Truman (24 page)

The language was neither elegant nor precise, but the broad message was clear. The United States Government was riddled with Communists, and it was the mission of the Junior Senator from Wisconsin, armed with the most detailed evidence, to get them out. Perhaps his cleverest trick was his appreciation that detail always sounds convincing. It did not greatly matter if it was spurious or even non-existent, provided that claim was laid to it. The detail of Wheeling was certainly spurious. What he ‘held in his hand' might have been anything from a blank sheet of paper to a laundry list, but it was not a list of 205 State Department Communists. Nor did he have any particular attachment to 205. By the time that he got to Salt Lake City it had become 57 ‘card-carrying members'. On the floor of the Senate eleven days later it had become 81. Three months later, again in the Senate, it had climbed back to 121. ‘I am tired of playing this silly numbers game', he replied when asked to explain the contradictions.

Immediately, the Wheeling speech was not widely reported. The
Chicago Tribune,
appropriately, was the only newspaper outside West Virginia to pick it up on the following day. The others soon caught up. McCarthy was launched on his five year parabola. At first the trajectory was more that of a turbo-prop than a jet. Truman did not take the onslaught too seriously—he was used to almost equally immoderate attacks from more senior Republican figures—although he did pay McCarthy the hidden compliment of writing him one of his famous unsent letters on the day after Wheeling. And six weeks later he told a press conference that ‘the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy'.
⁶

At first the Korean War stole McCarthy's thunder. Then it gave him a still more favourable climate in which to operate. He spent the later summer and early autumn of 1950 working quietly against two Democratic senators—Tydings of Maryland and Lucas of Illinois—who had been particularly vociferous against him on Capitol Hill. By November he had destroyed them both. He began to acquire a certain reputation for electoral omnipotence which made senators treat him with a new wariness. Senators attach a great importance to the standards of the club, but most are at least
equally concerned with their continued membership of it. The general Republican mood towards him began to change. Towards the end of twenty years of Democratic power, ‘two decades of treason' as he was later hyperbolically to describe them, the Grand Old Party was sick for power. Perhaps this vulgar huckster had found the key. Perhaps he could help to achieve it, where Landon, Willkie and Dewey, Taft, Vandenberg and Knowland had failed. They were not squeamish in its quest.

Favoured by this new atmosphere McCarthy soared to even greater heights of destructive misrepresentation during 1951. He inflicted major damage on figures of moderate note such as Owen Lattimore and Philip Jessup. He weakened the morale and self-confidence of much of the State Department. And he even forced Acheson on to the defensive to the extent of making him assure a Senate hearing that Communist China would
never
be recognized, and such a course was not even
discussed
within the Department. In June he launched a 60,000 word indictment of General Marshall. He read part of it on the floor of the Senate, and put the rest unread into the Congressional Record. Even he stopped short of claiming that the Secretary of Defense was himself a Communist, but he did claim that, ‘steeped in blood' Marshall was a man ‘whose every important act for years has contributed to the prosperity of the enemy'. He ‘would sell his grandmother for any advantage'. How could he be believed ‘under oath or otherwise'? The effrontery of the attack was breathtaking. Even some of his normal allies were a little shocked, but, like all McCarthy's enterprises at that time, it half worked. Marshall was off his pedestal for a lot of Americans.

Thus with Marshall chipped and Acheson scarred, McCarthy inflicted substantial damage on the last three years of the Democratic administration. Truman was staunch but he lacked the guile in dealing with him that Roosevelt would have shown. He was not good at digging pits for the Senator and mocking him when he fell into them. Lack of guile, however, was better than lack of courage, which was the deficiency which Eisenhower displayed, and which was to make the period of his campaign and the first eighteen months of his presidency the apogee of McCarthy's parabola. In Truman's day he sullied America. In Eisenhower's he ran amok and threatened to undermine the Army as well as the State Department. Fortunately he over-reached himself and the quick collapse began.

