Affection and Trust: The Personal Correspondence of Harry S. Truman and Dean Acheson, 1953-1971
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I think now that the country is faced with a problem which you and I faced early in 1949, when the Russians raised the blockade in Berlin and asked for a meeting of Foreign Ministers. The first was a gesture toward relaxation, which you and I thought came from a desire on their part to extricate themselves from a failure and a weak position. The great question was how far the Russians were prepared to go. We, therefore, accepted the proposed conference promptly and with an agenda which gave the Russians a chance to show their hand one way or another.
The first week of the conference was devoted to forcing them to expose their hand fully. It turned out that they were not ready to propose anything constructive and in the resulting propaganda battle lost heavily. This, I think, convinced our allies of the true situation more than any amount of speeches and enabled us to go forward together to meet the ensuing danger and hardships with a common appreciation of the facts.
1953 has much in common with 1949. Again it isn’t a time for meetings by heads of states, a situation which puts more pressure upon the democracies to have what at least looks like a favorable result than upon the Soviets. But it is a time for a four-power meeting, at which the Russians must be thoroughly smoked out. Much preparatory work should be done with our allies. The White House must discredit the demagogic isolationist wing of the Republican Party which wishes to insult and separate us from our allies.
If the Russians propose nothing which makes a really free unification of Germany possible, I think that again, as in 1949, the Allies can be brought together on a program of building strength. If they are willing to make real concessions, then a most delicate and difficult period ensues. We cannot—and would not wish to—insist upon a continued division of Germany, but we must be very careful about what kind of a Germany we are unifying and what its place in the Western world is. I think this could be handled if there were understanding and wisdom in Washington and if I had any confidence that in the present constitutional and political situation in France that country was able to accept any solution, whatever it was. Since both of these matters are in doubt, I think the future gives rise to real anxiety.
All of this, I know, you have thought of yourself; but it gives me comfort to talk with you in this way.
I have been urging some of Stevenson’s friends to get him back here in the near future. His voyaging seems to have been over-prolonged, and I hope that, if he is wise and tactful, he can help bring Democrats of various shades closer together on some lines of policy which will be a little more positive than the Congressional minority has been able to achieve so far. I should hope that you and he would find yourselves pretty close together and that some of us who might be called in a World War I phrase “the old contemptibles” might be of some use.
Alice joins me in the warmest messages to you and Mrs. Truman. I hope that her hands are better and that I am not in her black books.
Most sincerely,
Dean
Truman worries that conditions in Korea and Iran invite Russian adventurism.
August 18, 1953
Dear Dean:
I have been trying my best to write you on present day developments but I’ve had so much business to transact that I haven’t had a chance to write you.
Your letter of July twenty-first impressed me immensely. I’d like very much to have your present view on what effect the Armistice has had on our Russian trends and what your guess is for the next strike.
It looks as if the Iranian situation has come to a conclusion where the Russians may walk in and take over. If you will remember, we had things in shape at one time so the Shah could have taken control of the Government of Iran and I think he would have been able at that time to work things out but he balked at the most important point and now he seems to have stepped in in a hurry and has left himself without a throne or a Government. I’d like to have your comments on that also.
I hope, one of these days, to see and talk with you. I have been working like a Turk on the preliminary outline for the book which I contracted to write for Life and Time. It is a terrific job. If I had known how much work it is I probably would not have undertaken it.
I am enclosing you a letter from Samuel S. Freedman, Chairman, Yale Law Forum. He is inviting me to deliver a lecture before that august body. I wonder if I should consider it. Your advice will be highly appreciated.
Sincerely yours,
Harry
Acheson helped Charles Murphy and others draft the speech Truman gave in Detroit on Labor Day. After Truman left the presidency Acheson continued in his role of foreign-policy adviser to his old boss. Truman, for his part, knew that he still needed help from Acheson and other advisers, such as White House staff members Charles Murphy and David Lloyd, Averell Harriman, and personal advisers William Hillman and David Noyes to formulate and present his ideas. The letter from Acheson to Murphy that Truman mentions offers several revisions to the draft of the speech Truman was to give on Labor Day. Acheson began his three pages of critical remarks by saying of the draft, “It is a very good speech and will have a fine effect.”
September 2, 1953
Dear Dean:
I can’t tell you how very much I appreciated your interest in my Labor Day speech. Your letter to Charlie Murphy was a jewel. He was kind enough to let me read it. I’ll never be able to “square up” with you for all the trouble I’ve caused you over the last eight or ten years, but I can’t say that I am sorry that I did it.
Give my best to Mrs. Acheson.
Most sincerely,
Harry Truman
Acheson helped Truman’s speechwriting team write the foreign-policy section of an address Truman gave when he received the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award at a ceremonial dinner in New York City on September 28, 1953. Acheson is careful to point out to Truman areas where he must avoid appearing too close to some aspects of President Eisenhower’s foreign policy, such as “the Dulles liberation ideas,” which Acheson believed were impracticable and reckless.
