Truman (21 page)

It was only at this stage that Truman telephoned Marshall in Paris. Marshall spoke faithfully. At the end of the conversation Truman went back and told his disconcerted staff that, election or no election, the enterprise was off. This has sometimes been presented as the supreme example of Truman's attachment to responsibility rather than votes in matters of foreign policy. Certainly it makes an interesting contrast with his dealings with Marshall over the recognition of Israel five months previously. But it could also be presented as an example of his ill-considered rashness when he was operating more or less on his own and before he was brought up against the likely consequences of his actions.

Inevitably, of course, the ‘confidential' discussions with the broadcasting companies leaked, and Truman came near to getting the worst of both worlds. He had no vote-winning peace mission, but he was portrayed as having sought to play politics with major issues of national security. There was general dismay around him, but he himself treated the matter with some equanimity. He thought that there might be advantages in appearing as a man of peace who had nonetheless subordinated his instincts (and his need for votes) to the imperatives of General Marshall's orderly foreign policy. This was not a position compatible with high presidential authority, and could not conceivably have been held to be helpful had he been running as an unruffled incumbent. But as he and Dewey had spontaneously reversed roles, leaving the President to be the cheeky challenger, he was possibly right in hoping that the incident had done him little harm. And he was almost certainly right in thinking that Dewey's principal campaign gaffe, made a week later, was more damaging with the public, because it was much less sympathetic. In rural Illinois, where the Governor of
New York was making one of his relatively rare back platform appearances, the train suddenly moved a few feet into the crowd during the speech. Dewey snarled with ill-humour: ‘That's the first lunatic I've had for an engineer. He probably ought to be shot.' The words do not sound too serious, but they were enough to move a lot of public sympathy from the imperious little candidate to the engine driver, and Truman subsequently kept the incident skilfully on the boil.

For the last three weeks of the campaign Truman concentrated on the eastern half of the continent. Some of it proved to be stony ground for him, and the foundations of his success came from the West (beyond the Mississippi Dewey carried only Nebraska and Oregon), but the broad tactic was nonetheless right for it enabled him to make a major impact on two of the three most marginal states which were crucial to victory: Ohio and Illinois. His October 10th to 16th trip was particularly productive. Not only did he cover these two states but also three others—Wisconsin, Minnesota and West Virginia—which he won fairly comfortably. Then he went to Miami for the convention of the American Legion, where he gave a good explanation of his Vinson initiative. Then he had a day in Pennsylvania, which he failed to sway, even though he made one of his most successful anti-Dewey speeches in Pittsburgh.

On Sunday evening, October 24th, he left Washington for what most of those around him still thought was the last time before another president was elected. He went to Chicago (another visit to Illinois), Cleveland (another visit to Ohio), Boston (the centre of one of the only two north-eastern states that he carried), New York (a predictable waste of effort in view of the strength there of Dewey and Wallace, but obligatory), and then home to St Louis and Independence. In Harlem, on the Friday before the poll he made his only civil rights speech of the campaign. In Madison Square Garden the previous evening he had made his strongest commitment to Israel and claimed full credit for the United States victory in the race to recognize. Everywhere he continued to berate the Republicans without much respect for restraint or even truth. In Chicago he appeared to compare Dewey to Hitler as a tool of reactionary big business interests. In Boston he boxed the compass and denounced him as being the one the Communists wanted to win. It was however all done with considerable good humour.
Even his prepared big city rally speeches were by this stage interlaced with successful passages of mocking raillery.

Truman's last meeting was in St Louis on the Saturday evening. Then he went to Independence and eschewed campaigning for the last two days. He had travelled 21,928 miles and delivered 275 speeches.
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On the Tuesday he voted in the Independence Memorial Hall, before attending a luncheon for about thirty old friends given by the Mayor at the Rock wood Country Club. He reminisced about Missouri politics in a relaxed and expansive mood. Then he left, unaccompanied by anyone other than three Secret Service agents, and drove secretly to a hotel in Excelsior Springs, a small resort thirty miles north-east of Kansas City. There he had a Turkish bath, a sandwich and a glass of milk and went to bed and to sleep early in the evening.

