Truman Read online

  Truman

  Roy Jenkins

  Contents

  Preface

  1. The Transition

  2. Jackson County

  3. Junior Senator from Missouri

  4. Heir to a Dying President

  5. The New President

  6. Truman Battered

  7. Truman Resurgent

  8. Victory out of the Jaws of Defeat

  9. The Limitations of Victory

  10. Truman’s Third War

  11. The Last Phase

  12. A Quiet End

  References

  MAP OF KOREA circa. 1951

  Preface

  This book was started in 1982, but mostly written in 1984 and early 1985. It arose out of a probably over-elaborate design which had interested me in the early 1970s. I then did some considerable work for a series of ‘back to back’ portraits of American presidents and British prime ministers—perhaps three of each–which were to be published in a single volume. It would have been a very big volume. However long books were already in fashion, and I was not then as sceptical of the value of setting the reader a solid thirty to forty hour course as I am now.

  In the event only one of the British portraits was written before I again became too closely involved in other occupations to do any sustained writing. When I returned to the task I decided that less elaboration and more speed was necessary. One president would be enough to balance one prime minister. But who should it be? I had thought, for my original scheme, of covering Theodore Roosevelt, Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. Of these F.D.R. was the most interesting, certainly to a British audience, and the one about whom I knew most. But the more I penetrated the subject the more I found that he suffered from one fatal disadvantage. There was nothing new in the compass of a short biography that I could say about him. The best that I could do would be a re-setting of old facts and familiar anecdotes. And while I was not attempting original research, this was clearly not good enough.

  Truman, his successor, suffered from no such disadvantage. He did not have Roosevelt’s refulgence and he was president for a little less than two-thirds of the time that Roosevelt was–but as Roosevelt was president for a third longer than anyone had ever been before this was not a disqualification. Truman presided over the creation of the Western world as it still broadly exists today. The creation of NATO, the Marshall Plan with its emphasis on European unity, the resistance to Soviet expansion, peacefully in Berlin, bloodily in Korea, all had long-lasting consequences. He was a president of great significance. He was an odd and in one central respect a paradoxical man, with whom, had I known him well (I met him once, for an hour) I would not, I suspect, have got along easily. He had an interesting and not over-known provenance. Although he has inspired biographies and other books about him running well into double figures (of which at least three are good) I did not have any of that sense of repleteness which had afflicted me with Roosevelt. I thought that there would be a good deal that was reasonably fresh to say about Truman, and found this in practice to be so.

  I am indebted to a number of different groups of people for varying forms of assistance. Of those remaining who knew Truman well Mrs Clifton Daniels (Miss Margaret Truman) and her husband, Mr Averell Harriman and Mr Clark Clifford were particularly helpful. So, on this side of the Atlantic, was Lord Franks, British Ambassador in Washington from 1948 to 1952. Mr Robert Donovan, the most authoritative chronicler of the Truman presidency, answered several important questions. Mr and Mrs John Masterman of Kansas City gave me great assistance in visiting, in December 1983, the places of importance of Truman’s early life.

  My secretaries Miss Celia Beale and Miss Jenny Ross typed the manuscript. Miss Diana Fortescue, greatly assisted by the library of the United States Embassy in London, buttressed by that of the House of Commons, checked many facts and some interpretations.

  The typescript was read and helpful suggestions were made by Professor Arthur M. Schlesinger (who made many invaluable points), Professor John Kenneth Galbraith, Mr Mark Bonham Carter, Sir Ian Gilmour, Lord Harris of Greenwich, Mr John Lyttle, and my wife. Mr Irwin Ross, whose Loneliest Campaign chronicles the 1948 election, read the chapter which covered that vital event in Truman’s life. To all these and a number of others, I am very grateful.

  October, 1985 R.H.J.

  1

  The Transition

  For twelve years and one month Franklin Roosevelt was President of the United States. It was the longest period of continuous elective power which had been seen anywhere in the world for a century or more. Moreover, this decade and a quarter coincided with the advance of America to world leadership.

