Harry Truman

by Margaret Truman

  His exacting duties did not end with his work as press secretary. More and more, all of us came to depend on the counsel on questions of high public policy which he could give out of the wealth of his learning, his wisdom and his far-flung experience. Patriotism and integrity, honor and honesty, lofty ideals and nobility of intent were his guides and ordered his life from boyhood onward. He saw life steady and saw it whole. We shall miss him as a public servant and mourn him as a friend.

  After the statement was typed, Dad walked down the short corridor to the lounge where the reporters were waiting. They formed a semicircle around him, and he began to read the words, “The friend of my youth, who became a tower of . . .”

  He could not go on. “Ah, hell,” he said, and threw the typed words down on the table in front of the reporters. “I can’t read this thing. You fellows know how I feel anyway.”

  His head bowed, Dad walked out of the room.

  I WANDERED INTO this vortex of grief and crisis. Five hours after Charlie Ross died, I gave the final concert of my 1950 tour at Constitution Hall. Although I was on a warm, first-name basis with all of Dad’s aides, I was closest to Charlie. I treated him like an uncle, and he treated me like a fresh niece. We were always exchanging wisecracks and friendly insults. From the perspective of his own grief, Dad had decided I must not be told what had happened until the concert was over. This was easy enough to achieve. When the President of the United States gives an order, there are dozens of people ready to carry it out. It was far different from keeping the news of the attempted assassination from me. Then I was in a distant city, with only a handful of people to protect me from reporters. Dad’s order was faithfully obeyed. I went onstage knowing nothing about Charlie’s death.

  But Dad could not control the reaction of the audience. Charlie Ross was one of the most popular men in Washington. News of his death had spread throughout the city. I was the only one in Constitution Hall who did not know about it. Coming on top of the bad news from Korea and the phony atomic bomb scare, Charlie’s death may have made many people in the audience feel it was bad taste for me to be singing at all. At any rate, I soon sensed there was something wrong with their reaction. At the time, I blamed it on Korea. I was sure it had nothing to do with the music. In fact, I thought it was one of my better performances. At intermission, the music critic for the Times-Herald came backstage and congratulated me.

  The next day, Dad arose at 5:00 a.m. to grapple once more with the crisis in Korea. He picked up the Washington Post and read a savage review of my performance by the paper’s music critic, Paul Hume. “She is flat a good deal of the time,” he wrote. “She cannot sing with anything approaching professional finish. . . . She communicates almost nothing of the music she presents.”

  Dad saw red. For him, this was the last straw. His best friend had just died, the world situation was going from bad to awful, and now a critic was attacking his daughter with what seemed to be more malice than judgment. Dad sat down and wrote a very angry, longhand note. He told him he sounded like “a frustrated man that never made a success, an eight-ulcer man on a four-ulcer job and all four ulcers working.”

  Hume published the note, and the uproar was vast. Dad never felt the slightest remorse about sending it. He always insisted he had a right to be two persons - the President of the United States and Harry S. Truman, father of Margaret, husband of Bess Wallace. “It was Harry S. Truman, the human being, who wrote that note,” he said.

  A few days later, he summed up his stand on his calendar-diary. He rested his case more on his judgment of my accompanist’s performance on the piano. Dad would be the first to admit he was somewhat prejudiced in my favor. But when it came to a performance on the piano, he was confident his judgment was as good as any music critic’s in the country.

  December 9, 1950

  Margie held a concert here in D.C. on December 5th. It was a good one. She was well accompanied by a young pianist named Allison, whose father is a preacher in Augusta, Georgia. Young Allison played two pieces after the intermission, one of which was the great A Flat Chopin Waltz, Opus 42. He did it as well as it could be done and I’ve heard Paderewski, Moritz Rosenthal and Josef Lhevinne play it.

  A frustrated critic on the Washington Post wrote a lousy review. The only thing, General Marshall said, he didn’t criticize was the varnish on the piano. He put my baby as low as he could and he made the young accompanist look like a dub.

