by Nancy Gibbs
Like millions of his countrymen, when Eisenhower heard the news of Harry Truman’s sudden vault into the presidency upon Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, he admitted that he “went to bed depressed and sad.”
It was nothing personal—he had never met the vice president, and Eisenhower had not been one of Roosevelt’s pets. But to him and the other generals, “this seemed to us . . . to be a most critical time to be forced to change national leaders.” He knew better than most people the weight that was about to fall on Truman’s shoulders, the new threats rising even as a great enemy was finally routed. Just a few weeks later Eisenhower was accepting the German surrender in a small red-brick schoolhouse in northeastern France, the signal, Winston Churchill said, “for the greatest outburst of joy in the history of mankind.” And on June 18, 1945, Truman gave thousands of government employees the afternoon off so they could burst out themselves, and greet the supreme commander of what was being called the greatest victory in the history of warfare.
A million people jammed the hot, flag-wrapped streets of Washington, hung from windows, perched in trees to watch the parade and celebrate at last. Eisenhower arrived in a four-engine Skymaster at Washington’s National Airport, where Mamie waited for the husband she had seen only once in the last three years. He ran down the steps, caught her in his arms, and kissed her. Twenty bands played; dozens of fighter planes and bombers flew overhead in escort as the parade made its way through the capital. A “rush and storm of joy” swept the city, the New York Times marveled. “Stand up, so they can see you!” urged General George Marshall. So he stood in his jeep as it moved down Pennsylvania Avenue, his arms raised, delighted, embarrassed, his grin almost wider than his face.
“Isn’t he handsome?” said the voice in the crowd.
“He waved at me.”
“He’s marvelous.”
Ike arrived at the Capitol to address a joint session of Congress, the cabinet, ambassadors, and the justices of the Supreme Court, as though he were delivering his first State of the Union, only to an audience far more worshipful than any president of either party had ever faced. Yet every wave and bow, he insisted again and again, he made only as a representative of the three million soldiers he commanded. “They who earned your commendation should properly be here to receive it,” he said, but, “I am nevertheless proud and honored to be your agent in conveying it to them.” And the chamber erupted in a great rolling cheer.
“The U.S. liked what it saw,” Time swooned, “a kindly, common-sense man; a warrior who remembered that he was a citizen; a son of the Middle-West, unhardened by war, unspoiled by fame.”
That afternoon the towering hero of the age would meet for the first time the “little haberdasher.” That was not an easy day for the rookie president. “I have to decide Japanese strategy,” Truman wrote in his diary the night before. “That is my hardest decision to date.” He met with his War Cabinet to discuss the costs of mounting an invasion of the Japanese home islands—and the chance that more than a quarter million U.S. soldiers and many more Japanese civilians would die. Unless fate intervened. “We are approaching an experiment with the atom explosion,” Truman recorded. “I was informed that event would take place within a possible 30 days.”
At least the other war was over, and Truman, almost a bystander on a day of adulation, got to thank Eisenhower personally. In a ceremony on the White House lawn, Truman added a second oak leaf cluster to the general’s Distinguished Service Medal, praising “his modesty, his impartiality and sound judgment . . . and his great abilities as a soldier and a diplomat.” But his private message was more revealing. Truman, whose bad eyesight had prevented his attending West Point, who had had to memorize the eye chart in order to enlist in the Missouri National Guard, who at age thirty-three left his farm and family to command a field artillery battery in France during World War I and saw some of the most intense fighting of the war, pulled the great general aside: I’d rather have the medal, he whispered to Eisenhower, than the presidency.
Truman invited Eisenhower to a stag dinner at the White House that night, “as simple and homey as a community supper in Missouri,” said Eisenhower’s aide Harry Butcher. At Ike’s table were Secretary of War Stimson, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, Chief Justice Harlan Stone, Marshall, and Truman himself. “It had been General Ike’s first opportunity to visit with the new president, although he had seen him briefly that afternoon,” Butcher said. “What he saw and heard, he liked.”
