Harry Truman (68 page)

Everything about our trip was idyllic until we arrived in Sweden. There I discovered that all the angry things Dad said about the hostile American press were mere understatements compared to the fabrications which the Swedish press began to concoct. First, there was a rumor I was in love with Governor Adlai Stevenson. I denied this emphatically. Next the Swedish reporters went from imaginary gossip to fabrication of a nonexistent incident. I returned from a tour of City Hall to discover three of the most important papers in Stockholm were carrying a vivid tale of how my Secret Service agents had “roughed up” newsmen and photographers who wanted to take a picture of me. The story was replete with sneering remarks, such as “Miss Truman is in no danger of her life here - if she does not plan to sing!”

All this was intensely irritating, but what really infuriated me was the reaction of our ambassador, W. Walton Butterworth, and his fellow diplomats in the American Embassy. Instead of categorically denying the story, they proceeded to attempt to back up the Swedish accusation and practically draw up an indictment of my Secret Service men.

I waited ten days to write a letter to Dad, hoping I would calm down a little. But the one I wrote was still a scorcher. I told him how Butterworth began apologizing to the Swedish Foreign Office and anyone else who would listen, without even bothering to ask me about the so-called incident.

To my amazement, when I returned home I discovered Secretary of State Acheson and everyone else in the State Department defended Ambassador Butterworth’s behavior. For the first time, I got a look at how closely they stick together down in Foggy Bottom. It made me understand why my father never stopped wishing someone would shake up the State Department.

One mission I did accomplish successfully for Dad was to bring home from England a bottle of Truman’s beer. Dad often teased Cousin Ethel, our family historian, about the fact that Truman’s Beer and Ale is one of the biggest and best-known breweries in England. Cousin Ethel always winced every time she heard the family name associated with the liquor business. The next time Dad went
home
to Independence, he strolled over to the Noland house and gave Cousin
Ethel
this
sample
of the handiwork of the English Trumans. Obviously Dad never forgot one of Mamma Truman’s favorite sayings, “Being too good is apt to be uninteresting,”

I ended my letter from Sweden with some advice Dad didn’t
need. “Give
it to
‘em on
September 1st
and
show everybody who’s still on top and in control of the situation.”

By this time, the presidential campaign was on its way. The Republicans did exactly what Dad predicted they would do in his Jefferson-Jackson Day speech. They abandoned bipartisanship in foreign policy completely and conjured up the black-is-white story that “Korea was born at Yalta.” General MacArthur gave the keynote address at their convention, predictably blaming the Democrats for everything in sight. Herbert Hoover cried out against “our bewildered statesmanship” and John Foster Dulles declared, in the foreign policy plank of the Republican platform, that the Democrats had “lost the peace.” Dad was blamed for allowing Russia to absorb Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and China. For a final whopper, Dulles, the negotiator of the Japanese treaty and a constant companion of Democratic officials in the State Department declared, “In the main, the Republican Party has been ignored and its participation not even
invited.” Arthur Vandenberg
must have spun in his grave on that one.

Dad was not in the least surprised by Dulles’s political tactics. At one point during 1948, Dulles returned home from a conference with the Russians in Paris and did not even bother to pay a courtesy call at the White House. Instead, he went directly to Albany to report to the man he thought was going to be the next President - Thomas E. Dewey. Not a few of Dad’s aides were outraged by this snub and urged him to fire Dulles forthwith. But Dad felt his foreign policy was more important than his personal pride, and he passed over the insult in silence.

He got a modicum of revenge in 1949, when Dulles ran against Herbert Lehman in an off-year election for the seat of the late Senator Robert Wagner. Dulles paid a call on Dad before the campaign began, and they got into a friendly discussion of who was going to win the election. Dad told him he thought Senator Lehman would win because he knew how to talk to the average man in New York. “You’ll get off on a high international plane,” Dad said joshingly. “You’ve been making millions for the big fellows so long you don’t know what people really think or what they’re like.” ( Dulles had been a very successful Wall Street lawyer.)

He declined to take Dad’s advice and campaigned precisely as Dad had predicted he would - making large oracular statements like his mentor, Dewey. Lehman trounced him easily. The following day, Dad got a telegram that read: “YOU WIN. JOHN FOSTER DULLES.”

Among the Republican campaign promises in 1952 were even bigger whoppers than the speechmakers told at their convention. They said they would repudiate the Yalta agreements and secure the “genuine independence” of peoples who had become Communist captives. How silly these claims looked later.

One of the stars of the Republican convention was Senator Joe McCarthy, who was introduced as “Wisconsin’s fighting Marine.” Ike should have seen the trouble coming his way when Joe called Douglas MacArthur “the greatest American that was ever born.” He also said my father had started the Korean War for “publicity purposes” and urged everyone to study his “documents” in the Exhibition Hall which proved the government was still infested by Communists. They proved nothing, of course. They were just his usual gobbledygook.

These tactics aroused my father’s deep concern and made him all the more uneasy, because, right up to the eve of the Democratic Convention, Adlai Stevenson was still playing Hamlet. He even begged the Illinois delegation not to put his name in nomination.

