Truman (10 page)

Not notably fortified by this encounter, at once intimidating and dispiriting, Truman set about working out his schedule with his allies of the Democratic national machine. They planned a medium-profile campaign, which Truman faithfully carried out: no oratorical fireworks, but no major gaffes either. He began with a big rally at Lamar, his birthplace, which he had not visited for many years, supported by nine other senators and by too large a crowd for the facilities of the small town. He then went twice across the continent, to the Pacific, to the Atlantic and then back
to Missouri. He mostly campaigned in the northern industrial states. He travelled by two special Pullman cars, one for himself and his staff, the other for the press, hooked on to ordinary trains. He was at best a semi-star, oratorically always in danger of being outclassed, by Tom Connally at Lamar, by Henry Wallace in New York, by Orson Welles in Pittsburgh. But on the whole he drew good and friendly crowds. There were attempts to portray him as being a weak almost hysterical incompetent, totally out of his depth even in a vice-presidential role, and the old Ku Klux Klan
canard
was revived towards the end. These attacks did not greatly stick. The truth was that Truman, like Senator Bricker, his Republican opposite number from Ohio, was not a big factor in the campaign. He neither harmed nor much helped the ticket. He had the advantage for most places of not being Wallace, but beyond that it was the fourth Roosevelt-dominated election. The issue of the succession was one for the pundits not for the public.

For the poll and the result the Trumans went back, which was wholly traditional, to Jackson County. For some unexplained reason it was not to Independence, where the house, open in August and September, was closed, but to a suite or series of suites in the Muehlebach Hotel, Kansas City. There emerges an odd impression of the less reputable part of Truman's Battery D and Masonic friends having been allowed to take over. Unlike previous election nights, and still more his only subsequent one, when he showed iron will by going to sleep with the result in total doubt, Truman stayed up, playing the piano and no doubt consuming a good deal of bourbon, until Dewey conceded at 3.45 a.m. One difference was that, unlike 1940 or 1948, it was Roosevelt and not he who was at test. His friends mostly got drunk. He himself got rather maudlin about the terrible responsibilities which would fall upon him when Roosevelt died. His wife and daughter, although present in the hotel, seem for once to have been excluded from the centre of his stage.

Whatever happened, he had plenty of time to recover, because between election day on November 5th, 1944 and inauguration day on January 20th, 1945, he had practically nothing to do. He saw Roosevelt only once. He did not even have a new house into which to move. There was then, as for nearly 30 years subsequently, no official vice-presidential residence. He just stayed in his old five-room apartment on Connecticut Avenue. He was
vicariously victorious, highly likely to be President within a year or two, unbriefed but untroubled by any attempt to brief him, and probably less occupied than he had been at any time in the previous five years.

Roosevelt decided to have his fourth inauguration ceremony on the south porch of the White House rather than on Capitol Hill. The war provided the excuse. It was a bleak ceremony on a day of driving rain and sleet. Roosevelt had done it too often before to be much interested. He made a fairly perfunctory address to the 7,800, a high proportion from Missouri (one of his few signs of consideration for Truman) who were given the privilege of standing on a squelching lawn, and then quickly disappeared upstairs, leaving Mrs Roosevelt and the Trumans to receive these guests in their damp shoes and somewhat lowered spirits.

In spite of this inauspicious beginning, Truman rather enjoyed being Vice-President. He only held the job for eleven weeks and five days (both Tyler and Andrew Johnson had held it even more briefly), which hardly gave him time to become bored. Of these 82 days, Roosevelt spent only 30 in Washington. His absences did not of course mean that Truman took over the government of the United States. The power of executive decision remained wholly with the Cabinet officers and with the White House staff left in Washington, subject to such instructions as they received from the other members of the staff who were travelling with the President. But it at least meant that Truman, who had not been considered for inclusion in the Yalta party, could not feel resentment at not seeing Roosevelt, who was mostly 6,000 miles away. He got on with presiding over the Senate, cultivating his congressional relationships, and, rather surprisingly, being the most social Vice-President for many years. ‘For a while,' Margaret Truman wrote, ‘scarcely a night went by without him and mother departing from our Connecticut Avenue apartment, looking tremendously regal in evening dress.'
⁹

