Harry Truman

by Margaret Truman

  Simultaneously, Dad tried to build up support for his program by making public appearances in various parts of the country. He still could not resign himself to being a prisoner in the White House. But his experience on these brief junkets soon convinced him moving the President was like “moving a circus” and such trips, if the President was going to survive, had better be made sparingly. On September 15, he flew home to Independence to spend a weekend with his mother, and bring me back to George Washington University. His attempt to be “just plain Harry Truman” in his hometown soon threatened Independence and Kansas City with chaos. He dropped into the barber shop of his old friend Frank Spina, who had been a member of his battery. “None of that fancy stuff, I don’t want anything that smells,” he reminded him as Frank started to cut his hair. The rest of the story Dad tells in a letter to his mother: “I . . . hadn’t been in the chair five minutes until Tenth Street was blocked and the crowd was so thick trying to look into the front window that the police and Secret Service had to push them back. The hall by the elevator was jammed full of starers also. But Frank finally got the job done. The police made a path for me to the car and we went on to the office. At the Federal Bldg. the steps out in front were full and so was the hallway. It took all the Secret Service men and police to get me to the elevator.”

  Early in October, he flew to Caruthersville, Missouri, to appear at their annual fair. He spent two days there, shaking hands with thousands of people, breakfasting with the ladies of the Baptist Church and lunching with the ladies of the Presbyterian Church, riding a “40 & 8” mock locomotive with a crowd of Legionnaires, presenting a silver loving cup to the winning jockey of the President Truman Derby. One newsman, exhausted from trying to keep up with him, remarked he had done everything but have himself shot from a cannon. Dad was not enjoying himself very much either, as is evident from this comment to his mother and sister: “We had a nice time at the Fair if you can call it a nice time to be followed around by thirty newsmen and photographers everywhere and to be mobbed every time an appearance is made . . . I had to ride in an open car and give ‘em a Cheshire Cat grin and almost freeze stiff but the onlookers seemed to enjoy it.”

  From the fair Dad drove to Reelfoot Lake in Tennessee for a day of rest. In a letter written from the White House, he told his mother what happened: “We were lodged in a beautiful house - but I may as well have been in the center of Chicago so far as rest was concerned. They brought in school children from every school in forty miles, the Legion, the State Police force, and all the state and county officials for ten counties around to see whether a President walked and talked and ate and slept as other folks do - but it was a change of scenery anyway. They were all good people.

  Another reason Dad decided against leaving the White House was the crisis atmosphere which prevailed in the country, as America struggled to adjust to the abrupt arrival of peace. On October 13, he wrote his mother, “The pressure here is becoming so great I can hardly get my meals in, let alone do what I want to do.” In another letter, he summed up part of the problem: “Everybody wants something at the expense of everybody else and nobody thinks much of the other fellow.” He also ruefully admitted he was having trouble with his staff:

  It’s funny but I have almost as many prima donnas around me as Roosevelt had, but they are still new at it.

  They don’t get humored as much by me as they did by him. I fire one occasionally and it has a salutary effect.

  By now, my father had enough experience to take a pretty dim view of many of the ultra liberals who had tended to cluster around President Roosevelt. After attending a meeting of the Roosevelt National Memorial Committee in the East Room, he wrote on his appointment sheet: “Same bunch of Prima Donnas who helped drive the Boss to his grave are still riding his ghost.”

  One of the Truman prima donnas who eventually got the ax was Jake Vardaman. A former St. Louis banker who had served in the army in World War I, he had done some work for Dad in his Senate campaigns and gone into the navy in World War II. Dad made him his naval aide, and Vardaman immediately acquired an acute case of Potomac fever. Aboard the presidential yacht, he became the sailor par excellence, hurling nautical terms right and left. Before lunch one day, he announced he was going to “break out the silver.” This aroused guffaws and hoots from ex-army artillerymen Truman, Vaughan, and Snyder. In the White House, Vardaman proceeded to stick his nose into almost every office and tell them how it should be run. Then he made the blunder of all blunders. He descended upon Mother’s side of the White House and started telling them how to do the job. That was the end of Vardaman as naval aide. Dad elevated him to the Federal Reserve Board, and he repaid him for this kindness by voting against every Truman policy for the next seven years. He also went around Washington spreading the nasty story that he was kicked out of the White House because he did not drink or play cards.

  A Roosevelt prima donna who was also on his way out at this time was Harold Ickes. A complex man with many good qualities - my father admired him because he had administered the Interior Department with great integrity and complete disregard for special interest pressures - Ickes had an exaggerated opinion of his own importance. He had brawled repeatedly with President Roosevelt, and at one point, had been barred from the White House for six months. He loved a quarrel - the more spectacular, the better - which put him and Dad at opposite poles. Worse, Ickes also loved to gossip. It did not take Dad long to notice that almost everything discussed at a Cabinet meeting was paraphrased, after having been dipped in acid, by Drew Pearson on the following day. Dad suspected Ickes and finally proved it. At Eddie McKim’s suggestion, the staff planted a story on “Honest Harold” that they told to no one else. Dad recalls with a grim smile that it too showed up in Pearson’s column. Thereafter, Ickes’s days in the Truman Administration were numbered.

