The General vs. the President

by H. W. Brands

  Congress was in no mood to give Truman what he wanted on civil rights or anything else at this point, and so the president acted on his own. He issued executive orders prohibiting racial discrimination in federal hiring and directing the armed services to desegregate. The latter order posed the sterner test, pitting presidential authority against military tradition. Tradition won—for the time being. The desegregation order had no immediate positive effect on its intended beneficiaries, as the military brass, socially conservative and frequently Southern, found reasons to drag their boots. And the order had an immediate negative effect on Truman, by antagonizing Southern Democrats even more.

  Yet the more resistance Truman encountered, the more determined he became to fight for his job. It was an uphill battle even to win the Democratic nomination. A left wing of Democratic liberals, refusing to acknowledge that 1947 wasn’t 1937, berated Truman for not extending the New Deal. This group boosted Henry Wallace and loudly proclaimed that Wallace would be president already if FDR, in a moment of weakness, hadn’t bumped him from the 1944 ticket. They threatened to bolt the party. Southern Democrats threatened to do the same, albeit for conservative, anti-civil-rights reasons. Many career Democrats, recognizing that the country was suffering from Democratic fatigue, believed that only a fresh face at the top of the ticket offered any hope for success in 1948.

  The weight of the combined opposition might have discouraged another man, but not Truman, who simply fought harder than ever. He roundly criticized the potential defectors as “double-crossers all” and predicted, “They’ll get nowhere—a double-dealer never does.” He shamelessly manipulated the levers of presidential power to ensure the seating of friendly delegates at the Democratic convention, so that by the time the delegates gathered, his nomination was secure.

  Yet nearly everyone thought it an empty honor. The Republican victories in the 1946 congressional elections appeared to presage a GOP capture of the White House; Democratic delegates were a dispirited group as they convened in Philadelphia. “You could cut the gloom with a corn knife,” recalled Alben Barkley, who came away with the nomination for vice president. “The very air smelled of defeat.” A local cabdriver remarked, “We got the wrong rigs for this convention. They shoulda given us hearses.”

  Truman ignored the gloom. And when he gave his acceptance speech, he injected new life into the convention and the party. The roll call had taken hours; midnight was long past by the time Truman mounted the rostrum. The delegates were exhausted, but his appearance, in a dapper white linen suit, and his defiance of what everyone else considered overwhelming odds awoke some of the party’s fighting spirit. “Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make these Republicans like it—don’t you forget that!” he declared. Speaking without notes, in the staccato, hand-chopping style that was his trademark, he explained, “The reason is that the people know that the Democratic Party is the people’s party, and the Republican Party is the party of special interest, and it always has been and always will be.” Truman lambasted the Republicans in Congress for bemoaning conditions in the country but taking no steps to change them. “The Republican platform cries about cruelly high prices. I have been trying to get them to do something about high prices ever since they met the first time.” He castigated Republican tax changes, passed over his veto, as a program that “helps the rich and sticks a knife into the back of the poor.” The Republican platform called for increasing Social Security benefits. “Think of that!” Truman lampooned. “Increasing Social Security benefits! Yet when they had the opportunity, they took 750,000 off the Social Security rolls! I wonder if they think they can fool the people of the United States with such poppycock as that!”

  Truman jolted the convention and the country by announcing that he would summon the Eightieth Congress into special session. He had previously labeled the Eightieth Congress the worst in history; he was going to give the Republican majority a chance to prove him wrong. “What that worst 80th Congress does in this special session will be the test. The American people will not decide by listening to mere words, or by reading a mere platform. They will decide on the record.”

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  THE POLITICAL DRAMA in America unfolded against the intensifying crisis in Europe. Truman interpreted the Soviet pressure on Berlin as a trial of democracy’s willingness to defend Germany; if the Kremlin could force the Americans and their allies out of Berlin, it might drive them from Germany altogether. The challenge triggered the Midwestern stubbornness on which Truman prided himself. “We’ll stay in Berlin—come what may,” he wrote in his diary just days after his acceptance speech.

