Truman (33 page)

16.
Conflict and Crisis,
p. 172

17.
Off the Record,
p. 96

18.
Harry
S. Truman,
p. 330

19.
ibid,
p. 324

1.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 148

2.
Sketches from Life,
p. 157

3.
Off the Record,
p. 109

4.
Present at the Creation,
p. 219

5.
Alan Bullock:
Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary
(Heinemann, 1983), p. 379

6.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 343

7.
Crisis and Conflict,
p. 287

8.
ibid,
pp. 301-2

9.
The Forrestal Diaries
pp. 333-4

10.
Off the Record, p. 1
20

1.
Conflict and Crisis,
p. 319

2.
Harry S. Truman,
pp. 384-5

3.
Conflict and Crisis,
p. 374

4.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 388

5.
Conflict and Crisis,
p. 376

6.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 388

7.
Conflict and Crisis,
p. 376

8.
The Man of Independence,
p. 319

9.
Donovan,
op. cit.
p. 382, based upon statements by Clark Clifford

10.
Conflict and Crisis,
p. 361

11.
ibid,
p. 389

12.
ibid,
p. 289 (quoted in)

13.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 9

14.
ibid,
p. 11

15.
Irwin Ross,
The Loneliest Campaign
(New American Library, 1968), p. 129

16.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 21

17.
The Loneliest Campaign,
pp. 187-8

18.
ibid,
p. 240

19.
Conflict and Crisis,
p. 438

1.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 400

2.
Off the Record,
p. 168

3.
Tumultuous Years,
p. 54

4.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 425

5.
Off the Record,
p. 168

6.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 429

1.
Harry S. Truman,
pp. 435-6

2.
Off the Record,
pp. 177-8

3.
Margot Asquith,
Autobiography
(Eyre & Spotiswoode, 1985), p. 295

4.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 455

5.
Khrushchev Remembers
(Little, Brown, 1970), pp. 367-73

6.
Dear Bess,
p. 562

7.
Present at the Creation,
p. 406

8.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 457

9.
Dear Bess,
p. 562

10.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 469

11.
Tumultuous Years,
p. 224

12.
Present at the Creation,
p. 415

13.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 484

14.
Present at the Creation,
p. 406

15.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 493 (quoted in)

16.
Tumultuous Years,
p. 289

17.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 493 (quoted in)

18.
Tumultuous Years,
p. 309

19.
Present at the Creation,
p. 475

20.
ibid,
p. 478

21.
ibid,
p. 480

22.
K. Harris,
Attlee
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982), pp. 463-4

23.
Harry S. Truman,
pp. 513

24.
Ibid,
p. 518

25.
Off the Record,
p. 211

26.
Plain Speaking,
p. 301

1.
Tumultuous Years,
p. 335

2.
Off the Record,
p. 220

3.
ibid,
p. 245

4.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 532

5.
Off the Record,
pp. 266-7

6.
ibid,
pp. 268-9

7.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 545

8.
Tumultuous Years,
p. 392

9.
Memoirs of Harry S. Truman
(Doubleday, 1956), Vol. II, pp. 527-30

10.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 557

11.
ibid,
p. 557

12.
Off the Record,
pp. 275-6

13.
ibid,
p. 279

14.
Harry S. Truman,
p. 556

15.
ibid,
p. 555

16.
Tumultuous Years,
p. 407

17.
Plain Speaking,
p. 17

18.
Off the Record,
p. 288

1
Off the Record,
p. 546

2
Harry S. Truman,
p. 562

3
Off the Record,
p. 382

4
ibid,
pp. 403-4

¹
He was only the 32nd person to hold the office. But as Grover Cleveland held it twice, the Truman presidency is normally counted as the 33rd.

²
But see pp. 59-60
infra
for some exegesis on the uncertainty of the date when this note was first composed and of the order in which Roosevelt placed Truman and Douglas.

³
‘Cronies' always played a considerable part in Truman's life. They had to be male and possess at least some of the characteristics of being loyal, unpretentiously convivial, and adequately good at poker. Mostly they worked with or for Truman, although not necessarily so, and some of those with whom he worked most closely, and greatly liked and respected (notably General Marshall and Dean Acheson) were not cronies. This breakfast ‘crony' of his first day as President was Hugh Fulton who had been counsel to the Senate committee over which Truman presided during the war. Fairly soon afterwards Truman cooled towards him. This was unusual: he was mostly very loyal to cronies.

¹
Harry S. Truman,
published in 1973, a little more than a year after his death. It is the best ‘daughter biography' that I know. It is also very near to being the best book on Truman. It is rightly partial and does not see everything in the round (otherwise there would be no point in writing this book). But it is both interesting and careful with facts.

²
Amongst earlier Presidents the ‘S' in Ulysses S. Grant was equally sterile, although this arose accidentally from a confusion in Army records.

³
His grandmother was less impressed. When he appeared in it at Grandview she told him that it was the first time a ‘blue [i.e. Union] uniform' had been seen in that house since 1863, and that he was not to bring it there again.
(Letters to Bess,
p. 219.)

⁴
Biographical notes, written by Truman
circa
1956, and quoted by William Hillman in
Mr President
(p. 135). There seems some discrepancy between this picture and Margaret Truman's statement that the farm earned $15,000 a year.

⁵
Typically, he did not think much of it: ‘New York is a very much overrated burg', he wrote on March 26th, 1918. ‘It merely keeps up its rep. by its press agents continually harping on the wonder of it. There isn't a town west of the Mississippi of any size that can't show you a better time.'
(Dear Bess,
p. 253.)

