He felt that he should do this—or something like it. What did I think?
I thought it was a prescription for suicide. He was to sell our allies confidence in statements which were lies, to dilute—if he could—the growing distrust of Dulles, at home and abroad (while the grounds for it would remain true); he would embrace, for himself and the Democratic Party, a false and fraudulent policy and one which was certain to fail; and he would assume for all of us, the responsibility of devising steps which would not be taken, and which, if taken, would fail. The failure of foreign policy would be deftly transferred from Dulles to Stevenson.
I said that Dulles was smarter than I had thought. (You and I were pikers in trying to get Dewey to go to London.) I added that the real task was to pressure this decadent outfit into new and vigorous steps to (1) step up both our nuclear and conventional forces and research, (2) to have a vigorous program of economic cooperation (i.e., export of capital goods) to countries ready for them and subsidy for some others, (3) political policies which would tie the Western hemisphere and Western Europe together—the others would have no choice but to follow, in their own interest. To join this administration in telling others that we had military power which we do not have, and a resolution which does not exist, was inexpressibly foolish and wrong. Talk about bi-partisanship was cheese for a silly mouse.
Of course, he didn’t like it. He is almost irresistibly drawn as a monkey to Kipling’s boa constrictor. He wants to lay down conditions, to make policy—without knowing that to do this in such a field requires the vast knowledge and help of departments of Government which are at sixes and sevens and to which he would have no access, or knowledge as to how to use it, if he had it.
I write you this long and dreary story because although I have given him pause, he is clearly an eager beaver advised by junior grade Machiavellis and may well end up as a sort of reincarnation of Walter George and/or Dick Richards—only dragging the party into complicity for failure and frustration.
I do not intend politeness to inhibit me from calling god-damned nonsense, at least, folly; and I hope you will be careful not to let the silken cord of bipartisan honey talk bind you.
Enough of this. You know my thoughts and blood pressure.
As ever,
Dean
Truman raises the topic of his middle initial about which he never seems to have fully made up his mind. Should the “S” have a period or not? The original December 5, 1957, letter is not in Acheson’s papers. Truman kept a carbon copy with, at the bottom, Truman’s printed signature stamp—which includes a period after the S.
December 5, 1957
Dear Dean:
With reference to the attached, do you know the word meaning an initial standing in a name but signifying no name itself, as the “S” in
Harry S. Truman
Truman hopes to join Acheson at Yale to deliver lectures. Acheson later called Truman and arranged that he come to Yale the following April.
December 18, 1957
Dear Dean:
I have been trying to get things arranged so I could be with you at Yale, and it seems to me that the dates which you set out, the second Friday and Saturday in February, that is the 14th and 15th of February, would be most satisfactory to me, if that is all right with you. I don’t want to be there unless you are there.
I hope you will write and tell me just exactly what I have to do. I have a couple of lectures which I have delivered around to the various schools on “Hysteria” and on powers and duties of the President of the United States as set out in the Constitution. I also have a lecture which I have delivered on the first Ten Amendments of the Constitution from the viewpoint of a layman not fully educated in the law. Do you think any one of these would be right and proper for us to use at the time you suggest. I’ll be glad to do everything I can to keep you from being embarrassed by this old retired farmer from Missouri.
You tell Alice that her picture has a place of honor in my reception room and as soon as I can get a plaque made for it to tell what it is, what it stands for and where it came from, it will be labeled so everybody who comes in here can see just what sort of a Secretary of State I had by proxy.
Sincerely yours,
Harry Truman
[Handwritten note by Dean Acheson:] Arranged by telephone for HST to arrive N.H. Apr 8 and leave for Washington Apr 11th.
Acheson reaches some witty conclusions regarding Truman’s middle “S.” Acheson seems to be making a point here of not putting a period after the S, both in his quotation of Truman’s letter of December 5 and in the address line at the bottom of the page. Acheson enclosed the December 11 memorandum from Elizabeth Finley with this letter.
December 20, 1957
Dear Mr. President:
In your letter to me of December 5, 1957, spurred by your incurable (thank God) curiosity, you asked me this question:
“Do you know the word meaning an initial standing in a name but signifying no name itself, as the ‘S’ in
Harry S Truman”?
You know, and so do I, how to get at a question of this sort. In my youth an advertisement used to say, “Ask the man who owns one.” So I asked the two people who might know—and, of course, they were women—Elizabeth Finley, the librarian of Covington and Burling [law firm], past-president of the law librarians of the country, and Helen Lally of the Supreme Court library. Their reports are enclosed.
The essence of the matter is that we are blind men, searching in a dark room for a black hat which isn’t there. The “S” in Harry S Truman (no period after “S”) does not “stand for anything.” Therefore, it cannot have a descriptive noun—“vacuum,” “nothing,” etc., are already pre-empted. But, more positively, it is something—not representatively, but absolutely. You are “S” (without a period) because it is your name. For instance, you appointed an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court (may God forgive you) whose name is “Tom.” Now “Tom” usually stands for “Thomas.” But not in this case. There it stands for nothing—absolutely nothing—except, of course, Tom himself, which may—who knows?—be the same thing.