  His advisers weren’t all sure this could be done or even that it was a good idea to try. George Marshall was supportive, but James Forrestal, the secretary of defense, hesitated. “Marshall states the facts and the conditions with which we are faced,” Truman wrote after a meeting with the two. “Jim wants to hedge—he always does. He’s constantly sending me alibi memos which I return with directions and the facts….I don’t pass the buck, nor do I alibi out of any decision I make.”

  How to stay in Berlin became the crucial question. General Lucius Clay, the U.S. commander for Germany, advocated calling what he considered the Kremlin’s bluff. An armed convoy should be sent along the autobahn toward Berlin. If the Russians wanted to stop it, they would have to fire. He didn’t think they would, because he didn’t think they wanted a war.

  Truman judged that if the Russians wanted a war, they would find a way to start one. But he didn’t wish to play into their hands. And he feared that excessive force might produce a war by accident. As he wrote later, “We had to face the possibility that Russia might deliberately choose to make Berlin the pretext for war, but a more immediate danger was the risk that a trigger-happy Russian pilot or hotheaded Communist tank commander might create an incident that could ignite the powder keg.”

  The president rejected the armed convoy in favor of an airlift. The communists had not closed the air lanes to Berlin, and until they did, it was just possible that West Berlin might be fed from the air. This would be a stopgap; never in history had a city of any size been supplied from the air for any length of time. The Russians had, in effect, laid siege to the city. They knew something about sieges, having endured the epic siege of Leningrad during the war. That encirclement had claimed a million Russian lives and produced gruesome scenes of hunger, disease, exposure and madness that would haunt the survivors forever. Joseph Stalin, who had been complicit in the suffering by refusing to surrender Leningrad, had good reason to doubt that any democratic government could show such resolve.

  For their part, the West Berliners knew about Soviet treatment of those who fell into their orbit, especially if they resisted. As the European war had approached its climax, with the armies of Russia, America and Britain closing in on Berlin, the Germans in the capital prayed that the Americans or the British would get there first. Russian brutality was infamous. Russian soldiers shot Germans on a whim; they raped women and girls; often hungry themselves, they starved the Germans from necessity and spite. As bad as the war’s aftermath was in the rest of Germany, it was worst in the Soviet zone around Berlin. While the Americans were beginning to restore the economy in the western zones of the former enemy, the Russians were bleeding the eastern zone dry. Tools, machines and whole factories were dismantled and shipped to Russia. Jobs vanished, with no sign of return. Berliners, trapped inside the Soviet zone, scurried like rats amid the urban ruins and scraped the fields outside the city seeking rotten turnips and moldy potatoes.

  Stalin clearly hoped to break the West Berliners’ will to resist. As tenuous as their existence was before the blockade set in, they would quickly realize it would only get worse. He offered food to those who would cross over into East Berlin. Some did. Others entered the shadowy world of the black market, trading whatever they had of value for one more meal.

  But the great majority determined to stick it out. Parents went without food in
order to feed their children. Nearly everyone went without nonessentials, which soon disappeared from store shelves. To ration the coal supply, the West Berlin authorities rolled electrical blackouts across the city, forcing mothers to awake in the middle of the night to cook their potatoes, which they tried to keep warm until their families arose.

  Truman appreciated what the Berliners were risking, and he did everything he could to make the airlift work. It didn’t start promisingly. A quick accounting estimated that the relief planes would have to deliver forty-five hundred tons of food and other essentials a day, but the first day’s effort was a meager eighty tons. Reporter Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune asked General Clay if the airlift could long succeed. “Absolutely impossible,” he responded.

  But Truman’s determination helped make the impossible happen. With practice, ingenuity and courage, the pilots, crews, controllers and many others involved in the airlift dramatically increased its capacity. By the end of the summer the rescue mission was holding its own, and the West was holding its ground in Berlin.