  It upset me and I wrote him what I thought of him. I told him he was lower than Mr. X and that was intended to be an insult worse than the reflection on his ancestry. I would never reflect on a man’s mother, because mothers are not to be attacked, although mine was.

  I’ve been accused of putting my baby, who is the apple of my eye, in a bad position. I don’t think that is so. She doesn’t either - thank the Almighty.

  Dad discussed the letter with his aides and was annoyed to find they all thought it was a mistake. They felt it damaged his image as President and would only add to his political difficulties. “Wait till the mail comes in,” Dad said, “I’ll make you a bet that eighty percent of it is on my side of the argument.”

  A week later, after a staff meeting, Dad ordered everybody to follow him, and they marched to the mail room. The clerks had stacked the thousands of “Hume” letters received in piles and made up a chart showing the percentages for and against the President. Slightly over 80 percent favored Dad’s defense of me. Most of the letter writers were mothers who said they understood exactly how Dad felt and would have expected their husbands to defend their daughters the same way. “The trouble with you guys is,” Dad said to the staff as he strode back to work, “you just don’t understand human nature.”

  Meanwhile, Dad was meeting the crisis in Korea with that quiet courage he had displayed in the staff meeting on November 28. First, he coped with the defeatism of Prime Minister Attlee and his aides. They urged an immediate attempt to negotiate with the Chinese Communists. Dad absolutely refused to make such a move when we were in a weak position. Among the things the Communists were likely to demand were Formosa, including Chiang Kai-shek, complete control of Korea, and the right to participate in the Japanese peace treaty. Dad took this stand, even though his Joint Chiefs of Staff had joined MacArthur in massive pessimism, and told Attlee they did not think a line could be held in Korea if the Chinese attacked in force. “We did not get into this fight,” Dad said, “with the idea of getting licked. We will fight to the finish to stop this aggression. I don’t intend to take over military command of the situation in Korea - I leave that up to the generals - but I want to make it perfectly plain that we cannot desert our friends when the going gets rough.”

  Dad and Secretary of State Acheson also gave Attlee a lesson in political consistency. They pointed out the fate of Europe was intimately connected with Korea. We could not follow a policy of appeasement and surrender in Asia, and a policy of resistance and negotiation from strength in Europe. My father also disagreed with the British desire to seat Communist China in the United Nations at this time. It would be rewarding the Chinese for their aggressive, lawless actions in Korea. At that very moment, there was a Chinese Communist negotiator at the UN, heaping abuse on the United States for their “aggression” in Korea and Formosa. Dad also rejected a rather unsubtle attempt by Attlee to win some control over General MacArthur’s command. General MacArthur was the theater commander, and he had full charge - including full responsibility - for the conduct of war in his theater within the limitations which the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had clearly spelled out to him. Wars could not be run by a committee.

  Attlee went home pledging full support to Dad’s determination to stay in Korea - something he had come to Washington without the slightest desire to do. Meanwhile, our UN allies were crumpling in the face of the Chinese Communist propaganda assault. They refused to go along with a resolution condemning Chinese aggression in Korea, and, instead, created an agenda for the General Assembly in w
hich the problem of Formosa took precedence over the problem of Korea. In Congress, hysteria was the order of the day. Twenty-four Republican senators joined in a resolution offered by Senator James P. Kem, of Missouri, demanding to be informed about any “secret commitments” my father made to Attlee - a really laughable idea, in the light of the way Dad quietly strong-armed the prime minister into supporting his policy. A majority of the Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a resolution calling for the dismissal of Dean Acheson. General MacArthur was totally exonerated for the disaster that was threatening us in Korea. It was all Acheson’s fault because he was “soft on communism.”

