Truman (103 page)

That Rowe’s authorship was so brushed aside then and later distressed Rowe very little. Such was the nature of the system. “This is, as you know, a typical and acceptable White House staff technique,” he would write to a political scholar years later, “and one which I followed in the days when I was Administrative Assistant to President Roosevelt.” Who got the credit was not the point. They were all there to serve the President. Roosevelt especially had preferred people working for him to be equipped with “a passion for anonymity.”

In the Roosevelt and Truman years, George Elsey would remember, “staff was staff.”

The Republican nominee, Rowe predicted, would be Dewey, and Dewey, a “resourceful,” “highly dangerous” candidate, would be more difficult to defeat than in 1944. To win, the Democrats had to carry the West and the farm vote. Labor would have to be “cajoled, flattered and educated,” not because labor might vote Republican, but because labor might “stay home” on election day. The liberals, on the other hand, had to be “fed” idealism. For while few in number, the liberals, like the manufacturers and financiers in the Republican ranks, were extremely influential: “The businessman has influence because he contributes money. The liberal exerts influence because he is articulate.”

The black vote was crucial. “A theory of many professional politicians,” Rowe reported, “is that the northern Negro vote today holds the balance of power in Presidential elections for the simple arithmetical reason that the Negroes not only vote in a block but are geographically concentrated in the pivotal, large and closely contested electoral states such as New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.” Unless the administration made a determined campaign to help the Negro, Rowe insisted, the Negro vote was already lost.

No candidate since 1876, except Woodrow Wilson in 1916, had won the presidency without carrying New York, and crucial to New York, along with the black vote, was the Jewish vote, concentrated in New York City. But unless the Palestine issue was “boldly and favorably handled” by the administration, the Jewish vote was certain to go to the “alert” Dewey, or to Henry Wallace.

Housing and high prices would be the chief domestic issue. The foreign policy issue, of course, would be American relations with the Soviet Union, and, according to Rowe, there was “considerable political advantage” to the administration in its battle with the Kremlin. The Cold War made good election year politics.

Leadership in the Democratic Party was moribund or worse. It had been so long in power that it was “fat, tired and even a bit senile.” The old boss-run machines were a shambles.

The President appeared to be liked by the American people. “They know that he is a sincere and humble man and, in the cliché often heard, that he is a man ‘trying to do his best.’ ” The problem was the people saw him still as fundamentally a politician, and the politician as such did not hold first place in the ranks of American heroes. The “public picture” of the President, unfortunately, was “not sufficiently varied.” The people wanted more in a chief executive. To resolve the problem, Rowe suggested that Truman be seen less in the company of politicians and more often with such interesting people as famous scientists and best-selling authors. Further, the President should divest himself as rapidly as possible of any remnants of the “Missouri gang.” Rowe (and subsequently Clifford in the final version of the report) proposed that Truman invite Albeit Einstein to lunch at the White House, that Truman, as a matter of routine, be seen and photographed with not less than two interesting, admirable, nonpolitical figures per week.

Most important of all, the President must be seen more by the people. He must get away from Washington, travel the country.

In several respects the report was decidedly mistaken. There was the assumption, for example, that Truman would agree to an idea like inviting Einstein to lunch. Truman had no patience with such public relations gimmickry. It would be synthetic and out of character and he wouldn’t do it, he told Clifford. Nor was he about to cashier Harry Vaughan or Wallace Graham in order to enhance his standing in the public eye. But more striking was Rowe’s mistaken confidence that the solid South would remain loyal to the Democratic Party. It was, he said, inconceivable that any policies initiated by the administration, no matter how liberal, could so alienate the South it would revolt in an election year. “As always the South can be considered safely Democratic. And in formulating national policy it can be safely ignored.”

Since the Republicans controlled Congress, and since the southern Democrats who went along with the Republicans time and again were not about to change their attitudes, there was no reason to try to placate either faction.

“We were telling the President,” Rowe later recalled, “ ‘You can’t get anything done up there on the Hill, so, in effect, you want to send all the legislation you can up there and then give them hell for not doing anything about it….’ ”

How much real influence the memorandum had on Truman is impossible to measure. Probably it was relatively little, certainly less than later claimed. According to Rowe—who was told by James Webb—Truman kept it in the bottom drawer of his desk and read it “every once in a while.” But others would insist the memorandum made little if any impression on Truman, since he already knew most of the best that was in it. “To a politician of Harry Truman’s experience and resourcefulness,” remembered Robert Donovan of the New York
Herald-Tribune,
“the ‘famous political memorandum’ would have been a primer.” And in any event Truman would be running the campaign his own way, according to his own ideas, his own political instincts.

As things developed, the boycotting of the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner by Senator Johnston was only a mild preview of southern outrage. Fifty-two southern Democrats in Congress pledged themselves to fight any civil rights program in the Democratic platform and, by implication, any Democratic candidate for President who advocated such heinous liberal ideas. There were threats of a white southern march on Washington and Governor J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, speaking for a committee of southern governors, pledged to defend white supremacy and warned the leadership of the Democratic Party that the South was no longer “in the bag.” The Mississippi Democratic Committee said it would withdraw from the national convention unless “anti-Southern laws” were rejected.

Truman took all this very calmly. Then, on March 8, without fanfare, Senator J. Howard McGrath, Bob Hannegan’s replacement as national chairman, announced formally that the President was in the fight for reelection, adding also that the President’s position on civil rights remained unchanged.