So, you see, “S” is your middle name, not a symbol, not a letter standing for nothing, but an inseparable part of the moniker of one of the best men I have known in a largely misspent life. The same, for that matter, could be said of “Harry.”
“Harry” stirs all my deepest loyalties. The senior partner, who brought me up, was christened “J. Harry Covington”; and what a man he was! After years in Congress (he was one of the men who, in 1912 in Baltimore, brought about the nomination of Woodrow Wilson), he had a phrase which to me epitomizes the political obligation, perhaps among the most honorable obligations because resting on honor alone. He never said of an obligation—“I have to do it.” He always said, “I have it to do.” What a vast difference! In the first, one is coerced into action; in the other, a free man assumes an obligation, freely contracted.
This has a good deal to do with politics—about which you have always thought I knew nothing—in those reaches of it which fit men for government. There are some reaches which unfit them. Honor is a delicate and tricky concept. It does not mean standing by the unfit because of friendship. But it does mean standing by in time of trouble to see a fair deal, when the smart money is taking to the bushes. All of this I learned from the old judge, and relearned again from you in unforgettable days.
So I say that “S” is a good name as it stands, and I am for it. Should either of us have the good fortune to have another grandson, let’s agree to persuade his parents to a middle name of just plain “S” with no period, and no explanation.
Indeed, no explanation is possible, because it is the most truly international name. In 1200 B.C. it appeared in the Phoenician as a sort of wobbly “W”, but was, unhappily, pronounced sin. By 900, in the Cretan, it looked like a 3 and had become san, a great improvement. For the next 500 years the 3 was turned around. Then the Latins, Irish, and Saxons, for some odd reason, tu
rned it into a “V.” Finally, the British, as they have so often done, got the thing straight in a wiggle, from right to left to right, but not until our colonial ancestors, Ben Franklin included, printed it half the time as an “f” to you and me.
That again is why I like “S” for you. It has had one hell of a tempestuous life.
As ever,
Dean
December 11, 1957
MEMORANDUM FOR MR. ACHESON
Despite diligent research, I have failed to turn up any word which means the use of a letter instead of a name. I even asked assistance from the Library of Congress to no avail. I did find that catalogers, faced with such a name, enter a foot note on the card saying “alternate pseudonym”, but that is because catalogers are a special breed. They cannot endure an initial standing alone.
However, in Mr. Truman’s case, I understand his parents christened him Harry S; the “S” was not something he added himself just because he did not like the looks of a two letter monogram on his handkerchiefs. Parents can name their child anything they please, and if they choose to name him X, then X is his name. I think S is Mr. Truman’s middle name, as defined by Webster, “the title by which any person or thing is known or designated.”
On the other hand it seems a pity to offer nothing to an ex-President. Why not make up a word? I suggest sic, meaning “so in christening.”
Elizabeth Finley
Dean Acheson, Harry Truman, and others at the construction site of the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, in 1954.
6
January 1958 to June 1959
Meetings in New Haven, Kansas City, and Washington, D.C. – A Political Season – A President Who Doesn’t Know Where He’s Going – Three Foreign-Policy Crises – Truman Is “Steamed Up” – A Grand Birthday Celebration
As the 1958 midterm elections approached, Truman and Acheson increased their political activity, Truman as inveterate political campaigner and also as author of a new syndicated newspaper column, Acheson as a member of the Democratic Advisory Council and author of influential foreign-policy position papers. The presidential election wasn’t far away, and Truman and Acheson were already worrying about finding a good Democratic presidential candidate. They met on three occasions during this period—at Yale University in early April 1958, in Kansas City later that same month, and in New York and Washington, D.C., in early May 1959. All three occasions included, in addition to a personal get-together, speechmaking and other formal activities. Truman’s trip to New York City and Washington, D.C., was especially eventful. First he met with and spoke to students at Columbia University for three days, and then he attended a number of events at which his seventy-fifth birthday was celebrated in grand style. During all this, he was preparing to help his wife through a serious operation later in the month and to celebrate the birth of his second grandson. He fretted that his schedule did not permit him to visit with his old friend Winston Churchill, who was in Washington and New York on the same dates.
Truman’s and Acheson’s letters were, as usual, full of criticism of Eisenhower. Truman thought Eisenhower was following the same big-business economic policies that the Republicans had disastrously followed in the 1920s. There were three serious foreign-policy crises during this period. Truman and Acheson found themselves disagreeing in public about two of them: Eisenhower’s actions in Egypt—the so-called Suez crisis—and in what at the time was called the Formosa Strait, involving the small islands of Quemoy and Matsu. Acheson was strongly critical of Eisenhower’s responses to both crises, whereas Truman’s instinct was to support the commander in chief in times of peril and to advise all Americans to do so too. Acheson wrote him very cross letters about the wrongheadedness of the position he was taking.