⁶
‘The bonus' was an ex gratia payment to World War I veterans in the form of a twenty-year endowment insurance certificate due to mature in 1945. In the depression the American Legion demanded immediate cash payments. The issue was not resolved until January 1936. Hoover treated the ‘Bonus Marchers', who camped in Washington in the summer of 1932, with cold legality. He sent the Army, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, with his aide Colonel Eisenhower at his side, to disperse them. This was done with considerable roughness. Roosevelt gave them sympathy but not the money. Payment was eventually authorized by Congress over his veto.

⁷
It was a major issue at the Democratic National Convention in New York City that year. Even the exhaustion of 103 ballots to choose a ‘neutral' candidate, John W. Davis, former Ambassador to London, rather than the Catholic ‘wet' and therefore highly vulnerable Al Smith or William G. McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson's somewhat conservative son-in-law, did not prevent the delegates agonizing lengthily over whether or not to condemn the Klan in the platform, and only deciding not to do so by the splendid margin of 542
³
/
₂₀
votes to 541
³
/
₂₀
.

⁸
The Man of Independence
(J. B. Lippincott, 1950). Daniels was the son of Josephus Daniels, Wilson's Secretary of the Navy to whom Franklin D. Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary from 1913 to 1919. Truman is reported as having said of it: ‘That book is filled with a lot of bunk. He used to work for me when I was President and he worked for Roosevelt. But when he wrote that book he just seemed to go haywire in places [but] he got most things like that [facts & dates] right …' (Merle Miller,
Plain Speaking,
p. 60.)

⁹
And not only on the highways. Kansas City still has the rare distinction of a suburban stream (Brush Creek) that runs for four miles or more along a wide concrete bed.

¹⁰
Fourteen years later Truman took Canfil to the Potsdam Conference as a sort of baggage master. He had recently appointed him US Marshal for the Western district of Missouri. This enabled Truman to introduce him to Stalin as ‘Marshal Canfil'. Thereafter, Truman claimed, the Russian entourage treated him with immense respect. It became one of Truman's few enjoyable memories of Potsdam.

¹¹
Truman also placed a Jackson statue in front of the remodelled Independence courthouse. He would have been amazed to be told that a little over forty years later it would be complemented by a statue of himself, not on a horse, but walking at a vigorous pace—an unusual but appropriate portrayal. In Kansas City his courthouse was overshadowed within two years by a new City Hall of 26 floors, built across the street by his old rival Henry McElroy, who had become City Manager. The main contractors for both towers was the Sventon Construction Company, which must have had a good five years. McElroy died while awaiting trial after the Pendergast
débâcle
in 1939.

¹
Daniels
op cit
p. 183. Daniels' judgments, in my view and despite Truman's own disparagement of the work (see p. 22
supra),
remain perceptive after 34 years.

³
Truman firmly supported the President but this did not seem to impair his relations with Wheeler.

³
Louis Dembitz Brandeis, 1856-1941, associate justice of the Supreme Court, 1916-1939, the first Jew to be appointed to that body. Mostly his judgments (often in a minority) supported the New Deal, although he was a little suspicious of Roosevelt's centralizing tendencies and was against him on the constitutionality of the National Recovery Act and on the Court-packing issue.

⁴
Truman's health was of some continuing concern throughout the late 1930s. In September 1937 he went to an army hospital (he was a lieutenant-colonel in the reserve) at Hot Springs, Arkansas for two weeks of intensive check-up and tests, and returned there on several subsequent occasions. He was concerned about a whole variety of complaints: erratic sleeping, tiredness by day, lack of appetite, headaches. The picture of Truman as a man of unblemished health, robust appetite for simple food, assured sleep, effortless ability to rise every morning at 6.00 and walk a brisk four miles before breakfast, all adding up to a predictably long life to the age of 88, was something which came with his presidency and not long before. In his early fifties (as when he was a much younger man on the farm) there was a good deal of complaint about the difficulty of getting out of bed, accompanied by occasional bursts of 12 or 15 hours of sleep, and some touches of hypochondria.

^*
Cordell Hull, on the other hand, declined it flatly when Roosevelt dangled it before him. And Speaker Rayburn, Truman's first preferred candidate, in no way allowed himself to become obsessive. When Truman had proposed him at a San Francisco banquet in March he returned the compliment by proposing Truman at St Louis one week later. And when he found himself effectively eliminated by being judged insufficiently conservative to carry his own Texas delegation he took the setback calmly.

²
Neither fact could have been new to Roosevelt, particularly as he is reported as having been told by Cardinal Spellman of New York in 1940 how damaging the second would be. Spellman subsequently denied that he made any such statement. The Cardinal however was notable neither as an ally of Roosevelt nor as a witness of the truth.

³
Hannegan almost certainly had not. The last thing he wanted to do was to confuse the issue by bringing in Douglas's name.

^*
He committed suicide in 1949.

²
He had been Hoover's Secretary of State in 1929-33, as well as Taft's Secretary of War in 1911-13.

³
He would indeed have become so, despite his rout at the Chicago Convention, had Truman died. Until 1947 the Secretary of State, in the absence of a vice-president was first in line for the succession. He was then replaced by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, on the ground that an elected officer was more appropriate than an appointed one. The previous position of the Secretary of State was however one reason why Truman was so eager to replace Stettinius.