by Nancy Gibbs
All Roosevelt would agree to were arm’s-length meetings between Hoover and various cabinet officials, who would then report back to the president. Newsweek cast doubt on the sincerity of any White House overtures, on the grounds that “few Administrations in American history ever went to greater lengths to smear a predecessor than this one.”
At the Democratic convention in 1944, the moment when then Senator Truman’s star suddenly rose and he found himself anointed as FDR’s running mate, Hoover was still very much the enemy: candidates “invoked Herbert Hoover as the man they prefer to campaign against. We ought to be eternally grateful to Herbert Hoover,” one New Dealer remarked, “who has been our meal ticket for twelve years.”
But in 1945, when Roosevelt died and Truman suddenly found himself occupying the office Hoover once held, he approached his Republican predecessor very differently. Though a Democrat to his bones, Truman was not wired to see every decision as a political calculation. Neither Truman nor Hoover had Roosevelt’s gift for making politics a great show, or his subtle sense of human nature, or the patrician bravado that allowed him to embody the office rather than merely occupy it. Hoover was the only man alive who knew what it was like to sit in the chair in a crisis—and to be eternally compared to the sainted Roosevelt. So Truman was not allergic to the idea of inviting Hoover back to the White House in the spring of 1945, when he found himself facing a food crisis in Europe.
Truman had just as vivid—and selective—a recollection of how that meeting came about as he had of Hoover’s demeanor during it. He recalled how that morning he’d read in the paper that Hoover was in Washington, staying at the Shoreham Hotel. So he picked up the phone in the Oval Office and asked the chief operator to connect him to the hotel. She was shocked by the idea of a president placing his own call, but no more so than the man at the other end.
“How are you, Mr. President?” Truman said.
“Who is this?”
“This is Harry Truman,” he said. “I heard you were in town, Mr. President, and I called to ask if you would care to come over and see your old home.”
At this point, Hoover had not stepped foot in the White House since the day Roosevelt was inaugurated in 1933.
“Well, Hoover was just flabbergasted,” Truman recalled.
“Mr. President, I don’t know what to say.”
Truman told Hoover he’d like to talk to him, and would even come to see him at his hotel.
“I couldn’t let you do that, Mr. President. I’ll come to see you.”
“That’s what I figured you’d say,” Truman replied. “I’ve got a limousine on the way to pick you up.”
Another very nice tale of a spontaneous meeting of minds; but once again the record tells a different story. Presidential meetings hardly ever happen that easily, especially when the practice had gone out of fashion during the Roosevelt years, and much of the White House staff is opposed to it. It took multiple matchmakers and an elaborate courtship over a period of weeks before Hoover would come anywhere near the Oval Office. He knew he still had enemies in the neighborhood. If Truman had just happened to pick up the phone and summon his predecessor, how was it that the New York Times already knew about the meeting in that morning’s paper?
The real story was much more complicated. Hoover had been desperate to help as the war wound down. He just had certain conditions, since he knew how easily he could be undermined by Roosevelt’s palace guard, and he bore some grudges of his own. He’d been trying all through the spring to make his voice heard. He helped lead a nationwide drive to collect 150 million pounds of donated clothing. He blasted the inefficiency of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), formed the year before; if the agency couldn’t manage to get food to starving children, let the War Department take over. “It is now 11:59 on the clock of starvation,” he warned again and again. Apart from sheer humanitarian concern, the safety of American troops and the need for order required getting food to an increasingly desperate population.
On April 12, 1945, the day Roosevelt died, Hoover sent Truman a telegram. “All Americans will wish you strength for your gigantic task,” he cabled the new president. “You have the right to call for any service in aid of the country.”
Including, of course, his service. Truman wrote back a perfunctory note of thanks for the good wishes, but with a scrawled handwritten postscript: “I assure you I shall feel free to call upon you. Thanks for the offer.”
It was the opening Hoover had been waiting for: he told a friend that “now that there has been a change in Washington, I may be on the move often.” His hopes unleashed, he mused that if Truman would just name him secretary of war to replace the aging icon Henry Stimson, he’d be in the perfect position to get the relief where it was needed.
Republican congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce returned from a European tour aghast at the devastation and calling for appointment of some sort of “Super Hoover” to coordinate relief. And she was not alone. By early May, Stimson himself was playing matchmaker. A lifelong Republican who had served as Hoover’s secretary of state and as Taft’s, Roosevelt’s, and Truman’s secretary of war, he was a titanic figure in Washington—and the perfect presidential back channel. It’s time to call Hoover, he quietly urged Truman; the president, Stimson wrote in his diary, was “cordially acquiescent” to the idea, and made it sound like he was expecting Hoover to drop by any day now.
