by Roy Jenkins
For the moment, however, it was the reaction of the public rather than of the General which made the impact. ‘Quite an explosion,’ Truman wrote fairly laconically in his diary for April 10th. ‘Was expected but I had to act Telegrams and letters of abuse by the dozen.’25
‘By the dozen’ was something of an understatement. 78,000 pieces of mail on the issue eventually reached the White House, and they broke approximately twenty to one against the President. On the Gallup Poll he did somewhat better, only 69% supporting MacArthur as against 29% for the President. The loyal 29% were not enough to prevent Truman being burnt in effigy in many places across the nation, and there was a great deal of muttering about impeachment, some of it from relatively responsible members of the Congress. The press was substantially better than the public. The New York Times and the Washington Post, not then the heavenly twins of East Coast liberalism which they subsequently became, both supported the President. So did the New York Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor, the St Louis Post-Dispatch, the Chicago Sun-Times, to cite only a few.
There was however a second spasm of the earthquake still to be faced: the return of MacArthur to the United States. As it was the first time he had been seen in America since 1937, his arrival would in any event have caused considerable interest. In the circumstances it aroused hysteria. He reached San Francisco on April 17th. He was greeted by a crowd of 100,000 and seemed to show himself a dangerous master of sententious demagogy by announcing: ‘The only politics I have is contained in the simple phrase known well by all of you: God Bless America.’
He then proceeded to Washington for the joint session of Congress which he had been invited to address. Truman made a good if daring joke by sending General Vaughan to greet him. The Pentagon, even though firm on the issue, was more respectful. Marshall, Bradley and the three Chiefs of Staff were all present on the tarmac at National Airport. The address to Congress was powerful and provocative. The Cabinet, apart from Truman and Acheson, were sunk in gloom. They both believed there was an element of bathos about the much-acclaimed speech. They turned out to be right, but it required some bravado on their part to feel it at the time.
Perhaps MacArthur made a symptomatic mistake by ending in ambiguity. ‘“Old soldiers,” he said, “never die; they just fade away.” And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away– an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.’
Immediately he faded away to the Waldorf Tower in New York, but from there he made several powerful early forays. However his balloon fairly quickly began to subside. Truman, not the most impartial of witnesses perhaps, thought the beginning of the exhalation was when he was half laughed at at a baseball game in Queen’s. Certainly he was never seriously considered as a presidential candidate for 1952. He was of course immensely old, even by more recent sandards, to start a political career. He died, almost forgotten, in 1964, at the age of 84.
Truman, when led in that direction by an interlocutor,26 said that the sacking was the greatest test of his presidency. In a negative sense it was. But it required more nerve than judgment. It was a question of enduring the noise of bombardment, which was fearsome, but which, once he had got the rest of the military establishment on his side, was unlikely to prove fatal. And Truman was very good at that. Other crises of the war called for a rarer combination of qualities, and ones which came less easily to him. These, too, he surmounted well. The Korean War destroyed any hope of a joyous second term, but in all but the small change of short-run partisan advantage, it enhanced his reputation.
11
THE LAST PHASE
There were nineteen months between June 1951, when the Korean War subsided into a bickering stalemate, and the end of Truman’s presidency. After the searing years through which he had passed, and as an introit to the subsequent soaring of his reputation, it would be agreeable to record that they were a period of calm fulfilment and grateful recognition.
Unfortunately it would be completely untrue. The best that could be said for this final year and a half was that, by the standards of his presidency, relatively little happened during it. But most of what did occur was disobliging to Truman, and some of it was humiliating. His administration was plagued by the eruption of one petty scandal after another, cumulatively very damaging, although only those permeating the Bureau of Internal Revenue reached objectively serious proportions. Partly as a result his poll rating at the end of 1951 was down to 23%, substantially worse even than in 1946. He had to sack his Attorney-General and replace him with the third second-rater he had appointed to that post since getting rid of Roosevelt’s Biddle. He finally lost Marshall, who withdrew from the Department of Defense in September 1951, and he witnessed the sad spectacle of Acheson’s authority at home being increasingly undermined because the President lacked the power to protect his Secretary of State from McCarthy’s vituperation. Confronted with a steel strike Truman once again shot impulsively and probably illegally from the hip (although this time it was the companies, not the unions, who were his target), and was overturned by the Supreme Court.
As the 1952 elections approached he made almost every possible misjudgment about who the Republican candidate was likely to be, who the Democratic candidate ought to be, and which party was likely to win. He played with the idea of changing his mind and running again himself, but was dissuaded by the near unanimous advice of his family, his friends and his staff: a candidate with an age of 68 and a poll rating of 23% might reasonably be regarded by even his most fervent supporters as having got things nearly the wrong way round. He then had an unhappy campaign relationship both with Stevenson, whom he tried unsuccessfully to make his protégé, and with Eisenhower, with whom he entered into a bitter feud for a mixture of about one to two of good and bad reasons. After threatening darkly (to himself at least) that he would do nothing throughout the election but ‘sit on his front porch’–or, as it was the White House,1 the south or back porch—he then conducted a frenetic, ill-judged and unwelcome campaign on behalf of Stevenson.
