by Nancy Gibbs
So one might have expected that the general election would unfold without the two men drawing blood. Truman professed to believe in gentlemanly campaigning. “If you can’t win an election without attacking people who’ve helped you and who’re friends of yours,” Truman once said, “it’s not worth winning.” But that was a belief he suspended as the contest reached a fever pitch.
Maybe the habit was just too entrenched—that the only Republican any living Democrat knew how to run against was Herbert Hoover. Truman cast the race as a battle between the common man with his small-town values, and the Republican “power lobby” looking to cheat him at every turn. In one speech he mentioned Hoover sixteen times; not once was it to praise him. If only Al Smith had beaten Hoover in 1928, Truman declared, “we and the world would have been spared untold misery and suffering.” After Dewey’s campaign train accidentally backed up into an Illinois crowd and Dewey called the engineer “a lunatic,” Truman couldn’t resist the analogy: he began referring to Hoover as an engineer who “backed the train all the way into the waiting room and brought us to panic, depression, and despair.”
To Truman, this may have been perfectly acceptable political jousting, but “Mr. Hoover was absolutely shocked,” recalled James Rowe. “He didn’t see how a man who had been so nice to him could say such things about him. But I’d say, ‘Mr. Hoover, this is politics, he’s got to do that.’”
“Well, I suppose he does,” said Hoover. It would have been small comfort, but Truman didn’t mean a word of what he was saying, he confessed to John Steelman, his chief of staff: “Hoover didn’t have any more to do with the Depression than you or I did.”
And all the while Hoover kept his weapons sheathed. It’s hard to imagine, through the lens of twenty-first-century political warfare, how a leader of one party could have lethal ammunition to use against the other and choose not to deploy it in the name of some larger good. If the material gathered by his commission had been shared with the Republicans during the presidential campaign, James Reston wrote once it was all over, it would have been “fairly inflammable [sic] stuff. Mr. Hoover and his staff, however, were scrupulous in keeping the enormous collection of facts about inefficiency, disorganization, duplication and waste under wraps until after the campaign was over.” Hoover appeared to steer by the principle that a successful overhaul of the presidency was more important than any individual campaign for it—even if that meant keeping the Democrats in the White House for four more years.
Mr. Truman’s Salesman
Truman went on to win his historic upset victory, with Hoover maintaining his dignified silence. There were rumors that he would resign from the commission; the Democrats won back control of Congress as well, which meant that the liberals on the commission, led by future secretary of state Dean Acheson, could now assert their power. Acheson urged that Truman just walk away from the whole effort.
By this time Hoover had invested fourteen months and countless hours, and produced some two million words to be boiled down to nineteen reports that would surely be picked apart in the press and the Congress. His best hope was that the sheer logic of the commission’s proposals would overcome arguments of privilege or partisanship.
Hoover asked Truman’s aide Webb to have lunch with him, and vented all his frustrations: they had worked so hard, and he’d been so sure there would be a Republican president in place to carry out their proposals, and now it was all lost.
“I just sort of let him have it,” Webb recalled. “I said, ‘This is no way for a former President to talk. If your work was good yesterday it will be good tomorrow. If you really believe yourself it’s good, I’ll get hold of Mr. Truman and see if we can’t continue our cooperation.’ Well, his face lit up in a smile—he thought he was going to be kicked around like FDR kicked him around.”
The two men walked together back to Webb’s office, still talking; then Webb placed a call to Truman, who was savoring his victory in Key West. Webb was convinced of how much more Truman stood to gain if he and Hoover joined forces, and laid out his argument in a memo to the president three days after the election.
Republicans had typically been suspicious of a strong presidency, Webb observed. But “based on my relations with Mr. Hoover . . . I believe there is now a possibility of getting the last Republican President to urge you to accept an . . . organization for executive responsibility that the Republican Party has historically denied to Presidents.
“If that can be managed,” Webb argued to Truman, “you will undoubtedly be able to achieve—with at least a show of bipartisan agreement—a new level of Presidential leadership . . . unknown in our history.”
Hoover seemed to have gotten religion on the question of whether the government was too big, or just too untidy. “Our job is to make every Government activity that now exists work efficiently,” he told reporters after the election. “It is not our function to say whether it should exist or not.” As though on cue—which, actually, it was—Truman came out the next day and publicly renewed his support for Hoover’s investigation. The executive branch “imposes handicaps on effective and economic administration and must be brought up to date,” Truman affirmed to Hoover. “The task, as you and I have seen from our experience, is to crystallize this general belief into concrete and wise proposals for action.”
A couple of weeks later both presidents privately promised to join forces. Truman all but offered a secret club handshake: “As soon as I can dig out from the letters of congratulations and things of that sort,” Truman wrote, “I’d like very much to have a conversation with you on the whole subject. I believe we can really accomplish some good results, as you and I are fully acquainted with what is necessary to make the Government run more efficiently.”
