Truman (34 page)

⁴
Twelve years later he wrote of himself as ‘an innocent idealist' in 1945, but did not deny that he ‘liked the little son of a bitch'.
(Private Papers,
pp. 348-9.)

⁵
The régimes of these countries, together with the treatment of Italy and the Russian desire for the extraction of excessive reparations from Germany were the main issues of dispute at Potsdam. Even without the need for Russian support against Japan, however, Truman had little prospect of resisting Russian domination of Eastern Europe. The pressure to ‘bring the boys home' was so strong, as was the
in situ
position of the Red Army.

⁶
Alamogordo and Nagasaki were plutonium. Hiroshima was uranium, and the only one of its sort then in existence.

⁷
This was an ironical dispute, as the Emperor was eventually decisive in telling his more bellicose war commanders and ministers that they had to surrender without further destruction and might, had he been fully in charge, have done so before Hiroshima. In any event the fact that the formal and almost unprecedented intervention of the Emperor was necessary to overcome military resistance to surrender destroys the argument that the Japanese would have given up without the use of the A-bomb.

⁸
It is perhaps worth comparing the diary entry of Mountbatten, in later life an anti-nuclear prophet, for August 6th, the day of Hiroshima. He was dining at Windsor Castle. ‘Everybody was in good form as the atomic bomb had just fallen,' he wrote
(Mountbatten,
Philip Ziegler, Collins, 1985, p. 300). The weapon then meant victory and the end of carnage rather than a threat to the future of mankind.

¹
They were infrequently in the same geographical place either. Byrnes spent a remarkable amount of time away from Washington.

²
Truman eventually over-rewarded Vardaman by appointing him in the Federal Reserve Board, where according to Margaret Truman, ‘he repaid (Dad) by voting against every Truman policy for the next seven years. He went round Washington spreading the nasty story that he was kicked out of the White House because he did not drink or play cards.'(M. Truman,
op. cit.
p. 290)

³
The Gridiron Dinner was a traditional Washington press and politicians' pre-Christmas occasion, at which Roosevelt had established a firm pattern of self-confident presidential wit. General Sherman's aphorism was not delivered at an earlier Gridiron dinner. He was proving that war was indeed hell by his march through Georgia on the equivalent date eighty years before.

⁴
With typical curmudgeonly honesty, however, he then modified the blow by answering a question as to whether he would work against Truman politically with the response: ‘I might work for him in 1948. I can think of worse contingencies.' (Donovan,
op. cit.
p. 183)

⁵
There was a considerable similarity between the treatment of Truman in America and the treatment of Attlee (whose nadir however came about a year later) in Britain. Both are now put high in the leagues of presidents and prime ministers, but both suffered contemporary derision. ‘An empty taxi drew up outside 10, Downing Street and the Prime Minister got out', ‘Mr Attlee is a modest man, with a great deal to be modest about.' These
mutatis mutandis,
are very much the sort of jokes which might have been made about Truman at the time.

⁶
The 1944 Democratic Convention.

¹
Individually, by telephone, not to emergency collective session, which would have been an imperious way of assuaging his New Year's Day loneliness.

²
Although, according to the family doctor, General Graham, who left the Army in 1953, returned to Kansas City and looked after them both to the end, she had some health reasons for doing so. ‘When she was in Washington, she was always tense,' he recorded, ‘and her blood pressure was always high.' As she lived to the age of 97, the condition cannot have been very acute.

³
Sir Oliver (now Lord) Franks, British Ambassador to Washington from 1948 to 1952, was a rare exception. He has something of Marshall's own qualities of calm, authoritative incisiveness. Field Marshal Dill may have been another exception. But he was dead two years before Marshall became Secretary of State.

⁴
This fourth meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers was spread over 43 formal sessions lasting from March 10th to April 25th. The pace of late 1940s diplomacy was much more that of the Congresses of Vienna or Berlin than of today's meetings of ministers. Bevin was away from London for more than eight weeks, having spent six weeks in New York in November-December 1946. The condition of his heart meant that he mostly had to set off eastward by train and westward by ship.

