General Marshall continued in his duties as before. When some of Marshall’s friends urged him to resign, Marshall allegedly replied that one did not resign because a President who had the constitutional right to make a decision made one. However, Marshall would not speak to Clark Clifford ever again.
Asked long afterward what he had thought to say to Marshall, to get him to agree at the last moment to American recognition of Israel, Robert Lovett said: “I told him that it was the President’s choice.”
III
The year of the birth of Israel, the year of the Republican tax cut and the Truman Balcony, would be remembered also as the year green (chlorophyll) chewing gum became a fad, the year of a new word game called “Scrabble,” of tail fins on Cadillacs, and an unimaginably daring new bathing suit called the bikini, after the island where the atomic bomb tests were carried out the summer before.
The economy was booming. Profits were up. Farmers were prospering. American prosperity overall was greater than at any time in the nation’s history. The net working capital of American corporations hit a new high of nearly $64 billion. For the steel, oil, and automobile industries, it was a banner year. Unemployment was below 4 percent. Nearly everyone who wanted a job had one, and though inflation continued, people were earning more actual buying power than ever before, and all this following the record year past, 1947, which, reported Fortune magazine, had been “the greatest productive record in the peacetime history of this or any other nation.”
In London, the same summer of the 1948 national political conventions, American athletes—Bob Mathias, Harrison Dillard, Melvin Patton—swept the field in the first Olympic Games since 1936 in Berlin, winning thirty-eight medals.
It was a time of extraordinary technical and scientific achievement. A 200-inch telescope, the world’s largest, was unveiled at Mount Palomar, California. Test pilot Chuck Yeager, flying a revolutionary rocket-plane, the Bell X-l, broke the sound barrier. The transistor was developed, a new antibiotic, Aureomycin, and cortisone to treat rheumatoid arthritis. A new kind of fuel, liquid hydrogen, promised, its inventor claimed, to “send men to the moon.”
For evening entertainment the country was tuning in to such radio favorites as “Duffy’s Tavern” and the Jack Benny Show. Radio dominated, for news and entertainment. But approximately one family out of every eight now owned a “television machine,” as Truman called it, and 1948 would be remembered as the premier year for the “Camel Newsreel Theater,” with John Cameron Swayze, the first nightly television news program. Also, for the first time ever, there would be television broadcasts of the political conventions, these to be held in the same city, Philadelphia, in order to make such coverage easier.
It was the year, too, of Christina’s World, a haunting portrait by Andrew Wyeth of a crippled woman and a forsaken house on a bleak New England hill—a world bearing no relation to that of green gum and supersonic flight—that would become one of the most popular paintings ever done by an American.
The music being sung and danced to in 1948 included such hit songs as “Enjoy Yourself, It’s Later Than You Think,” “It’s a Most Unusual Day,” and a new rendition by Pee Wee Hunt of the old Kansas City favorite, “Twelfth Street Rag.” Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate was on Broadway, and several of the new motion pictures were some of the finest ever made—The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Red Shoes, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet. Among the best-selling books were Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, Robert E. Sherwood’s Roosevelt and Hopkins, Eisenhower’s account of the war, Crusade in Europe, and Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred Kinsey, an Indiana University professor whose statistical revelations concerning male promiscuity in postwar American life caused a sensation.
In January, Mahatma Gandhi had been murdered while walking through a garden in New Delhi. In March, Czechoslovakian Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, whose father founded Czechoslovakia as a free democracy, either jumped or was pushed to his death from a third-floor window in Prague, news that stirred grief and anger as almost nothing else had done since the end of the war. (“But let the world not misunderstand what he said, with that leap,” wrote Dorothy Thompson. “He said: He who collaborates with Communism chooses slavery, treason, dishonor—or suicide.”) In June would come a crisis in Berlin.
In July, one of Truman’s favorite Americans, General John J. Pershing, died at age 87, and his body lay in state under the Capitol dome. Truman rode to the Capitol without police escort to pay his respects, as he said, “in my role as a Field Artillery Captain in World War I.”