Hoover, however, remained suspicious of Truman’s delegates on the commission. “They went along until November election and then began giving trouble,” Rickard recorded in his diary after visiting with Hoover, “as undoubtedly any real, vicious New Dealer does not want the misrule of the last 15 years exposed.” Hoover came to suspect that the New Dealers were now working against Truman’s own interests in muscular reorganization. He continued to pour everything into the commission’s work, even as he doubted that any good would now come of it with the Democrats back fully in charge.
In the months that followed, the first commission reports were released to the public. Hoover faced a delicate political calculation, which wasn’t exactly his strong suit. He had to decide whether to ask for what he wanted, or for what he thought he could get. Should he water down his findings to appease Democrats, or let the chips fall?
Truman and Hoover met on January 7, 1949, to get down into the weeds; how many agencies to eliminate or streamline, how to get cabinet members to support the commission’s recommendations. You now had two presidents from different parties conspiring together to supercharge the powers of the office they had both held.
A week later Hoover went before Congress urging them to give Truman the power to restructure the executive without first asking the lawmakers’ permission, and without exempting certain agencies. The first report was submitted on February 7. The “critical state of world affairs,” it stated, required that the president have the ability to act decisively, and be held accountable to the people and to Congress. Hoover offered twenty-seven specific recommendations, including that some sixty-five departments and agencies that reported directly to the president be cut down by two thirds. Congress would still have the right to reject any reorganization within sixty days by a majority vote.
In the past, protecting its patronage powers and influence, Congress had always resisted granting the president such blanket authority. When Roosevelt sought more modest reforms, he was charged with dreaming of an “Executive dictatorship.” But there had never been a study that approached in scale or comprehensiveness what Hoover had produced, nor had the need and timing been so suited to reform. Finally, columnist Arthur Krock wrote, “none has gone to the Capitol with
such powerful . . . sponsorship as that jointly assumed by a President fresh from a great election triumph and a former president who is acknowledged to be the greatest living authority on the functioning of the American government.” In other words, never before had a president and former president joined forces to defend the Oval Office agenda against the parochial interests of the rest of Washington. This was, in fact, the first true test of the club’s potential.
On February 7, 1949, the day Hoover submitted his first report, the House approved a reorganization bill. The Times called it “one of the most remarkable votes taken in that branch of Congress in years. Here was a measure which challenged inertia, defied tradition and gave the president power to undo . . . some of the favorite handiwork of Congress itself. Yet it was approved by the almost unprecedented margin of 356 to 9.”
In the weeks that followed, the commission submitted further reports on restructuring the State Department, unifying the national security and defense apparatus, bringing logic to agriculture programs, and centralizing purchasing authority to reduce excess inventories and waste. Based on the commission’s recommendations, Truman sent one reorganization plan after another to the Hill for approval, and Hoover continued to lobby as the two corresponded throughout the summer. Testifying before the Senate in July, Hoover brushed back challenges to the president’s plans: “Senator, don’t try to create any difference between the President and myself,” Hoover chided Louisiana’s Democratic senator Russell Long, “because the President has been most cooperative in this whole work.”
Rebirth of a President
Given the scope of the recommendations, it would take years before they were fully enacted; but eventually fully 70 percent of the Hoover Commission’s proposals went into effect, providing the president with enhanced powers, reduced legislative interference, and a streamlined chain of command—as well as savings conservatively estimated in the billions. As late as 1961, notes historian Richard Norton Smith, Kennedy’s Defense chief, Robert McNamara, thanked Hoover for helping save billions in the Pentagon budget.
And so it went: an unlikely partnership had produced a new kind of presidency. It was an arrangement that favored them both; by 1951, Truman and Hoover ranked three and five on Gallup’s list of Most Admired Men. Together, the two presidents had pushed through the greatest transformation of the presidency in history. A commission created to kill the New Deal instead helped save it, by making the structures it created more effective. In fact, on his last night in office in 1953, Truman was said to have observed proudly that he had reinvented the White House office in such a manner that no future president could make a mistake.
Truman left office convinced that former presidents still had much to give after their terms had ended. “A man who has the experience of a President, or a Vice President, or a Speaker of the House, gets a chance to become much more familiar with our government than anyone else,” he wrote years later. “These are the men to whom we must look for help and counsel. That is why we must not shelve or thrust into obscurity men with such unique experience. And least of all, our former Presidents.”
