “To tell the truth, I was kind of a sissy.”11
He was a small, delicate boy in a town where people rode horses and carried guns and where barroom brawls were not uncommon. While other boys his age played and wrestled in the streets, Harry Truman diligently practiced his piano at home and socialized with his little sister and her friends. His mother, Martha, was raised in a pioneer farming family, but she had the extraordinary distinction of having attended college, where she studied art, literature and music. She hoped Harry would follow in her footsteps and encouraged his interest in the piano.
His father, John, a tough mule trader, came from a long line of pioneers and, unlike his son Harry, was not afraid of a fight. He was only five foot four, but he was scrappy. Once, during a court trial, a lawyer accused him of being a liar. John chased the man out into the street, threatening to beat him up.12 Stubborn and uncompromising, he was long remembered by his neighbors for his work ethic, his integrity and his temper. The dogged persistence for which his son Harry would become known was no doubt inspired by John’s “never give up” attitude.
Harry also inherited his father’s appetite for risk. John believed in hard work, but he also believed every man needed luck to be successful. The trouble with John was that so few of the risks he took paid off.
Once, he lost the family’s savings in a bet on grain-market futures. Afterward, Harry had to abandon his dream of attending college in order to help pay off the debts: he worked as a mailroom attendant, a bank teller and then a railroad timekeeper. After another risky venture, his father lost the family home and the Trumans were reduced to running the farm of a family relation. Harry left his job in the city and moved back home to help with the labor. He was not the outdoorsy type, but he did his best for eight years at his father’s side. His hard work revealed a rugged determination that his father had not known existed. He might have lived out the rest of his days as a farm laborer had his father not been injured and died after straining himself lifting a boulder. On his deathbed, John catalogued his regrets, telling his son that he believed his life had been a failure.
Remembering his father’s last words, Truman set off on a string of risky ventures of his own. First, he borrowed money to invest in a zinc mine—it failed. Then he borrowed even more money to invest in an oil business—that too failed. Hoping to change his luck, he enlisted in the Missouri National Guard after the US entered World War I in 1917. As a thirty-three-year-old farmer, Truman was not required to serve. He had never been in a fight in his life, but he was put in command of an artillery company.
The rigors of war reinforced Truman’s confidence in himself. During one harrowing battle, under heavy fire, his men panicked—scrambling in every direction—but Truman kept his head. As shells exploded around him, he shouted orders to his men, rallying them into ranks, and marched them out of danger. Not a single one of Truman’s soldiers lost his life that day. Truman’s grace in battle won him the enduring respect of his men and would one day be the source of his professional resurrection.
When the war ended, Truman returned home to Missouri and tried his luck at business again, this time selling menswear. Sadly, after just two years, he and his partner decided to close the shop for good. He was thirty-eight and up to that point had known mostly failure in life, but his luck was about to change.
In 1922, an old reserve buddy remembered Truman when his uncle, the legendary Missouri political boss Tom Pendergast, was looking for someone to run for Jackson County commissioner. Truman agreed to throw his hat in the ring. He was no public speaker, but his military record helped him stand out as a candidate. He discovered that he enjoyed campaigning and was able to win a narrow victory. For the next decade, he built a reputation as an honest and hardworking public administrator.
In 1934, after deciding to take another risk and run for the US Senate, Truman surprised everyone, including himself, by winning. As the junior senator from Missouri, he put his head down and applied himself to the task of slowly building a reputation for energetically fighting waste, fraud and abuse in government contracting. In the process, he saved the nation billions of dollars and established himself as a well-regarded national public figure.
Truman’s fortunes took another positive turn in July 1944, when Democrats arrived in Chicago to nominate Franklin Roosevelt for a fourth term as president. A group of powerful back-room operators considered the choices for Roosevelt’s running mate: former Supreme Court justice Jimmy Burns was a staunch segregationist and unacceptable to the liberals; Henry Wallace, the current vice president, was a champion of civil rights and too liberal for the conservatives. Hoping to strike a compromise, Democratic leaders chose Truman. The president did not know Truman, but he was too preoccupied with the war and with his own failing health to care who his running mate was. When Truman’s name was raised, he accepted with little objection. That decision turned out to be one of the most important of FDR’s presidency. He died in office eighty-two days later.
In April 1945, as he prepared to assume the presidency, Truman understood Washington and politics, but he must have wondered whether that would be enough to guide the nation. After all, he was following in the footsteps of a man who, after three full terms in office, was the only president an entire generation had ever known. And Roosevelt had only ever met with Vice President Truman twice and had never accepted him into his inner circle, so not only
was now-President Truman ill-prepared for the immense public commitments of the office, he was unaware of even the most urgent matters President Roosevelt had been dealing with before his death. Making matters worse, the new president stepped into the shoes of the great FDR surrounded by people who shared his doubts about his abilities.
The new president was a short, stocky man, who never left the house without his suit pressed and his shoes shined. His daughter, Mary Margaret, described his appearance as that of someone who had just walked off of the band stage. His hands were powerful and rough from his years spent behind a plow. He had a nasally but resonant voice that had a gravelly quality and that easily betrayed his discomfort with public speaking. When nervous, he would stumble over his words, pause and then repeat himself. He wore thick spectacles that magnified his eyes into great orbs. Though he did his best to look confident, he confessed to his family that in the beginning of his presidency he was genuinely scared. He was a small-town guy suddenly elevated to the head of the most prosperous country and most powerful army the world had ever known. He made no secret of the fact that he felt entirely out of his depth.
The press picked up on Truman’s discomfort and reported on his blunders so often that even ordinary Americans began to wonder whether Harry had it in him to be president. In two important ways, Clark Clifford helped change perceptions about the new president. First, where Truman was awkward in public, Clifford was graceful. In his effort to surround himself with his own people, Truman had chosen men who, unfortunately, were not as polished as one might expect. Clifford’s smooth elegance helped change the negative reputation of the men around the president. Second, Clifford was a highly capable and disciplined adviser, able to delve with confidence into any policy area. He was the ideal right-hand man—articulate, competent and completely committed to the president’s objectives. Like a figure out of central casting, he emerged on the scene precisely when Truman needed him most.
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