  Early in 1946, Ickes practically handed my father the reason for his resignation. Dad had appointed Ed Pauley Under Secretary of the Navy. He was very impressed by the firmness and negotiating skill Pauley had displayed in dealing with the Russians on the tricky matter of reparations. James Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy, was already saying he wanted to resign, and Dad thought Pauley would make an excellent successor - and eventually a very good Secretary of Defense in the unification of the armed forces which was another Truman Administration goal. Ickes, summoned to testify before the Senate committee considering Pauley, proceeded to accuse him of playing politics with offshore oil reserves. He made this accusation without a shred of evidence to support him, and without even a hint of warning to Dad that he was opposed to Pauley.

  Very angry but controlling it, my father said grimly at his next press conference that he backed Pauley, no matter what Ickes said. Honest Harold immediately sent Dad his resignation, claiming Dad had publicly displayed his lack of confidence in him - which was the truth. The letter, as my father put it later, was “the sort of resignation a man sent in, knowing it would not be accepted. Honest Harold was more than a little astonished when he got a phone call from the White House informing him his letter was accepted - immediately. He asked permission to stay on the job another six weeks. Dad gave him two days to clean out his desk.

  In spite of all my father’s efforts, things did not improve in the country, or in Washington, D.C. A wave of strikes threatened to cripple the economy. Management lobbied fiercely for the removal of wartime price controls. Mournfully, Dad informed his mother and sister he had canceled plans to come to Kansas City on November 15 and fly on to Oklahoma for another personal appearance on the 18th: “I am going to have to cancel all my dates for every place until I get things going here. The Congress are balking, labor has gone crazy, and management isn’t far from insane in selfishness. My Cabinet, that is some of them, have Potomac fever. There are more Prima Donnas per square foot in public life here in Washington than in all the opera companies ever to exist.”

  On the international scene, my father had to cope with imminent signs of famine in E
urope. Reserves of food in the United States had to be rushed across the Atlantic to avert this catastrophe, forcing him to maintain wartime food rationing controls here. Along with the epidemic of labor-management conflicts, Dad had to struggle with increasing pressure to demobilize America’s armed forces as quickly as possible. With an aggressive Russia pressing its claims from the Kurile Islands to Iran to Berlin, Dad knew such a step was not in the best interests of the nation. So did most of his military commanders, and all except one loyally supported him.

  My father and his military planners in Washington were operating on figures given them by General Douglas MacArthur that he would need 500,000 men to occupy Japan. On September 18, General MacArthur blithely made a unilateral statement that he would need only 200,000 regular army troops. The White House was forced to issue a special statement on demobilization, promising no one would be held in the service a day longer than necessary. Dad authorized Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson - Secretary of State Byrnes was in London for a foreign ministers conference - to make a statement that included the rather harsh words: “The occupation forces are the instruments of policy and not the determinants of policy . . . and whatever it takes to carry this out will be used to carry it out.”

  Already General MacArthur was arousing my father’s political suspicions. Twice in the months after the war ended, Dad invited him to return to Washington, as General Eisenhower had done after the end of the war in Europe, to receive the tribute of a grateful nation. Both times MacArthur refused, pleading the urgency of his duties as commander of the Allied Occupation in Japan. My father suspected that he preferred to await a political summons from the Republican Party, so he could combine a triumphal return with a nomination for the presidency.

  My father was particularly irked because the demobilization problem was linked with his hopes for one of his most important programs - universal military training. He sent a request for this program up to Congress and followed it with a speech before a joint session on October 23, 1945. Carefully he pointed out: “. . . Universal military training is not conscription. The opponents of training have labeled it conscription and by so doing have confused the minds of some of our citizens. Conscription is compulsory service in the army or navy in time of peace or war. Trainees under this proposed legislation, however, would not be enrolled in any of the armed services. They would be civilians in training. They could be no closer to membership in the armed forces than if they had no training. Special rules and regulations would have to be adopted for their organization, discipline, and welfare.”

  Dad’s plan called for a year of training for every young man in the nation, whether physically qualified for actual combat service or not: “There should be a place into which every young American can fit in the service of our country. But some would be trained for combat, others would be trained for whatever war service they are physically and mentally qualified to perform.”

  No program he presented to Congress aroused deeper feelings in Dad than this one. You can sense his anxiety in the words he wrote to his mother a few hours after he made the speech: “It is 10:40 and I have been listening to a rebroadcast of my address to Congress on military training. When I listen I don’t know why they applauded - except maybe because I am the President of the United States and they probably wanted to be respectful. But in spite of that we need the program which the President urged them to adopt.”

  Congress refused to agree with him. Dad was terribly frustrated by his failure to get UMT across and he remained frustrated. He was convinced that if we had had universal military training, there would have been no war in Korea, and possibly no war in Vietnam. The Communists would not have dared to challenge us because we would have been ready to respond with maximum strength and maximum speed.