  Nor was the hysteria confined to Congress. On December 12, Joseph P. Kennedy, known at the time only as the former ambassador to London, issued a call for immediate withdrawal from Korea, Berlin, and Europe. He called American policy “suicidal” and “politically and morally bankrupt.” Kennedy had been prominent among those Democrats advising appeasement of Hitler before World War II. He could be safely ignored, but it was harder for Dad to ignore Herbert Hoover, who issued a long, carefully thought out statement, calling for a new policy to “preserve this Western Hemisphere Gibraltar of Western civilization.” In 1944, my father cabled President Roosevelt on the night of their victory, “Isolationism is dead.” He was wrong. It had only been lying dormant, waiting for the moment when defeatism and panic gave it a new opportunity to strike at those who were trying to hold the nation steady on its course as leader of the free world.

  In his next press conference, my father blasted back at the attacks on his Secretary of State.

  How our position in the world would be improved by the retirement of Dean Acheson from public life is beyond me. Mr. Acheson has helped shape and carry out our policy of resistance to Communist imperialism. From the time of our sharing of arms with Greece and Turkey nearly four years ago, and coming down to the recent moment when he advised me to resist the Communist invasion of South Korea, no official in our government has been more alive to communism’s threat to freedom or more forceful in resisting it.

  At this moment, he is in Brussels representing the United States in setting up a mutual defense against aggression. This has made it possible for me to designate General Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe.

  If communism were to prevail in the world - as it shall not prevail - Dean Acheson would be one of the first, if not the first, to be shot by the enemies of liberty. . . .

  The comment about General Eisenhower was another, equally dramatic example of Dad’s refusal to alter his fundamental policy, in spite of the trouble in Asia. The creation of an integrated European army had been patiently negotiated by Acheson and his assistants during the previous year. It was the climax to the decision to resist Stalin’s aggression in Europe in 1947 - a decision that gave Dad those six weeks of worry he described to me in his letter. He was showing Stalin that, in their duel for world leadership, the United States did not intend to allow a temporary defeat to rattle them. Those last two weeks in December were the days when my father demonstrated the essential strength and potential greatness of the American presidency. The strength of the office lies in its simplicity - the fact that its enormous power is in the hands of a single man. Legislative bodies are notoriously incapable of dealing with periods of crisis. They tend to succumb to the panicky counsels of the timid. The President, as my father has often pointed out, can be as courageous and as great as he and he alone dares to be.

  To deal with the panic in Congress, Dad met with congressional leaders of both parties in the Cabinet Room at 10:00 a.m. on December 13. He brought with him to the meeting the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, and several other members of his Cabinet and White House staff. Carefully and calmly, he read to them top secret CIA reports on probable Russian moves around the world. They were, for instance, fiercely attacking our aid to Greece, Turkey, and Yugoslavia. They had also announced they “would not tolerate” the rearmament of Germany, which had become an essential part of our NATO strategy. The emphasis was on the global view of our security, not the battle in Korea. Only after the congressmen had heard these very sobering facts did Dad ask General Marshall to brief them on the situation in Korea. Speaking with the authority only he possessed, the Secretary of Defense assured the congressmen the situation was improving every day. Our army had retreated with very minor losses and was now regrouping with a good chance of making a firm stand. My father then called on each of the congressional leaders, and all of them agreed we had to increase our military strength immediately. Most of them favored declaring a national emergency - which was precisely what Dad was considering as his next step.

  First, however, he decided to explain the situation to the American people. He went on radio and television at 10:30 p.m. on December 15 and called on everyone to join in a national effort to meet this crisis. “All of us will have to pay more taxes and do without things we like. Think of this, not as a sacrifice, but as an opportunity, an opportunity to defend the best kind of life that men have ever devised on this earth.”

  He did not flinch from the truth about the Chinese offensive. “As I speak to you tonight, aggression has won a military advantage in Korea. We should not try to hide or explain away that fact.” He called on the American people to shoulder a responsibility greater than any nation has ever borne in the history of the world. The goal was peace, a goal that could only be achieved by cooperating with other free nations and “with the men and women who love freedom everywhere. . . .”