“The Dulles liberation ideas” refer to Secretary Dulles’s stated objective of “rolling back communism” in Central and Eastern Europe, which was taken as encouragement by Hungarian patriots in their disastrous revolt in 1956.
September 24, 1953
Dear Mr. President:
Dave Lloyd sent me a copy of Draft No. 2, 9/22/53 of the Four Freedoms Award speech, with the request that I give particular attention to the foreign policy section of it, which I have done. I tried to reach him in St. Louis on the telephone with my suggestions, but have not been successful, so I am sending them to you, with a copy to him here, as I understand that he will be back tomorrow afternoon.
The first suggestion relates to page 5, paragraph beginning “it is not enough to defend our freedoms at home only,” to the bottom of the page. I think this part, together with the quotations from President Roosevelt, seems to commit you to an impossibly broad program and one which I am afraid will get you entangled with the Dulles liberation ideas. I do not think that you want to say that it is our task to establish the Four Freedoms everywhere in the world—Russia, China, South Africa, etc.—and that there is no end save victory in this struggle. President Roosevelt may have meant this in the enthusiasm of the war, but I doubt whether he would advocate it today. Therefore, I suggest that this whole section be written as follows:
“It is not enough to defend our freedoms at home only. We must be concerned with a world environment in which free men can live free lives. Franklin Roosevelt knew that we could not exist in an oasis of freedom in a world of totalitarianism or war. ‘The world order which we seek,’ he said, ‘is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.’ The Four Freedoms for us, as for all free men, depend upon a world in which peace and justice are maintained by the concerted efforts of the free nations.”
My next suggestions have to do with the listing of the foundation of our foreign policy on pages 8 and 9. The first foundation as stated is �
�a renewed reciprocal trade program.” I suggest the insertion after “renewed” of another adjective, so that it would read, “a renewed and reinvigorated reciprocal trade program.” The purpose of this is not to commit you to a mere renewal of the act in its present amended and weakened form.
The last suggestion has to do with the eighth foundation. I suggest that it read as follows:
“The willingness, in firm agreement with our allies and from a position of united strength, to seek in all sincerity solutions of our differences with the Soviet bloc through patient and peaceful negotiation.”
The first purpose is to fix up the English. As written, it sounds as though we need negotiating differences rather than non-negotiable differences, which clearly wasn’t meant. The second idea is to bring our allies into it so that no one would think that you had bilateral negotiations in mind. The third idea is that the purpose of the negotiations is to seek solutions rather than merely to compromise all outstanding questions.
Otherwise, I think the speech is in good shape and I am looking forward to hearing you deliver it and to seeing you in New York on Monday.
I hope Dave showed you the few observations that I am planning to make and that he has any suggestions in regard to them which you might have.
Most sincerely,
Dean
At the dinner, in presenting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Award to Truman, Acheson said, “I hope that it will never be thought of me that I approach the matter of doing honor to President Truman with an open mind. On the contrary, it is with unshakeable convictions [that I do him honor], one of which is that no honor which can be conferred on Mr. Truman can equal the honor which he has won for himself.… I suppose Mr. Truman would like no description of himself better than, in the words of a Seventeenth Century writer, as ‘An honest plain man, without pleats.’ That indeed he is, but we cannot let him escape with that. In my prejudiced judgment we must bring in a word which is very much abused and which I fear may annoy him a good deal. But he will testify that I have always told him the truth as I saw it—and this is no time to stop. The word is ‘Greatness.’ ”
Truman refers to his regret for not sending a congratulatory cable when Acheson received an award at a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Dinner in New York. Truman also talks of his plans for his presidential library.
October 2, 1953
Dear Dean:
I failed to send you a telegram last night for the simple reason that I was out in the midst of the Caruthersville Fair Grounds making a speech on the educational necessities of the next generation. I left in a hurry to drive eighty miles in an hour and a half in order to catch a train to be home this morning.
I wish I could have been present and would have been had not circumstance prevented me. I don’t know of a more well deserved Award than that one. I would have given anything to have expressed my opinion at the meeting publicly in the same manner in which you did to me. I’ll never forget that meeting as long as I live. I wish I deserved all the nice things that you said about me and that the other gentlemen were kind enough to say. In fact I was overcome as you could very well see.
I arrived in St. Louis and they had a special session of the Grand Lodge of Masons of Missouri at which I presented them one of the stones out of the White House which had the Masonic marks on it. For the first time in my connection with that organization of some forty-four years, they had an overflow crowd present and gave me an ovation like the one in the Waldorf-Astoria, so maybe we are making some converts.
I am having more interest displayed in the proposed Library than I ever had since it started. Two or three of the great Foundations are now anxious to become interested in it and I am somewhat in a quandary as to just what to do but I guess it will work out all right. The Directors have authorized the construction of the first building, which will be the Archives part of it, and I suppose we will go to work on that in the not too far distant future. I am anxious to get the records of the whole Administration lined up there if I can. I would like, as I told the members at a Cabinet Meeting one time, to have every Cabinet Member make some contribution in papers and documents to that institution.
