The following day, he left for Chicago and the convention that was already under way.
V
Truman’s distress over the choice of a Democratic standardbearer had grown extreme. Firm in his belief that any red-blooded Democrat ought to be ready and willing to run against any Republican, he had become increasingly annoyed with Adlai Stevenson, whose reluctance to commit himself had begun to strike Truman as not only tiresome but perhaps something of an act.
As the press was saying, nearly all the old Democratic bosses were gone now. Jim Farley was long past his prime. Tom Pendergast and Bob Hannegan were dead. Ed Flynn was ill. Frank Hague no longer ruled in New Jersey, and Kefauver, with his primary campaigns, had eclipsed Ed Crump of Tennessee. “There was no one to supply party-wide leadership except the President,” reported Newsweek, and he was “under tremendous pressure to name his preference for the nomination….”
Truman continued to wait, holding out for Stevenson. It was only a week before the convention, his patience gone and resolved to do almost anything to stop Kefauver, that he at last suggested that Barkley would be a good choice—and then wished he hadn’t because Averell Harriman, having declared himself a candidate, was proving a spirited champion of the whole New Deal—Fair Deal program in a way that made Truman glow.
When someone raised the point that Harriman had never run for public office, and so might not be up to a sustained campaign, Truman remarked, “You never know what’s in you until you have to do it.”
The Republicans opened their convention in Chicago on July 7. Taft had the largest number of committed delegates. Attacking what he called the “me-too” Republicanism of the party’s eastern liberals—the Dewey people who were backing Eisenhower this time—Taft said it was time to give the American people a clear choice. The floor fight before the balloting turned bitter. “We followed you before and you took us down the road to defeat,” declared Senator Everett Dirksen from the podium, shaking his finger at the New York delegation, where Dewey sat. “And don’t do this to us again.” But such were the tactical skills of the Eisenhower managers, combined with the glamour of the Eisenhower bandwagon, that the general swept to victory on the first ballot—as no doubt he would have done at the Democratic Convention, too, had he been willing.
Of the Democratic candidates, on the eve of the Democratic Convention, Kefauver was far in the lead, claiming 257 delegates, or nearly half what was needed for the nomination. Richard Russell, running as the candidate of the South, had 161, Harriman 112, Stevenson a mere 41 while Truman, it was believed, could swing at least 400 votes to whomever he chose. As Time reported, Truman’s hold on Democratic leaders continued remarkably strong because they saw him as the smartest practical politician around. “If Harry Truman turns out to have an enormous influence on the convention, it will not be a case of delegates doing his bidding, but of their following his highly respected judgment.”
A Barkley boom began and gathered surprising force, only to be abruptly terminated when the leaders of organized labor met with Barkley and told him the blunt truth. It was not that they objected to him on issues, as they had with Jimmy Byrnes in 1944, he was just too old.
Barkley called Truman to say he was withdrawing, and on the afternoon of July 24, the day of the steel strike settlement at the White House, Stevenson telephoned from Illinois to ask Truman if it would embarrass him were he, Stevenson, to allow his name to be placed in nomination. Truman, as he later said, chose some “rather vigorous” words. “I have been trying since January to get you to say that,” he told the governor. “Why would it embarrass me?” Stevenson could count on his full support. As far as Truman was concerned, Stevenson was as good as nominated.
On the floor of the immense international amphitheater at the Chicago Stock Yards, a headlong Stevenson boom was already under way, as a result of the governor’s own brilliant welcoming address to the convention. James Reston in The New York Times called Stevenson “a leaf on a rising stream.” When, during the first ballot the next afternoon, Friday, the 25th, the Missouri delegation was polled, the President’s own alternate, an old Pendergast stalwart named Tom Gavin, was seen voting for Stevenson just as the President and First Lady were leaving from Washington on the Independence. On television the two events were shown simultaneously on a split screen.