At midnight he awoke and listened to the radio for a few minutes. He was a little ahead in the popular vote, but was still predicted to lose. At 4.00 a.m. he was awake again, to be greeted by the news that Ohio, Illinois and California had been left holding the balance and that he had already won Illinois. He decided that that was it, had a harder drink than milk, and motored to the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City, where his staff were installed and where he arrived in dapper condition at 6.00 a.m. He had to wait another four hours for Dewey's concession. This was not due to any ill-grace on Dewey's part (indeed his concessionary press conference was one of the most gracious of his career) but to the fact that he had gone to bed very late, with the issue still unresolved, but with his hopes draining away as fast as his disappointed supporters were leaving the ballroom of the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, and had not awakened until 10.30 a.m.

That evening Truman attended an informal impromptu celebration of 40,000 people in Independence, and on the following day took the train back to Washington. At St Louis, where there was a huge crowd at the station, he held up the famous Wednesday morning edition of the
Chicago Tribune,
with the headline ‘Dewey defeats Truman'. In Washington there was more than a solitary Dean Acheson to greet him on the railroad platform. ‘Barkley and I must have shaken hands with at least five or six hundred—some of them Johnnie come lately boys,' he did not fail to note. (He felt the same way about $750,000 in back-dated cheques which Louis Johnson received for campaign funds after the result.) However it
was all highly satisfactory after the troughs which Truman had been through, and the crowds which greeted him between Union Station and the White House were immense and enthusiastic. There were only two immediate snags. The first was that Bess Truman had a bad sore throat, and that the President had to be up at 3.00 a.m. administering medicine to her on the night after his return. The second was that the White House was falling down. It was already propped up inside like a mine working, and immediate arrangements had to be made for a move across the street to Blair House, which was expected to be for ten months but in fact extended to forty. First, however, he was able to get away to his beloved submarine base at Key West for two weeks.

How did this spectacular and unexpected victory occur? To take a downbeat aspect first, it was achieved on a very low poll. Only 51% of the electorate voted. That probably favoured the Democratic Party, which was somewhat better organized at local level, although certainly not better funded at national level. On the popular vote Truman was significantly although not magnificently ahead. He had a lead over Dewey of 4½%, which would be equivalent in a British constituency election to a majority of about 2,500. He just failed—by 0.4%—to get over half of the votes cast, but he compensated for this by keeping Dewey to a slightly lower percentage of the total than he had achieved against Roosevelt in 1944. Truman had to contend with Wallace and Thurmond, which Roosevelt never had to do.
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Thurmond polled nearly 1,200,000, just over 2%, and because he was geographically concentrated got nearly 8% of the votes in the Electoral College. Wallace did a shade worse, more or less up to expectations in New York, from which state he got nearly a half of his national total, but was badly down in California, thought to be his other pillar. Geographically unconcentrated, however, he got no votes in the Electoral College.

Even without his 50%, Truman nonetheless gained a higher percentage than any British Prime Minister since the war, over 7 points more than Mrs Thatcher in 1983; 2 points more than Lord Wilson in 1966, half a point more than Lord Attlee in 1945.
Nonetheless his result, under the Electoral College system, could have been easily overturned, or at least put into the House of Representatives. It was not dissimilar from the Kennedy result in 1960, although his popular majority was greater. Truman carried Ohio by only 7,000 and California by 17,000. A switch of 12,000 votes in these two states would therefore have left the House to decide. In Illinois the majority was only 33,000. A switch of another 17,000 there would have given Dewey an absolute victory. In a poll of nearly 50 million a well distributed shift of 29,000 votes, just over .05 per cent of the total, could have produced a reversal.