But no official invitation came. Friends urged Hoover to offer his help again. Over lunch, Bernard Baruch too pushed him to call Truman, “and for the fourth time,” Hoover recorded, “I had to explain that I would not go to Washington except at the direct invitation of the President.” Friends kept telling him that if he presented himself at the White House he would be warmly received and offered “a big job in Europe.” But Hoover was convinced they were playing games, resisting any official initiative in order to avoid offending “the left wingers.” If Truman wanted his advice, he could ask for it, the former president concluded. “Because of the pettiness and vindictiveness of the group in Washington . . . my own inclination was to tell them to all go to Hell.”
So on May 13, Stimson invited Hoover for Sunday lunch at his Long Island home: it was “very hush hush,” Hoover’s close friend Edgar Rickard wrote in his diary. Hoover did not hide his pride or bitterness. Democrats had been beating him up for years: if Truman wanted to mend fences he needed to do it properly. But he was softening; Hoover was impressed by the reports of Truman’s administrative style, and told Rickard he thought Truman would make a decent president “even though he is a Democrat.”
But when Stimson proposed later that week that Hoover come to Washington to see him and some aides to discuss the situation in Europe, Hoover balked. An informal lunch between old friends is one thing; this meeting sounded too official, and Hoover didn’t want to be seen as angling to get back inside. Stimson said he was “making a mountain out of a molehill.” But Hoover had been hearing reports of people around Truman who wanted to have nothing to do with him: press secretary Steve Early, a Roosevelt loyalist, was reported to have said that “if Hoover wanted anything he would have to come down on his knees to get it.”
This would come to be a club puzzle: how do you navigate the advisors who often have an interest in keeping presidents apart? Hoover knew his way around the White House, knew what can happen when a president wants to reach around his aides for advice. The only way he would get a real hearing internally was if Truman himself asked for it.
And so it was that on May 24, Truman personally mailed a letter, handwritten on White House stationery:
My dear Mr. President:
If you should be in Washington, I would be most happy to talk over the European food situation with you.
Also it would be a pleasure to me to become acquainted with you.
Most sincerely
Harry S Truman
That gesture would require Truman to do some blocking and tackling. The Roosevelt loyali
sts “had lost their leader and they were down in the dumps,” Truman observed. They were watching closely, keeping score of Truman’s departures from Roosevelt’s rules, and rehabilitating Herbert Hoover was a cardinal sin. He waited until the staff meeting the next morning to break the news. As aide Eben Ayers remembered it, “the president said he was going to tell us of something he had done last night on his own—and we might all throw bricks at him.”
Hoover wrote back immediately and the meeting was set for May 28; his friend Rickard observed that Hoover was “elated” at the invitation. In an editorial on the morning of the visit, the New York Times celebrated the foundation of the modern club: a summit that brings together “the two men who, working in concert, should be able to do more than any two men in America toward relieving the distress of 100,000,000 people. . . . Mr. Hoover’s advice has been available but unsought for a long time.”
Hoover arrived a little early, taking in the sights and smells of the halls he hadn’t seen in so long. He greeted employees who had served while he lived there. And then he greeted Truman in the Oval Office. His account of the meeting was much less moist than Truman’s later recollection.
Hoover approached problems like a clock to be dismantled, and so laid out for the president his sense of the food challenge and how to meet it. The next three months until the harvest would be key: it would take a million tons of wheat per month to stave off disaster. He reminded Truman that when Wilson put him in charge of relief after World War I, he had had the authority to cut through red tape, as well as the advantage of having the Big Four powers gathered at the peace talks in Paris to help break down any obstacles he encountered. “During the next ninety days . . . no organization could be formed that could cut through the maze of red tape except the Army.” He stressed the strategic imperative as well as the humanitarian one: “Bare subsistence meant hunger,” he told Truman, “and hunger meant Communism.”
At home, Hoover said, Truman should create an economic equivalent of the War Council to battle bureaucracy, develop policy, and relieve Truman of the burdens on him. And the agriculture secretary needed much more authority over how food was grown and distributed.
They talked about Japan, and how to sue for peace; they discussed the perils of a war with the Soviet Union. Truman asked if Hoover would write him a memo with his ideas.
The meeting lasted nearly an hour, which was noteworthy given that Truman was stingy with his time, cutting the length of cabinet meetings in half and holding most visitors to fifteen minutes. When they finished, Truman recalled, he invited Hoover to stay over at the White House if he wanted; Hoover thanked him, but said he preferred a hotel. “This is the same answer I would have given if I had been in his place,” Truman wrote later, but added that he made sure that every courtesy was extended to Hoover whenever he came to Washington.
The reporters who greeted Hoover afterward were eager to hear all about what had happened. There he stood, in front of the cameras again, with the press corps hanging on to what he had to say about his foray back into the heart of the action. It was a moment Hoover had been awaiting for a very long time. But in a gesture establishing the first club protocol, the former president let his successor shape the message. “The President of the United States has the right to make his own announcement concerning anything he may have said to visitors or what visitors have said to him.”
