The world, said Truman, was in a twilight time between a war so dearly won and “a peace that still eludes our grasp.” The chief cause of unrest was the Soviet Union. The great divide was not between the United States and the Soviet Union, but between the Soviet Union and all the free nations of the world. The refusal of the Soviet Union to work with its wartime Allies for world recovery and world peace was “the most bitter disappointment of our time.”
Different economic systems could live side by side and in peace, he said, but only providing one side was not bent on destroying the other by force.
Our policy will continue to be a policy of recovery, reconstruction, prosperity—and peace with freedom and justice. In its furtherance, we gladly join with all those of like purpose.
The only expansion we are interested in is the expansion of human freedom and the wider enjoyment of the good things of the earth in all countries.
The only prize we covet is the respect and good will of our fellow members of the family of nations.
The only realm in which we aspire to eminence exists in the minds of men, where authority is exercised through the qualities of sincerity, compassion and right conduct….
I believe the men and women of every part of the globe intensely desire peace and freedom. I believe good people everywhere will not permit their rulers, no matter how powerful they may have made themselves, to lead them to destruction. America has faith in people. It knows that rulers rise and fall, but that the people live on.
Two days later, on June 14, at Los Angeles, an estimated 1 million people packed both sides of his parade route from the railroad station to the Ambassador Hotel. “They clung to the roofs of buildings, jammed windows and fire escapes and crowded five deep along the sidewalk,” reported the Los Angeles Times. It was the first visit to the city by a President in thirteen years.
Los Angeles, said Truman with a grin that night at the Press Club, was quite a whistle-stop. Stepping up the attack on Congress, he called for action on price controls, housing, farm support, health insurance, and a broader base for Social Security. Only that morning he had vetoed a Republican bill that would have taken 750,000 people off Social Security.
Schools were overcrowded, he said, teachers underpaid. A bill for aid to education had passed the Senate and would take only ten minutes for the House to pass, but the House was “roosting on it,” he said. “No action! No action!”
The one issue passed over, in this and other speeches along the way, was civil rights. Truman’s advisers were divided over which would help him more, saying nothing about it for now, or speaking out. Truman had decided to say nothing for the time being.
When a smiling Jimmy Roosevelt turned up at the Ambassador Hotel for a private conference, and stood towering over Truman as they shook hands, Truman jabbed his forefinger into Roosevelt’s chest, and according to the only witness to the scene, Secret Service Agent Henry Nicholson, said to him, “Your father asked me to take this job. I didn’t want it…and if your father knew what you are doing to me, he would turn over in his grave. But get this straight: whether you like it or not, I am going to be the next President of the United States. That will be all. Good day.”
Turning east, the train crossed Arizona, New Mexico, and Kansas, with stops the whole way, then on into Missouri, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. The crowds continued large and friendly. “Are the special privilege boys going to run the country, or are the people going to run it?” he asked. This was the theme. The election, he was sure, would ride on it.
He covered 9,505 miles through 18 states, delivered 73 speeches, and was seen by perhaps 3 million people. The train reached Union Station on a steamy Washington afternoon, Friday, June 18. Truman, his sunburned nose peeling, his lips cracked, was, as reported, “full of bounce.”
From the first day of the 1948 Republican National Convention, when former Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce told the cheering, amused crowd that Harry Truman was a “gone goose,” to the final celebration on the convention floor, there was never anything but a feeling of victory in the air.
The convention opened in Philadelphia on Monday, June 21. Of the five most publicized contenders for first place on the Republican ticket—Dewey, Taft, Vandenberg, Stassen, and Martin—Dewey, the favorite of the party’s eastern liberal wing, showed almost overriding strength from the start and won on the third ballot, after Stassen refused to release his delegates to Taft. For his running mate, Dewey chose Governor Earl Warren of California, making it a “dreamboat of a ticket”—two popular, youthful, progressive governors of the two largest, wealthiest states in the Union. If Dewey seemed overly cool and self-assured in manner, Warren had more than compensating warmth. Nor had anyone forgotten how close Dewey had come the last time to defeating the Champion, Franklin Roosevelt. Time and Newsweek agreed that only a miracle or a series of unimaginable political blunders could save Harry Truman from overwhelming defeat.
Truman thought the Republicans had made a mistake. They would have been better off with Taft, he said privately; Taft was an honorable man who deserved the nomination and would have made a tougher opponent than Dewey.
In his acceptance speech, Dewey talked of national unity. “Our people yearn to higher ground, to find common purpose in the finer things which unite us…”
Truman had little time to dwell on the Republicans and their convention. On the day Dewey was chosen, Thursday, June 24, 1948, the Russians clamped a blockade on all rail, highway, and water traffic in and out of Berlin. The situation was extremely dangerous. Clearly Stalin was attempting to force the Western Allies to withdraw from the city. Except by air, the Allied sectors were entirely cut off. Nothing could come in or out. Two and a half million people faced starvation. As it was, stocks of food would last no more than a month. Coal supplies would be gone in six weeks.