Truman felt the same way. “He is a nice fellow and a good man,” Truman wrote home to Bess, calling the dinner “a grand success.”
“He’s doing a whale of a job,” he went on, and already the political implications were apparent. “They are running him for president, which is ok with me. I’d turn it over to him now if I could.”
And so for the first of many times, Truman imagined stepping aside for a man who people were already calling “Our Next President.” Eisenhower didn’t think this even merited a response. “There’s no use denying that I’ll fly to the moon because I couldn’t if I wanted to,” he said. “The same goes for politics.”
Had that resolve remained untested, the story of Truman and Eisenhower’s jagged relationship might have a very different ending.
Brothers in Arms
Where Hoover and Truman could hardly have been more different, Truman and Eisenhower had much in common. Raised 150 miles apart in solid families, both nearly died from illness as children, and both watched their fathers lose everything in a business calamity. Truman and Eisenhower’s brother Arthur had even been roommates in a boardinghouse in Kansas City in 1905. Both married women of higher social standing, and launched themselves in careers (or in Truman’s case, multiple careers) with no particular flavor of destiny about them. They were avid readers of history, though Truman’s preferred relaxation would be at the piano, Eisenhower’s at an easel. Both were late bloomers, who owed their ultimate glory to Franklin Roosevelt but were never in his inner circle and bridled at his deviousness. Both were patriots, ever and instinctively putting their country before their comfort and convenience; and both were ardent internationalists whose roots in, and love for, the American heartland did not prevent them from embracing a new role for the young superpower in a suddenly more dangerous nuclear age.
When they met, however, both were public men, and the stature gap between them was vast. While Truman’s popularity was high in 1945, he was never revered the way Ike was, and quickly came to be derided by critics as mediocre, insignificant. He was one of history’s “wild accidents,” wrote liberal columnist Max Lerner, “whose basic weakness lies in his failure to understand imaginatively the nature and greatness of the office he holds.” He was surrounded by “moochers” and “big bellied, good-natured guys who knew a lot of dirty jokes,” charged the ecumenically lethal columnist I. F. Stone. Far from feeling like the seat of a great democracy, Truman’s White House, columnist Joseph Alsop observed, was like “the lounge of the Lions Club of Independence, Missouri,” rank with the odor of “ten cent cigars.”
Eisenhower, on the other hand, had by this time earned the adulation not just of privates and sergeants but kings and queens and heads of state, all of whom jostled to shower honors on him: the French Legion of Honour, Grand Croix, the British Order of Merit (never before bestowed on a foreigner), the Greek Royal Order of the Savior, the Danish Order of the Elephant, even the Soviets’ diamond- and ruby-studded Order of Victory.
As Eisenhower would later tell the story, Truman first offered to serve as his political patron that same summer of 1945, when they met again during Truman’s trip to Potsdam. They were driving with General Omar Bradley, discussing what the war’s leaders would do with themselves in peacetime. Ike affirmed that he had no ambition beyond retiring to a quiet home—at which point Truman declared, “General, there is nothing that you may want that I won’t try to help you get. That definitely and specifically includes the presidency in 1948.”
“I doubt that any soldier of
our country was ever so suddenly struck in his emotional vitals by a President with such an apparently sincere and certainly astounding proposition as this,” Eisenhower recalled. So he laughed it off.
“Mr. President, I don’t know who will be your opponent for the presidency,” he said, “but it will not be I.” If Truman, a faithful Democrat, was listening closely, that mention of “your opponent” should have clarified at the very least which party Ike identified with—an allegiance he would not profess publicly for another seven years.
The men parted in Germany with a renewed sense of mutual admiration, though Eisenhower’s respect was as much for the office as the man who held it, and he was not above a certain amount of ingratiation. Eisenhower called Truman “sincere, earnest, and a most pleasant person with whom to deal.” Once back in Washington, Truman was surprised to find a gift awaiting him: the immense globe he had admired at Eisenhower’s headquarters, with the engraving: “Presented to President Harry S Truman by General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower, who personally used this globe throughout the campaign of 1942–1945.”