As time would tell, the politics of 1948 would also introduce a number of new words and expressions into common American usage—“whistle-stop,” “Dixiecrat,” and “red herring.”
According to “scientific” polls given much attention in the press, 94 percent of the American people believed in God. According also to the polls, Harry Truman stood no chance of remaining President. “Obviously the Republican star is approaching its zenith,” reported Life, the country’s most popular magazine. Indeed, for all the change and tumult of the times, among the few accepted certainties was that it would be a Republican year, a dull campaign, and a debacle for Truman and the Democrats worse even than 1946.
Two experiences greatly influenced Truman’s outlook through what remained of that spring, and on into summer and fall, giving him both courage and seemingly irrepressible confidence no matter how bleak the forecasts—and they grew steadily bleaker—or how many people deserted him—and there were to be many.
The first had happened eight years before. Nothing, no struggle, no road traveled, could ever again be so difficult or look so hopeless, he felt, as had his chances in the Senate primary of 1940, the summer he ran against Lloyd C. Stark. It was a segment of Truman’s past that many political commentators and forecasters might well have studied closely in 1948. Courage, the saying goes, is “having done it before,” and in 1948 Truman knew he had done it before—against the odds, without money, without newspaper support, without the blessing of Franklin Roosevelt or any serious speculation by those supposedly in the know that he might actually wind up the winner. The persistent talk of his coming defeat in November, the tone of smug certainty in so much that was written and said, all had a very familiar ring to him.
Of greatest importance also was the more immediate experience of a much publicized “nonpolitical” tour made by rail cross-country in June, exactly as recommended in the Rowe Report. For while the two-week expedition was not without its blunders and embarrassments and seemed at times to have been a mistake, Truman found it exhilarating in a way nothing else could have been, and he returned to Washington looking and feeling as vigorous and sure of himself as at any time in his political life.
But courage and confidence, however important, would have been hardly enough without such other imponderable attributes as genuine sympathy for human feelings, humor, common sense, physical vitality—truly exceptional physical vitality for a man in his middle sixties—pride, determination, and a fundamental, unshakable Jacksonian faith in democracy, which to his mind mattered above all. Harry Truman trusted the American people. It would be said often, it sounded corny, and it was true. He loved the politician’s work of “getting out among the people,” loved seeing the country, loved the crowds. When local politicians came aboard the train to shake his hand, at one stop after another on this and later trips, and Truman took time for each of them, he was never just going through the motions, he genuinely liked such people, enjoyed seeing them.
As President he felt more than ever a need to see and make contact with what he called the everyday American. And he always felt better for it. On a recent evening in Washington, on one of his walks, he had decided to take a look at the mechanism that raised and lowered the middle span of the Memorial Bridge over the Potomac. Descending some iron steps, he came upon the bridge tender, eating his evening supper out of a tin bucket. Showing no surprise that the President of the United States had climbed down
the catwalk and suddenly appeared before him, the man said, “You know, Mr. President, I was just thinking about you.” It was a greeting Truman adored and never forgot.
In the primary summer of 1940 in Missouri, he had worked his way through small-town crowds pumping hands and saying, “I just wanted to come down and show you that I don’t have horns and a tail just because I am from Jackson County.” Now, across the West, the refrain, somewhat modified, was heard again: “I am coming put here so you can have a look at me and hear what I have to say, and then make up your mind as to whether you believe some of the things that have been said about your President.”
His sixteen-car “Presidential Special” departed from Union Station the night of June 3, Truman traveling again in his special armor-plated car, the Ferdinand Magellan, and accompanied by about twenty of the White House staff, including Secret Service agents, and fifty-nine reporters and photographers, which made it a record press party.
The excuse for this “nonpolitical” tour was an invitation to receive an honorary degree and deliver a commencement address at the University of California at Berkeley, but no one took the nonpolitical claim seriously, least of all Truman, who began with his first brief stop at noon the next day, June 4, at Crestline, Ohio. “On this nonpartisan, bipartisan trip that we are taking here,” he said to the obvious enjoyment of the crowd, “I understand there are a whole lot of Democrats present….”
