Where the Buck Stops
Page 49
And then, after the war and after I opened a men’s clothing store in Kansas City, Missouri, with Eddie Jacobson, who had been my partner in running the canteen at Camp Doniphan, Oklahoma, during our training days, and we went bust, I was back in politics again and managed to get myself elected judge of the eastern district of Jackson County, Missouri, with the help of Tom Pendergast. Pendergast, incidentally, was not at all the kind of political boss like Tweed of New York or Big Bill Thompson of Chicago. He was sincerely for the welfare of the people, and whenever a man wanted to do the right things, Pendergast supported him in doing right. There’s no question about the fact that sometimes, when there was a man or an organization who wanted to get votes by an underhanded program, Pendergast might support them, too. But when he found a man who wanted to do right, he always supported him, and I think I’m a good example of that.
And then, in 1926, I was elected presiding judge of Jackson County, and reelected in 1930, and in 1934, I ran for senator from Missouri and won. And in 1944, of course, I was the candidate for vice president when Roosevelt ran for his fourth term.
So now there I was, at 7:09 p.m. on the evening of April 12, 1945, as Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone swore me in as president of the United States in the Cabinet Room at the White House, underneath a portrait of Woodrow Wilson. And as I’ve already admitted, I was plenty scared. But scared or not, and prepared or not, I promised myself one thing that evening, and in the days and nights that followed: that I’d work damn hard and try damn hard to be a good president.
I think most people will give me that much: that I tried hard to be a good president. And I hope that some people, at least, will feel that I succeeded.
WHILE THIS BOOK was still being edited, a small excerpt was published in Parade, the Sunday supplement that appears in hundreds of newspapers in the United States and Canada. The excerpt was the section in which my father lists his choices for the eight best presidents and the eight worst. Shortly after the excerpt appeared, Parade’s editors sent over a pile of letters that came in response to the piece. I’ll admit that I opened the letters with a certain amount of nervousness, expecting that my father had stepped on some toes in naming his “worst” choices, one or two of whom might turn out to be other people’s favorites. To my relief and pleasure, there were no letters like that at all. Instead, virtually every letter said exactly the same thing, and I’ll quote one of these, from a gentleman in Illinois, which is typical of all the rest. “There’s a terrible omission in the Truman article,” the letter said. “He forgot to list one of the best presidents of all: Harry S. Truman. Or, if he insisted on being modest, why didn’t he just make it nine best presidents and include himself in that way? And definitely not at the bottom of even that exalted list.” You’ll get no argument from me on that subject.
- Margaret Truman
1My father wrote these lines sometime before Richard Nixon was in fact elected president. He decided, however, not to change the sentence, He said his comments on Mr. Nixon would be unprintable. MT
2My father once mentioned something to me that he said typified Millard Fillmore and summarized Fillmore’s presidential career in a nutshell. When my father was working on this book, he said he referred occasionally for dates and other data to a number of history books, among them two particularly popular and intelligent books, A Basic History of the United States by Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard and A Pocket History of the United States by Allan Nevins and Henry Steele Commager. In the Nevins and Commager book, Fillmore is mentioned in a single line as “the dim and forgotten Millard Fillmore.” In the Beards’ book, Fillmore doesn’t appear in the index at all. MT
3I wish my father were around today to give me his views, and tell me what he believes, or doesn’t believe, about the Reagan administration and Irangate. MT
4I’ve made a change here. My father used the word “Negroes” throughout, but I’ve changed all references to “blacks” because that’s the word that African Americans now commonly employ. My father always had a desire to be modem and up-to-date, and I’m sure he would approve. MT
5This is a slight misquote; Mr. Coolidge actually said, “They hired the money, didn’t they?” But “hired” is an old-fashioned usage, and as I’ve already reported, my father liked to be strictly up-to-date. MT
6I described my father’s reactions to the campaign promise in my own book, Harry S. Truman. published in 1973:
“. . . Candidate Eisenhower let one of his speech writers put into his mouth words that completely infuriated my father, In a speech in Detroit, Ike announced he would ‘go to Korea in person and put an end to the fighting.’ As politics, it was a masterstroke, it was exactly what millions of Americans, unhappy and worried about the deadlock in Korea, wanted to hear. As a realistic policy, it was a blatant lie. Equally fatuous was his promise that he would overnight arrange things so that the South Koreans would do all the fighting, and our troops could go home. ‘While he is on the back platform of his train, holding out his glowing hope,’ my father said angrily, ‘his staff are in the press car pointing out to reporters that he has not said when he can do this. And he knows very well he can’t do it without surrendering Korea—until the present Korean conflict is at an end.” MT
7This was prophetic on my father’s part, though he had no idea how prophetic it was. He was no longer with us when Lebanon became one of the world’s most war-torn countries, and when American and other hostages were taken. Or when, in October 1983, American and French military headquarters were bombed by Arab terrorist groups and 241 Americans and 58 French soldiers died, and not long afterwards, the Americans left Lebanon. The slaughter in Lebanon, of course, continues. MT
