Truman

by Roy Jenkins

  Curiously his Cabinet were almost all in favour of his accepting the bill. The only two against were Schwellenbach, the egregious Secretary of Labour, who naturally had his clients to consider, and Hannegan, the Postmaster-General, whose primary business was not mails but the fostering of the Democratic Party machine. Snyder, Truman’s closest Cabinet friend, was particularly strong in favour of his signing the bill. At the least equally curiously, the White House mail on the subject was both huge and overwhelmingly in favour of a veto. Over 750,000 communications were received. It was of course largely an organized campaign, but it was not the sort of organization at which the unions were usually very good.

  There was no certainty until the last moment about what Truman was going to do. Then on June 20th he came out against the bill with a message of exceptional length—over 5,000 words. There was no reflection of hesitancy in the tone of this message. The bill was ‘a shocking piece of legislation … bad for labor, bad for management and bad for the country’. There was an element of bathos about this ‘veto’, which so far from stopping the bill in its tracks, merely held it up for three or four days while the House overrode the President’s view by a majority of 4 to 1 and the Senate by nearly 3 to 1.10

  Nevertheless his disapproval of it earned him considerable credit with the unions. A year earlier the President of the Brotherhood of Railways Trainmen had threatened that the Brotherhood would ‘open its treasury’ to defeat Truman in 1948. Now Alexander Whitney caused his spokesman to state: ‘It is indicated that our Brotherhood will throw all its resources behind President Truman and his Administration in an effort to elect a Congress which will back the President’s liberal programme’, thus demonstrating both the union’s flexibility and its faithfulness to good trade union jargon.

  At least equally importantly, Truman’s ‘veto’ of Taft-Hartley, following the Marshall speech, clutched back the liberal wing of the Rooseveltians from the enticements of Wallace. In early 1947 Americans for Democratic Action had been founded, with Mrs Roosevelt as its figurehead, a number of old New Dealers as its Praetorian Guard, those patriarchal New York immigrant clothing worker union leaders, Dubinsky and Potofsky, as its godfathers, Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers as a whipper-in, and the then relatively junior John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. as its young Turks. This body at first had no commitment to Truman. Indeed as late as February 1948 ADA refrained from endorsing him. But the Taft-Hartley veto made them neutral. Wallace’s withdrawal from support of the Marshall Plan when the Russians walked out in Paris disenchanted them with him. And the sponsors of his candidature (announced in Chicago in December 1947) made them profoundly suspicious, for they were always firmly hostile to Communist front organizations. Thereafter ADA flirted around a little, even with Eisenhower, but never with any seriously possible Democratic candidate for 1948, before coming solidly to Truman’s support in the campaign itself.

  During most of 1947, however, Truman was far from being pre-occupied with thought of the 1948 election. In the first place he was doubtful whether he wanted to run. Although there is no direct documentary evidence there is strong oral support for the view that at some time (possiby on several occasions) during the year he renewed his 1945 suggestion to Eisenhower and offered to step aside and support him for the Democratic nomination. This is testified to by Rosenman who wrote many of Truman’s speeches, Steelman of his White House staff, and from the other side of the fence by Milton Eisenhower, the General’s brother. The reasons why it was not subsequently confirmed in the writings or words of either of the principals are fairly obvious. Eisenhower did not wish to confirm that he had let Truman think he was a Democrat. And Truman, partly as a result of Eisenhower not rallying to Marshall’s defence against the calumnies of McCarthy, moved into a position of such abiding dislike of his successor that he preferred not to recall that he had ever thought of promoting him as President of the United States. But there seems little doubt that, at any rate during the first half of 1947, Truman was still attracted by the idea, and spoke accordingly to Eisenhower, who said that he had no intention of going into politics (such dissimulation was another subsequent count against him in Truman’s eyes), but not that he was not a Democrat.