Truman faced the issue with notable caution and firmness. It was suggested that the Allies force their way into Berlin by land, with an armored convoy. It was suggested that the United States retaliate by closing its ports and the Panama Canal to Russian ships. Truman rejected such ideas. When, at a meeting in his office with Forrestal, Lovett, and Secretary of the Army Royall, the question was asked whether American forces would remain in Berlin, Truman said there was no need for discussion on that: “We stay in Berlin, period.”
Royall asked skeptically if the consequences had been thought through.
“We will have to deal with the situation as it develops,” Truman said. “We are in Berlin by the terms of the agreement, and the Russians have no right to get us out by either direct or indirect pressure.”
Lovett cabled the American ambassador in London that night: “We stay in Berlin.”
General Clay, the American commander in Berlin, had already begun shipping supplies by air, on a very limited scale, a step considered little more than a palliative. On Monday, June 28, Truman ordered a full-scale airlift.
The same day he sent two squadrons of B-29s to Germany, the giant planes known to the world as the kind that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. But in fact, these had not been modified to carry atomic bombs, a detail the Russians were not to know.
That the Berlin Airlift was about to become one of the most brilliant American achievements of the postwar era and one of Truman’s proudest decisions, strongly affecting the morale of Western, non-Communist Europe, and the whole course of the Cold War, as well as Truman’s own drive for reelection, was by no means apparent to anyone at this point. No one had any idea how things would turn out in Berlin, and Truman was no exception. General Bradley, who had replaced Eisenhower as Chief of Staff, thought the President was being far too vague, when, as Bradley later wrote, “we were nose to nose with massive Soviet military power.” It hardly seemed realistic to expect a major city to be supplied entirely by air for any but a very limited time.
In making his decision, for all the political heat and turmoil of the moment, Truman had consulted none of the White House staff or any of his
political advisers. Indeed, throughout the blockade, as George Elsey would recall, the White House staff “had no direct role whatever in any decisions or in the execution of any of the carrying out of the airlift.” There was no talk of how the President’s handling of the crisis would make him look, or what political advantage was to be gained. And neither did Truman try to bolster the spirits of those around him by claiming the airlift would work. He simply emphasized his intention to stay in Berlin and left no doubt that he meant exactly what he said.
Summer had arrived in Washington and that same evening, Monday, June 28, the President and the First Lady took their dinner on the South Porch of the White House, Truman seated so he could enjoy the view. A scrap of paper on which he recorded the scene would later be found among his papers:
A ball game or two goes on in the park south of the lawn. Evidently a lot of competition, from the cheers and calls of the coaches. A robin hops around looking for worms, finds one and pulls with all his might to unearth him. A mockingbird imitates robin, jays, redbirds, crows, hawks—but has no individual note of his own. A lot of people like that. Planes take off and land at National Airport south of the Jefferson Memorial. It is a lovely evening….
In imagination he pictured the old Chesapeake & Ohio Canal crossing the grounds of the Washington Monument, as it had long ago, barges anchored somewhere west of the Monument.
“I can see old J. Q. Adams going swimming in it and getting his clothes stolen by an angry woman who wanted a job,” he wrote. “Then I wake up, go upstairs and go to work….”
As Churchill had observed at Potsdam, Truman was a man of immense determination. “Stubborn as a mule,” others often commented. And in nothing that Truman, or anyone else wrote or said as 1948 unfolded is there any indication that once having made up his mind to run for reelection he was ever tempted to withdraw, or like the mockingbird, to sing a song not his own.
“I am not a quitter,” he would say, and that was all there was to it.
Yet game as he may have been, as restored in spirit as, he may have felt after his swing west, there was by all signs no cause for hope among Democrats. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, his prospects could not have appeared much more grim. It was not just that he faced a strong, heavily financed, supremely confident Republican opponent, or the threat of the Wallace movement cutting away at his support among liberals. The whole Democratic Party, the famous, disparate Democratic “coalition” of labor, intellectuals, city bosses, and southern segregationists fabricated by Franklin Roosevelt, was coming to pieces. Harold Ickes, as if to settle old scores with Truman, wrote to tell him:
You have the choice of retiring voluntarily and with dignity, or of being driven out of office by a disillusioned and indignant citizenry. Have you ever seen the ice on the pond suddenly break in every conceivable direction under the rays of a warming sun? This is what has happened to the Democratic Party under you, except that your party has not responded to bright sunshine. It has broken up spontaneously.
The biggest break came now from Ickes’s own liberal side of the party, the doctrinaire New Dealers. The call for Eisenhower started by Roosevelt’s sons had swelled to a chorus, with Claude Pepper, Chester Bowles, former head of the Office of Price Administration, who was now running for governor of Connecticut, Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis, who was running for the Senate, all favoring an Eisenhower draft at the convention. The Americans for Democratic Action, the ADA, recently formed as a non-Communist liberal response to the Wallace movement and sometimes known as the “New Deal in Exile,” voiced its preference for Eisenhower over Truman, and if not Eisenhower, then Justice William O. Douglas. Such professional Democrats as Jake Arvey of Chicago, Mayor William O’Dwyer of New York, and Boss Frank Hague of New Jersey also decided it was time for Eisenhower. Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and Phil Murray of the CIO joined the Eisenhower movement. And so did Alabama Senators Hill and Sparkman and South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, making it appear almost as though the old Roosevelt coalition were regrouping around the glamorous general, who by this time had become president of Columbia University.