⁵
Joseph E. Davies, 1876-1958, had been US Ambassador to Moscow 1936-8 and was used by Roosevelt, and indeed Truman in his early days, for special missions.

⁶
Claude Pepper, b. 1900, was Senator for Florida from 1936 until his defeat in 1950. He returned to Capitol Hill as a congressman in 1962.

⁷
Broadcast on April 28th.

⁸
Acheson,
Present at the Creation
p. 232. The author, having delivered the Harvard Commencement Address of 1972, a quarter of a century after Marshall, is inclined to concur. I regard my Harvard degree as one of the three or four greatest honours I have ever received. I thought the occasion to speak on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Marshall as one of the greater opportunities of my life. I was mistaken. I enjoyed the rest of the twenty-four hours very much. But the open-air speech to a slightly somnolent post-prandial gathering of 3000 alumni, where 10 or 12,000 had been present in the morning for the degree giving, was something of an anti-climax.

⁹
As late as July 28th, one middle rank State Department official wrote to another: ‘The “Marshall Plan” has been compared to a flying saucer—nobody knows what it looks like, how big it is, in what direction it is moving, or whether it really exists.' (Bullock,
Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary,
p. 403)

¹⁰
Two-thirds majorities were required in each case. In the House more Democrats voted against the President than with him. The young Lyndon B. Johnson, as Donovan points out, voted against Truman. The still younger John F. Kennedy was one of the 71 who voted for him.

¹¹
This comes from Mr Merle Miller's conversations with Truman in 1961
(An Oral Biography).
If Mr Miller was accurate in recording Truman, and Truman was accurate on Marshall's reply that, ‘if Eisenhower ever came close to doing such a thing he'd not only bust him out of the Army, he'd see to it that never for the rest of his life would he be able to draw a peaceful breath' this may go some way towards explaining Eisenhower's less than heroic defence of Marshall in 1952. But the existence of this letter is not well-authenticated.

¹²
See pp. 182-202,
infra
for an account of Truman's attitude to Stevenson.

¹
There was a peculiar irony in Bevin being the victim of a dockers' boycott. In 1920 he had both made his national reputation and earned the title of ‘the dockers' KC' with his presentation of their case before a public court of inquiry; and in the same years he had organized the refusal of the London stevedores to load the
Jolly George
with arms for Churchill's support of the White Russians.

²
Attlee listened to R. H. S. Crossman, a member of the same Committee expatiate on the subject for three quarters of an hour and then concluded the interview less provocatively but still more discouragingly by merely saying ‘How's your mother, Dick' (Kenneth Harris,
Attlee,
p. 411). Had he and Truman known of each other's interview they might have had more mutual sympathy on the issue.

³
He had been well briefed about the direction of official thinking in Washington.

⁴
During the Convention itself, when he was unsuccessfully urging Douglas to accept the vice-presidential nomination, he wrote exasperately: ‘I call him, tell him I'm doing what FDR did to me. He owes it to the country to accept. He belongs to that crowd of Tommy Corcoran, Harold Ickes, Claude Pepper crackpots whose word is worth less than Jimmy Roosevelt's … No professional liberal is intellectually honest … Most Roosevelts aren't either.'
(Private Papers,
p. 8)

⁵
The Loneliest Campaign,
published in 1968.

⁶
An ex-governor of Indiana got a half vote.

⁷
This blandness (which did not repeat itself in his firm and courageous Supreme Court judgments nearly twenty years later) perhaps reached its epitome in his speech at Charleston, West Virginia, on October 5th, with its engaging image of a beneficent traffic policeman directing the economy: ‘The little jeeps of small business should have a chance to keep moving, just as well as the ten-ton trucks of big business.' Watch needed, however, to be kept on ‘the economic road hog'. (Ross,
op. cit.
p. 210)

⁸
Mrs Longworth (Alice Roosevelt, the daughter of the 26th President) who was credited with the remark that he was like the bridegroom on the wedding cake, would no doubt have thought that he could not stoop without disappearing from sight.