On July 24, three days after the convention opened, my father, who had stayed in Washington worrying about Korea and other problems, got a phone call from Stevenson. He asked if it would embarrass him if he allowed his name to be placed in nomination. Dad hit the ceiling. He told Stevenson in very blunt terms what he thought about his indecision. “I have been trying since January to get you to say that. Why would it embarrass me?”

Stevenson did not realize how close my father had come to not supporting him. About two weeks before the convention, Alben Barkley asked Dad if he would support him for the presidency. Although he still felt the “Veep” was too old for the job, my father said yes, largely because none of the other candidates aroused any enthusiasm in him. But when Barkley went to Chicago to line up delegates, he found the influential labor leaders at the convention unanimously opposed to him. On the day the convention opened, he called Dad and dejectedly informed him he was going to withdraw, and this freed my father from his obligation - which he would have regarded as irrevocable - to support the vice president. Barkley was so painfully disappointed that Dad telephoned the Democratic Chairman, Frank McKinney, and urged him to give the Veep the consolation of a farewell speech. He did so, and on the morning of July 23, Barkley gave one of his greatest talks, full of that wonderful humor and ridicule of Republicans and their pompous ways that by now had become his trademark.

Meanwhile, the convention was plunging toward chaos. Senator Kefauver, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, Harriman, and Governor Stevenson all had blocs of supporters and none seemed capable of building up a majority. Visions of earlier Democratic Conventions, where discord had torn the party apart, began haunting my father. He decided to intervene powerfully on Stevenson’s behalf. He telephoned the man who was sitting in for him on the Missouri delegation, Tom Gavin, and told him to spread the word the President was behind Stevenson. But the governor of Illinois was still having trouble mustering majority support when Dad’s plane landed at Midway Airport in Chicago on July 25.

My father had a political ace which he was now prepared to play. When Averell Harriman discussed making the race, Dad had told him his candidacy had his approval - but not his backing - quite a different thing in party politics. He also wanted him to agree to one thing. If the convention was deadlocked, he would help him nominate the strongest candidate. My father made it clear that in his opinion this was Adlai Stevenson. Averell, a good party man, had agreed.

Now Dad told Charlie Murphy to find Harriman and order him to withdraw in Stevenson’s favor. Harriman, knowing my father was in town and foreseeing the request, withdrew even before Charlie reached him. The addition of Harriman’s 121 delegates sent Stevenson stock soaring, and he was elected on the next ballot. Dad took him out on the platform and introduced him, declaring: “You have nominated a winner, and I am going to take off my coat and do everything I can to help him win.”

This is exactly what he did. But the campaign was doomed almost from the start by Stevenson’s poor political judgment. No one liked Stevenson more than the Trumans. Even after he lost, my father regarded him as a great spokesman for the Democratic Party. But the governor lacked the will and the force to win a presidential campaign. Among his many mistakes, the greatest one he made was his attempt to run as a new species of independent Democrat, with very little interest in defending the record of the Democratic administration he was hoping to succeed. He even let Richard Nixon, Joe McCarthy, and the other purveyors of the Communists-in-government big lie put him on the defensive. Equally galling to Dad was Stevenson’s admission that there was “a mess in Washington” that he would clean up. Thus, he capitulated to two of the worst Republican smears. From an organizational point of view, the campaign was an even worse fiasco. Stevenson set up his own headquarters in Springfield, and there was little liaison between his people and the White House.

My father did his utmost to cooperate with Stevenson, in spite of these problems. In a letter he wrote to him on August 16, 1952, he could not have been more forthright about his motives: “Again, I want to say to you that I am at your disposal to help win the election and I also want you to understand that there is nothing further that can add to my career as a public servant. As I told you when you were here . . . I think there comes a time when every politician whether he be in a County, State or Federal office, should retire. Most of them find it impossible to do that - they either have to be carried out feet first or kicked out. I made up my mind in 1949 that that would not happen to me if I could get the national picture on a basis that would prevent world war three and maintain a domestic program that would give all sections of the population fair treatment.”

Most of the time Stevenson’s mistakes made my father more sad than mad. It was General Eisenhower who really aroused his wrath. Eisenhower tried, for a while, to confine himself to glittering generalities and stay above the battle. But one of his biggest supporters, the Scripps-Howard newspapers, warned him his campaign “was running like a dry creek.” Then Senator Taft had a famous conference with the General, in which he extracted from him a promise to attack the Democratic Party’s foreign and domestic policies. When Ike started accusing the Democrats of betraying the United States at Yalta and failing to foresee the menace of Russian aggression thereafter, Dad boiled. He promptly quoted Ike’s words before a committee of Congress in 1945. “There is no one thing,” Ike said, “that guides the policy of Russia more today than to keep friendship with the United States.”

This was one of my father’s strongest convictions. More than once, he said to reporters and others who criticized his administration, “Any schoolboy’s hindsight is worth a President’s foresight.”

What troubled my father was the fact that Ike was attacking policies he had helped to formulate and carry out. This seemed to Dad 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, perhaps 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.

In late September, we launched a whistle-stop tour to Hungry Horse, Montana, to dedicate a new dam there. After almost eight years as President, Dad was as tireless as ever, making six and eight speeches a day and wearing out everyone else on the train, including yours truly.