Heading west, Truman watched the convention on television “all the way” in flight, something no President had done before. He saw the results of the first ballot—Kefauver 340, Stevenson 273, Russell 268, Harriman 123—and the start of the second. By the end of the second ballot, at 6:00 P.M. Chicago time, with Stevenson gaining but still no decision, Truman was at the Blackstone working on his speech in Room 709, the same corner suite where he had taken the fateful call from Franklin Roosevelt eight years before. To others in the presidential entourage, he appeared in high gear.
With the convention in recess until nine o’clock, Truman went by motorcade and booming motorcycle escort to the Stockyards Inn and dinner in a private dining room with Jake Arvey, Sam Rayburn, and Democratic Chairman Frank McKinney. From there, he also sent word to the governors of Massachusetts and Arkansas, as well as to Averell Harriman, to release their delegates to Stevenson. Charlie Murphy was the messenger sent to see Harriman, who, as it happens, had already decided on his own to withdraw in favor of Stevenson.
The convention’s dramatic turn to Stevenson came on the third ballot, with the release of the Harriman delegates. But it was past midnight before the vote was made unanimous, and not until 1:45 in the morning, as late nearly as four years before, when the nominee and the President entered the hall arm in arm, down the floodlit runway to the rostrum, Truman exuberant, a spring to his step, Stevenson, a short, rather dumpy figure, looking slightly uncertain.
They had picked a winner, Truman assured the crowd. “I am going to take my coat off and do everything I can to help him win.”
Stevenson spoke briefly and eloquently. “The people are wise,” he said, “wiser than the Republicans think. And the Democratic Party is the people’s party, not the party of labor, not the farmer’s party—it is the party of no one because it is the party of everyone.” The ordeal of the twentieth century was far from over. “Sacrifice, patience, understanding and implacable purpose may be our lot for years to come. Let’s talk sense to the American people….”
Later, Stevenson, Truman, Rayburn, McKinney, and four or five others met backstage. Stevenson asked for advice on a running mate. The Republicans had chosen Senator Richard Nixon as their vice-presidential candidate. Stevenson mentioned Kefauver, but when Truman vigorously objected, Rayburn and McKinney backed him. Barkley and Russell were also mentioned and rejected. Finally, the choice was Senator John Sparkman of Alabama. “Stevenson made his decision with Harry Truman’s help,” one of those present explained afterward to a reporter.
In his room that morning at 6:40, Saturday, July 26, having slept perhaps an hour, if at all, Truman wrote a warm letter to the nominee on a sheet of Blackstone Hotel stationery; a letter such as he himself had never received from Franklin Roosevelt.
Dear Governor:
Last night was one of the most remarkable I’ve spent in all my sixty-eight years. When thousands of people—delegates and visitors—are willing to sit and listen to a set speech and introduction by me, and then listen to a most wonderful acceptance speech by you, at two o’clock in the morning, there is no doubt that we are on the right track, in the public interest.
You are a brave man. You are assuming the responsibility of the most important office in the history of the world.
You have the ancestral, political and educational background to do a most wonderful job. If it is worth anything, you have my wholehearted support and cooperation.
When the noise and shouting are over, I hope you may be able to come to Washington for a discussion of what is before you.
But though Stevenson sent a gracious reply and would eventually meet with Truman at the White House, he was
no less determined than before not to be seen as Truman’s candidate. “He was affronted by the indifferent morality and untidiness of the Truman Administration and was frantic to distance himself from Truman,” his friend George Ball would remember. In quick succession, Stevenson replaced Truman’s party chairman, McKinney, with a Chicago friend, Stephen A. Mitchell, an attorney with little political experience, and announced that Democratic headquarters henceforth would be in Springfield, Illinois, not Washington—decisions certain to offend Truman. Nor did he make any effort to solicit Truman’s advice on plans for the campaign.
Stevenson’s attitude toward him was a “mystery,” Truman would write in his Memoirs. But in a letter he never sent, Truman told the nominee, “I have come to the conclusion that you are embarrassed by having the President of the United States in your corner…. Therefore I shall remain silent and stay in Washington until Nov. 4.” He did not like being treated as a liability. Frank McKinney, he wrote, had been the best party chairman in his memory. “I can’t stand snub after snub by you….”