Years later, when things had turned bad and the notion of Eisenhower in the Oval Office was anathema to Truman, he’d repeatedly deny making any offer of political support. “I told him how grateful the American people were for the job he’d done, and we talked about the fact that a lot of wartime heroes get into politics,” Truman reported. “And he said that under no circumstances was he going to get into politics at any time. And that’s all there was to it.” But Bradley confirmed Ike’s account, as did Truman himself to reporters covering him at the time.
And it would not be the last time Truman would try to tempt the charismatic general into a new line of work—provided, of course, that Eisenhower would reveal himself to be a good Democrat under all that brass. Partly this reflected Truman’s modesty; he developed a deeper respect for the general as they tackled together some of the toughest challenges of the postwar era: the reconstruction of Europe, the resettlement of the Jews, the trial of war criminals, the ambitions of the Soviets. When George Marshall stepped down as army chief of staff in 1946, Truman tapped Eisenhower to take his place: “I told him I’d much rather retire,” Eisenhower recalled, “but he said he had special need of me at the moment.”
Retooling a war machine for peacetime was no small assignment, at a time when wives were sending baby shoes tagged “bring daddy back” to congressional offices and riots were erupting overseas among soldiers demanding a boat home. Eisenhower appreciated Truman’s commitment to returning veterans, his push for housing, health care, for the GI Bill; at one point veterans services consumed 20 percent of the federal budget. The reorganization of the armed forces was a priority for both men: while the Army favored unification, the Navy and allies in Congress were largely opposed. Truman stood little chance of getting a new structure past various congressional fiefdoms without Eisenhower as his offensive lineman. But it was a mission that required compromises and retreats and frustrations, a far less gratifying one than leading a wartime crusade. One day late in 1946, Eisenhower sent Truman a bottle of scotch: “I think I’ll inhale it rather than pass it out to these ‘thugs’ who hang around here and drink my whiskey,” Truman wrote in thanks. “Maybe you and I could think up an occasion when we could share it.”
The two worked well together, though their dealings were largely formal. The following year, when the trustees of Columbia University offered Eisenhower their presidency, he accepted it with Truman’s blessing. “What a job he can do there,” Truman wrote in his diary in July of 1947, after a long talk with the general. Among other things, Truman recalled, the two had discussed the political ambitions of another general: Truman’s brilliant, cantankerous Supreme Commander in Asia, Douglas MacArthur. They mused that MacArthur planned to make a triumphal return to the United States just in time for the 1948 Republican convention.
“I told Ike that if he did that that he [Ike] should announce for the nomination for President on the Democratic ticket and that I’d be glad to be in second place, or Vice President,” Truman wrote. “Ike & I could be elected and my family & myself would be happy outside this great white jail, known as the White House.”
The conversation ended with an understanding: Ike won’t quote me, Truman vowed, “and I won’t quote him.” Eisenhower, in his own diary, called the talk “astounding. . . . I wonder whether five years from now HT will (or will want to) remember his amazing suggestion!!”
You have to wonder if Truman foresaw the potential of political ambitions to pull the friends apart. On January 1, 1948, Eisenhower called Truman to wish him happy new year. He noted in his diary how Truman had said to him, “Ike, no matter what you do or whatever your plans, let us both resolve that nothing shall ever mar our personal friendship.”
The Roosevelt Rebellion
Truman was one of the very few people who took the general at his word when he said he wasn’t interested. “All journalists know that political life can be rugged,” Eisenhower observed, “yet each assumes, automatically, that every man who has the chance wants to get into political life and that anyone who denies such ambition is a liar.” But it wasn’t just the journalists. A majority of people, according to one 1947 poll, didn’t even know which party he belonged to—and didn’t seem to care. Beginning that fall and into the election year of 1948, polls showed that while Truman would narrowly defeat the likely Republican nominee, whether New York governor Thomas Dewey or Ohio senator Robert Taft, Eisenhower would crush them all. “Draft Eisenhower” groups vowed to enter his name in the New Hampshire and Pennsylvania primaries whether he liked it or not.