And all this was made more remarkable by the fact that no one knew anything of Eisenhower’s politics. No one could say even whether he was a Democrat, let alone what his position on issues might be—on civil rights, Social Security, taxes. Or how to keep peace with Stalin.
To Truman and those loyal to him, the revolt of the old New Dealers was especially grating. It seemed besides an act of personal betrayal, wholly unprincipled and intellectually dishonest. Truman had borne the banner of the New Deal as faithfully as any successor to Franklin Roosevelt possibly could have, was their feeling. No more progressive program had ever been put before Congress than the Truman program. That was a matter of record.
Though Eisenhower had stated publicly several times that he was not a candidate and did not want the nomination, this did little to dissuade his new admirers. Over the Fourth of July weekend, a week in advance of the Democratic Convention, the Eisenhower faction, led by Jimmy Roosevelt, wired each of the 1,592 delegates to choose the “ablest, strongest man available” as their candidate, adding that “no man in these critical days can refuse the call to duty and leadership implicit in the nomination and virtual election to the Presidency of the United States.”
Truman, concluded the veteran New York Times political reporter James C. Hagerty, could look forward to “a hard and possibly losing fight for the nomination….”
In six months he had faced some of the roughest abuse and difficulties of any President in history. He had been castigated by southern Democrats over civil rights, repudiated by a Republican Congress, ridiculed for his White House balcony and his Missouri cronies. He had faced the pressures of the Palestine issue, the increasing threat of war over Berlin, watched his popularity disintegrate in the polls, seen himself portrayed in the press as inept and pathetic. His party was broke. And now the New Dealers were abandoning him, and noisily. No President in memory, not even Herbert Hoover in his darkest days, had been treated with such open contempt by his own party.
“If you can’t stand the heat, you better get out of the kitchen,” Truman liked to say, an old line in Missouri that he had first heard in the 1930s, from another Jackson County politician named E. T. (“Buck”) Purcell.
To a few former New Dealers the whole spectacle was appalling. “I am simply aghast at the unfair way in which President Truman is being ‘judged,’ if the current lynch-law atmosphere can be called ‘judging’!” recorded David Lilienthal in his diary. “And the attitude of liberals and progressives, now whooping it up for Eisenhower or Douglas, is the hardest to understand or to be other than damn mad about.”
Truman’s record [continued Lilienthal on July 5] is that of a man who, facing problems that would have strained and perhaps even floored Roosevelt at his best, has met these problems head on in almost every case. The way he took on the aggression of Russia…his civil rights program, upon which he hasn’t welched or trimmed—My God! What do these people want?
If it is said that he wobbled on veterans’ housing or Palestine or this or that, did F.D.R. never wobble? Don’t be funny; F.D.R. wobbled through the Neutrality Act and Arms Embargo (isolation of the very worst and blindest kind); he wobbled on economic matters all the time…Did F.D.R. ever stand up for public development of power, or human rights, or labor, essentially any more firmly than Truman? And who knows what Eisenhower would do on any of these issues! Bah!
It is grossly unfair. They say the people want someone else; that the people aren’t for him. Well, who in the hell but the Southern extremists and the perfectionist “liberals” together have created the impression (eagerly encouraged, of course, by the reactionaries and the Republicans) that the people don’t have confidence in him?
That makes me mad and rather ill, these hounders of a real man.
When Matt Connelly reported the defection of Frank Hague to Truman, he merely said,
“All right, let him go. I never did like him anyhow.” Writing in his diary later the same day, Truman would describe Hague, Jimmy Roosevelt, Jake Arvey, and the ADA as “double-crossers all,” adding, “But they’ll get nowhere—a double dealer never does.” The Democratic leaders opposing his nomination were all acting very foolishly. He was certain Eisenhower was not a candidate, perhaps not even a Democrat. “I don’t think he would be a candidate on the Democratic ticket anyway,” he wrote to a friend. The influence of a sitting President—as leader of his party—was too great to be thwarted. Not even Theodore Roosevelt with all his popularity had been able to deny the Republican nomination to the incumbent Taft in 1912, he reminded his staff.
Did he think he would have enough pledged delegates to win on the first ballot at Philadelphia, Truman was asked at his press conference on July 1.
“Sure,” he said.
But he may not have been so sanguine as professed—not according to a f story later recounted by Arthur Krock, whose source apparently was Kenneth Royall.
At a “bull session” over drinks among some half-dozen administration figures on the South Portico of the White House one evening shortly before the convention, Truman asked what they all thought would happen were Eisenhower’s name put in nomination. Claude Pepper, already in Philadelphia, had proposed that the convention draft Eisenhower as a “national” rather than a party candidate. Everyone but Royall assured the President he would make short shrift of any such attempt. Truman, noticing Royall’s silence, asked for his view. Ike would be nominated by acclamation, Royall said, causing a furor among the others. Truman said nothing, but afterward, at the White House door, an usher told Royall the President wished to see him upstairs. He found Truman in the Oval Study with John Snyder.
Truman Page 85