  During these harrowing days, my father deeply missed the presence of Arthur Vandenberg in the Senate. Senator Vandenberg may have been a bit difficult at times, but he was a man of vision, a politician who realized the nation’s interests had to be placed before politics. After several operations for cancer, he was forced to retire to his home in Grand Rapids, never to return. Dad wrote him a number of touching letters lamenting his absence.

  You just don’t realize [he wrote in the spring of 1950] what a vacuum there has been in the Senate and in the operation of our foreign policy since you left. That has always been one of the difficulties in the continuation of policy in our government. . . .

  I mentioned you yesterday in a press conference as one of those who could appreciate exactly what the country needs in its foreign relations.

  Personally, I am not confining that need to foreign relations alone. It is very seldom that men really become statesmen while they are yet alive, in the minds of the people and their associates. As you well know, I have always held you in that category. Take good care of yourself, and if there is anything I can do to contribute to your welfare and recovery, all you need do is name it.

  Meanwhile in Korea, Walton Walker, the commanding general of the Eighth Army, was killed in a jeep accident, and General Matthew Ridgway was named to replace him. He arrived in Tokyo on December 25 and within forty-eight hours was in Korea, taking charge. Seldom in American history has there been a more dramatic example of what gifted leadership can accomplish. One of the great combat leaders of his generation, Matthew Ridgway took an army whose confidence had been shaken by retreat and confusion of purpose and within a month restored its fighting spirit. General MacArthur, isolated in his Tokyo headquarters, was unaware of what was happening in the field. He continued to shower Washington with demands for the right to widen the war by bombarding Manchuria and unleashing Chiang.

  Early in January, these opinions had to be taken seriously because General Ridgway, under fierce Chinese pressure, was forced to abandon Seoul, the South Korean capital. But he exacted a fearful toll from the Chinese as he fell back, and by mid-January the Chinese “Third Phase Offensive,” which was supposed to knock the UN command out of the war, was an obvious failure.

  In the midst of this Chinese offensive, and in fact just as it was petering out, the UN went into another political collapse. The General Assembly passed a new peace plan on January 13, 1951, offering Red China adm
ission to the UN and handing over Formosa to her if she would agree to a Korean settlement. We had done everything we could to forestall this vote, but that meant little to the political opposition in Congress. Senator Taft called the offer “the most complete surrender to which the United States has ever agreed.” To Dad’s immense relief, Red China overplayed her hand. Arrogantly, she demanded immediate admission to the UN and the convening of a peace conference - with the right to continue the fighting. When the Third Phase offensive sputtered out, and the Eighth Army went over to the offensive on January 25, miraculously rigid spines suddenly began appearing in the General Assembly. On February 1, a large majority formally branded Communist China as an aggressor in Korea.

  My father, with his knowledge of military history, had foreseen what now began to happen. We had the Chinese at the end of a leaky supply line running 260 miles back to the Yalu. Every foot of this line was being pounded by our airplanes. The Chinese army soon ran short of food, medicine, and ammunition. Typhus, spurred by the brutal Korean winter, seared their ranks. By the end of March, Seoul was recaptured, and the UN army was back on the 38th parallel once more. Behind them lay hundreds of thousands of Chinese corpses. Mao Tse-tung was being taught a very harsh lesson about the rewards of aggression.

  Instead of expressing praise and pleasure for General Ridgway’s achievements, General MacArthur became more and more contemptuous of the way we were fighting in Korea. He called it “an accordion war,” sneering that all we could do was advance until our supply lines became overextended, and then we would be forced to fall back, while the enemy took the offensive until his supply lines were overextended. This was nonsense, and a soldier as experienced as MacArthur must have known it. Our supply lines were hardly vulnerable to the savage assault from the air that we were pouring on the roads and railroads of North Korea.