  On November 12th 1947, Truman told Forrestal that ‘he would be delighted not to run again if it were not for a sense of duty which compelled him to do so.’9 In other words he had crossed his Rubicon. Duty would make him run. But his reluctance was sincere. He talked of the intolerably constrictive effect which the presidency had upon the life of his daughter and of the limited satisfaction which he derived from it.

  As that winter turned into the spring of 1948 Truman’s political mood evolved further. By March or April he was determined to fight and if possible to win. It was 1940 writ large. In part this was reaction against Eisenhower, and well before McCarthyism. It was one thing for him to think of handing over the baton to Eisenhower. It was another for others to promote Eisenhower when Truman had already decided that the General had no stomach for a political fight. Yet this is precisely what happened. The whole Roosevelt clan (with the crucial exception of Eleanor who was tempted, but continued to treat Truman as well as ever) and many of their associates too, were seized with a ‘draft Eisenhower’ craze in the early months of 1948. Truman was furious. He was not going to be dumped for an allegedly non-political general who had rejected his own overtures. Subsequently he dragged up Eisenhower’s relationship with his wartime English driver, Mrs Summersby, and his 1945 letter to General Marshall, saying that he wanted to be relieved of his duty, divorce his wife and marry Mrs Summersby, as a reason why he could not support Eisenhower for president.10 This was very much ex post. As Truman knew of the Eisenhower-Marshall correspondence later there seems little reason why he should not have known before 1947. Indeed it would have been more appropriate to disclose it to him as Commander-in-Chief, while both the generals were serving officers, than when they subsequently became political figures of differing affiliation.11 While he was not vain, Truman could occasionally take deep and unforgiving offence if he thought that someone combined excessive self-regard with an attempt to put themselves on a higher moral plane than himself. A curious selection of people fell into this category. Robert Oppenheimer and Adlai Stevenson12, as well as Eisenhower are amongst their number.

  Nevertheless it remains the case that throughout 1947 Truman was, for a president, unusually unconcerned with electoral considerations. This did not mean that he was indifferent to politics. Even when he thought that he might voluntarily go out in 1949, he wanted to do so with 3¾ years of effective presidency behind him. He therefore welcomed the big improvement in the polls which took place in the spring (of 1947), when his approval rate rose to a very respectable 60% from a low of 32% in September 1946. He wished to preserve a base in the Democratic Party, even if the South had to some extent to be let go, and he even cultivated with moderate assiduity his relationship with what he was later to denounce as the ‘do-nothing, good-for-nothing, worst (ever) Eightieth Congress’. On July 23rd when he was lunching at the Senate he took the unprecedented step of strolling on to the floor after the meal and sitting in his old seat. Vandenberg, who was in the chair and who of course had been carefully tipped off, ‘recognized’ the ex-Senator from Missouri for five minutes. Truman used the time to make a nostalgic little speech which was well received on both sides.

  1947 was notable in the annals of the Truman administration on a number of other counts. It was the year of the National Security Act, which set up the Department of Defense and unified the armed forces, although not in nearly as complete a form as Truman would have liked. The Act also, and almost incidentally, established the CIA. It was the year when Truman, a little afraid but having the courage to go on when frightened, landed himself with a civil rights programme, which was the forerunner of much subsequent legislation in the field, as well as the cause of the Dixiecrat revolt of 1948 and thus the beginning of a substantial geographic
al re-orientation in American politics. It was also a year, particularly in the latter part, when the Palestine issue obtruded heavily on to both the domestic and the foreign politics of the United States. But that had to some extent been so in 1946, and was to be still more so in 1948, to which year the core and crunch of the story belongs.

  Altogether Truman ended the year in much better shape than he had begun it. He had started with the courage of desperation. To most people it looked inconceivable that he could run again, let alone be elected. It looked likely that his own words of 1944 about vice-presidents who succeeded to the presidency (’usually they were ridiculed in office, had their hearts broken, lost any vestige of respect they had had before’) were making themselves even more applicable to himself than to most of the others. By the end of the year he had a certain solidity of achievement, particularly in the foreign policy field. His presidency could not be regarded as negligible, whatever was to happen in the future. He had overcome his own reluctance to run again. Given his temperament he probably already thought that he could win. It was still the case, however, that few others did, although they would no longer have dismissed his ability to be nominated.