The dominant event of 1950 was not however the eruption of McCarthy but the outbreak of the war in Korea. It was also the great test of Truman's second term. Did it strike him out of a clear blue sky? The answer is mixed. In his State of the Union message on January 4th he had stated unequivocally: ‘The greatest danger has receded …' He was referring, with justification, to the improvement of the position in Europe. But the statement was geographically unqualified, and was given practical backing by the fact that he announced a defence budget for the fiscal year July 1st, 1950 to June 30th, 1951 of $13.5 billion against $14.4 billion for the year then in progress. Despite the early Russian achievement of an atomic weapon the United States was planning to continue with its post-1945 policy of a military establishment dictated by economy rather than by any attempt at conventional balance.

Nevertheless, within a month, Truman commissioned a major internal government study of the future risks and needs of US defence policy. This was carried out largely by Paul Nitze, working under the direction of Acheson, although with some Pentagon participation. The result was a secret document known as NSC (National Security Council) 68. It was delivered to the President on April 7th. It was an explosive state paper. It predicted Soviet nuclear equality by 1954 and said that by then the United States, because of a defence budget totally inadequate to the commitments it had assumed, would be in a ‘disastrous situation'. The shield of atomic superiority, let alone monopoly, would be gone, and the American people would be placed ‘in their deepest peril' by their weakness in conventional forces. This danger could only be counteracted by an entirely different scale of defence effort.
What was needed was a budget not of $13-14 billion, but of $40-50 billion.

What Truman would have done, in the absence of the Korean War, about this deeply disturbing document is almost impossible to conjecture. It was not without its critics within the government. Kennan and Bohlen thought it exaggerated and even hysterical. But its message was such that it could not comfortably be set aside. But its costs were such that they seemed impossible to accommodate within the framework of responsible peace-time finance. The only assuagement was that while the threat was dire it was not immediate in the sense of requiring action within a few weeks. In any event the recommendations clearly could not be implemented without a major programme for the education of public and congressional opinion.

This was a fence that Truman did not rush. In May he made the most extensive speaking tour of his second term. The nominal purpose was to dedicate Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State. He did the journey both ways in the presidential train and was away from Blair House for two weeks, making 57 speeches in twelve states. It was nominally a non-political trip, but this did not unduly inhibit the President's combative style. There were a lot of pre-election swipes at the Republicans. Margaret Truman, who was of the party, wrote of it as the high point of the second term, engendering in her father a feeling which presaged ‘smashing Democratic victory in the fall elections'.

‘It was a delightful trip,' she added. ‘There was none of the tension of 1948.'
¹
Perhaps there was not enough tension. It was certainly no Midlothian campaign conducted by a latter-day Gladstone. Truman stuck mostly to domestic issues, although he interlaced them with warnings against the perils of isolationism. But he sounded no call to arms, or even a call to pay vastly more for arms. Nor did he engage head-on with McCarthyism. This was due, not to cowardice but to his mistaken belief that the evil Senator's machinations would quickly snuff themselves out if not fanned with too much attention.

At the time of the Grand Coulee trip Truman had already decided and committed firmly but privately to paper that he would serve no more than another 2¾ years. Only nine days after he had received NSC 68 (but not I think in any way because of it) he chose a peculiarly fine Sunday, with Washington suffused in
sunshine and cherry blossom, to commit himself to not staying there any longer than he had to.

‘I am not a candidate for nomination by the Democratic Convention', he rather quaintly began.
^*

‘… I have been in public service well over thirty years, having been President of the United States almost two complete terms.

‘Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Madison, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson as well as Calvin Coolidge stood by the precedent of two terms. Only Grant, Theodore Roosevelt and F.D.R. made the attempt to break that precedent. F.D.R. succeeded.

‘In my opinion eight years as President is enough and sometimes too much for any man to serve in that capacity.

‘There is a lure in power. It can get into a man's blood just as gambling and lust for money have been known to do.

‘This is a Republic. The greatest in the history of the world. I want this country to continue as a Republic. Cincinnatus and Washington pointed the way. When Rome forgot Cincinnatus its downfall began. When we forget the examples of such men as Washington, Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, all of whom could have had a continuation in the office, then we will start down the road to dictatorship and ruin. I know I could be elected again and continue to break the old precedent as it was broken by F.D.R. It should not be done. That precedent should continue—not only by a Constitutional amendment but by custom based on the honour of the man in the office.