  Another of Dad’s major frustrations at this time was his inability to create a Missouri Valley Authority, similar to the TVA. This was a dream he had nurtured from his earliest days in the Senate, but it was an enormously complex problem. He began talking about it with David Lilienthal as early as September 18, 1945. In his journal, Lilienthal gives a very realistic description of Dad in action - discussing the problem: “‘In the Missouri Valley . . .’” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, “‘that’s the hard one . . .’ He explained the conflicts between the downstream people and those upriver, how dams below Sioux City wouldn’t do, would fill up with silt in a year; there wasn’t any power in that part of the river. Flood control dams would have to be built on the little streams and kept empty - and so on, with a loquacity and excited interest that reminded me of his predecessor on such a subject. He went down the list of Senators in each of the nine states - all against MVA except two. ‘We’ll have to figure out something . . . We have got to figure out something that they will accept.’”

  Lilienthal said he hoped Dad meant it would be a regional authority that could deal with the people on the spot. He dreaded the possibility Dad might propose a National River Basin Board, one of the pet ideas of Secretary of the Interior Ickes.

  Dad shook his head. “I’m against it. If these things are going to be just part of the bureaus here in Washington we might as well leave them in the hands of Congress.”

  A relieved Lilienthal agreed. He said one of the things he liked about working in a decentralized agency was that people “can get at you and you feel you are part of their life.”

  Dad nodded. “Do you know why I go back home every once in a while? So people can kick me around.”

  Another problem that required a vast amount of my father’s time and attention during these first postwar months was atomic energy. His talks with David Lilienthal convinced Dad this was the perfect man to head the Atomic Energy Commission. He had both the administrative ability and the breadth of vision Dad wanted for this enormously important job. Behind the scenes, there was a terrific battle going on between Congress, the White House, and the army about the final control of atomic energy. General Leslie Groves was busily deciding what facts could or could not be disclosed to members of Congress. He was also negotiating agreements with foreign governments to give us access to more uranium, without bothering to tell the State Department.

  On October 3, 1945, my father sent a message to Congress, calling for the creation of an Atomic Energy Commission for the development of peaceful domestic uses of the atom, as well as an international atomic policy, which he proceeded to hammer out in conferences with Prime Minister Attlee and Canadian Prime Minister MacKenzie King. After a tremendous amount of wrangling among Congress, the military, and the scientists, some of whom favored military control, Dad settled the dispute by emphatically calling for an AEC composed “exclusively of civilians.”

  Our atomic energy policy was intimately connected with our relationship to Russia. Some remarks that my father made on this subject in a press conference around this time show how hard he was trying to reach an understanding with Moscow. One reporter asked: “Mr. President, I have read that one of the causes for the lack of accord between this country and Russia grows out of the fact that we have the atomic bomb and Russia doesn’t.”

  “It isn’t true. It isn’t true at all,” Dad said. “The difficulty, I think, is a matter of understanding between us and Russia. That has always been a difficulty, principally because we don’t speak the same language. It is a most difficult matter to translate the meaning of what I am saying right now into Russian, so it will mean the same thing in Russian as it means in English. The same thing is true when you translate Russian into English. When I was at the conference with Stalin at Berlin, he had an interpreter and I had one, and it took the four of us to be sure that we each understood the meaning of the other.”

  Later in the same talk, Dad said he would love to go to Russia. “I think Russia has been badly misrepresented in this country as we have been badly misrepresented in Russia. If there is complete understanding, there wouldn’t be very many difficulties between us, because Russia’s interests and ours do not clash an
d never have. We have always been friends and I hope we always will be.”

  Secretary of State Byrnes found Molotov totally hostile and disagreeable at the foreign ministers’ meeting in London. Still my father persisted in hoping for the best and continued making friendly statements about Russia. At a press conference on October 8, he insisted the London meeting was not a failure but only one step in arriving at eventual peace settlements. He was not a bit alarmed, he said. He had no doubt the world situation would work out just as he believed the domestic situation would eventually settle down. He foresaw a new era of international friendliness and understanding.

  These words concealed Dad’s mounting concern about Russia’s intentions and our ability to live in peace with our erstwhile ally. They were consolidating their grip on the countries of Eastern Europe and fomenting guerrilla warfare in Greece. Yugoslavia was still insisting on its right to Trieste. The Russian army was showing no sign whatsoever of moving out of Iran, and Stalin was repeating his demands for control of the straits of the Bosporus, which would mean the virtual occupation of Turkey. He wanted to replace our Occupation regime in Japan with a “Control Council,” which would have meant the kind of partition that gave him a third of Germany.

  To make the situation even more difficult for my father, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes was beginning to act as if he was a totally independent operator. Shortly before he left for another foreign ministers conference - this one in Moscow - he conferred with a group of senators from the Special Committee on Atomic Energy and the Committee on Foreign Relations without bothering to tell the President. Two days later, the members of this special committee arrived at the White House in a flap, to inform Dad his Secretary of State seemed ready to give away vital atomic secrets in Moscow. Dad reported this complaint to Secretary Byrnes but assured him he was confident the senators were wrong. He wanted the Secretary to have the widest possible latitude to receive any proposals the Russians might make on sharing atomic energy and defusing the atomic arms race.