Where the Buck Stops

by Harry Truman

  A few months before that, a serious disagreement developed between the United States and Egypt. The United States had promised Egypt a loan of $70 million so that Egypt could build a dam at Aswan, on the Nile, but some of Eisenhower’s people didn’t care much for Gamal Abdel Nasser, and we suddenly and unexpectedly canceled the loan. Nasser was furious and announced that he was nationalizing the Suez Canal, which in turn infuriated Great Britain, France, and Israel, which needed free movement on the Canal for oil supplies, and in the case of the first two countries, also needed free movement on the Canal because of their dependencies in the Pacific and elsewhere. The three countries asked the United States for help, hinting that it had, after all, been this country that had started the thing by making a promise and then breaking it.

  Eisenhower ignored this plea, too, and Great Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt. All that Eisenhower did about that was to join Russia in a cease-fire resolution at the United Nations, which, of course, Great Britain and France vetoed immediately. The three countries eventually left Egypt after Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, assured them that he’d guarantee free access to the Canal. Nasser came through on this for Great Britain and France but not for Israel, a fact that Eisenhower and Dulles also ignored. I’d recognized Israel immediately as a sovereign nation when the British left Palestine in 1948, and I did so against the advice of my own secretary of state, George Marshall, who was afraid that the Arabs wouldn’t like it. This was one of the few errors of judgment made by that great and wonderful man, but I felt that Israel deserved to be recognized and didn’t give a damn whether the Arabs liked it or not. So as you can imagine, I wasn’t very happy about what amounted to a double cross of the Israelis by Eisenhower and that stuffed-shirt Dulles.

  I’ll just mention one more situation where Eisenhower looked out of the window or played golf or read one of those Westerns by Luke Short he was always reading when he should have been taking decisive action on behalf of the country and perhaps the world. And that situation is, as you might have guessed, when Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1958.

  I was interviewed a while ago by a young fellow who was putting together a television show, and he asked me what I thought about Eisenhower’s nonaction on Castro. I didn’t mince words then, and I’m not going to mince words on that subject in this book. I told that young man that nonaction was characteristic of Eisenhower as president because he’d proved to be such a dumb son of a bitch when he got out of his uniform, and that one of the dumbest things that happened during his administration was ignoring Castro when there was a good chance - and I’m certain there was a good chance - to get him on our side rather than Russia’s.

  I said that if I’d still been president when Castro started that revolution against Batista and won, I’d have picked up the phone and made friends with him, offered him financial aid and other kinds of help in getting Cuba on its feet. I don’t think for a minute that Castro was a locked-in pro-Russian at that point; I think he turned toward Russia because when he looked at us, all he could see was a bunch of backs turned away from him. I’d have said, “Listen, Fidel, come on down here to Washington and let’s talk.” Maybe I’d have hinted that it would be nice if he took a haircut and a good shower before he came, but speaking seriously, I’d have seen to it that we had a sensible meeting and worked things out, and we wouldn’t be worrying ever since that time about what’s being cooked up between the Cubans and the Russians on that island just ninety miles away from Florida.

  But, as I said to that young television fellow, all that Eisenhower did was sit on his behind and hope that if he didn’t seem to notice Castro and the other Cuban revolutionaries, they might go away, and naturally the Russians didn’t sit on their behind, and they got Castro nice and deep in their pockets. Good old Ike Eisenhower was probably sitting there waiting for a staff report from one of his people that would tell him what he ought to think, something he could look at with one eye and initial and buck over to somebody else. Maybe he’s still waiting for it as I write these words.

  Those were some of the do-nothing things in the Eisenhower administration. Now, let’s take a look at some of the things that did happen while Eisenhower was president, usually instances where Eisenhower followed the advice or instructions of his people, and see how they reflect on the man.

  Eisenhower got a big boost to his reputation, and undoubtedly a lot of votes in November of 1952, because he promised to go to Korea if he was elected president and end the war there. He did go, and the war, thank the Lord, did end in Korea - but was that campaign promise a decent and honorable thing to do, and did his trip have much to do with ending the war? In my view, the answer is no, emphatically no, to both questions. On the question of whether it was a decent thing to do, or the opposite, I’ll remind people that I was furious about the promise because, as I said at the time, if Eisenhower really had a solution to the Korean War, it was his responsibility to tell it to me, and to the American public, right then and there, so that not a single day would be wasted, and not a single additional life would be lost, before it was put into operation.

  I asked Eisenhower why he hadn’t suggested his solution to the Korean War when he was one of my advisors, pointing out that if he felt he knew a way to end the war when he was elected president, we could and should do it now and save a lot of lives. He didn’t respond because, of course, there was no solution; it was just a grandstand play. He went to Korea in December, and the shooting war dragged on for six months after that, with the armistice being signed in Panmunjom on June 27.