Truman did reap a political benefit. The Hoover visit, Time pronounced, was “as shrewd as it was generous. In one master stroke, he had won the applause of Republicans and had sharply reminded the nation of the immediate necessity of feeding Europe.” Hoover suspected there was more theater than substance to the effort. In his own notes he concluded that Truman “was simply endeavoring to establish a feeling of good will in the country.”
Hoover went back to the Waldorf to write the memos he had promised. Still skeptical of the palace guard, he sent them to Truman through his new press secretary, Charlie Ross, with a note: “I am sending it to you as I do not know how many hands these things go through under the present mechanism.” Ross made sure Truman got them, and the president in turn passed the memos around his cabinet, asking the State Department to analyze the Japanese peace proposal. He gave the military a stronger hand in the immense relief effort, laying the foundation for what he and Hoover would undertake the following year. Hoover publicly praised the president a week after their visit for doing an “admirable” job.
But it is Truman’s takeaway from the meeting that sheds the most light on a president’s unusual needs. It would be three days before he got around to writing about the meeting in his diary, and he had nothing much to say about food relief or Japan or anything else, other than that the discussions had been “pleasant and constructive.”
What stayed with him was what the two men shared about “the general troubles of U.S. Presidents—two in particular.”
Truman had once observed to his mother that Washington featured more divas per square foot than all the opera companies combined. Hoover knew something about that.
“We discussed our prima donnas and wondered what makes ’em. Some of my boys who came in with me are having trouble with their dignity and prerogatives. It’s hell when a man gets in close association with the President. Something happens to him.” This was even true of Truman’s old Senate comrades, who would stop by to chat and drink his bourbon, then go out and tell reporters how they were helping Harry save the world. “That publicity complex is hell and few can escape it here. When a good man comes along who hasn’t the bug I try to grab him.”
And what else was on the president’s mind that night, as the world bore down hard around him? The unique loneliness of being the most public man on the planet. That morning he had walked across the street to St. John’s Church and slipped into a back pew. He didn’t think more than six people recognized him. “I’m always so lonesome when the family leaves,” he wrote in his diary. “I have no one to raise a fuss over my neckties and my haircuts, my shoes and my clothes generally.”
In his note of thanks to Hoover, Truman added a postscript: “I appreciated very much your coming to see me. It gave me a lift.”
The Committee to Save the World
Two months later, Truman got to see for himself how bad things were in the war zone. During his August 1945 trip to the Potsdam Conference outside Berlin, he drove through flattened cities filled with sick, broken people living at the edge of despair. No war president, observed historian David McCullough, not Lincoln or Wilson or Roosevelt, had ever seen anything like what Truman confronted. Berlin was “an absolute ruin,” the president said. The empty look on people’s faces was haunting.
In the weeks that followed things got even worse; too many European farmers had been turned into soldiers, too much fertilizer had been diverted to make explosives, and too many farm machine factories had been converted to churn out munitions. By September it was clear that the harvest would be bad, and hunger a growing threat. The Soviets were showing how casually they viewed the provisions of international agreements, as they swallowed one weakened state after another. Meanwhile American workers were restless, the housing shortage critical, Truman’s cabinet partially mutinous, and many in Congress were shocked to find that Harry Truman was a liberal, after he sent up a sixteen-thousand-word message laying out his goals for health insurance, housing, education, unemployment, and the minimum wage that left Republicans and Southern Democrats growling.
Hoover and Truman continued to correspond, and the former president watched the fall wrestling matches with interest. “He does not have the abilities of his predecessor in adroit coercion and bribing with political spoils,” Hoover observed to a friend. Hoover could sympathize; he’d managed to alienate a Republican Congress during his presidency, to the point that even a friendly columnist declared him “the most left-footed President politically the world ever saw.”
And Truman wasn’t exactly enjoying himself. At Christmas he went home to Missouri with Be
ss, but that didn’t go very well. Back at the White House a few days later, he wrote her one of those cranky letters he had the good sense to stick in a drawer. “I’m here in the White House, the great white sepulcher of ambitions and reputations,” he began. Bess hadn’t been very supportive lately, he suggested, and he sounded frustrated. “No one ever needed help and assistance as I do now. If I can get the use of the best brains in the country and a little help from those I have on a pedestal at home, the job will be done.”
For at least one of his immediate problems, the “best brain” happened to be lodged in the head of Herbert Hoover. A few days later, on January 4, 1946, new British Labour prime minister Clement Attlee cabled Truman warning that widespread food panic was making the task of reconstruction massively harder. Europe’s wheat crop and Asia’s rice crop had come in below expectations; much of Holland was underwater from flooding where dams had been destroyed. There were food riots in Hamburg, looting in Sicily; Romanians and Hungarians were reduced to eating acorns. Drought and locusts wrecked crops in Africa and India, and even Canada’s wheat production was down 25 percent. Attlee, Truman said, “pleaded for my personal and active interest.”