Affection and Trust: The Personal Correspondence of Harry S. Truman and Dean Acheson, 1953-1971

by David McCullough

  At Vicenza we saw the first covered theater and an old bird put on a show for us by conversation. Margie had been there and signed the book and a program that I signed under her name and explained that I am Margaret’s pop. It surprised the caretaker! It was the same all around the trip but it was a happy experience!

  With the heads of State, Kings, Generals, Presidents, Princes and Foreign Ministers, I had some most interesting conversations, as I did with cooks, waiters, taxi drivers, little merchants and farmers. Dean, I’m sure they like us and if we had a Secretary of State and a President they’d love us as they did in the past.

  In New York some fellow made the remark that it would be a terrible thing if Ike died and Nixon became President. The man he was talking to said he thought it would be worse if Sherman Adams died and Ike became President. I heard some more like that I’ll have to hold and tell you later.

  My best to Alice and all the family. Glad they are well. Hope that internal machine of yours becomes O.K. Hope to see you soon.

  Sincerely,

  Harry

  Acheson congratulates Truman on his August 17 speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, in which Truman expressed support for his former adviser Averell Harriman for the presidential nomination and publicly criticized Adlai Stevenson, saying, “He lacks the kind of fighting spirit that we need to win.…” When the convention gave the nomination to Stevenson on the first ballot, Truman quickly and effusively supported him, saying, “Governor Stevenson is a real fighter, and I ought to know.… He’s given some of us here a pretty good licking.”

  August 21, 1956

  Dear Mr. President,

  We were proud of you Friday evening. You ate your crow graciously and with high good humor. It did a lot to restore an atmosphere of unity and confidence. The reality of unity is, I fear, a little further away. It depends on a real change in Averell’s attitude. Publicly he, too, was gracious and good tempered, but that is not his state of mind, as you know better than I. For quite a while now he has been engaged in operation self-deception. It is going to be hard to wake up to the realities of life and the necessity of forcing on himself an attitude which will not be self-destructive. The most pathetic figure of the new deal was Al Smith, a magnificent figure eaten away by the leprosy of resentment and bitterness. I remember so well my father, after Mr. Roosevelt fired me in 1933, quoting St. Paul—“Think not on those things which are past, but on those which lie before us.” You more than anyone, in view of what you have done for him and suffered because of it, can point this out to him. I hope you will.

  Averell said to me not long ago that Adlai could not carry New York. Nothing will contribute more to this result than Averell’s belief in it. Nothing will refresh and revive his own spirit more than to put all he has into proving his prediction wrong. I shall do my best to persuade him of all this; but you are the man who can do it.

  If you want to read a delightful and most informative book get George Kennan’s volume just out, Russia Leaves the War. It shows the confusion in conducting foreign policy in World War II as almost a carbon copy of that in World War I. It also throws a flood of light on the causes of the bewildering contradictions in United States–Soviet relations.

  Alice is delighted that she spotted the new necklace and gives Mrs. Truman a big hand on it. Stanley Woodward and I are lunching together next week when I shall hear all about the trip.

  Our most affectionate greetings.

  Most sincerely,

  Dean

  August 29, 1956

  Dear Dean:

  As usual you “set me up” if you understand a Missouri bowling term. I talked to Averell for a half hour—at his expense!—wrote Sam Rosenman and it looks as if things are moving in the right direction.

  When I arrived in Chicago things were dead, no life, no nothing. I decided to wake them up. It worked. We obtained a platform that is the best we’ve had, forced the candidate to endorse the New Deal and I’m sure he’ll get around to the Fair Deal and you and me before he’s finished on November 5th, Monday before [the] election.

  You are right as can be about Al Smith. If he’d known some history and some results of what happens to bad losers he’d have been in a better position to help Franklin.

  I am going to do all I can to help win this election. How I wish I were ten years younger! But I ain’t, so there.

  The professors of political science want me to talk to them in Washington on Sept. 7th and I may do it if you think I can do any good toward teaching the next generation what they have and what to do to keep it.

  I’ve been reading a book about the ten years from ’45 to ’55. It builds up the small things and overlooks the big ones. Maybe that’s history. If it is we must do what we can to leave facts to off set it.

  Just got stuck with a speech to the Political Science Association in Washington September 7, 1956. You know I can’t say “No” so it is understood. We’ll see you then.

  My best to Alice—the Boss joins me—and to you.

  Sincerely,

  Harry

  Sam is Sam Rosenman, the highly respected assistant and speechwriter for President Roosevelt.

  September 1, 1956

  Dear Mr. President,

  What good news about your talk with Averell and letter to Sam. I am sure both will do a lot of good.

  Alice and I are very sad that we are going to be away just when you will be in Washington. We leave on Tuesday, Sept. 4, for a visit with our daughter, Jane, in Martha’s Vineyard and friends on the way to and from. What bad luck! I am glad you will speak to the professors. They were kind enough to ask me, also, but I have been working on briefs all summer and just had to get away. This note is merely to bring you and Mrs. Truman our regret and affection. I shall write a proper one later on.

  Sincerely,

  Dean

  Harry and Bess Truman with Margaret Truman on November 18, 1953. Event is unknown.

