Truman

Roy Jenkins

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

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.

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.