I had a meeting of the Deans of History and the Librarians in the City of St. Louis while I was at the Grand Lodge. I went to breakfast with these gentlemen of the Universities around St. Louis and was informed by the Dean of History of the St. Louis University that they had obtained permission from the Pope to make photostat microfilms of all the manuscripts in the Vatican—some three million of them—and that those microfilms could be available for my Library on an exchange basis. Something like that has been coming up nearly every day since I have been home from Hawaii. I feel very much encouraged about it.
Again, I can’t tell you how very much I appreciated what you did in New York last Monday night.
I have been going down to Caruthersville for twenty or twenty-five years because that southeast corner of Missouri has always been in my corner politically and I went down there this time since I was out of office and not running for office to show them I was just interested in them. I had one of the biggest crowds they ever had when I addressed the meeting and I got a bigger ovation than I did when I was President of the United States. They gave me a great big silver cup engraved—Harry S. Truman. From your friends and admirers in Caruthersville.
They had to take me eighty miles to a city down in Arkansas, Jonesboro, to catch the train for home. There had been no previous announcement that I was to go there but when I got to the station there were two thousand people there. It took two policemen and a Deputy Sheriff to get me on the train. I don’t know what the world is when people in Arkansas and southeast Missouri, which is about the same as the deep South, turn out like that for an Ex-President, who has told them where to get off on Civil Rights. Maybe the world is turning over.
I think I’ll put up a tent and charge admission!
Sincerely,
Harry S. Truman
Please give my best to Mrs. Acheson.
Acheson lists several of the Truman-administration veterans who had given generous donations to Truman’s presidential library. Some familiar foreign-policy problems from the Truman administration—France, the European Defense Community, Iran—are also on Acheson’s mind. Iran was a particularly lively topic at this time. The Iranian prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddeq, had been overthrown by coup d’état in August. Reference is made here to the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, nationalized by Mosaddeq and, significantly, not denationalized by the shah when he was restored to power by a CIA-managed coup. David Bruce served the Truman administration as ambassador to France and Undersecretary of State; George Perkins as Assistant Secretary for European Affairs; Stanley Woodward as Director of Protocol; George McGhee as Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East; Robert A. Lovett as Undersecretary of State, Undersecretary of Defense, and Secretary of Defense; James Webb as Director of the Budget and Undersecretary of State; James C. Dunn as ambassador to Italy and France; Chester Bowles as ambassador to India; and Harold Linder as president of the Export-Import Bank.
October 8, 1953
Dear Mr. President:
Our correspondence has been interrupted for the happiest of all reasons; that I have seen you twice since your letters of August and September. And now I have your letter of October 2 about the Woodrow Wilson dinner in New York, the progress of the library, and the great and deserved ovation which you got at Caruthersville and Jonesboro.
Please do not have the matter of a message to the Wilson dinner on your mind. I knew from David Lloyd what you were up to, knew that you would wire if you could, and completely understood and understand why you couldn’t.
The two dinners in New York last week were, I thought, wonderful and happy evidence that what you say in the last paragraph is true—that perhaps the world is turning over and people are understanding better some things which were obscure to them last November.
I am enclosing a copy of the few obser
vations which I made at your dinner and of the speech which I made at the Wilson dinner. The last six months or so I have been thinking a good deal about the essence of the problems which we had to face and the measures which we took to face them. These thoughts I tried to state in a pretty tightly reasoned statement. I hope you will approve of it. In light of what you said on Labor Day and in New York, I think it shows that the Truman-Acheson front remains as solid as it was in the old days.
A few days ago the Republican Policy Committee sent for copies of my speech. The messenger who came for them said they were wanted urgently for a meeting on the Hill. I should like to believe that they were in a mood to learn. The truth probably is that they were to be analyzed for less pleasing purposes. It will be interesting to see what they can do. As I read General Eisenhower’s latest speech in yesterday’s Times, it seemed to me that any shafts which the Republicans loose at you or me may ultimately lodge in the General’s palpitating bosom.
I am delighted to hear your good reports about the Library. One of the pleasant experiences which I have had in the last few months is the response of friends with whom I have talked about it.
Dave Bruce, George Perkins, Stanley Woodward, George McGhee, Jim Webb, Jimmy Dunn, Chet Bowles, and Harold Linder have all responded instantaneously and most generously. The other night Bob Lovett sought me out and pressed a goodly check upon me, with the promise of another in a few months. More will come. I am sure the main thing to do now is merely to get a few people in a few cities to raise the matter with your many friends.
As for depositing papers in the Library, I think that so far as the State Department is concerned, you have all the essential papers in your own files. I did not take any at all with me when I left the Department. The real records of our foreign policy are contained, I believe, in the various memoranda which we sent to you for your comment and action and in the detailed reports which went to you every day from the various conferences—four-power foreign ministers, three-power foreign ministers, NATO, the Palais Rose discussions in 1951 and UN meetings. I shall keep the matter always in mind and make available to you anything which I can gather.