  5

  November 1956 to December 1957

  Foreign-Policy and Civil-Rights Crises – A Meeting in Washington – More Politics – The “S”

  Truman and Acheson did not write each other for almost three months, September through November 1956. Truman was busy campaigning coast to coast for Adlai Stevenson and other Democrats, and stopping for a time to see his daughter and grandson (born in 1957) whenever his itinerary took him to New York City. Acheson got pneumonia at the time of the presidential election. His wife wrote Mrs. Truman that she thought the election was responsible for the pneumonia. “He refuses to see any ray of light ahead anywhere,” Mrs. Acheson wrote.

  When Truman and Acheson began writing again, their attention was fixed on a foreign-policy crisis in the Middle East regarding control of the Suez Canal and involving three American allies—the United Kingdom, France, and Israel, two of which were members of NATO. Acheson was highly critical of President Eisenhower’s response to the crisis, which put the United States in agreement with the Soviet Union. He was also displeased with Truman’s support for the President’s so-called Eisenhower Doctrine proposal to offer U.S. military assistance to countries in the Middle East facing armed communist aggression. Acheson wrote some harsh words to Truman, but, as always, the friendship withstood the momentary disagreement, even over an important matter.

  A civil-rights crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, renewed Truman’s and Acheson’s conviction that what they saw as President Eisenhower’s weak leadership was damaging the U.S. position in the world. The two friends also wrote about the dedication of the Truman Library on July 6, 1957, and the cool message Eisenhower sent for the occasion. Their travels, lecture commitments, and too-infrequent meetings with each other always required some attention in their letters. They also wrote about the importance of combining their efforts to fight against a soft, pacific, trusting approach to foreign policy, as advocated by well-meaning but wrongheaded people such as Adlai Stevenson and George Kennan, and to fight for a foreign policy grounded in incisive under
standing of national interests and power balances, and executed through a well-maintained alliance of free nations.

  The speech Truman sends Acheson is actually drawn from Truman’s Inaugural Address, not the State of the Union Message of 1949. The speech puts forward, like the Inaugural Address, a “program for peace and freedom” and calls on the leaders of the new Democratic Congress to “come up with what it takes to assure peace, liberty and the welfare of all nations.” In this letter Truman also expresses worry about, among other things, the crisis in Egypt over the Suez Canal.

  November 30, 1956

  Dear Dean:

  I sincerely hope that virus infection has left you and that you are well on the road to recovery.

  I sent you a copy of the speech I made in St. Joseph night before last which undoubtedly went to your office. I am sending you another copy so you can contemplate it at home. Maybe it will contribute to your recovery—it is a paraphrase of the State of the Union Message of 1949 and it seems to me it is just as good now as it was then.

  I have been terribly worried about the foreign situation as well as the domestic one and I am urging all the members of Congress, with whom I can get in touch, to come up with something because I don’t think there will be any leadership from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

  Tell Alice that Mrs. Truman joins me in best wishes to both of you.

  Sincerely yours,

  Harry S. Truman

  Truman writes a somber letter about U.S. foreign policy in the eastern-Mediterranean area. “This ignorant top notch man and Sullivan and Cromwell” refer to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and the New York City law firm for which Dulles had worked before becoming Secretary of State.

  November 30, 1956

  Dear Dean:

  I dictated a political letter to you this morning about the national and international situation. You know I’m worried as you are about it. Never do I like to talk about what might have been. You know that old abolitionist John G. Whittier said in his Maud Muller poem “Of all sad words of tongue or pen / The saddest are these: ‘it might have been.’ ”

  In my opinion the meanest of all words are “I told you so.” In 1948 I had the Secret Service take down the crow eating invitation on the Washington Post Building.

  But had the man with power said No emphatically and then have stood by our friends and allies no eastern Mediterranean crisis would have arisen. [About three words are indecipherable] be a mentally and physically tired man and we’d have had a peaceful settlement of Greece, Israel, Egypt, and “Oil.” Well, here we are telling behind the Iron Curtain countries to rebel and then letting them be slaughtered!

  What the hell can we do?

  Tell me something to make me feel better. You and I did the right thing and this ignorant top notch man and Sullivan and Cromwell threw it out the window.

  Get well and maybe something can be done.

  My best to Alice and all the family.

  Harry

  Acheson writes a Trumanesque “spasm” on the “negation of leadership” in American foreign policy. Acheson was concerned that Eisenhower’s administration was not addressing the realities and challenges of U.S.-U.S.S.R. hostility, particularly regarding the future of Germany.

  December 4, 1956

  Dear Mr. President,

  Alice had such a nice note from Mrs. Truman giving me her sympathy and cheer. Now I have two from you. I am already on the way out of this horrid imprisonment. The doctor says about a week more. It has been an awful bore.

  One of my friends believes that his ills of the flesh are inflicted on him by a just and implacable old testament God in punishment for evil thoughts or words which he has entertained or expressed. I am afraid that even a month of pneumonia would not atone for the flood of invective which the events of the past month have evoked from me. They have encompassed not merely our sanctimonious and unutterably stupid rulers, but the press which misinforms us, and our complacent, ignorant and fat-headed, fat bellied fellow citizens who create the environment for this negation of leadership.