  Then, on April 12th, 1945, Roosevelt died, suddenly if not unexpectedly, at Warm Springs, Georgia. Three hours later Harry S. Truman was sworn in as the 33rd President.1 He was nearly 61. It was the most intimidating succession in the English-speaking world since Addington succeeded William Pitt in 1801: ‘Pitt is to Addington as London is to Paddington,’ Canning wrote. And Paddington did not then even have a railway station. But Addington had been an intimate of Pitt’s for years and enjoyed his continuing friendship until their quarrel of 1803. Truman knew the Senate, of which he had been a member since 1934, but his experience of the executive branch, with its expanded war-time complications, was minimal. He had been Vice-President for less than three months. During this period, except at Cabinet meetings, he saw Roosevelt twice. Also, as Truman recorded, ‘Roosevelt never discussed anything important at his Cabinet meetings.’

  Even more certainly Roosevelt never discussed anything important with his Vice-President. He looked to Truman to keep the Senate in order and to ensure that his peace treaty of the future did not meet the same fate as that which had befallen Woodrow Wilson’s in 1919. He had encouraged him to do ‘some campaigning’ in 1944, adding rather incongruously ‘I don’t feel like going everywhere.’ (In fact he went only to New York, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia.) But there had been no question of treating Truman as a deputy head of government. In accordance with the American tradition, he regarded him as part of the legislative not the executive branch. He treated him as he had treated Garner and Wallace, and as indeed much as every previous president had treated every previous vice-president. There was however an essential difference between Truman and his two predecessors. They were just vice-presidents, threatened with the obscurity which was mostly the historic fate of those who had occupied that office. Truman, from the moment of his nomination, was a likely president. But Roosevelt was the last man who wanted to recognize that. He never thought of including him in the party of a hundred or more Americans who went to the Yalta Conference in late January 1945. He gave him no special account of the outcome. Nor did he tell him about the Manhattan project, which was on the threshold of creating the atomic bomb.

  Roosevelt had indeed tossed the vice-presidential nomination to him rather like a bone to a dog, except that Truman was not hungry. But in so doing he had given almost his only indication that he was concerned about the succession, and that a very faint one. He was prevailed upon not to have Wallace again. This was partly due to electoral considerations and threats from the South. But he could have ridden these. He encouraged James Byrnes, but eventually ditched him. Finally he committed something to paper, although phrased in a manner well short of enthusiastic endorsement. He passed through Chicago on the opening morning of the Democratic Convention, which he deliberately did not attend. He had a conference in the railroad yards there, without getting out of his train, with Robert E. Hannegan, the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and Edwin Pauley, a Los Angeles oilman who was a Democratic king-maker of the time. They emerged with a note which expressed Roosevelt’s willingness to have either Truman or Justice (of the Supreme Court) William O. Douglas on
the ticket.2

  As Douglas had no support in the Convention, and Roosevelt knew it, this effectively threw the President’s endorsement to Truman. The only obstacle was that Truman genuinely did not want it. This was from a mixture of motives. He thought the vice-presidency itself was a grey and obscure job, and did not want it for that reason. ‘I’ll bet you can’t name the names of half a dozen vice-presidents,’ he told his sister during a discussion of the prospect. He apprehended however that in the circumstances of 1944 it might well lead to the presidency. And that he did not want for almost opposite reasons. He thought the responsibility was too great for him, and that in any event no man should seek the position. (Exactly how presidents were to emerge if this rule was followed was not clear.) Furthermore he was committed to nominating James Byrnes.

  Although genuine, his reluctance was not unshakeable. After he had been present in the room (at the receiving end) when Roosevelt said to Hannegan on the telephone: ‘You tell him that if he wants to break up the Democratic Party in the middle of a war that is his responsibility,’ he gave in. He even made fairly strenuous efforts to find a proposer in the shape of his fellow Senator from Missouri. He was nominated on the second ballot. And so, nine months later, he found himself President of the United States. He was relatively old, more so than any new president since James Buchanan in 1857, although there have since been three older ones. Yet he was completely inexperienced in the executive side of government. He was unbriefed, and untravelled outside North America since 1919. The war against both Germany and Japan was still unwon, and he had succeeded the most charismatic figure in the world.