His last two months of office, apart from a few prickly brushes with Eisenhower, were fairly satisfactory. With a strong sense of the august nature of the presidency (but not of the President) he naturally felt to the full the change in his life which was about to occur. He had a lively awareness of doing things for the last time. But he did not regret this. He felt he had served his time and done his duty. He was ready to go. And when he went he had a grand send-off.
Some of the newer members of his staff sensed a certain lack of grip. Joseph Short, who had replaced Charles Ross as press secretary, thought that Truman was much too inclined to believe that the minor financial scandals could be left to blow themselves out. Roger Tubby, Short’s assistant, wrote an extensive and often worried journal. During a holiday visit to Key West a little before the beginning of the final nineteen months, he wrote: ‘Poker, poker, I wonder why he played so much … a feeling of vacuum otherwise, no struggle, excitement? … companionship, banter, escape from the pressing problems of state?’ Then, the train of his thought being obvious, he added: ‘I read the New Republic editorial expressing fear lest Truman end up in as bad repute as Harding—though that hardly seems possible … the stuff so far [has] been such chicken feed compared to Teapot Dome.’21
No doubt the newer staff found it less easy than the longer serving ones to understand the peculiar mixture of his weave of relaxation and decision taking, which had certainly not left the country short of firm government. There was no suggestion of disloyalty developing amongst either group. What was striking, however, was the unanimity with which they all said ‘no’ when, in early March 1952, he seriously considered running again.
This did not mean that his private memorandum of renunciation, by then nearly two years old, which he had revealed to his staff in the previous November, was just a piece of play-acting. He genuinely thought that it was right and desir
able that he should not serve again. He also no doubt had a roseate vision of finding a satisfactory Democratic candidate, whom he could promote, instruct in the ways of presidential politics and government, and then protectively install in the White House.
Truman’s approach to the 1952 election cannot be understood without comprehending that he firmly believed a Democratic candidate could and would win. This was based partly on his fierce partisanship, which made him overestimate the continuing appeal of his own and Roosevelt’s record. It was also based on the view, which he held steadfastly up to the opening of their Convention in early July, that the Republicans would nominate Taft, whom he regarded as eminently beatable. In Truman’s view therefore any presentable Democrat (certainly including himself, in spite of the 23% poll rating) would be President and not merely a sporting runner. This view, except possibly for the inclusion of Truman himself within the electable category, was broadly shared by much informed opinion over the winter of 1951-2.
At the beginning of that winter, on November 19th, Truman for the first time discussed the succession freely with his staff. Adlai Stevenson, who at the age of 51 was three years into a successful term as Governor of Illinois, was the first name to be mentioned in this inner group, as it was already becoming the first name in more public circles. Truman spoke against him, on somewhat inconsequential grounds. According to his daughter he expressed his hope that the Democratic Party ‘would be smart enough to select someone who could win. And by that I don’t mean the Stevenson type of candidate. I don’t believe the people of the United States are ready for an Ivy Leaguer.’3
Truman’s choice was his own appointment as Chief Justice, Fred Vinson, a former Kentucky congressman who had been briefly Secretary of the Treasury before elevation to the Supreme Court. As Chief Justice, which office he occupied respectably rather than with distinction, Vinson remained surprisingly close to the President’s inner circle (he was a poker player). Truman, as in the case of the abortive mission to Stalin in 1948, tended to credit him with both a greater sagacity and a higher public repute than he in fact possessed. What was indisputable was that he was a man with whom Truman felt comfortable. This combination of qualities, real and imagined, made Truman prepared to leap over a precedent-free gulf and try to put a Chief Justice in the White House.† Vinson, however, was unresponsive. He was 62, not in perfect health, and sensitive about damaging his judicial reputation. By early December he had convinced the President that he was not available.
This left Truman without a satisfactory candidate. Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, Barkley, Harriman and Estes Kefauver all wanted the job, but Truman considered none of them right. Russell was an able Senator but too much a man of the South to be acceptable. Barkley had been ‘a great Vice-President’, but at 74 he was simply too old. ‘It takes him five minutes to sign his name,’ which would be a substantial disqualification for dealing with the 600 documents a day which, Truman claimed, the President had to sign.4 Harriman, on the other hand, was well capable of doing the job, but Truman thought that his lack of campaign experience and political backing, together with his provenance as the son of one of the great railroad predators of the turn of the century, probably made him unelectable. Kefauver, the anti-crime campaigner in the coonskin hat, he simply regarded as unappetizing. Privately he mostly referred to him as ‘Cowfever’.
In these circumstances Truman did two things, neither of which turned out well. First he began to move back towards himself as a candidate, and chose Eisenhower, of all people, as a correspondent to whom to open his mind. Partly because of a certain romantic attachment to the idea of the relationship of the President as Commander-in-Chief to a great commander overseas, and perhaps also to compensate for the MacArthur rupture, he had the habit of writing to Eisenhower in terms closer than that General ever reciprocated, either in thought or word. Certainly on this occasion he wrote to him by hand in a foolishly unbuttoned way:5
‘Dera Ike, [Truman wrote on December 18th.]