  When Henry Wallace announced his independent candidature on December 19th it did little to spoil Truman’s Christmas. Indeed the President organized the holiday rather better than usual, with a large family party in the White House in place of the usual rather bad-tempered dash for thirty hours to Independence. The reason for the family party was that it was the first Christmas without ‘Mamma Truman’. Paradoxically but rather typically, however, the large White House party was made up overwhelmingly of relations of Bess rather than of Harry Truman. The President’s brother, Vivian, could not come because he had too many of his own family to entertain at home in Missouri. ‘I am sure they had a grand dinner’, Truman wrote ruminatively, ‘a much happier one than a formal, butler served one, although ours was nice enough. But a family dinner, cooked by the family mother, daughters, grand-daughters and served by them, is not equalled by the White House, Delmonico’s, Antoine’s or any other formal one.’10 Truman had launched himslf on a modest quest for racial equality but he was a long way from embracing the idea of women’s liberation. An ideal to which however his dedication could never be doubted, whether in good times or in bad, was that of a simpler, earlier, more honest America. But it was always something which, whether he was in Washington or Independence or Grandview was just beyond the receding horizon. It was the nostalgia of an incurable romantic, mostly slightly dissatisfied but rarely self-pitying. And unlike some of his successors he did not try to inflict his nostalgia as political stock-in-trade upon the nation.

  8

  VICTORY OUT OF THE JAWS OF DEFEAT

  1948, in contrast with its revolutionary predecessor a century before and in contradiction of Yeats, was a year when the centre held. The word of Marshall was made flesh in the form of the European Recovery Programme. The foundations of NATO were laid. And Truman confounded Dewey, the Chicago Tribune and Dr Gallup by being re-elected President of the United States.

  During the first part of the year, however, leading up to the proclamation of the state of Israel on May 14th and its immediate recognition by the United States, the divisive issue of Palestine was repeatedly hovering over the international landscape. It was divisive between the White House and the State Department. It was divisive within Truman’s own mind. In an intermittent way it had been all of these things since the first months of his presidency. It was the greatest irritant of the period to Anglo-American relations. It probably was the factor which most inhibited the growth of real respect, let alone affection, between Truman and his most powerful European auxiliary, Ernest Bevin. And it certainly strained the President’s relationship with his much admired Secretary of State more than every other issue put together.

  Truman appeared, in the eyes of the British Government and to some extent of the State Department, to be determinedly, even carelessly, pro-Zionist. In fact he was much more objectively than subjectively so. He had a general predisposition in favour of a Jewish national home, and indeed a Jewish state, but no great emotional commitment to the cause. He was however subject to a number of influences, personal and political. There were two determined Zionists in the White House staff. The first was David K. Niles, whom he had inherited from Roosevelt, and greatly liked. The second and more central was Clark Clifford, who from 1946 had constant access to the President and never hesitated to take on the State Department. Then there was his old haberdashery partner, Eddie Jacobson, who had re-established himself more successfully in similar business in Kansas City and re-entered Truman’s life as an unofficial but extremely effective ambassador of the Jewish Agency in the summer of 1946. On several crucial occasions he applied pressure upon Truman in a way that the President would have accepted from few other people. In addition, Weizmann himself, operating less intrusively but with a grander sweep than Jacobson, never failed on the three or four occasions when they met to exercise almost as magnetic an effect upon Truman as he had upon Balfour thirty years before.