  After the oath-taking ceremony in the White House he held a short, shocked Cabinet meeting, hurriedly asked everyone to stay in their posts, had a brief word with the Secretary of War, Stimson, who told him in the broadest terms about the atomic bomb project (he had, in fact, heard about it in even vaguer terms while he was vice-president, and then not from Roosevelt but from Byrnes) and then went home to his modest apartment on Connecticut Avenue. ‘My wife and daughter and mother-in-law were at the apartment of our next door neighbor … They had a turkey dinner and they gave us something to eat. I had not had anything to eat since noon.’ Then he telephoned his mother in Grandview, Missouri. Then he went to bed and to sleep, and ‘did not worry any more.’1

  The next morning he was up a little later than usual—at 6.30 -breakfasted with a ‘crony’,3 and was then driven to the White House, giving a lift to a rather derelict political reporter on the way. He had a series of mostly desultory meetings in the morning, and then went to the Capitol, for lunch with about 15 senators and congressmen. This, his diary suggests, he regarded as his most important meeting of the day, more so than briefing meetings with the Secretary of State and the Chiefs of Staff, or than exchanges of telegrams with Stalin. He also approved public arrangements for Roosevelt’s funeral and made some private dispositions for his own living. These last were done so as to cause the minimum inconvenience, both to his neighbours, who in those days had not much noticed a vice-president but did not fancy the security upheaval of a president living alongside them, and to Mrs Roosevelt. He would remove his family to the subsidiary official residence of Blair House within a few days, but not to the White House for nearly a month. And, extraordinarily, all on that first day, he twice saw ‘just to visit’ a gentleman called Mr Duke Shoop, of the Kansas City Star.

  So, one might have thought, the imperial presidency came to an end, within a few years of its beginning. Truman trailed none of Roosevelt’s clouds of glory. He had none of his style, none of his prestige, none of his informal, patrician grandeur. A failed Missouri haberdasher had taken over from a Dutchess County country gentleman. Main Street had replaced the Hudson Valley. But the imperial presidency flowered with the change. Indeed in an important sense it developed only under Truman. Roosevelt had been the leader of the free world at war, when, after Pearl Harbor, the commitment of America was relatively easy to sustain, and the acceptance of its leadership automatic. Truman achieved the more difficult feat of being the leader of the free world at peace, or something fairly near to peace. He was the first president to preside over the Pax Americana. It was not immediately apparent that this would be so. There was considerable early faltering. But once he had got into his stride, his capacity for informal decision taking and for doing what he regarded as right, without regard to the personal consequence, became remarkable. ‘…his ego never came between him and his job,’ Dean Acheson wrote. Acheson firmly believed that he was a better president than Roosevelt; but Acheson, for his own reasons, neither liked nor admired Roosevelt.

  Truman did admire him, though he was instinctively very critical of the prominent. Of his successors in one form or another, he despised Nixon, was unforgiving of Eisenhower for his treatment of General Marshall, thought Stevenson effete, and believed that Kennedy’s nomination, to which he was less entitled than Lyndon Johnson, had been bought for him by his father. But he admired Roosevelt as a great leader who was also a consummate politician. He tried to follow in his path without copying him. He would sometimes mock his grand voice and Harvard accent, and it is doubtful how much he liked him. But he was iron in his determination never to complain about the scant notice which Roosevelt had taken of him, and he had little of the resentment against the Eastern sophistication of his predecessor’s White House which devoured Lyndon Johnson. ‘I see red every time [the sabotage] press starts a ghoulish attack on the President (I can never think of anyone as the President but Mr Roosevelt)’ he was writing, admittedly to Eleanor Roosevelt, nearly six months after he had taken office.