Truman immediately attributed his triumph to union support ‘Labor did it', he was reported by the
New York Times
as having said on the morning after. It is certainly true that in spite of the upsets of 1946 the leaders of both the AFL and CIO worked far more committedly in that campaign than they ever had before, and probably carried most of their members with them; only the ever-aberrant John L. Lewis, flanked this time by Alvanley Johnston, were for Dewey. They also provided the necessary money and foci of organization for his campaign. Several of his most successful major rallies were labour-sponsored. Yet, when all that is said, to suggest that a candidate who lost in Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania was carried to victory on the backs of the union leaders is verging on the fanciful. It was much more the farmers who ‘did it'. This was certainly Dewey's view, and it was substantially borne out by Truman's remarkable string of successes across the Middle West, the mountain states and the Pacific. For a Missouri Democrat to carry Kansas suggested that something was stirring deep in the farm belt. One cause was a fall in the price of corn from $2.25 a barrel in July 1948 to $1.26 in October. It was not dissimilar to the 1921 decline. Then it bankrupted Truman. In 1948 it was a major factor in keeping him in the White House. It was a triumph of his campaign that this collapse was blamed not on the incumbent president, but on the outgoing Congress and the candidate who was tarred with their brush.

Truman also did well, but by no means sensationally so, amongst blacks. Most did not vote at all, but of those who did twice as many were for Truman as were for Dewey. In the big cities Truman maintained the traditional Democratic majority, but substantially
less strongly than had Roosevelt. The best summing up seems to be that he held together, on a declining asset basis, the traditional Roosevelt coalition, sustained it with a special injection of farm votes, and was fortified by an over-confident Dewey campaign which discouraged marginal Republican supporters from voting.

However achieved, it was a famous victory. As Mrs Truman, through her sore throat, told the White House assistant usher on the morning after their return to Washington: ‘It looks like you're going to have to put up with us for another four years.'
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There was also going to be a great deal with which Truman himself, and vicariously Mrs Truman, would have to put up during that forthcoming four years.

Just as defeat in the mid-term elections of 1946 had liberated Truman in his own mind from the shadow of Roosevelt's splendiferous personality, so his much more important victory in 1948 gave him a new freedom in the minds of most of his countrymen both from this formidable shadow and from the limitations of his own occasionally jejune impact. He had joined a small company of three presidents who had succeeded through death and subsequently been re-elected in their own right. Theodore Roosevelt was the first predecessor, Calvin Coolidge the second. Truman could no longer be regarded as a president simply of chance and gaffes.

This gave him no immunity from criticism. But no president including Washington and Jefferson has ever approached such immunity. Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, to cite the other two (with Washington and Jefferson) now most commonly regarded as in the first league, were peculiarly far away from it.

Roosevelt, by virtue of the beneficent power of the United States when Hitler menaced the world, approached immunity internationally, but not internally. Lincoln, on the other hand, signally failed to achieve it either abroad or at home. The London
Times
under one of its most distinguished editors (Delane) accomplished the considerable feat of describing the Gettysburg Address as ‘rendering ludicrous' what might otherwise have been an impressive ceremony of dedication. Nor, beset by the relentless ambition to replace him of his Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, and by his own capacity for selecting incompetent generals, did he stand high internally until victory for the Union was manifestly within his grasp. The American democracy has
many qualities, but appreciating great presidents during their terms of office is not amongst them.

It should therefore be no surprise that, while Truman's election was recognized as remarkable, it gave him no guarantee of four years of unchallenged authority. Even before his inauguration on January 20th, 1949, there had been two precursors of the troubles of the second term. In December 1948, Alger Hiss, a State Department official who as a young man of promise had occupied junior but central posts, had been indicted for perjury in denying that he had passed classified documents to a Communist agent. During the same late autumn it became obvious that the Chiang Kai-Shek régime would be driven out of mainland China. Those who wished to oppose the administration said that this was due to supineness in Washington. Those who wished to support the administration thought it was an inevitable result of the corruption and inefficiency of the Kuomintang. It opened a great foreign policy divide in American politics. Towards Europe there was an adequate community of approach. Towards the Far East there was no such thing. Vandenberg's health was declining. (He died in April 1951.) The China Lobby was rising. Truman was to have more foreign policy trouble at home during the second term than during the first.