Immediately Alabama’s Senators Lister Hill and John Sparkman, two of the South’s most liberal voices in Congress and old friends of Harry Truman, called on him to withdraw and said they would give him no support at the convention. Clearly, a southern rebellion of major proportions was under way.

Troubles of an entirely different nature were besetting Truman, meantime, some minor, even trivial, yet conspicuous and time-consuming just the same.

A huge stir of disapproval and ridicule—editorial indignation, jokes, cartoons—had erupted when he announced a plan to add a new balcony to the South Portico of the White House, extending from his upstairs Oval Study, so that he and his family could enjoy some outside “breathing space” with a degree of privacy. It would mean the first major change in the mansion since the time of Andrew Jackson, when the North Portico was added.

The balcony project was Truman’s own idea and to his extreme annoyance, it met with instant disapproval from the Fine Arts Commission, as well as a large part of the press. He was called “Back Porch Harry” and accused of meddling with a structure that not only didn’t belong to him, but that he was not likely to be occupying much longer. Republicans were delighted, as the “Truman Balcony” became an overnight sensation. Truman, his temper up, stood his ground, arguing that Jefferson himself had used just such upstairs galleries or balconies in his columned buildings at the University of Virginia. (The Washington
Star
expressed gratitude that the President had never seen the Taj Mahal or the old Moulmein Pagoda, or he might have had even more outrageous notions.) The balcony would make the White House “look right,” Truman insisted. It would do away with the need for the unsightly awnings used in summer to shade the mansion’s downstairs rooms on the south side. “The awnings you will remember were attached about halfway up the beautiful columns and looked always as if they’d caught all the grime and dirt in town,” he wrote to his sister. “Had to be renewed every year [at a cost of $780] and cost $2,000 a year in upkeep. In eight years the portico will be paid for in awning cost and the White House from the south will look as it should.” On his morning walks, when approaching the White House from the south side, he hated the sight of the dirty awnings and the way they “put the beautiful columns out of proportion.” He would go ahead with his balcony. And that was that.

To compound his concerns over the old house, he was informed discreetly by Head Usher Howell Crim that the whole second floor was in imminent danger of falling down. After close examination, an engineer told Truman the ceiling in the State Dining Room was staying in place largely from “force of habit.”

Charlie Ross was in a fury because Harry Vaughan insisted on making his own announcements to the press. The soft-spoken, thoughtful press secretary and the Falstaffian military aide had come to dislike one another more and more. Ross was “terrifically upset,” warning there had to be a showdown; “it had to be either Vaughan or himself,” recorded Eben Ayers.

Wallace Graham, the President’s physician, was accused of gambling in grain futures at the very time the President had denounced commodity speculation as a contributing cause of inflation, and the implications were that Graham had benefited from inside information. Though at first Graham insisted he had “lost his socks” in the market, he eventually admitted to having made a profit of $6,000 on an investment of $5,700. Nonetheless he, like Harry Vaughan, remained on duty at the White House, and the more the press deplored their presence, the more Truman dug in his heels.

“You can guard yourself against the wiles of your enemies,” Ross observed ruefully to Ayers, “but not the stupidity of your friends.”

Henry Wallace, meantime, was crusading up and down the country and drawing huge crowds. His followers included ardent young liberals, working people, blacks, and, conspicuously, members of the American Communist Party. Attacking the Democrats and Republicans alike for their internal “rot,” Wallace proposed turning America’s atomic weapons over to the United Nations, and called for a massive reconstruction program for the Soviet Union to be financed by the United States. He repudiated the Marshall Plan as a marshal plan. He talked of nationalizing the country’s coal mines and railroads. Truman’s political strategists worried that the effect of the Wallace movement on Democratic loyalties could do more damage than defections in the South.

But above all, it was the urgent problem of what to do about Palestine that troubled Truman. Reflecting on her father’s White House years long afterward, Margaret Truman would call this in some ways his most difficult dilemma of all.

The issue was complicated, baffling, and charged with emotion, “explosive,” as Truman said, and in the heated climate of an election year, exceedingly sensitive. Its consequences in human terms—for the Jewish people, the Arab Palestinians, in its effect on Middle Eastern relations—could clearly be momentous and very far-reaching.

Truman felt pulled in several directions. Like the great majority of Americans, he wanted to do what was right for the hundreds of thousands of European Jews, survivors of the Holocaust, who had suffered such unimaginable horrors. His sympathy for them was heartfelt and deep-seated. As senator, at the mass meeting in Chicago in 1943, he had said everything “humanly possible” must be done to provide a haven for Jewish survivors of the Nazis. Often as senator, he had personally assured Zionist leaders he would fight for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. As President, he was further impressed by the report of an emissary sent the summer of 1945 to investigate displaced person camps in Europe and talk to Jewish survivors. Earl G. Harrison, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and former U.S. Commissioner of Immigration, had supplied Truman with an exceedingly moving document describing misery that, as Truman said, “could not be allowed to continue.” And it reinforced his own belief that Palestine was the answer. Palestine, reported Harrison, was “definitely and preeminently” the choice of the Jewish survivors in Europe. Only in Palestine would “they be welcomed and find peace and quiet and be given an opportunity to live and work. No other single matter is, therefore, so important from the viewpoint of Jews in Germany and Austria and those elsewhere who have known the horrors of concentration camps as is the disposition of the Palestine question.”