  The airlift was one of the grand spectacles of the time. Day after day, night after night, the roar of the cargo planes never ceased. The planes flew in good weather and bad; on landing they hardly turned off their engines for unloading before flying back to the western zones of Germany for another cargo. The children of Berlin, who had learned during the war to hide on hearing the sound of airplane motors, caught on that these were good planes. They crowded the space behind the fence at Tempelhof Airport hoping for something to eat. One American pilot, Gail Halvorsen, handed out candy to the kids; the response was so heartbreakingly positive that he started dropping candy from his plane. The cargoes wafted down on improvised parachutes, and Halvorsen became famous in Berlin as the Candy Bomber. American children donated sweets to keep the Candy Bomber supplied; eventually, tons of candy, chewing gum and other tasties rained down from the sky over Berlin.

  Truman was pleased yet hardly reassured. He understood that the airlift proceeded on Soviet sufferance. The heavily laden cargo planes were easy targets for gunners or fighter planes. At each step of the Berlin crisis, the Russians had ratcheted things tighter. Truman wasn’t sure how they could ratchet them any tighter now without triggering a war. And the air link to Berlin was a fragile skein. A single incident could set in motion a chain of escalation.

  In mid-September the president met with his military advisers, who briefed him on the progress of the airlift. “I have a terrible feeling afterward that we are very close to war,” he wrote in his diary.

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  POLITICS AT HOME made Truman’s situation worse. The Republicans rallied behind New York governor Thomas Dewey, who had made a respectable showing against Roosevelt in 1944 and appeared poised to capitalize on Truman’s multiple weaknesses. Meanwhile the Democrats did anything but rally behind Truman. Henry Wallace led the liberals out the left door of the party to regroup under the Progressive banner, while Strom Thurmond and many Southerners exited to the right, to run as States’ Rights Democrats, or Dixiecrats. Numerous polls gave a big lead to Dewey, who proceeded cautiously, to preserve his advantage, and began making lists of those he would appoint to cabinet offices.

  With nothing to lose, Truman campaigned furiously. He mounted a grueling whistle-stop train tour, hammering the “do-nothing” Republican Congress, which obliged in the special session by living down to his epithet. He reiterated that the Democrats stood for the honest, ordinary people while the Republicans did the bidding of the wealthy. “It will be the greatest campaign any President ever made,” Truman wrote to his sister midway through the tour. “Win, lose, or draw, people will know where I stand and a record will be made for future action by the Democratic Party.” Speaking of the 140 stops so far, he said, “We had tremendous crowds everywhere. From 6:30 in the morning until midnight the turnout was phenomenal. The news jerks didn’t know what to make of it—so they just lied about it!”

  Voters warmed to Truman’s plainspoken style. “Give ’em hell, Harry!” they shouted lustily. “I don’t have to give ’em hell,” Truman rejoined. “It’s a lot worse for me to tell the truth on ’em, because they can’t stand the truth.”

  Polls showed the race tightening, but Truman appeared to run out of time. As late as election day the cause seemed lost. The anti-Truman Chicago Tribune, extrapolating from Dewey’s strong showing in the East, gloatingly went to press that evening with the front-page banner “Dewey Defeats Truman.”

  Yet Truman had the laugh the next day. Overnight tallies revealed that the West had gone heavily Democratic, returning the president to office by a comfortable margin.

  Clark Clifford, then in the early stage of a career as political guru to Democratic presidents, proclaimed the victory a personal triumph for Truman. “It wasn’t, in my opinion, because he was a skilled politician that he won,” Clifford said. “He was a good politician…a sensible politician….But that wasn’t why he was elected president….It was the remarkable courage in the man—his refusal to be discouraged, his willingness to go through the suffering of that campaign, the fatigue, the will to fight every step of the way, the will to win….It wasn’t Harry Truman the politician who won; it was Harry Truman the man.”