The main task, at once ironical and disparaging, which Roosevelt set him was that of getting Henry Wallace confirmed by the Senate as Jesse Jones's replacement as Secretary of Commerce. He achieved it with great difficulty and at the price of Wallace losing a substantial part of the powers that Jones had exercised.

The main initiative that he took was to requisition a US Army bomber to attend Tom Pendergast's funeral in Kansas City.
Pendergast died on January 26th. He was long since out of gaol, but was without influence and left only $13,000. It was six days after the inauguration and Roosevelt had already departed for Yalta. So Truman had to make his own decision about both the funeral (which he would no doubt have done in any event) and the bomber (which alone made his attendance compatible with an important Philadelphia speaking engagement). He was much criticized, but his presence meant a great deal to the Pendergast family. He had no doubt that it was a proper discharge of an old debt of political friendship.

Roosevelt got back at the end of February. A week before Washington had been swept by a rumour that he had died at sea, but it was General ‘Pa' Watson, his long-standing military aide, and not the President himself who had gone. March was a month of continuing allied military success, but also of gravely deteriorating relations with the Russians, with the exchange of messages of mounting complaint and acerbity between Stalin and Roosevelt. There were also several disagreeable edges to the relationship between the President and Congress. Truman had two meetings at the White House during the month, but it was only Congressional difficulties and not global problems which were even perfunctorily discussed. Truman was given no special account of the Yalta Conference. It became abundantly clear that the President had neither the energy nor the desire to bring a new face into the inner core of government.

At the end of March Roosevelt left for Warm Springs, Georgia. There, two weeks later, at the beginning of a sunny afternoon he had his massive stroke and was dead in a couple of hours. Truman received the news in Washington in the rain. After a desultory day presiding over a desultory session of the Senate he was having a restorative drink in Sam Rayburn's office when he was hurriedly summoned to the White House. He made the journey only half fearing the worst. When he got there he was shown to Mrs Roosevelt's upstairs study, where she was with her daughter and son-in-law and the White House press secretary. She told him what had happened. He was sworn in at 7.09 p.m. just over three hours after President Roosevelt had been pronounced dead. So, as the news rang around the world, there began the transition described at the beginning of this book.

Almost all Truman's early views about how he should handle the Roosevelt inheritance, at once splendid and frightening, turned out to be wrong.

His initial ideas, I believe, were roughly these. First, his perceived inferiority would be greater than he himself thought it to be. (His real view of Roosevelt stood well short of idolatry; in view of the treatment he had received it would have been a miracle had this not been so.) He would therefore respond by exaggerating his own very considerable modesty. This reflected itself in his early statements to the press: ‘I don't know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay or a tree fall on you. But last night the house, the stars and all the planets fell on me. If you fellows ever pray, pray for me.' The trouble with this was that he was in danger of publicly under-valuing himself.

Second, on policy issues, particularly in the, to him, largely hidden fields of strategy and inter-Allied relations, he would discover Roosevelt's designs and continue to execute them. The trouble with this was that Roosevelt had at the end very few designs. He had always relied heavily on improvisation. This tendency became still greater as he grew more tired, and in any event the circumstances were changing so fast as the strains with Russia increased and the discipline of the single objective of victory was removed.

At the same time Truman believed that he should exploit his few obvious areas of greater strength: notably his natural accessibility, and the fact that (Harding, who hardly counted, apart), he would be the first president from the Congress since McKinley. He symbolized both by going to lunch on Capitol Hill almost as
‘one of the boys' on his first day in office. The trouble with this was that it was very time consuming, and combined with his self-deprecation looked as though he was putting the presidency into commission. There was more real danger of time loss than of making himself a cipher of the legislature. In domestic policy he turned out to have more battles with the Congress than any president since Andrew Johnson. But his appointment sheets were full of ‘Judge X—to pay respects' and ‘Representative Y—just to visit'.

