Truman (19 page)

The rapid authority of this response would not have been possible without the coincidence of three factors. First there was the Secretary of State's confidence in the President's capacity for robust decision making. Second there was solid bipartisan support in the Senate for a forward position in Europe. When the ‘Vandenberg Resolution', which gave general endorsement to the idea of an Article 51 military engagement, was put to the vote in April it was carried by 64 votes to 4. Third, and this made speed necessary as well as possible, there was a background of mounting menace in Europe. On February 25th there had been the Communist takeover of the Czech Government. On March 10th Jan Masaryk had been found dead on the flagstones of the Prague Foreign Ministry. During the same weeks, as plans developed for the setting-up of a West German government, there came the first sporadic signs of Soviet interference with Western military rail traffic to Berlin.

These events helped to concentrate many minds in Washington. Even so, the speed and firmness of decision making was prodigious by any standards. That spring the Marshall Aid appropriations were obtained from Congress. Truman came out with a demand for compulsory selective service accompanied by universal military training on a part-time basis. A clear decision was made within
the administration that even though the Nationalist régime in China was declining into defeat, a strict limit should be set to the amount of bolstering support which it would receive from the United States. ‘… the costs of an all-out effort to see Communist forces resisted and destroyed in China would … be impossible to estimate,' Marshall stated. ‘But the magnitude of the task and the probable costs thereof would clearly be out of all proportion to the results to be achieved.'
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Europe was to have priority, even though this was to involve a lot of trouble for Truman with the China lobby. The ‘bipartisanship' which lubricated US foreign policy in Europe did not extend to the Far East.

This priority expressed itself in the momentum with which the creation of NATO was carried forward; and the need for it was demonstrated when the sporadic harassment of the spring turned into the full Berlin blockade of the summer. On June 20th the new currency that was to be at once a cause and symbol of the
wirtschaftswünder
was bestowed by the allies upon West Germany. At first the deutschmark was not intended for Berlin. But when the Russians retaliated by introducing a new currency of their own into all sectors of the city, the allies re-retaliated by extending the D-mark to the three Western sectors. The next day, June 24th, a full blockade was imposed by the Russians.

Truman responded with a mixture of firmness and restraint. There were three possible courses. One was to give in, to allow Berlin to be strangled into the Soviet zone. The second was to send an armoured train up the railway track, or perhaps more plausibly, a fighting column up the
autobahn,
with orders that if necessary it should try to shoot its way through. The wisdom of this course depended upon a calculation that the Russians would climb down when confronted with the challenge of war. In the days when the Americans still, just, had a nuclear monopoly, it was not an obviously foolish course. It was advocated by General Clay, the American military commandant in Berlin, and some Air Force opinion (although not by the Joint Chiefs of Staff), as well as by Aneurin Bevan from within the British Cabinet. It clearly had its risks but it also offered the chance of a quick victory, attractive at any time but particularly so in an election year.

It was not however the course which Truman chose. He
preferred the third option of the airlift. That carried the risk that it might not work and the near certainty that it would involve months of hard slog. But it offered less of a flash-point of danger, it was in accordance with the weight of advice which he received, and it was best calculated to hold the allies together. The fact that Truman chose it is another example of his happy capacity to act more wisely than he often spoke or wrote.