In August, to make matters worse, Stevenson carelessly signed a letter prepared by an assistant in answer to a question from the Oregon Journal. “Can Stevenson really clean up the mess in Washington?” the editor of the Portland paper had asked. “As to whether I can clean up the mess in Washington,” read the Stevenson reply, “I would bespeak the careful scrutiny of what I inherited in Illinois and what has been accomplished in three years.” The Republicans quickly made the most of the letter, as confirmation by Stevenson himself that there was truly a mess in Washington, and Truman, in another letter he never mailed, said Stevenson had now made the whole campaign “ridiculous.”
I’m telling you to take your crackpots, your high socialites with their noses in the air, run your campaign and win if you can. Cowfever could not have treated me any more shabbily than have you.
At a later point, Stevenson sent Chairman Mitchell to tell Truman that it would greatly help the campaign if Dean Acheson were to announce his plan to retire as Secretary of State once the election was over—an idea Truman bluntly rejected.
But as his daughter Margaret would recall, Truman was more sad than angry. “Oh, Stevenson will get straightened out,” he told his staff. “The campaign hasn’t really started.” And in time to come, he would write that Stevenson conducted himself magnificently in the campaign:
His eloquence was real because his words gave definition and meaning to the major issues of our time. He was particularly effective in expressing this nation’s foreign policy. He made no demagogic statements…. While some felt he may have talked over the heads of some people, he was uncompromising in being himself. His was a great campaign and did credit to the party and the nation. He did not appeal to the weakness but to the strength of the people. He did not trade principles for votes. What he said in the South he would say in the North, and what he said in the East he would say in the West. It will be to his credit that, although given provocation by the opposition, he stayed away from personalities and accusations…. I hold him in the highest regard for his intellectual courage.
On August 12, Stevenson came to the White House at Truman’s invitation to have lunch with the Cabinet and be briefed at length on the state of the Union. In the course of three hours of discussion, Truman said more than once that he wanted to do everything possible to be of help. He did not wish to direct or dominate the campaign in any way. Stevenson was the boss, Truman stressed. “I think the President wants to win this campaign more than I do,” Stevenson remarked. “As much as you do,” interrupted Truman, who appeared to be greatly enjoying himself, until the meeting ended and he and Stevenson stepped outside to talk to the press.
Truman came out the door first, as customary, only now the photographers shouted to him, “Wait for the Governor, Mr. President.” A new order had clearly begun. “That’s your point of contact right there, Governor,” Truman said, gesturing to the microphones.
Stevenson joked about the size of the lunch he had just enjoyed, saying if he had another he would be too fat to campaign. Truman, usually the first to laugh at such banter, barely smiled, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. “There was just a hint of tension in the atmosphere,” wrote Andrew Tully of The New York Times, “and of sadness—as Harry Truman watched this man taking over….” When Stevenson finished, Truman did not linger, but turned and walked back to his office, “slowly, head erect.”
Several of the White House staff watched in pain. Secret Service Agent Floyd Boring turned to Roger Tubby and remarked, pointing to the President, “There’s a man of granite. And him [pointing to Stevenson], he looks like a sponge.”
With the campaign under way in September, Truman quickly forgot any injured pride he felt and joined the fray with all his old zest. Though not the candidate, he saw the election as a referendum on his presidency. Nor, constituted as he was, could he possibly have stayed out once the fight was on. “We didn’t have to ask Mr. Truman to get into the campaign,” remembered the new party chairman, Stephen Mitchell. “He was raring to go…and he put on a great show.”
He took to the rails, crisscrossing the country again in the Ferdinand Magellan. Stevenson traveled by plane and they kept entirely different schedules, never appearing on the same platform. Stevenson was eloquent as no presidential candidate had been in more than a generation. Truman was the fighter, the believer. “When you vote the Democratic ticket…you are voting for your interests because the Democrats look after the interests of the everyday man and the common people,” he said, sounding very like the candidate of 1948. He praised Stevenson. He evoked the memory of Franklin Roosevelt, heaped scorn on the Republican Party, stoutly championed his own Fair Deal programs. Toward the Republican candidate He was unexpectedly gentle at first. It was Taft he attacked.