  And as for whether or not Eisenhower’s trip had anything to do with the eventual armistice - well, since I’m obviously a prejudiced party here, I’ll quote from a book I admire, a book I think everybody admires because it’s so open-minded that I don’t believe anybody could ever accuse it of prejudice, Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager’s A Pocket History of the United States: “Eisenhower had promised during the campaign that he would halt the cruel, grinding Korean War. The task was made the easier by Stalin’s death, and by Chinese war-weariness. But positive administration steps contributed to the declaration of a truce. The administration let the Communists know, through Prime Minister Nehru of India, that if the conflict did not soon end, UN forces would begin bombing Chinese supply lines. In other words, Eisenhower and Dulles were ready to make tactical use of atomic weapons in China proper, even at the risk of bringing Russia into the struggle and opening a third world war!” The exclamation point is Mr. Nevins and Mr. Commager’s. I would have used ten exclamation points. Then the writers continue and conclude: “At this point the Chinese government yielded; perhaps because it really wanted a truce, perhaps because the new government in Moscow after the end of Stalin’s blindly bellicose regime brought pressure upon Peiping, perhaps because Nehru’s influence counted. . . . The truce was supposed to be followed at once by a political conference, a treaty, and a permanent peace, but these proved a mirage. The world got an end to fighting, but it did not get a settlement, and Korea did not gain unity. . . . When in 1954 a conference of nineteen nations met in Geneva . . . it resulted rather in losses than gains for the free world. Korea was shoved aside; agreement there was impossible . . .”

  I’ll add only that I feel that even these comments give the Eisenhower administration more credit than deserved; I believe that the time had come where the people fighting in the Korean War were ready for an armistice no matter who was president, and without the brinkmanship of atomic threats at a point in history when the Russians also had atomic weapons. Anyway, that’s my view of Eisenhower and his advisors’ cynical use of a terrible war situation for political purposes.6

  Eisenhower also allowed his party and his advisors to make a man like Richard Milhous Nixon his vice president. That speaks so much for itself that I won’t even comment further.

  Another thing Eisenhower did was to allow the clock to be turned back so that there were giveaways of natural resources and essenti
al natural properties, practices that almost totally destroyed many of the things Franklin Roosevelt and I had worked so hard to achieve. During my administration, the Supreme Court ruled that tideland oil resources, the deposits off the coasts of California, Texas, and Louisiana, were the property of the federal government, and I’d given them to the navy as a reserve, filling a need I felt was essential to our defense. The Eisenhower administration gave these to the states for transfer to private companies. I worked hard to support the Tennessee Valley Authority, and Eisenhower and his people cut TVA appropriations and turned hydroelectric development back to private companies. Eisenhower also gave federal grazing lands back to private firms. His people also threw out controls over natural gas, so that companies wouldn’t have to worry about or be subject to federal regulations. And one of the few bills vetoed by Eisenhower during his presidency was a bill allowing the government to keep an eye on pollution of rivers by industrial waste.

  As you can probably tell from some of these examples, there were really two basic things wrong with Eisenhower and his administration. One was that a major motivation in some of the things Eisenhower and his people did, or conversely, avoided doing, was to discredit the previous two administrations - rather than deciding on doing or not doing something on the basis of whether it was good or bad for the American people. When I was succeeded by Eisenhower, the simple fact is that a very serious attempt was made to reverse some of the basic policies established during my administration and Roosevelt’s, and for no good reason - just the fact that we were Democrats and now a Republican was president. Nobody had any reason to believe that Eisenhower, who had been through a lot of the programs with President Roosevelt and General Marshall and me, would attempt to reverse things and kill things just for the sake of discrediting us, but that’s exactly what happened. And behavior like that is not just the result of political differences; it arises out of nothing more or less than boneheaded foolishness. It was just a program to make the fellows who preceded him look bad, and I don’t think that’s the right attitude for a president to have when he takes over the office. Any man who has been president, whether you like him or not, has got to be a reasonably intelligent man or he wouldn’t have been president. Eisenhower’s attitude was the pinheaded personal attitude of a man who doesn’t know anything about politics.

  Eisenhower had the best chance in the world of any president who has ever taken over to have a complete outline of all existing situations. If he wanted to change things he didn’t like, there wasn’t any harm in changing them. That would be his business. They would be his new policies. But he had the idea that if he could cause situations to arise that would reflect on his predecessors, that would be to his credit. It didn’t turn out that way. And it really shouldn’t be that way. The objective of an incoming president ought to be to find out exactly what the past policies have been and to anticipate what future policies should be. Then, when the new president takes over, he should leave good policies alone and change policies he doesn’t like to the way he wants things to be. But what Eisenhower and his people had in mind was to upset the old apple cart and make it appear that Roosevelt hadn’t been a good president and I hadn’t been a president at all. Well, it didn’t work.

  The second basic fault in the Eisenhower administration is that Eisenhower really didn’t want to do anything or decide anything. He passed the buck, down. Which can’t be done. And he tried to let somebody else do the jobs that he should have been doing himself. He also made it clear on several occasions that he wanted some sign from Congress, or some vote by Congress, before he made his own decision. That’s not presidential behavior. A president should make a decision and then ask Congress to endorse it, which they usually do. Fortunately, Eisenhower and his advisors had to make relatively few decisions during the Eisenhower administration.