‘The columnists, the slick magazines and all the political people who like to speculate are saying many things about what is to happen in 1952.
‘As I told you in 1948 and at our luncheon in 1951, do
what you think best for the country. My own position is in the balance. If I do what I want to do, I’ll go back to Missouri and maybe run for the Senate.7 If you decide to finish the European job (and I don’t know who else can) I must keep the isolationists out of the White House. I wish you would let me know what you intend to do. It will be between us and no one else.
‘I have the utmost confidence in your judgment and your patriotism.
‘My best to you and Mrs Ike for a happy holiday season.
Most sincerely,
Harry S. Truman.’2
Eisenhower took two weeks to reply and then did so at best guardedly, at worst hypocritically. There was no reciprocation of esteem let alone affection. Reading between the lines it was clear that he was open to political angling. But his formal statement of position, ‘you know, far better than I, that the possibility that I will ever- be drawn into political activity is so remote as to be negligible’ was, to say the least, disingenuous. Five days later Henry Cabot Lodge announced with authority that Eisenhower’s name would be entered in the New Hampshire Republican Primary. Two days after that Eisenhower issued a somewhat unctuous statement of availability for ‘higher duty’.
Truman’s name also was entered, by an over-enthusiastic local supporter, in the New Hampshire Democratic Primary. He tried but failed to get it withdrawn. He was heavily beaten by Senator ‘Cowfever’. Well before that outcome, however, he had made his second unfortunate move. This was to decide that Governor Stevenson, even if he carried a little too much ivy, was the most likely winning candidate, and that he should be summoned to Washington for a placing of the hands upon the head.
The occasion for this act of consecration was a meeting at Blair House after dinner on January 22nd. It was the first time they had attempted to talk intimately. Stevenson had been forewarned by Murphy what would be proposed. This did not however mean that he responded with the crisp and grateful acceptance which Truman expected. Nor, it appears, did he give a clear ‘no’. On the following day Truman reported to Murphy that he had reluctantly said ‘yes’. Stevenson reported to his friends that he had said ‘no’. The confusion is probably to be explained by the fact that the two men understood each other about as well as if they had been conversing in a neutral foreign language which neither understood or spoke easily. The reality however was that Stevenson, while flattered by the offer, was genuinely unsure whether he wanted the nomination, partly because of hesitant ambition, partly because of fear of Eisenhower, and certain that he did not want it as Truman’s surrogate. He believed that any Democrat with a chance of winning would have to offer a new start in Washington and not a continuation of the Truman régime under a new name.
In the course of a few days Truman came to understand that he had not netted his candidate, but not the reasons for this failure. He believed that Stevenson, like a shy Victorian heroine receiving her first proposal of marriage, had been too overwhelmed by the offer to make a rational reply. A little perseverance would probably do the trick.
On March 4th, when President and Governor met for the second time, Truman was forced to accept defeat, although it seems unlikely that many misunderstandings were cleared away, for the account which Truman wrote on the same day of the interview, while happily friendly towards Stevenson, was frankly incredible:
‘Tonight the Governor came to see me at his request to tell me that he had made a commitment to run for re-election in Illinois and that he did not think he could go back on that commitment honorably. I appreciate his view point and I honor him for it … His is an honorable man. Wish I could have talked with him before his announcement. He is a modest man too. He seems to think that I am something of a superman which isn’t true of course.
‘… I told him I could get him nomina
ted whether he wanted to be or not. Then I asked what he’d do in that case. He was very much worried and said that no patriot could say no to such a condition [sic].
‘Then he argued that only I can beat any Republican be he Taft, Eisenhower, Warren, or anyone else! My wife and daughter had said the same thing to me an hour before. What the hell am I to do? I’ll know when the time comes because I am sure God Almighty will guide me.’3
Truman in fact turned more for guidance to ChiefJustice Vinson, who had the advantage of being resident in Washington. He had him, Charles Murphy and a few others to one of his last dinners in Blair House. They were discouraging. The rest of the story is told vividly, as usual, by his daughter: ‘Later, he convened a larger meeting, which included the whole White House staff as well as several congressional leaders. At this meeting he polled the entire room –a dozen or more—and asked each man what he thought. Although they gave varying reasons, not one of them thought he should run again. Mother felt the same way. So did I. Mother’s opinion carried a lot more weight than mine, of course. Dad decided that the verdict seemed to be unanimous.’4
That settled the question of his own candidature. He went off for another vacation at Key West and on his return used a Jefferson/Jackson Day Washington dinner to make a surprise announcement of unequivocal non-availability. ‘I shall not accept a renomination’, he said. ‘I do not feel that it is my duty to spend another four years in the White House.’ It did not, however, settle the question of Stevenson. Truman had switched off him, but public attention had not. Indeed, as soon as Truman made his statement of withdrawal the cameramen rushed to the other end of the same long table where the Governor of Illinois was seated.