He liked Ike, too, Truman would say, seeing Eisenhower buttons or signs in a crowd. But he liked him as a general in the Army. As it was, Ike didn’t seem to know what he was doing. “I think Bob Taft and all the Republican reactionaries are whispering in his ear, and pulling his leg,” he told the people of Whitefish, Montana. “If you like Ike as much as I do, you will vote with me to send him back to the Army, where he belongs.”
The truth was he did still like Ike. Even when Eisenhower refused Truman’s invitation to the same kind of briefing as he had given Stevenson, Truman had written to Eisenhower privately to express his friendship as much as his distaste for those now advising the general:
What I’ve always had in mind was and is a continuing foreign policy. You know that is a fact, because you had a part in outlining it.
Partisan politics should stop at the boundaries of the United States. I am extremely sorry that you have allowed a bunch of screwballs to come between us….
May God guide you and give you light.
From a man who has always been your friend and who always wanted to be!
In conversation on board his train, Truman could swing from premonitions of Eisenhower as a dangerous President, “a modern Cromwell,” to open expressions of sympathy. “You know, I still feel sorry for Ike. He never should have gotten into this.” When it was revealed in mid-September that Eisenhower’s running mate, Nixon, had been subsidized by a secret fund subscribed by California millionaires, and others traveling with Truman were cheered by the news, he commented only, “This will help us, but I’m sorry to see it happen, for it lowers public opinion of politics.”
As so often before, the grueling business of a campaign seemed to restore and enliven him. He would be remembered rolling along at night in the dining room of the Ferdinand Magellan, eating fried chicken with his fingers, enjoying stories and “matching wits” with his staff, while every now and then in the darkness outside a lonely light flashed by. He would be remembered washing his socks in the bathroom sink in California and after a day of eight speeches from Ohio to upstate New York, sitting in a hotel in Buffalo playing the piano at 1:30 in the morning.
The pace and heat of t
he contest picked up rapidly.
The Republicans, campaigning under the slogan “Time for a Change,” had no intention of repeating Dewey’s bland glide to defeat. Much of what was said by both sides became very unpleasant. “I nearly choked to hear him,” Truman remarked privately after Eisenhower, stepping up the attack, assaulted the foreign policy that, as Truman saw it, Eisenhower himself, as Chief of Staff and head of NATO, had helped shape and implement. Eisenhower, Truman now charged, had become “a stooge of Wall Street.” He was “owned body and soul by the money boys.” Eisenhower, because of his career in the Army, knew little of the realities of life, didn’t “know the score and shouldn’t be educated at public expense.”
Eisenhower, for his part, deplored the “top-to-bottom mess” in Washington, “the crooks and cronies,” while Nixon hammered at what became known as “K1C2”—“Korea, Communism and corruption.” When Nixon accused Truman, Stevenson, and Dean Acheson of being “traitors to the high principles in which many of the nation’s Democrats believe,” Truman understood this to mean Nixon had called him a traitor, and he would not forget it.
There was no Charlie Ross to help this time, no Clark Clifford. Press Secretary Joe Short had recently been hospitalized for what was thought to have been a mild heart condition. When Truman received word that Joe Short was dead, he took it very badly, feeling acutely, personally responsible. “I feel as if I killed them,” he said, remembering Ross as well.
Stevenson “has the most wonderful command of the language and he is delighting audiences wherever he goes,” recorded Roger Tubby, who took over in Short’s place.
[Stevenson’s] humor, his gift of satire and the devastating barb are irrepressible and so, thank God, the nation is being treated as it has not in some time, perhaps not since Lincoln…. Nevertheless some observers wonder whether S[tevenson] is “getting across” to the people, and compare his style unfavorably with the President’s, which is simple, declarative sentences, blunt and hard-hitting. Ike meanwhile goes blundering along, often badly tangled in his thoughts and words, but sticking persistently to a couple of simple themes: get rid of corruption, throw the rascals out….
Truman Page 122