  Truman was in some ways the superior of Roosevelt. He did not have his style, his resonance, his confidence, his occasional sweep of innovative imagination, or his tolerance and understanding of diverse human nature. But he was less vain, less devious and better to work for. He was more decisive, and quite apart from Roosevelt’s physical disability, he had more sustained energy than the wartime Roosevelt. He could always be up at 6.00 or 6.30 in the morning and be consistently fresh and on the job until however late was required. He was mostly better briefed, and not only in an immediate and superficial sense. He was at least as well read in history and biography as was Roosevelt. He was steeped in the history of the Republic and particularly of the presidency, but he was also a considerable expert on the lives of the Roman emperors and of almost every great military commander in the history of the world. Yet his knowledge sat less easily on his shoulders. Mr Merle Miller, who published a so-called ‘oral biography’ of Truman after the death of his subject, made an interesting comment:

  ‘He was a self-educated man, and he mispronounced a reasonable number of words, which in the beginning puzzled me. Then I realised that while he had often read them, he had seldom, if ever, spoken them aloud, not even in many cases heard them spoken aloud. It’s like that if you are one of the few readers in town.’2

  This gets close to the central paradox of Truman. His manner was that of a Midwestern machine politician, and he was intensely loyal to his background and to those who had helped him on the way up. His friends were mostly ‘regular fellows’, and he had many of the values of a member of a Rotary Club. But a few of those he most respected and liked—Dean Acheson and General Marshall—already mentioned—were very different from this and from each other. His affections were heavily concentrated upon his close relations, and he was not much at ease in female company outside his family.

  It is tempting to say that he was an intellectual amongst political ‘pros’ and a political ‘pro’ amongst intellectuals. But that is much too easy an aphorism. As a boy and a young man he was more of a book-worm than an intellectual. He absorbed many facts, and he thought about them a good deal, but his conversation involved no spinning of general theories. He neither possessed nor aspired to intellectual or social sophistication. His speech and his writing—and he wrote a lot of unsent letters and undelivered speeches, even under the pressure of the
presidency—were generally splendidly direct, but the choice of words was rarely distinguished, and the sentiments sometimes narrow and intolerant: ‘Sissy’ was one which he employed a good deal. He used it frequently, disparagingly and foolishly about Adlai Stevenson. But when once asked at a school question and answer session, after he had been President, whether he had been popular as a boy, he replied:

  ‘Why no, I was never popular. The popular boys were the ones who were good at games and had big, tight fists. I was never like that. Without my glasses I was blind as a bat, and to tell the truth, I was kind of a sissy.’3

  This interplay provided part of the formation of his personality and character. He was an ‘anti-sissy’ sissy, a puritan from the poker rooms, a backwoods politician who became a world statesman not just because he was President of the United States in the plenitude of its power but because he had an exceptional sense of duty and power of decision, and because he could distinguish big issues from little ones, and was as generally right on the big ones as he was frequently wrong on the small ones.

  2

  JACKSON COUNTY

  Truman’s early life was wholly contained in the western part of the state of Missouri. There is no evidence that, as a young man, he ever went as far afield as Chicago, let alone to New York or Washington. Yet within this small perimeter his life was mobile. He changed houses, and later jobs, with almost excessive frequency. But there was also a strong undercurrent of stability, which came from the homogeneity of his stock, a close-knit family, and the continued existence of a fair-sized family farm at the impressively named Grandview.

  His four grandparents were all Americans of several generations’ standing who, coming from Kentucky, had settled in Missouri in the 1840s. The Truman side was of English origin. The origin of the Youngs, his mother’s family, was Ulster, with a German infusion. The two families embraced various nonconformist sects: Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists; no Episcopalians, and certainly no Catholics. In the literal meaning of the acronym, Harry Truman was as WASP as could be, although his style and outlook had little in common with the connotation for which the term was later contrived. This was not because of simple questions of geography or even wealth. The families, despite fluctuations and vicissitudes, had a certain underlying prosperity. Margaret Truman, the President’s daughter, in no way a pretentious lady, stated in her biography of her father,1 that the Youngs at least were ‘certainly upper-middle class’ and that the Grandview farm, even when it had been reduced by one of these fluctuations, regularly earned $15,000 a year in the early 1900s, which would be the equivalent of a good $150,000 today.1