  We cannot seem to understand that we are playing for keeps in a deadly serious operation in which there are no rules, no umpire, no prizes for good boys, no dunce caps for bad boys. In this game good intentions are not worth a damn; moral principles are traps; weakness and indecision are fatal. This is what Americans have been taught since they went to Christian Endeavor meetings cannot and must not happen—“the law of the jungle,” where the judgment of nature upon error is death.

  And so we commit every error of every sort against nature. We make ourselves unworthy of the trust of our allies, we disregard their interests, we join with their and our enemies to weaken, humiliate and destroy them and our alliance with them. We believe for some incomprehensible reason that the U.N. is some disembodied moral force apart from ourselves. We are elated when it serves as the front for the combination of Russian and American power which crushes our allies. This is principle. We turn away when American desires running counter to Russian have no more effect than a peashooter on a tank.

  I do not agree that your 1949 speech is appropriate today. Surely it is true and all that. But the truly false philosophy of 1956 is the American philosophy—by General Motors out of Eisenhower—two televisions in every pot, not a worry in a carload, live now and pay later—or leave to one’s children. The finest flower of democracy—thirty-five million Americans can’t be wrong—Or can they be.

  As ever,

  Dean

  Truman continues the “spasm” against Eisenhower and Dulles. It’s not clear whom he means by “Kenetsy, Bully et al.,” but he is referring to the Suez crisis, when the United States took effective measures, some in the United Nations, to force Britain, France, and Israel to stop their invasion and withdraw their forces from Egypt. It was generally thought that Eisenhower’s position was the right one, but there was suspicion at the time that Dulles had encouraged the British-French move against Suez and only backed off when Khrushchev threatened to intervene, a suspicion that was strengthened by Harold Macmillan’s memoirs, in which he said as much.

  December 7, 1956

  Dear Dean,

  You’ve no idea how very much I appreciated yours of the 4th. Never was anyone gifted with expression of the facts in clear and understandable English as are you.

  Since Jan. 20, 1953, I have had mental spasms over what has and has not come from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. Apparently nothing can be done about it. Public communications, printed word, radio, television have all been joined in a cover up and distortion program to help a do nothing attitude from the head of the greatest free government in the world.

  What can we do to meet a situation such as that? How can we meet a fake sanctimonious and counterfeit prayer approach to a situation of “force makes right”? As you say we are playing for keeps and there are no rules and no umpires, no dunce caps for Stalinists, no rewards for good relations. Only the iron fist with a hundred yard saber in it will be understood by Stalin’s successors.

  Wonder what Nehru thinks now. What in hell was Ike thinking when he joined Kenetsy, Bully et al. in the U.N.[?] There can be no U.N. without guts and guns from us. Look, as if we have neither.

  Get well and you and I can have a real get together and cuss everybody and settle everything—on paper and by words only.

  Sincerely,

  Harry

  Truman praises Acheson for his statement a few days earlier before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs opposing Eisenhower’s request for congressional authority to offer U.S. military assistance to any country in the Middle East facing armed aggression by a communist power. “The more one studies this proposal,” Acheson had said, “the more vague, uncertain, and inadequate it appears as a statement of policy; and the more undesirable as an exercise of the legislative power of Congress.”

  January 14, 1957

  Dear Dean:

  Dave Lloyd sent me a copy of your statement of Friday t
o the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

  In Missouri language, it is a humdinger. Wish I’d been present to hear it. They asked me to appear and I told them that the Boss had been unfortunate and had broken two bones in her left foot besides pulling a ligament loose, that our old black cook had a heart attack and that I am chief cook and bottle washer at 219 North Delaware—would the Committee let me send a statement.

  Had a most courteous telegram from them saying they’d be delighted to have the statement. Now—I don’t know what to say. You’ve said it all.

  But you know what, I’ll crib some of your stuff, some of Paul-Henri Spaak’s in the last quarterly of Foreign Affairs and some of my Greece and Turkey message of March 12, 1947, and a few other things, some of which I can’t use, and there it will be.

  Damn it, I wish I could see you oftener. You always give me a lift.

  Bess is in a cast and has to behave. You should try it on Alice. I have a couple of black women who come in all day about to be sure the Boss doesn’t fall again and I’ve cancelled my trip to Jefferson City, St. Louis and one or two other places so I can stay home nights. I wanted to see our Governor inaugurated today but can’t do it. It would be my first since 1932. My best to Alice and tell her to stay away from that cast.

  Sincerely,

  Harry

  Acheson writes an unusually strong criticism of Truman’s North American Newspaper Alliance (NANA) article. Acheson was exasperated with Truman for undoing the considerable work Acheson had invested in a foreign-policy formulation that he had recently outlined while testifying before Congress. “If I were now a member of the United States Senate,” Truman’s article began, “I would support the request of the President for Congressional authorization to use the armed forces of the United States against any communist or communist-dominated aggressor in the Middle East.… Congress has no alternative but to go along with the President in this program to prevent the Russians from taking over the whole strategic Middle East.…”