by Nancy Gibbs
They talked about the fighting in Korea, and agreed on the need for continuity on foreign policy. But Truman also tried to prepare Eisenhower for what lay ahead—give him a window into the office and the keys to success in it. He needed to find a skilled diplomat as his appointments secretary, Truman advised, who was “able to say ‘No’ nine tenths of the time and make no one angry.” He’d need a shrewd press secretary able to keep reporters in line. Then they went to the Cabinet Room, where the secretaries of state, defense, and treasury briefed him and answered questions.
Truman came away from the meeting convinced that Eisenhower had had a rude awakening to the ordeal ahead; that he was “awestruck by the long array of problems and decisions the President has to face. If that is so, I can also understand his frozen grimness through our meeting.”
Ike reported no such reaction: the meeting, he said, “added little to my knowledge, nor did it affect my planning.”
Watching the tension between the two men, Acheson was puzzled. Eisenhower’s easy charm was nowhere in evidence. “He seemed embarrassed and reluctant to be with us—wary, withdrawn, and taciturn to the point of surlinesss,” Acheson observed. “Sunk back in a chair facing the President across the Cabinet table, he chewed the earpiece of his spectacles and occasionally asked for a memorandum on a matter that caught his attention.”
Before Ike left, Truman handed him three loose-leaf volumes summarizing U.S. security policies and top secret plans in case of an all-out communist attack on Korea, Yugoslavia, or Iran. Talking with his staff, he imagined what awaited his successor. “He’ll sit here and he’ll say, ‘Do this, do that,’ and nothing will happen. Poor Ike. It won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”
He savored the prospect of Eisenhower’s steep learning curve once the burdens of the office fell on his shoulders. “This fellow,” he told reporters as inauguration day approached, “don’t know any more about politics than a pig knows about Sunday.”
The closer inauguration day drew, the happier Truman became. “Why you’d have thought the President won the election, the way he acts,” a White House valet told the Washington Post. He seemed unbothered by the shadow of so bitter a campaign, the prospect of moving out, the complete uncertainty about the future. Even his critics, like columnist Walter Lippmann, would say that “in the manner of his going, Mr. Truman has been every inch the President, conscious of the great office and worthy of it.” But one critic—the one who was about to take his place—refused to see this.
No Top Hats
Inauguration day is democracy’s secular feast day, a celebration of pride and patriotism and the peace that follows partisan warfare. But there is also a long history of gale winds on those mornings, often inside the White House itself. And so it was in 1953, which may rank as the most rancorous inauguration day of the twentieth century. Ike had warned an aide that “I’ll never ride down Pennsylvania Avenue with him. I’ll meet him at the Capitol steps.”
That’s very nearly what happened.
The first fight was sartorial; custom demanded that the president-elect wear a top hat and cutaway coat. “It’s this sort of thing where everybody goes over to a tailor and for the day hires an outfit with an ascot tie,” correspondent Robert Nixon recalled. But Eisenhower rejected the top hat in favor of a homburg—without conferring with his predecessor. Truman acceded graciously—“I don’t want to get into any hat controversy,” he told the Washington Post, but he later wrote that he felt the occasion of an inauguration warranted more formal attire. (For the record: Ike wore a morning coat for Kennedy’s inauguration eight years later.)
Eisenhower was aiming for a “simple and dignified” celebration, but it was just the nature of the times, so much pent-up celebratory fervor and hunger for a change, that it turned out to be one of the biggest, costliest, longest extravaganzas the capital had seen in years. It was a beautiful sunny day; three quarters of a million people lined Pennsylvania Avenue, some peering over the crowds through cardboard periscopes.
By custom the incoming president comes to the White House to pick up his predecessor and ride together to the Capitol. But Eisenhower sent word that he wanted Truman to come pick him up at the Statler Hotel. “Well, I wouldn’t do it of course,” Truman recalled. Bess Truman had prepared a small luncheon for the Eisenhowers. “We were disappointed when the invitation was refused and the custom ignored.” Eisenhower pulled up just in time to head to the Capitol—and even then, he refused to get out of the limousine. Ike could be an unforgiving enemy—but this was especially graceless in victory. Only when the Trumans emerged did Eisenhower get out of the car. “It was a shocking moment,” said CBS newsman Eric Sevareid. “Truman was gracious and he had just been snubbed. He showed his superiority by what he did.”
So it was a frosty ride to the ceremony. “It’s interesting that a single thing, that great smile of Eisenhower’s, gave him the worldwide and lifelong reputation of being a sunny and amiable man,” Truman reflected, “when those of us who knew him well were all too well aware that he was essentially a surly, angry and disagreeable man.”
When they reached the Capitol, they went to the sergeant at arms office to await their summons to the platform. It was at this point that Eisenhower turned to Truman and asked: “I wonder who is responsible for my son John being ordered to Washington from Korea? I wonder who is trying to embarrass me?”
“The President of the United States ordered your son to attend your inauguration,” Truman replied. “The President thought it was right and proper for your son to witness the swearing-in of his father to the presidency. If you think somebody was trying to embarrass you by this order, then the President assumes full responsibility.”