The principal reason for declaring it an official presidential trip was that the Democratic Committee had no money. The cost was thus charged to the President’s annual travel fund, to the outrage of leading Republicans and much of the press.
What surprised everyone on board, and pleased Truman exceedingly, was the size of the crowds that turned out—1,000 people at little Crestline, 100,000 at Chicago, where he rode to the Palmer House in an open car.
At Omaha, an embarrassing foul-up caused by his old friend Eddie McKim produced much adverse publicity. Fewer than two thousand people attended a major speech, sitting down front in the huge Ak-Sar-Ben (Nebraska spelled backward) Auditorium, leaving eight thousand freshly polished, empty seats stretching behind. McKim, in charge of arrangements, had neglected to publicize the fact that the speech was open to the public and not just to Truman’s old war outfit, the 35th Division, which was holding its reunion in Omaha. It was a stupid blunder. Photographs of the nearly vacant hall appeared all over the country, as a show not only of Truman’s pathetically low popularity but of obvious political ineptitude. Yet Truman did not seem to mind. He went on stage as if speaking to a packed house. Nor did he blame or criticize McKim. “I don’t give a damn whether there’s nobody there but you and me,” McKim would always remember him saying. “I am making a speech on the radio to the farmers. They won’t be there—they’ll be home listening to that radio. They’re the ones I’m going to talk to.”
Far more important to Truman, a better measure than the rows of empty chairs that night, was the welcome he had received in the streets of Omaha earlier the same day, when marching with the 35th Division. Wearing a light tan double-breasted gabardine suit and his favorite two-tone summer shoes, he stepped along at the head of his own Battery D, doffing a western-style hat right and left. He looked as happy as a man could be and the enormous crowd responded wholeheartedly—in Omaha, a Republican town. As Edward T. Folliard reported in the Washington Post, “They lined the streets in this Republican stronghold, 160,000 of them, and gave President Truman a welcome reminiscent of his ‘honeymoon’ days in the White House three years ago.” Frank Spina, Truman’s old barber, marched beside him, carrying the original Battery D guidon. Behind came Eddie Jacobson, Monsignor Tiernan, Eddie McKim, and Jim Pendergast.
The onlookers were thrilled and charmed. Mr. Truman, sensing their friendliness, never looked more pleased [said the Omaha Morning World Herald].
President Truman was at his best Saturday morning…. He marched jauntily, shoulders back. He smiled and waved his hat. Those watching the parade, astonished to see the President walking on the streets of Omaha, laughed and cheered.
In April, in a conversation in his office with Arthur Krock, in answer to Krock’s question whether he detected any change in his own makeup since becoming President, Truman had said he could think of nothing, except a growing sense of being “walled-in.” Now away from Washington, back among his own kind of people, people who would naturally laugh and cheer to see him walking their streets, he felt both free from the walls and much more himself. “The President, you know, is virtually in jail,” he had told the crowd by the tracks at his first stop at Crestline. “He goes from his study to his office and from his office to his study, and he has to have guards there all the time…but when you go out and see people and find out what people are thinking about, you can do a better job….” Now, again and again, he let his audiences know how much being with them was doing for him, how much it meant to him to see them, how buoyed up he felt by their numbers. “It almost overwhelms me to see all the people in western Nebraska in this town today,” he said at little Sidney at the western end of the state, and he was “certainly happy to see this enthusiastic crowd!” at Laramie, Wyoming. “My goodness!” he exclaimed looking over the turnout at Dillon, Montana.
At Butte, a cheering throng lined the sidewalks several deep beside a four-mile parade route. When his train pulled into Missoula late at night and a crowd waited, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, he appeared in his pajamas and bathrobe. “I am sorry I had gone to bed,” he said. “But I thought you would like to see what I look like, even if I didn’t have on any clothes.”
He was folksy—he just wanted to say “Howdy”—and often corny—he was on his way “down to Berkeley to get me a degree”—and the crowds grew steadily bigger.