8In my book about my father, I described Dad’s reaction to these events in this way: “What troubled my father was the fact that Eisenhower was attacking the policies he had helped to formulate and carry out. This seemed to Dad to be the worst kind of hypocrisy. But what really drove the Truman temperature right off the thermometer was Ike’s endorsement of Senators William Jenner and Joe McCarthy, men who spent hours in the Senate vilifying Ike’s old commander, George Marshall. Without General Marshall’s help, Ike would have remained an obscure colonel, at most a brigadier or major general, commanding a division before the war ended. When Ike appeared on the same platform with William Jenner,. and deleted a personal tribute to General Marshall from a speech he planned to make in Milwaukee because Senator McCarthy would have been offended by it, my father just about gave up on candidate Eisenhower.” I’m going to have to admit now that that phrase “just about gave up on . . . Eisenhower” was the understatement of the century. My father never used salty language in the presence of my mother or me, but he came very, very close to it when he talked about Eisenhower in those days. MT
9My father gives no details and mentions no names here, and even threw out the correspondence between Marshall and Eisenhower on this matter, as a courtesy to Eisenhower, when Dad left the Oval Office. But of course he’s referring to the relationship between Eisenhower and Kay Summersby, the British WAC who was Eisenhower’s driver and then his romantic partner during the war. Eisenhower wrote Marshall at the end of the war, asking to be returned to the United States so that he could divorce Mamie Eisenhower and marry Kay Summersby. Marshall responded with fury, telling Eisenhower that his conduct was disgraceful and that, if he went through with his plans, Marshall would kick him out of the Army and harass him in other ways for the rest of his life., None of this is secret now because, in 1975, Kay Summersby told the whole story in a book, Past Forgetting: My Love Affair with Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower dropped Kay Summersby after his correspondence with General Marshall. MT
10For the record, my father was rated ninth in the list of thirty-one presidents, and fourth in an associated list of “near-great” presidents, just above John Adams on the “near-great” list. I think he’d rank even higher in a poll conducted today, I also think Eisenhower would rank lower. MT
11Height is often deceptive among presidents. Perhaps it’s the way they’re photographed, or before photography came along, the way their portraits were painted. Among recent presidents, I’ve discovered in conversations with friends who hadn’t ever seen Lyndon Johnson in person that he’s sometimes thought of as a man of average height, but I remember so well that my father and mother and I used to look way up at him, though not necessarily politically. He was our tallest president after Lincoln, standing six feet three inches. Many people think John Kennedy was taller than Johnson because he was so slim, but he was actually just slightly over six feet. Jimmy Carter is often believed to be quite short, but he’s about the same height as my father and Eisenhower were. And I believe most people think of Ronald Reagan as exceptionally tall, but he’s tall but not exceptionally tall; he’s six one. He looks very tall because a lot of the people around him are rather short. I don’t think that was planned or intentional, but who knows? MT
12It’s growing harder all the time, of course. The latest figures estimate the present population at just under 250 million people. My father would have been astonished at this, but pleased. MT
13I was indirectly responsible for our move to Blair House. The White House was really in terrible shape when we moved in in 1945. The place was infested with rats; my father once mentioned in a letter, for example, that Mrs. Roosevelt had told him that she was entertaining some women in the south portico when a rat ran right across the porch railing. The areas seen by tourists were kept freshly painted and decorated, but the paint in the private quarters was dingy, some of the furniture was falling apart, and one night, at an official reception in 1947, the color guard marched in and the old chandelier began to sway and it looked for a while as though it would collapse on the heads of everybody present. Another time, a man brought my father breakfast in his study, and the whole floor began to move as if it weren’t connected to anything. My father also said in a letter that he’d learned that Coolidge was hit on the head one day by a piece of the roof, but that frugal man had the roof and the third floor repaired and left the second floor—where we lived—alone. But the coup de grace occurred when a little spinet, one of the two pianos in my sitting room, suddenly broke through the floor, and we were promptly moved across the street to Blair House until the White House could be put in shape. MT
14My father wouldn’t have hesitated for a minute on what to do about Colonel North and Admiral Poindexter. But then I’m certain that he wouldn’t have had them around him in the first place. MT
15This was a phrase my father used often and about many people, but nearly always affectionately and rarely in a pejorative sense. Washington wasn’t an old man when he became president: he was fifty-seven, as compared, for example, to Reagan, who was seventy when he took office, or John Adams, who was sixty-two. My father was sixty-one when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died and he became president, and sixty-four when he ran against and defeated Thomas E. Dewey. MT
**This is an exception to the preceding endnote. Neither Mr. Roosevelt nor my father were being affectionate when they used that phrase. MT
16Babylonia is now part of Iraq, and Elam is now part of Iran. They were fighting then as now. As my father states in this book, he believed strongly in the lessons we can learn from the past and in the ways we can apply those lessons to present situations. He’s quoted succinctly on this point in Merle Miller’s book about him: “There’s nothing new in human nature, The only thing that changes are the names we give things. If you want to understand the twentieth century, read the lives of the Roman emperors, all the way back from Claudius to Constantine. . . . Those people had the same troubles as we have now. Men don’t change. The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.” MT