All of these issues had to be faced with lonely courage rather than the gregarious self-confidence which comes with a back-drop of popular esteem. Personally and politically Truman suffered a wounding spring and summer. His rising ratings of 1947 proved to be a false dawn. A sharp plunge began that autumn. By April 1948, his Gallup approval rating was down to 36%, almost as low as in 1946. On February 17th the Democrats had suffered a sensational loss in a by-election in the Bronx, one of their safest seats; the victor was not a Republican but a supporter of Henry Wallace. This accompanied by serious sulking in the South made it look as though the Democratic Party under Truman's pilotage was losing both its left and its right wings. There were some who did not hesitate to point this out to him. Ickes wrote with a special venom: ‘You have the choice of retiring voluntarily and with dignity, or of being driven out of office by a disillusioned and indignant citizenry. Have you ever seen the ice on a pond break in every conceivable direction under the rays of the warming spring sun? That is what has happened to the Democratic Party under you, except that your party has not responded to bright sunshine.'
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Meanwhile his own personal contribution was to get involved in two unfortunate controversies. A few people close to him (Edwin Pauley in a big way and General Wallace Graham, his doctor, in a small way) were exposed by the Senate Appropriations Committee as having engaged in commodity speculation, acting allegedly on inside knowledge. This might not have mattered too much had not Truman denounced such speculators in October as particularly heinous contributors to inflation. Still more controversially he decided to build a stone balcony between the second and third floors (in American parlance) on the south front of the White House. It was against the advice of the Commission of Fine Arts. It was regarded as presumptuous interference with a national monument by a peculiarly temporary and unaesthetic tenant. Apart
from anything else it would involve the re-designing of twenty dollar bills. However Truman persisted in creating this ‘monument to a Missouri mule' as it was sometimes called. The passage of time has tended to justify him in this, as in bigger things. It certainly improved the amenity of the White House, and probably the appearance too, for it got rid of the canvas awnings, which were always previously used in summer, and would look more cluttering today than they did in 1948. At the time, however, it seemed a singularly ill-judged enterprise for Truman to undertake in what was so widely assumed to be the last year of his presidency.

This was the background against which he formally announced his candidature on March 8th. At this stage at least it looked as though there was no direction in which he could go except up. That however proved an illusion. His declaration, so far from being steadying, coincided with the beginning of a widely-based but ill-considered ‘draft Eisenhower' (and ‘dump Truman') campaign which continued from then until the threshold of the Democratic Convention in mid-July.

It began, paradoxically, on the left of the party. During March and the first week of April two of the Roosevelt sons, several important labour leaders, both the (liberal) senators from Alabama (one of whom, Sparkman, was to be Adlai Stevenson's running mate in 1952) as well as the equally liberal Senator Pepper of Florida all issued anti-Truman and broadly pro-Eisenhower statements. Colonel Arvey, the effective boss of Chicago, joined in the chorus from a slightly different angle. The common keynote of the statements made them particularly wounding. It was not just that they preferred Eisenhower. They were all predicated on the view that Truman was incompetent, unappealing and unelectable. It was his duty to the party to withdraw. ‘I hope (he) will not be a spite candidate like Henry Wallace' one of the labour leaders said. On April 12th, Americans for Democratic Action formally repudiated his candidature and urged one of Roosevelt's former dark horses, Justice William O. Douglas, as an alternative if Eisenhower would not run.

There is not the slightest indication that Truman was ever tempted towards withdrawal by these disavowals and appeals. Once he had got over his hesitations of 1946-7 it was the mule-like rather than the modest side of his character that was to the fore.

He privately denounced the liberals.
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In public he mostly ignored them. He had come to a more realistic view of Eisenhower's intentions than they had: ‘General Eisenhower, I am sure, is not a candidate for President', he wrote unusually temperately in a political letter at the end of April, ‘and I don't think he would be a candidate on the Democratic ticket anyway—his whole family are Republicans and I know them all.'
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Eisenhower's behaviour in 1948, let alone 1952, fully bore out the truth of this statement. But still the extraordinary wave of liberal support for him rolled on. It was joined by two major tributaries: some of the most important machine politicians in the northern cities and the leaders of the disaffected South. As the General persistently said he had no intention of being a candidate he had no need to declare his position on any issue from civil rights to Taft-Hartley to farm support. All who wanted to get away from Truman could cluster under his branches.