They told me at a little town in Idaho at 5:15 A.M. the whole town was out [he wrote to Mary Jane]. I wasn’t up. At Pocatello, Id. at 7:15 there were 2000 people and at Ketchum, the P.O. for this place, everybody in the county was there.
There was another widely reported gaffe at Carey, a little town in southern Idaho. Dedicating the new Willa Coates Airport, Truman began to praise the brave boy who had died for his country, only to be informed by a tearful Mrs. Coates that “our Willa” was a girl and that she had died in a civilian plane crash.
Charlie Ross and Clark Clifford had been urging Truman to speak extemporaneously as much as possible, certain that with practice he could become as effective in front of a crowd as they had seen him be so often with small groups in his office. If only the public could know the Harry Truman he knew, Ross often said. In April Truman had spoken off-the-cuff to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in May to a rally of Young Democrats in Washington, and both times with notable success. The press had commented favorably on “the new Truman.” But at times now things he said made his staff cringe. “I have been in politics a long time, and it makes no difference what they say about you, if it isn’t so,” he declared unexpectedly at Pocatello. “If they can prove it on you, you are in a bad fix indeed. They have never been able to prove it on me.”
Reporters on board began singing a many-versed song that included the refrain:
They can’t prove nothing;
They ain’t got a thing on me.
I’m going down to Berkeley
For to get me a degree.
Editorials in the East deplored the carnival air of the trip. The President, said the Washington Evening Star, was making “a spectacle of himself.”
At Eugene, Oregon, recalling his meeting with Stalin at Potsdam, Truman suddenly confided to the crowd gathered about the rear platform of his car: “I like old Joe! He is a decent fellow.” The remark sent reporters scrambling and caused an immediate sensation. From the State Department, Robert Lovett put through an urgent call to Clifford, who tactfully advised the President not to repeat the remark ever again. And Truman never did. “Well, I guess I goofed,” he said, as he rolled on in good spirits.
Crossing into Washing
ton, he made stops at Spokane, Ephrata, Wenatchee, Skykomish, Everett, Bremerton, Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia. At Spokane, he judged, there were “about two acres of people.” At Seattle more than 100,000 people turned out, the largest crowds seen in Seattle in thirty years. Not even Franklin Roosevelt had been given such a reception.
By now a decided pattern had begun to emerge in the speeches, a free-swinging style with Congress the main target.
“You know, this Congress is interested in the welfare of the better classes. They are not interested in the welfare of the common everyday man,” he said at Bremerton.
“Pour it on, Harry!” someone shouted.
“I’m going to, I’m going to,” Truman responded happily.
“Educate yourselves,” he told his audience at Olympia. “You don’t want to do like you did in 1946. Two-thirds of you stayed at home in 1946, and look what a Congress we got! That is your fault, that is your fault.”
A remark to a reporter that the 80th Congress was the worst in history produced immediate howls of outrage from Republicans in Washington. Harry Truman, said House Majority Leader Charles Halleck, was the worst President in history, while Representative Cliff Clevenger of Ohio called him a “nasty little gamin” and a “Missouri jackass.” Speaking in Philadelphia, Senator Taft deplored the spectacle of an American President “blackguarding Congress at whistle stops across the country,” and Democratic Party Chairman Howard McGrath and his publicity director, Jack Redding, immediately saw an opportunity too good to miss. Telegrams went out to the mayors of thirty-five western towns and cities on Truman’s, route to ask if they agreed with Senator Taft’s description of their community as a whistle-stop. “Must have the wrong city,” responded the mayor of Eugene, Oregon. “Grand Isle was never a whistle-stop,” came a reply from Nebraska.
In his commencement address at Berkeley, which was carried on a nationwide radio broadcast, Truman turned to foreign affairs and delivered one of the finest, most thoughtful speeches of his presidency. The setting was the University of California’s huge, sun-drenched football stadium, with fully 55,000 people present, twice the usual attendance at such ceremonies.
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