⁹
‘Shall we expose our country to a return of the seven years of New Deal depression because my opponent is indispensable to the ill-assorted power-hungry conglomeration of city bosses, Communists and career bureaucrats who now compose the New Deal,' he had there said of Roosevelt. (I. Ross,
op. cit.
p. 47)

¹⁰
Edwin A. Lahey of the
Chicago Daily News,
quoted in Ross,
op. cit.
p. 216.

¹¹
Samuel Lubell, a notable political commentator of the period, argued however that on balance both these candidatures helped Truman. Wallace took the Communist curse off him and strengthened his position with right wing Democrats, particularly Catholics. Thurmond helped him with the black vote. Lubell's
The Future of American Politics
was published in 1952.

¹
She attributed this mood of optimism principally to the excellent functioning of the White House staff, and gave the chief credit for this to Charles S. Murphy, who had been there since 1947, but who succeeded Clark Clifford in the top job only at the beginning of 1950. This was a little unfair to Clifford, who had flair and had rescued Truman's office from chaos in 1946. Murphy, an intelligent North Carolina lawyer, was more self-effacing and perhaps meshed more easily with Truman's personality.

The staff remained tiny by present-day standards. Truman himself took a 30 were such that they seemed-minute meeting with ten or twelve of them—which was effectively the lot-each morning at 9.30. (Margaret Truman,
op. cit.
p. 449)

¹
It was a quaint beginning because no Democratic Convention could possibly take place within 2¼ years.

²
It was also surprisingly decided that Truman should make no allusion to the invasion when he went about his ordinary business—a visit to his brother's farm—on the Sunday morning. Were not the Agency tapes clattering away?

³
In fact the navigator arrived and clambered up a rope ladder as the plane, under Truman's orders to leave immediately, was beginning to taxi. Truman then wasted far more time by landing at St Louis to pick up Secretary Snyder, probably a less useful member of the team than the navigator. But with Truman old friendships died hard, and he liked familiar faces in a crisis, even if he looked more to the advice of those who were less familiar but better informed.

⁴
This may have been partly the fault of Acheson who in March had made a speech which appeared to exclude South Korea from the United States perimeter of defence.

⁵
The outcome was remarkably successful. Britain and Turkey contributed the most. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, Colombia, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Ethiopia all sent land troops, and some sent naval and air support as well. South Africa sent an air unit but no ground forces. Italy, India, Denmark, Norway and Sweden sent non-combat medical units.

⁶
There was doubt until the last moment as to whether Malik, the head of the Russian delegation would re-take his seat and block the whole proceedings. He did so neither on this occassion nor, for the second key vote, two days later, although for no obvious reason he suddenly resumed his place on July 20th. The second vote was on a resolution to give teeth to the Sunday one. In effect it called for military sanctions. It got through by seven votes to one, Yugoslavia having moved from abstention to dissent, India and Egypt from assent to abstention. It was still a powerful majority.

⁷
A typical such meal, made unusual only by its solitariness and the grandeur of the service, had been recorded in his diary by Truman on November 1st 1949: ‘Had dinner by myself tonight … A butler came in very formally and said “Mr President, dinner is served.” I walk into the dining room in Blair House. Barnett in tails and white tie pulls out my chair, pushes me up to the table. John in tails and white tie brings me a plate, Barnett brings me a tender loin, John brings me asparagus, Barnett brings me carrots and beets. I have to eat alone and in the silence in candle-lit room. I ring. Barnett takes the plate and butter plates. John comes in with a napkin and silver crumb tray—there are no crumbs but John has to brush them off the table anyway. Barnett brings me a plate with a finger bowl and doiley and John puts a glass saucer and a little bowl on the plate. Barnett brings me some chocolate custard. John brings me a demitasse (at home a little cup of coffee—about two good gulps) and my dinner is over. I take a hand bath in the finger bowl and go back to work. What a life!'
(Off the Record,
pp. 168-9)