As late as the first week of July, with the Convention opening on July 12th, a group, including in addition to those already mentioned, Hubert Humphrey, then Mayor of Minneapolis, Strom Thurmond, Governor of South Carolina and soon to be ‘Dixiecrat' candidate against the ticket, two other southern governors, Chester Bowles, former head of Roosevelt and Truman's Wages and Prices Administration and successful aspirant to the governorship of Connecticut, Mayor O'Dwyer of New York City, and ‘Boss' Hague of New Jersey, came together in a last minute appeal for the Convention to offer, and Eisenhower to accept, a draft. It was a remarkable coalition by any standards. Walter Reuther of the Automobile Workers, David Dubinsky of the International Ladies' Garment Workers, and Philip Murray of the CIO, had also been involved at earlier stages in moves for the promotion of the General and the demotion of the President.

On July 9th, in reply to a final ploy of Pepper's which was that he should be drafted by the Convention, not as a Democrat but as a ‘national' candidate, Eisenhower issued a refusal sufficiently
comprehensive and categoric to bring everyone at last to their senses so far as he was concerned. Arvey and O'Dwyer, as ‘pros', responded by immediately endorsing Truman. Pepper responded by announcing his own candidature, which lasted for little more than 24 hours. The chairman of ADA responded by trying to launch Douglas. Douglas killed that on the Sunday (July 11th). On the Monday he killed Truman's attempt to get him to accept the vice-presidential nomination. ‘I can't be a No. 2 man to a No. 2 man,' he was reported to have said.
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On the Tuesday there was a brief ‘Barkley for President' boomlet; he had made a notable keynote speech on the previous night, and it still did not take much to set some people flapping towards anyone but Truman. On the Wednesday Truman himself, having disposed of Barkley by getting him to accept the vice-presidential nomination, for which it was alleged that he had been angling at every Convention since 1928, made the short train journey to Philadelphia and arrived at 30th Street Station ‘in the rain at 9.15,' as he recorded. Margaret Truman put it more graphically: ‘Philadelphia on that night of July 14th seemed to be wrapped in a huge suffocating blanket of heat and humidity.'
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It was nearly five hours before he could make his acceptance speech. This was because of the general incompetence with which this despondent Convention was run rather than because of any particular difficulty at this stage over his nomination or that of Barkley. His dangerous rivals had eliminated themselves. Irwin Ross, the authoritative chronicler of the 1948 campaign,
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thinks that even had Eisenhower entered the contest, the sundering of his totally disparate coalition, which must have followed from a declaration of his position on civil rights, would probably just have given Truman the edge. But it would at best have been a very close run thing. As it was Truman cantered to a formal victory, with 947½ votes to 263
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for Senator Russell of Georgia, who, as an anti-civil rights candidate had a strictly limited constituency, the more so as Mississippi and Alabama had already walked out of the Convention.

Truman's nomination was not then made unanimous as was customary. Rayburn, in the chair, although pro-Truman, could
not risk it. The South was too adamant, and had been made more so by the main excitement of the Convention, which had occurred earlier that day. The liberals, deprived of Eisenhower, compensated with an amendment for a stronger civil rights commitment, moved by Hubert Humphrey, and carried against the platform by 651½ votes to 582½. The Truman forces-McGrath, Clifford, Niles, the Missouri delegation—had all been against the amendment, so it was perhaps a little hard of the South to deny him the unanimity which they had always given to Roosevelt and which they gave to Barkley on this occasion. His daughter suggests that he had already said enough and that they (Thurmond at least) paid him the compliment of believing that, unlike Roosevelt, he meant what he said on the issue.

The absence of unanimity was however the last of the series of insults which the Democratic Party had been delivering to Truman. His speech, to a packed audience in a foetid convention hall in the middle of the night, was a remarkable success. He used his new technique, which he had been developing under advice since early May, of speaking not from a text, of which his reading was always deadening, but from a series of headings. These left room for improvisation and animation, and the fact that they gave a certain staccato quality to his speaking suited his style:

‘Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make the Republicans like it—don't you forget it. We will do that because they are wrong and we are right.'
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