  The political pressures came from the Democratic machine, both nationally through Hannegan and his successor McGrath, and from State leaders, primarily but not exclusively in New York. It was funds, still more than votes, that they were concerned about. Their pressure was re-inforced by the fact that the Republicans, Dewey and even Taft, were prepared to outbid the President whenever he veered towards accepting State Department caution towards the rapid creation of a Jewish state.

  To Attlee and Bevin, who at least until 1947 when they tried to hand over the problem to the United Nations, had direct responsibility, Truman emerged from all this as a rampant partisan, careless alike of Arab opinion and the prospects of peace in the area and concerned only with the exigencies of American domestic politics. Attlee responded with some tart private messages which Bevin supplemented with occasional exasperated and ill-judged public speeches. In June 1946, he enlivened the Labour Party Conference by saying ‘Regarding the agitation in the United States … for 100,000 Jews to be put into Palestine, I hope it will not be misunderstood in America if I say, with the purest of motives, that that was because they did not want too many of them in New York.’ The hope with which he prefaced his delicate irony, it need hardly be said, was misplaced. Nine months later, he had another go: ‘I really must point out that in international affairs I cannot settle things,’ he told the House of Commons in typically egotistical terms, ‘if my problem is made the subject of local elections. I hope I am not saying anything to cause bad feeling in the United States, but I feel so intense about this …’

  These statements did Bevin a lot of harm with American public opinion, in New York at least. On one occasion dockers there refused to unload his luggage from the Queen Mary1 and on another he was booed at a baseball game in Yankee Stadium. More importantly they infuriated Truman, and acted as a countervailing influence to the irritation with which he reacted to excessive Jewish lobbying. In June 1946 he at first refused to see a delegation of all the New York Congressmen, and finally received them only with obvious impatience. He was no better when the two Senators from the state, Wagner and Mead, brought a former member of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry (into Palestine) to see him. ‘I am not a New Yorker,’ Truman is alleged to have told them. ‘All these people are pleading for a special interest. I am an American’1 2 ‘… The Jews themselves are making it almost impossible to do anything for them’, he wrote to Edwin Pauley in October.2 And in August 1947, he used to Mrs Roosevelt the analogy he had applied to the labour unions over a year before: ‘I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath. I regret this very much because my sympathy has always been on their side.’2 A couple of months after this he pretended to Senator Pepper of Florida (to irritate not propitiate him) that he had personally burnt 35,000 pieces of unread pro-Zionis
t mail.

  Then in February 1948 he refused to see Weizmann. This led to Jacobson being sent in to secure a reversal of the decision. He succeeded, but not without touching some of Truman’s rawest nerves. He arrived unannounced at the White House and as was habitual got an interview without difficulty, although he was urged not to talk to the President about Palestine. Needless to say, Jacobson did not for long stick to this advice. ‘He [Truman] immediately became tense in appearance, abrupt in speech, and very bitter in the words he was throwing my way,’ Jacobson recorded. ‘In all the years of our friendship he never talked to me in this manner or anything approaching it … I suddenly found myself thinking that my dear friend the President of the United States was at that moment as close to being an anti-Semite as a man could possibly be, and I was shocked that some of our Jewish leaders should be responsible for Mr. Truman’s attitude.’3

  Nonetheless Jacobson used his special powers of persuasion to get Weizmann his interview, which took place secretly on March 18th, 1948. It led to one of the worst foreign policy confusions of Truman’s presidency. On November 29th, 1947, the UN General Assembly, with the problem dumped in their laps by the British, had voted by 33 to 13, with 10 abstentions, in favour of partition. As a two-thirds majority was required to give the resolution validity the margin was adequate but not handsome. The United States lobbied hard in its favour. Truman issued instructions that the delegation in New York was not to use ‘threats or improper pressure’ on other delegations. That instruction, however, even if fully carried out, and there is evidence that it was not, would have left some room for persuasion and ‘proper’ pressure. What is certain is that without not merely the vote, but the influence of the United States, then far greater in the General Assembly than today, there would have been no chance of the requisite numbers.