17My father was a plain-spoken man and always said he preferred small words to big words. He also said that people sometimes forgot that the purpose of language was to convey thoughts to one another, and they used big words not to convey thoughts in the clearest way but to impress each other. My father, however, knew the big words and sometimes surprised people - and me, as in this case - by using an unfamiliar word now and then when it was the best choice. Some of the readers of this book may be ahead of me and know exactly what “hegemony” means when they come across it in that sentence, but I’ll admit that I didn’t and had to look it up. It’s the right choice: It means “preponderant influence or authority, especially of a nation over others.” MT
18I might as well go ahead and do my first, and maybe last, footnote of this book and list the fifty-four other signers of the Declaration of Independence for the record. I’m not much on footnotes; I like to read right along when I’m reading a book and not keep dropping my eyes down eight or ten inches all the time. But I guess some footnotes are necessary, and particularly this one because it’s amazing how many of these men are forgotten even though some have had streets and towns named after them. They were brave men who ought to be noted and remembered. Here are the names of the forty-eight men who signed right after Hancock signed: Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Samuel Adams. John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery, Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington. William Williams. William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris, Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark, Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Caesar Rodney, George Read, Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton. William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn, Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton, Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, and George Walton. The six men who signed late were Oliver Wolcott, Elbridge Gerry. Matthew Thornton, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas McKean, and George Wythe.
Some autograph and document collectors spend a lifetime trying to assemble a set of signatures of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The scarcest signature is Button Gwinnett’s. Gwinnett was a delegate from Georgia; he was forty-one when he signed the Declaration of Independence, and he was killed a year later in a duel with a political rival named Lachlan McIntosh, who lived on to become a general in the Revolutionary War and then a congressman and a commissioner of Indian affairs dealing with the Cherokees and the Creeks. I gather that Gwinnett signed practically nothing other than the Declaration of Independence, and his signature is so valuable today that a friend who visited me in the White House told me a joke about it. Seems someone wrote and offered a collector a letter of minor importance, but he went ahead and bought it, and then had to go out of town and told his secretary to keep an eye out for the letter., When he got back, he found a memo from his secretary. “The letter arrived in good order,” the memo said, “but it was practically worthless because some fool had written across the bottom of it, ‘See me about this. Button Gwinnett.’ But it’s okay now. That stuff was written all the way on the bottom, and I cut it off neatly and threw it away, and the cut doesn’t even show.” HST
19My father once told me that the Hessians were also a source of trouble to the Americans in a second way; they brought along with them, undoubtedly inadvertently, a destructive insect called the Hessian fly. I thought he was joking because he wasn’t too crazy about the Hessians or any other soldiers who fought for money rather than principle, but I later looked it up and discovered that he was absolutely right. The Hessian fly is actually a gnat that attacks wheat, rye, and other grains by laying its eggs on leaves, and the larvae then consume the sap and the plants can’t yield grain. The Hessian fly is a menace right up to the present time. It can be avoided to some extent by late planting, but if the insects manage to attack plants, the only thing that can be done is plow them under. My apologies to Dad, who commented a page or two ago (though in a footnote of his own) that he doesn’t like footnotes, but I think some of these things off the main point are interesting. MT
20I s
uppose there’s no way to avoid another footnote in order to say that that’s just a figure of speech, since Washington never actually lived in the White House, either the original or the place that was rebuilt after the British set fire to the original building during the War of 1812. The cornerstone of the original building wasn’t laid until 1792, and the first president to live in the drafty old barnm, John Adams, didn’t move in until 1800. It wasn’t called the White House, even unofficially, for quite a while. When the plans were drawn up, it was called the Palace because it was natural in those days to think unconsciously in terms of monarchies, and monarchs lived in palaces, but that name was never really used. It wasn’t called anything at all for a while, and then some people began to refer to it as the White House because it was painted white to cover up the smoke stains after the British set fire to it. But it wasn’t called the White House officially until Theodore Roosevelt decided to stlick it on his stationery one day. HST
21For the reader who’s forgotten who John Roosevelt was, he was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s youngest son; born 1916, died 1981. He was the only Republican in his family and a constant source of aggravation to his father and to a lesser extent, mine. He was the chairman of Citizens for Eisenhower in 1952, and in later years supported Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan, MT
22Interestingly, the poll of historians lists the three presidents in exactly the same order my father sometimes did: Washington as our best president. Lincoln as second best, Roosevelt as third best. And perhaps for the same reason. MT