“The tossing about of my name in the political whirlwind is becoming embarrassing,” he wrote in his diary in January of 1948. But acting coy was just assumed to be part of the game, and reporters insisted the general was enjoying the circus. Laying a wreath on Ben Franklin’s grave, he was stopped by a man wearing a “Draft Eisenhower” button in his lapel. “Take that thing off and throw it away,” Eisenhower said. But, one reporter remarked, “he wore his widest grin as he said it.” A week later he had officially and emphatically bowed out of the race he had never actually entered, in a letter to a New Hampshire publisher who had been stirring the draft movement. Among his reasons: a reluctance to campaign against his commander in chief, who, he knew, would put up a tough fight; a general distaste for partisan politics; and a conviction that “generals in politics were bad for the nation and bad for the Army.” He affirmed that politics was a noble profession, then added, in what he’d later call “a model case of a cracked crystal ball: ‘My decision to remove myself completely from the political scene is definite and positive.’”
That same day, he resigned as Army chief, and prepared to take up his life as a college president. In a warm letter to Truman, Eisenhower observed that “your encouragement, understanding and above all, your friendship, have always been priceless to me.”
This might have been the end of Eisenhower’s political career. The Republicans were so convinced they were finally going to win the White House back from the increasingly unpopular Truman that party leaders didn’t actually want to deal with an immensely popular war hero whose views they didn’t know and whose actions they couldn’t control. They were quite happy with Dewey as their standard-bearer. It was the Democrats who sparked the first political battle between Truman and Eisenhower—as it happened, against the wishes of both men.
As the Democrats approached their 1948 party convention, many were concluding that, in the words of one New York delegate, “Our dear President Truman, of whom we are all so fond, cannot possibly be reelected.” Party bosses and big-city mayors and sitting senators called on him to retire. True-believing liberals were breathing fire: “You have the choice of retiring voluntarily and with dignity,” Roosevelt’s faithful advisor Harold Ickes wrote to Truman, “or of being driven out of office by a disillusioned and indignant citizenry.” Editorial writers were less delicate. He is “an incompete
nt,” declared the conservative Chicago Tribune, “the most complete fumbler and blunderer this nation has seen in high office in a long time,” said the Los Angeles Times.
And now the surviving Roosevelts arose in mutinous assault. “No President in memory, not even Herbert Hoover in his darkest days,” wrote historian David McCullough, “had been treated with such open contempt by his own party.” Ten days before the convention opened, Roosevelt’s sons Franklin and James and wife, Eleanor, spurred the newly formed Americans for Democratic Action to launch a Dump Truman movement, and recruit—of all people—Eisenhower to lead their crusade.
Thus did the family of a former president turn their fire on his handpicked successor. They sent telegrams to every Democratic delegate, dangling Ike’s name as the alternative to Truman and hoping to win enough delegates to block him on the first ballot. Never mind that Eisenhower had no interest in being a stalking horse—or a Democrat. “Here was President Truman who had met every liberal test that existed in that period,” recalled presidential advisor Clark Clifford, “and here was supposedly the professional liberal organization who demonstrated their true colors. They weren’t interested in a liberal candidate; they were interested in the candidate who they thought could win.”
So once again, Eisenhower was forced to step up and flatly declare that “I will not at this time identify myself with any political party and could not accept nomination for any public office or participate in partisan political contests.” As for Truman, he had come to like the job, and he loved a good fight, with Southern Democrats who didn’t like his stand on civil rights, with New Dealers who felt he’d abandoned them, with the city bosses who worried he’d lose so badly they’d be tossed out as well.
“When the President in the White House decides he wants to be renominated,” Truman said later, “nobody can keep him from it.”