If you were to judge only by the letter Eisenhower wrote three days later, he was actually grateful for Truman’s thoughtful gesture in bringing John home for the occasion. He thanked Truman for “the very many courtesies you extended me,” all his efforts to smooth the transition, and also, “on the personal side, I especially want to thank you for your thoughtfulness in ordering my son home from Korea for the inauguration; and even more so for not allowing either him or me to know that you had done so.” Truman wrote back by hand: “It was a pleasure to help all I could in the orderly transfer from my administration to yours. I would never have mentioned the incident of your son, had you not asked me about it.”
Maybe the letters were perfunctory gestures of statesmen; maybe there was a momentary truce that simply couldn’t last. For whatever reason, the incident became another flashpoint between the two men. “Eisenhower didn’t like it,” Robert Nixon said. “He felt that Truman was interfering in his private life and the life of his family. Even more than that, Truman was calling his son back from an atmosphere of combat. He felt his son should be there fighting. . . . Under no circumstances did he want his son to be called back to Washington just to see his father inaugurated President.
“Truman, of course, was flabbergasted,” Nixon went on. “Here, out of the kindness of his heart, and a genuine feeling for family, he had made what he thought was a nice gesture. For whatever were the reasons, this turned out to be another breach between these two men. One trying to be nice, thoughtful and kind, and the other resenting it.”
It was all so bitter that Truman wondered whether he and Bess would be left to walk to the train station when the ceremonies were over. But the White House provided a ride, and the crowd waiting at Union Station to send him off was so big he had trouble getting to his train. “Make way for the President,” boomed the public address system. People cheered and sang “Auld Lang Syne.” “In all my political career I have never had anything like this,” Truman said. “I’ll never forget it if I live to be a hundred, and that’s just what I expect to do.”
He was a man with great hopes but few plans and less money. He had already turned down various lucrative offers, since he didn’t want to cheapen the presidency by selling his name. But he had a model to steer by.
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“I think Herbert Hoover has handled himself perfectly,” he declared.
Truman in Exile
The first time the Trumans returned to Washington, in June of 1953, reporters asked if he’d visit Eisenhower. No, said Truman lightly, “He’s too busy to see every Tom, Dick and Harry that comes to town.” When asked at a county fair why he’d been so mild in his post-presidential statements, he smiled and observed, “If we point out the Republicans’ errors, they might mend their ways, and we would not have the chance to take them to task.”
Besides, he was enjoying himself. Truman’s retirement offered him the chance to rest, to travel, to reflect on his journey; he visited Churchill in London, received an honorary degree from Oxford, had an audience with Pope Pius XII, played Mozart’s piano in Salzburg.
But over time, the silence from the White House became conspicuous. Eisenhower never called to ask advice or offer a visit; he seemed intent, in fact, on erasing all signs of Truman ever having served there. Truman’s portrait was removed from public rooms, along with his piano, and a favorite chandelier; the bowling alleys built by friends of Truman’s from Missouri were taken out. This fight, Fletcher Knebel wrote in Look magazine, “is no ordinary case of ruffled feelings in the wake of a heated political contest, but one of the real hell-for-leather grudges of our era.”
Relations were so tense in the fall of 1953 that a furor erupted simply over whether Eisenhower ignored a phone call from Truman when the president was visiting Kansas City. Ike was staying at the Muehlebach Hotel, where Truman regularly had lunch with friends. According to Truman, he called the hotel to pay his respects to the president: “I was very curtly told that the President’s time was all taken up and that there was no opportunity for that to happen.”
Some Eisenhower aides suggested that Truman never called; others blamed a hotel operator, who allegedly said that when Truman identified himself, he replied, “And I’m Julius Caesar.” Ike’s friend George Allen recalled Eisenhower ordering the Secret Service to look into what had happened. Years later during the 1960 campaign, the issue was still tender. “Oh, that was wrong,” Richard Nixon told Edward Folliard. “The President should have called up Mr. Truman and told him he was sorry, and that would have ended the whole thing.” As for Eisenhower himself, years later when he was working on his memoirs, he was still convinced Truman had invented the whole incident. “The man is a congenital liar,” he told his aide William Ewald.
But it was not just the call; within two months a far more serious assault was under way, by Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell. He opened an investigation into whether Truman had knowingly promoted a Soviet spy named Harry Dexter White to become executive director of the International Monetary Fund. “The effort of Herbert Brownell to picture Mr. Truman as a traitor,” argued Truman’s aide Clayton Fritchey, is “one of the ugliest chapters in our history.” Eisenhower had to have given his consent, Fritchey charged, because “having told the country that Washington was teeming with Communists and security risks, they had to find some.”
Things got so out of hand that Truman was subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee; he refused, on the grounds that the charge was pure political payback, and an appearance abridged the doctrine of separation of powers. He spoke on television instead, defending himself in a national address against what he called “shameful demagoguery” in the service of “cheap political trickery.”
That showdown is worth noting for the tone it set and the precedents it left. The power of the president had increased immensely during the 1930s and 1940s; so the power of former presidents increased as well. Truman was the first to claim executive privilege for the ex-president; constitutional experts debated his premise, but the public was on his side. He never appeared, and the investigation was dropped. Decades later, Richard Nixon would have Truman to thank for the foundation he laid.