Of course when Truman wrote this, he too was a former president, who had by then watched a former friend and ally take over the office and show little inclination to heed his advice. Upon Dwight Eisenhower’s election in 1952, the club finally had two retired members, and this time they were actually friends. It was a friendship that deepened over the next decade, enlivened in part by their surprising mutual antagonism toward the general who had taken over the job. Truman, observed his budget director, Frank Pace, “really gave Mr. Hoover all of the honors and attentions due a former President . . . I know that Mr. Hoover was most appreciative of it. Although they were quite different kinds of men, I know how deeply Mr. Truman’ s treatment affected him.”
From Partners to Friends
Out of office, their political battles behind them, Hoover and Truman continued to correspond; they visited together in New York, Independence, and Key Largo, and consulted on official club business as needed. Since they were frequently enlisted to lend their names and prestige to various causes, Hoover proposed protocols, lest they get drawn into unworthy enterprises: “I think we need an agreement,” he wrote to Truman, “that we will not allow promoters of causes to trap us into joint actions for their schemes without our having prior consultations.”
Truman invited Herbert Hoover to his presidential library dedication in July of 1957. Shaping one’s legacy is the mission they all share—even when they find themselves doing it at one another’s expense. Among the modern presidents, the workshop where legacies are polished and framed is their libraries, and so the first presidents to build them took an enormous interest in one another’s efforts.
Hoover, rearranging his travel plans, promised to be on hand “except for acts of God or evil persons,” since “one of the important jobs of our exclusive trade union is preserving libraries.”
“Yours was one of the nicest letters I have received,” Truman wrote back, “and, as we say in Missouri, I am all swelled up about it.”
“I feel that I am one of his closest friends,” Truman said when it was his turn to help dedicate Hoover’s library in 1962, “and he is one of my closest friends.” The two men exchanged the books they were writing; upon receiving a copy of Truman’s latest, Hoover wrote back the most heartfelt and intimate of all the letters they exchanged. The book, he said, “goes into the file of most treasured documents.” And he proceeded to unspool a tribute to his Democratic friend that belied both his political instincts and his deep Quaker reserve:
This is an occasion when I should like to add something more, because yours has been a friendship which has reached deeper into my life than you know.
I gave up a successful profession in 1914 to enter public service. I served through the First World War and after for a total of about 18 years.
When the attack on Pearl Harbor came, I at once supported the President and offered to serve in any useful capacity. Because of my varied experiences during the First World War, I thought my services might again be useful, however there was no response. My activities in the Second World War were limited to frequent requests from Congressional committees.
When you came to the White House within a month you opened the door to me to the only profession I knew, public service, and you undid some disgraceful action that had been taken in the prior years.
For all of this and your friendship, I am deeply grateful.
If Hoover and Truman could forge such a bond, there was no telling what two presidents who actually had something in common might do together.
EISENHOWER AND TRUMAN:
Careful Courtship, Bitter Breakup
Some presidents—a Lincoln, an FDR—achieve Olympian status in office, though neither of those lived to leverage it later. But alone among twentieth-century figures—or really any figure other than Washington—Dwight Eisenhower was bigger than the office before he even held it. In his role as Supreme Allied Commander during the war, he had faced burdens and pressures comparable to those of a head of state—heavier, in fact, than many presidents ever face. And so when it came to solace or guidance from his presidential predecessors, his needs were minimal. As for polishing his legacy, he was the rare president who both entered and left office more popular than any man alive.
That made him a particularly powerful member of the club he never really set out to join.
Eisenhower and Truman met in 1945 at the hinge of history, just weeks after Truman had taken office and Eisenhower had defeated the Nazis. Together they built the scaffolding of the American Century, reviving Europe, reforming the armed forces, establishing NATO, and building a national security structure to meet the challenge of the Cold War. Eisenhower called their friendship “priceless”—until it all fell apart in the hot campaign of 1952, the moment the general hung up his uniform, turned into a politician, and came quickly to find that among his fiercest enemies was his old friend Harr
y Truman. The fight was never really about policy, or even politics; the hostility was deeply and devoutly personal, the conviction on Truman’s part that Eisenhower, though a great soldier, was a moral coward for failing to confront the worst elements in his party. Ike would grow just as contemptuous of Truman—a contempt, however, mixed with some measure of guilt that on at least one scarring occasion, Truman was right.
By inauguration day 1953, they were barely speaking. For a decade they alternated between ignoring and insulting each other. It would have to wait until they were both out of office and found themselves suddenly riding side by side—in the funeral procession for the man who replaced them—for the club to make peace.
3
“The News Hounds Are Trying to Drive a Wedge Between Us”
—HARRY TRUMAN
Useful as a former president like Hoover could be to a rookie chief executive, a future president’s star power proved just as valuable.
In 1945, one month after Truman turned to Hoover for help, he made the acquaintance of the hero of Western civilization, General Dwight David Eisenhower, who was every bit as revered as Hoover had been reviled. In those two men, Truman found the allies who would help him shape the postwar world.