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  TRUMAN’S COURAGE CONTINUED to be tested in Berlin. If the president had known how long Stalin intended to apply the tourniquet to the city, he might have made a different decision at the outset. It was one thing to keep Berlin alive during the summer, when demands for fuel were comparatively modest, but as winter approached, the challenge intensified dramatically. Winter weather, moreover, complicated the choreography of getting the planes in and out of Berlin.

  But Truman was as stubborn as Stalin was patient, and having inspired the West Berliners to stand against the Russians, the president determined to see the mission through. He and the Berliners knew what was at stake. “The Soviets had declared that all of Berlin was theirs, and their newspapers in German language didn’t cease to foretell the realization of that claim,” remembered Willy Brandt, who would become mayor of West Berlin and then chancellor of West Germany. “They spread rumors of different kinds, they didn’t spare threats and intimidations. Thus, here and there, doubts arose as to whether one would be able to resist the Russian pressure in the long run. The retaliation and vengeance in case of a defeat would be terrible.”

  The airlift intensified as the days grew colder and shorter. The pilots and controllers grew bolder and more imaginative; the cargo crews devised methods of getting tons out of the planes in mere minutes. The people of Berlin bent their backs to rebuilding runways pounded to dust by the constant traffic.

  The struggle, the privation, the shared danger, had a marvelous effect. With each week that passed that Berlin did not capitulate, the Berliners grew more self-confident. By the beginning of 1949 it was becoming clear, even to Stalin, that the blockade had backfired. Its immediate purpose had been to drive a wedge between the Berliners and the West; its result was to make the Berliners the Germans most devoted to the West. The larger Soviet aim had been to weaken the American attachment to Europe; the success of the airlift furnished the final impetus to the North Atlantic Treaty of April 1949, which bound the United States to Europe as nothing before. The ultimate retort to Stalin was the amalgamation of the western zones of Germany into the single Federal Republic of Germany, precisely the result the Berlin blockade had been initiated to prevent.

  By the time the Russians dropped the blockade in May 1949, the world viewed Harry Truman with new respect. The accidental president, lately returned to office by a vote of the American people, had gone toe-to-toe with Stalin, and Stalin had yielded. Truman’s combination of firmness and patience had held freedom’s ground without provoking war. It was hard to imagine any chief executive doing better.

  3

  YET DOUGLAS MACARTHUR imagined just that. More precisely, MacArthur imagined himself being president. He had climbed to the pinnacle of the Amer
ican military; as a five-star general, he was outranked only by George Marshall, who had preceded him to that level by two days. He could achieve nothing more at arms; the sole public office not beneath him was the presidency. Many of his correspondents and visitors told him he would be a better president than Truman; his sense of honesty compelled him to agree, usually silently.

  People had told him this before. He hadn’t disagreed then, either, though he now realized he should have. In 1944 he had allowed himself to be put forward as a candidate for the Republican nomination for president. He permitted a draft-MacArthur campaign to develop, and he exchanged letters with a Republican congressman, Arthur Miller of Nebraska, who denounced Franklin Roosevelt in the most vitriolic terms. “If this system of left-wingers and New Dealism is continued another four years,” Miller said, “I am certain that this monarchy which is being established in America will destroy the rights of the common people.”

  “I appreciate very much your scholarly letter,” MacArthur replied. “Your description of conditions in the United States is a sobering one indeed and is calculated to arouse the thoughtful consideration of every true patriot.”

  MacArthur polled strongly in parts of the Midwest before the professionals in the Republican party made clear how difficult it would be to elect a general over his commander-in-chief in the middle of a war. George McClellan had tested this route during the Civil War and failed. The MacArthur boom fizzled, prompting MacArthur to disavow further interest. “I request that no action be taken that would link my name in any way with the nomination,” he said. “I do not covet it nor would I accept it.”