This combined with the development of an almost obsessive desire to leave no decision untaken—another area where he believed he could improve upon Roosevelt—meant that he left himself inadequate time for reflection and discussion. It was not that he was ill-briefed. He read his papers meticulously and impressed those around him with the thoroughness with which he mastered facts. But he was so determined to be decisive on the issues of the day, and then to have an untroubled night's sleep before awakening fresh and early for the separate decisions of the next day, that he was in danger of not fully considering the options, and not seeing one decision's impact upon another, or indeed its relation with a coherent general policy. A classic early example was his acceptance of a recommendation to cut off Lend-lease within a few days of the end of the war in Europe.

There was also a risk of his losing the advantages of the remarkable quality of many of the people who were assembled in wartime Washington. First he lurched towards continuity by asking all the members of the Roosevelt Cabinet to stay in office. The trouble with this was that it was not where Roosevelt had assembled his most useful talent. He took scant notice of his Cabinet. After Pearl Harbor it rarely met. In accordance with American practice it did not engage in serious collective discussion. And by 1945 the older members were becoming played out. This was true of Frances Perkins at Labor and even of Harold Ickes at the Interior. Stettinius, who as the holder of the most senior post should have been the most important of the newer ones, was a handsome nonentity. Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury since 1934, was in a separate position. He was intellectually vigorous, but the author of a singularly silly plan for the post-war treatment of Germany. Wallace was Wallace. Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy for the past year, had more brio than
balance.
¹
The Cabinet officer with the most authority was probably Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of War since 1940, but as a 78-year-old Republican
²
he was certain not to stay long in a post-war Democrat Cabinet.

Truman balanced this temporary obeisance to continuity at Cabinet level by the replacement (with only one senior exception, old Admiral Leahy) of Roosevelt's staff with his own in the White House. Probably no one would have expected him to have done otherwise, although nearly twenty years later Lyndon Johnson, for all his Texan chips, was to keep far more Kennedy men.

There were far more to keep, and this White House change was not as important in 1945 as it would have been in 1963 or still more so 1985. Truman's own White House staff was never more than thirteen, compared with the many times that number who served President Johnson in the 1960s and the more than 300 who serve President Reagan today. The biggest growth was under President Nixon. Quality did not however make up for quantity. Truman liked cronies immediately around him, and there was mostly a strong whiff of the second-rate about the immediate entourage. Poker players from Missouri got too many places. For a number of reasons this did not do as much harm as might have been expected. First there were exceptions, most notably Clark Clifford, who although a Missourian arrived by accident as an assistant naval aide, and emerged after a year as an outstanding top staff man, who effectively ran Truman's White House until 1950.

Second the Missouri poker players were neither vicious nor over-ambitious. They were a little easy-going. General Vaughan was a typical example. Unlike some of their successors they did not pursue dedicated feuds either amongst themselves or with the rest of official Washington. Above all they did not try to make the President their creature or to cut him off from other advice.

Truman did not stick long to Roosevelt's Cabinet. By July 1945, he had replaced the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Attorney-General, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Labour, and the Postmaster-General. Only four remained, and of these Stimson went in September and Ickes in the following
February. One of the changes had been arranged under Roosevelt, two or three of them were wholly voluntary, and at least one (the removal of Stettinius) was highly desirable. But on balance Truman probably reduced the quality of the Cabinet, while at the same time considerably elevating its importance. He stopped well short of turning it into a collective decision-making body. His vote, following the Lincoln aphorism, counted for more than all the rest put together. Nevertheless he assembled them, in principle at least, twice a week, once in formal session and once at lunch.