So it went, throughout Eisenhower’s presidency. When Truman, living on a tiny military pension, published the first volume of his memoirs in 1955, Eisenhower declined to return the favor Truman had granted him as amateur author; Truman had to pay two thirds of the royalties in income taxes. Upon Ike’s overwhelming reelection in 1956, Truman wrote another letter he never sent, which signed off with “Best of luck and may the honest Democrats and Liberal Republicans save you from disaster.” In his private writings, he made his feelings plain: “I’m not one of Eisenhower’s admirers. I’m sure he has some, perhaps many, though for the life of me I can’t tell you why.” Soldiers just aren’t suited to be president, he said; too hierarchical, too divorced from civilian reality.
But his greatest objection appears to have been born of rejection. Presidents, he argued, need to build on the successes of their predecessors, “and not try to abandon them simply because the previous president . . . belonged to a different political party.” And then he laid out the essential challenge of club membership, where the public and private demands collide.
“Most Presidents don’t seem to want to talk to former presidents,” Truman admitted. “And from my own experience, I know that’s pretty natural behavior. A new president wants to be president on his own hook and not have a former president around trying to give him advice. It’s customary for the president, after he’s elected, to want to run things himself. . . . But the really terrible thing is when a president sets out to actively discredit the policies of the former president, and that’s what happened when I was succeeded by Dwight Eisenhower.”
Eisenhower could be petty to the point of hostility—as when the White House asked Herbert Hoover not to attend Truman’s library dedication in 1957. Roosevelt’s press secretary and later radio advisor Leonard Reinsch was assigned to herd the dignitaries at the dedication ceremony and told Hoover how gracious he was to be there. “I wouldn’t miss it,” Hoover told him, having ignored the administration’s request. Eisenhower sent Truman a “congratulatory” letter, to be read by the General Services administrator, that was so chilly “you could almost see the icicles on it on a hot July day,” said Reinsch.
“President Eisenhower still harbors a fierce personal distaste for his once generous patron,” concluded the Chicago Daily News. “Only if he had sent the GSA employee who is up for night watchman at the library could Mr. Eisenhower have expressed his cold detachment more pointedly.”
Meanwhile Truman would continue to hammer at Ike and his domestic policies all through the campaigns of the 1950s—but he also took opportunities to come to the president’s defense on some matters of club principle. In 1958, with the economy in recession, Eisenhower was attacked for using a government plane to take Mamie to an Elizabeth Arden resort in Arizona. Truman, who had once been criticized for using the plane to visit his dying mother, defended the flight: “Whatever the President sees fit to do for the welfare of his family, he should be allowed to do without a lot of people jumping on him,” he said. “I don’t believe in attacking a man through his family.”
Even more important, Truman consistently spoke out in support of the president’s foreign policies, whether sending Marines to Lebanon or vowing to defend the islands of Quemoy and Matsu in the Taiwan Strait. He said he hoped that “those who are trying to destroy the free world will clearly understand that we will unanimously support . . . the President of the United States.” In this posture, Truman was at odds with his own former secretary of state: “Please don’t be hooked on one of those my country right or wrong gambits,” Dean Acheson wrote to Truman, for “in this way Foster [John Foster Dulles, Ike’s secretary of state] can always drive us like steers to the slaughter pens.” On another occasion Acheson questioned Truman’s assertion that “we must . . . accept the President’s assessment of what the situation is [because] only the President is in possession of all the facts.” But at that moment Truman was expressing kinship with a man who knew what it was like to bear the burden, to live with the full knowledge of the dangers the country faced. Let the armchair critics with t
heir blinkered view have at it; presidents know that there are some things only presidents know, and so Truman, for all his issues with Eisenhower, would still grant him the benefit of the doubt.
After that there were signs of thaw in Eisenhower as well; he invited Truman to a Memorial Day lunch at the White House in 1958, and to a NATO anniversary celebration the following year, neither of which Truman could attend due to scheduling conflicts. Their reunion would have to wait, for a moment that suited both irony and history.
Funerals for Their Friends
In October of 1959 the two presidents were reunited for the first time in six years at a chapel near Arlington Cemetery. The funeral was for, of all people, George Marshall. Truman was already seated in the pew when Eisenhower arrived and sat beside him.
“How do you do, Mr. President,” Eisenhower said, offering his hand.
“How are you, Mr. President,” Truman replied. When the service was over, the men stood side by side as the casket was removed; Eisenhower saluted his former commander in chief—and Truman returned the salute. Then they left through separate doors.
A year later, Eisenhower would be getting ready to turn over the keys to the Oval Office and reenter civilian life. More than most of his predecessors, that adjustment was complicated. It had been decades since he had stepped foot in a clothing store or a barbershop; as Stephen Ambrose recounts in his biography, Ike had never paid a turnpike toll, and he couldn’t remember how to type, adjust a television picture, or make orange juice. He even had to be shown how to place a phone call. And he had some bridges to rebuild.