· · ·
Truman has been reading Acheson’s book Power and Diplomacy, which was based on his William L. Clayton Lectures at Tufts University. Truman also refers to his upcoming speech, on February 22, at a Democratic National Committee fund-raising dinner. In the phrase “Humphrey-Mellon program,” Truman means Eisenhower’s Secretary of the Treasury George M. Humphrey and Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. The country was in recession in early 1958, brought on, Truman believed, by the typical big-business policies of the Republican Party.
January 24, 1958
Dear Dean:
I’ve been reading the lectures you delivered for the Will Clayton set up and for the benefit of Harvard, Tufts, et al. Those lectures are history at its best. I hope you’ll keep the fires burning on foreign affairs. John Foster needs guidance just as his boss does. When I said that all the toady columnists had spasms! Shows it needed to be said.
John Knight, believe it or not, took it for what it meant. Even Hearst could not refute it. Let’s keep needling them. Sam Rayburn asked Charlie Murphy to urge me not to needle Ike too much in my Feb. 22nd speech. Shows what’s going on. My Sec. of the Treasury, John W. Snyder, has refused to be mixed up with me on a financial article about the Humphrey-Mellon program which brought on the recession. Now they found what happens when the N.Y. Federal Reserve Bank discount committee has charge of things financial. For three years that outfit tried to influence me to do what the former Sec. of the Treasury did (Mellon).
Now the Seventh Fleet has been returned to the Federal Reserve Bank, not only in D.C. and N.Y. but even in this backwoods, long horn, cattle, hog and hay capital known as Kansas City—the biggest suburb of the capital of Jackson County—Independence, Missouri.
In every instance where Ike, et al. have tried to discredit you or me they’ve had to back up.
Take care of that area and remember we have those tickets sold out here. We’ll have a reunion around Feb. 22 in Washington.
Sincerely,
Harry
Acheson has finally succeeded in arranging a “distinguished visitors” program for Truman at Yale. It is not clear what the enclosed column was about, but the reply (see the next letter) indicates the subject was presidential disability.
March 25, 1958
Dear Mr. President:
I am enclosing the revised schedule for the three days, April 8, 9, and 10, in New Haven.
You and I will both be staying with Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Bergin at the Master’s House of Timothy Dwight College. This is one of the ten residential colleges in which Yale undergraduates, except Freshmen, live. Professor Bergin is a genial host and an Italian scholar of considerable eminence. Mrs. Bergin you will find a delightful lady.
In making out the schedule, I have insisted that you must have a nap every afternoon. If, as seems likely, they have crowded you a little, we will stretch it out again.
All of your engagements on the list, with the exception of the Law Journal Banquet, are with small seminar groups, enlarged a little for your visit, but not too much, say, fifty or sixty students. The Law Journal Dinner is the annual event given by the high-standing men in the Law School who publish their monthly Journal. I am to introduce you and you are to speak. There is no occasion for a lecture or any written speech. As I said over the telephone this morning, the ideal thing would be for you to take an important presidential decision—we talked this morning of Korea—and trace through how a President meets this responsibility and comes to his conclusion—how the facts, uncertain at first, gradually develop, how and from whom the President gets counsel, and how finally he does what only he can do, come to a decision. This can be fairly short, and I think I would keep it to twenty minutes.
In the seminar groups, the subject matter of which is fairly well indicated on the schedule, either the professor in charge or I will break the ice with a few minutes of chatter, and then ask a question ourselves or stimulate the boys to begin. Once they begin, the meeting rapidly becomes very informal and a great deal of fun.
The train which you should take from New York on Tuesday morning, April 8, is the New York, New Haven and Hartford train No. 8, leaving from the Grand Central Station at 8:00
a.m. You will be met at the New Haven station. I will arrive as soon thereafter as my plane can get up and get in, and probably will meet you at Mr. Bergin’s house around noon.
They will arrange at Yale for your transportation to Washington so you will get there in time for the luncheon. This will be either by the Federal Express from Boston to Washington, which has a New Haven car, or by morning plane as the weather seems to indicate.
You will need to bring dinner coat and black tie.
I talked this morning with President Griswold, whom you will like very much. He is looking forward keenly to your visit and to having you to dinner.
Sam Rayburn has already said to me that the enclosed column of mine shows mental deficiencies which cause him grave worry. Since you are the other “eminent” man referred to, you had better see how stupid I am as soon as possible.
With warm regards.
As ever,
Dean
Truman talks about both his and Acheson’s recent articles on presidential disability and succession. Truman, who served without a Vice President during his first term as President, believed that the Speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate should succeed to the presidency ahead of the Cabinet officers. This order of succession became law in the Presidential Succession Act of 1947.
March 28, 1958
Dear Dean:
Affection and Trust: The Personal Correspondence of Harry S. Truman and Dean Acheson, 1953-1971 Page 23