‘Therefore to re-establish that custom, although by a quibble I could say I've only had one term, I am not a candidate and will not accept the nomination for another term.'
²

This was a firm and honest statement of his view that he did not want another term, and did not believe that, even if he did, constitutional propriety entitled him to one. It was a little over-embellished by bombast and self-righteousness. It was ridiculous, after the narrow squeak of 1948, to believe in 1950 that he would be unassailable in 1952. Eisenhower would probably have beaten him as effectively, although half for different reasons, as he beat Stevenson. And it was a little far-fetched and nigglingly antiRoosevelt
to equate a third term with the beginning of the end of republican virtue. It was always Truman's way, when putting his thoughts on paper, to be provocative, mock-modest, and critical of the standards of others. However, there is no doubt that he meant what he wrote and that he had taken the decision for largely unselfish reasons.

Furthermore he had the good sense to keep it to himself. He showed the paper to no one until November 1951. Then, with fourteen months of his presidency still to go, he read it to his immediate staff, whose futures were almost as much affected by the decision as was his own. They kept the secret remarkably well. He made no public announcement until a Jefferson/Jackson Day dinner at the end of March 1952. He wisely delayed turning himself into a lame duck until the last reasonable moment. This was of great benefit, particularly during the year from June 1950, when, with the Korean War at full blast, MacArthur insubordinate, Vandenberg dying and most of bi-partisanship with him, Acheson and even Marshall sufficiently hobbled by McCarthyism to be unable to sustain him at home as they had done in 1947-49, he needed every ounce of presidential authority that he could muster.

Truman flew to Independence at the end of Saturday morning, June 24th. He had to begin the day with a speech for the inauguration of Friendship International Airport in Baltimore. But he had intended the next 48 hours to be a relaxed midsummer weekend of family visiting, both with his wife and daughter, who had already retreated from Washington, and with other less frequently-seen relations.

His plans were blown up. So were the ill-trained and ill-equipped eight divisions of the Republic of Korea which were subject to a full-scale attack from the Communist Democratic People's Republic of the north, launched at dawn on Sunday, June 25th. Differences of time enabled Acheson to receive news of this at his Maryland farm soon after dinner on the Saturday evening. After an hour's digestion of the news he informed the President.

Truman's first instinct was to summon the presidential plane (which was at Kansas City Airport) and make an immediate return to Washington. Acheson dissuaded him. Such a long night flight was, somewhat surprisingly, considered to be dangerous, as well as unnecessarily alarmist. There were still a lot of uncertainties. It was
better that he should carry on as though nothing had happened until at least the next day, when the question of return could be reviewed.
²

The uncertainties were manifold. They related to the scale of the invasion, to the ability of South Korean troops to repel it, and to the degree of commitment of Russia and China to Kim Il-sung's adventure. Upon this third uncertainty, there turned the likelihood of the invasion leading to a world conflagration, either because this was already planned by the Soviet Union, with moves against Berlin, or Yugoslavia or Iran or all three likely to follow, or because of a more spontaneous escalation if it became necessary for United States troops to be directly involved.

The first two questions were substantially and disagreeably cleared up by lunchtime on the Sunday, when Truman received his second telephone call from Acheson. There was no doubt about the seriousness of the invasion. It was no frontier raid, comparable with those which had quite frequently occurred in the previous months, but a determined military attempt to re-unite the peninsula under Communist control. Nor was the South Korean performance giving any basis for confidence. Syngman Rhee, their seventy-five-year-old president, who had returned from nearly forty years' exile in the United States, was a master of fulmination, almost as much against the pusillanimity of the West as against the aggression of the Communists. But at this stage at least he could not make his army fight. Within the first twenty-four hours, Seoul, the capital, together with the main airport of the country and the second maritime port were all imminently threatened. What was immediately proposed by Acheson was the calling of an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council in the hope that it would not only denounce the aggression but pass a resolution of action. If it did so the main burden of implementation would clearly fall on the United States. If it did not the responsibility on the leading nation for trying to deal with the resultant diplomatic chaos and the exposed military impotence of the UN would be greater still. Truman therefore decided to return immediately and to summon a dinner meeting of his principal advisers, civilian and military, at Blair House for that evening.