  Getting back to some of the things that did take place during the Eisenhower administration, did you think Eisenhower had nothing to do with the Vietnam War, that it all came about long after he was out of office? A lot of people have a memory gap there and think that’s the case, but it isn’t. In 1954, when the French were still in Vietnam and fighting at Dien Bien Phu, the French government asked the United States for help in the form of air support. The Eisenhower administration, typically, didn’t provide any help; they did nothing whatsoever. But after the French left, it was Eisenhower who sent in “military advisors” and “military observers,” those two terms used dishonestly and so often for soldiers and other fighting men. I doubt that Eisenhower and his people thought the whole thing through; I doubt that they gave any thought to the far-reaching consequences. To quote Nevins and Commager again, “When, in 1954, the French departed, the Americans moved in, though neither their interest nor the nature of their commitment was entirely clear. And soon the Americans were confronted with all of those problems which had confronted, and confounded, the French.” And that was the start of it all.

  And I wonder if any of the people reading this book have ever given much thought, or any thought at all, to the little Middle East country of Lebanon, where I think more and more trouble will be showing up in the years to come. That was Eisenhower, too, who first got us involved with that country, a country I see as a time bomb waiting to explode, by sending a Marine outfit to the capital city of Lebanon, Beirut, in 1958, to help out the government.7

  But I think the ugliest and the dumbest thing that Eisenhower did during his administration, and while he was campaigning before his first term, was the cowardly way he ducked the whole question of McCarthyism even when good, decent people around him were being hurt more and more by that awful and horrible man. McCarthy first began to make himself noticeable during my administration, and I recognized him immediately as a fake and a phony and as a real menace to our country and our principles of freedom and decency. I realized that he didn’t really believe that stuff he was spouting about Communists taking over the country any more than I did, and that he was just whipping up hysteria without any evidence at all because it was getting him headlines and the hope of maybe taking over the country himself. (Fat chance he had of that because the American people were just too smart to let him stay around for too long.) And I let my staff and the Congress and the rest of the world know how I felt about McCarthy every chance I got. I vetoed, in 1950, a bill put together by McCarthy’s friend, Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, and by Richard Nixon, the McCarran-Nixon Bill, which required members of the American Communist Party and members of so-called Communist front organizations to register with the Justice Department, even when the connection of some of these organizations with communism was extremely doubtful, and placed many restrictions on people labeled in this way; I felt that this bill was even more un-American than communism, but it was passed over my veto. I also vetoed, in 1952, the McCarran Internal Security Act, which put ridiculous restrictions on immigrants, including prohibiting people who’d been communists in their teens and then disavowed it, from entering the country. But this, too, passed over my veto, and all these things made McCarthy more and more brazen, and he began to call the Roosevelt administration and mine “twenty years of treason.”

  McCarthy was joined by other individuals of the same ilk, men like Senator William Jenner of Indiana, and then by a few well-respected politicians like Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, men who either believed his big lies or more likely, felt that they might get some political advantage out of appearing to be his pals. Taft even gave McCarthy some advice that was so downright low that it could have come from McCarthy himself, telling McCarthy something along these lines: “Keep talking, and keep accusing people. And if a charge doesn’t stick, accuse someone else, until you get a charge that does stick.”

  A lot of people began to be afraid of ruffling McCarthy’s feathers or the feathers of his admirers. In 1952, I was doing some campaigning for Adlai Stevenson, and when I went to Boston to make a speech there, a couple of Massachusetts politicians asked me to go easy on McCarthy. They didn’t li
ke McCarthy any more than I did, but John F. Kennedy was running for the Senate that year, and a lot of other New England people were running for other offices, and the men who said that to me were afraid that people who liked McCarthy would end up voting for the opponents of the Democrats I was trying to help. Well, I refused absolutely, and when I gave my speech, I called McCarthy a gangster and a purveyor of the big lie and a lot of other things which, at that, were probably a little kinder than I should have been. It didn’t seem to do any harm, since Kennedy was elected to the Senate all right, and most of the other people who were running also won. And it may have helped some people see McCarthy for what he really was, people who were fooled by his bluster and his unsubstantiated accusations before I said what I said.

  Eisenhower, on the other hand, was also asked to say nothing against McCarthy, and he obeyed orders and didn’t say a word against him. He even got up on a platform with McCarthy’s mirror image, Jenner, and put his arm around the man and looked as though he were aching to kiss Jenner’s rear end.

  But Eisenhower’s cowardice about McCarthyism really became evident, really became shameful and disgraceful, when he was told to cut out a statement about General Marshall in a speech he was about to give. This involved a few lines written by one of Eisenhower’s speech writers, a fellow named Emmett John Hughes. By this time, McCarthy and Jenner were so arrogant that they were attacking just about everybody; I believe they’d have called the Almighty Lord a Communist if they’d happened to think of it. And one of their targets was General Marshall, whom they called a traitor, actually using that word, and saying that the Army was loaded with Communists and Marshall was soft on communism and looking the other way. Well, a man like George Marshall didn’t really need defending from the likes of McCarthy and Jenner, but Hughes had written in those few lines anyway, having Eisenhower say that he’d known General Marshall for many years, and that Marshall was a loyal and patriotic American (as if anyone, including McCarthy and Jenner themselves, could possibly think otherwise).