From December 12 to Christmas Day, when my father left the White House for Independence, Byrnes was negotiating in Moscow. Dad had expected the teletype in the White House map room to hum with messages detailing Russian proposals, not only on atomic energy, but on the other major problems Byrnes was supposed to discuss: the Balkan nations, China, the Japanese Occupation, and - an item which Dad had specifically ordered on the agenda - Russia’s refusal to get out of Iran. Instead, there was almost total silence from Moscow. Byrnes obviously did not feel any need to seek the President’s advice.
Mother and I had returned to Independence for a family Christmas. My father stayed in the White House alone, worrying over the silence from Moscow. Writing to his mother on December 24, he explained why he was not coming home until Christmas Day: “It’ll take sixteen Secret Service men and about that many newsmen to get me to Kansas City and back. The reason I didn’t come sooner was to let all of ‘em have Christmas Eve anyway at home.”
That same night, my father received a very brief message from Secretary Byrnes, giving only an optimistic summary of what had been discussed at Moscow. The next day, Dad flew home to Independence and was resting there on December 27 when Charlie Ross called to tell him Secretary Byrnes wanted the White House to arrange for him to make an all-network speech to the American people on the results of the Moscow conference. Several hours later, the State Department’s communiqué on the conference was handed to Dad - an hour after it had been released in Washington.
Thoroughly incensed, my father flew back to Washington the next day, to find Senator Vandenberg threatening to resign as Republican spokesman of our bipartisan foreign policy. He thought Secretary Byrnes had agreed to give the Russians atomic secrets without hammering out inspection safeguards. It took hours to calm him down and issue a statement clarifying the cloudy wording of Secretary Byrnes’s communiqué. Later that day, Dad boarded the presidential yacht Williamsburg with a number of advisers to work on a major speech he was preparing for January 3. They were anchored off Quantico, Virginia, when Secretary of State Byrnes called from Washington to ask about his all-network broadcast.
Charlie Ross took the call. My father was sitting next to him and told him what to say in reply. “The President asks me to tell you that you had better come down here post haste and make your report to the President before you do anything else.”
At 5:00 p.m., that afternoon the Secretary of State boarded the Williamsburg and got a lecture which made it very clear to him he was not the President of the United States. Harry S. Truman was President, and he expected to be the man who made the final decisions on all aspects of our foreign policy. A few days later, after studying the documents Byrnes brought home from Moscow, Dad summoned him to the White House and read him a long handwritten letter which spelled out in detail his disappointment with Byrnes’s accomplishments at Moscow. He felt we had made concessions - particularly on the matter of recognizing the puppet governments in Rumania and Bulgaria and Poland - in return for very little from the Russians beyond an agreement to continue talking. Dad summed up his position in the last line of his letter: “I’m tired of babying the Soviets.”
Two other problems began troubling my father in these first postwar months. The first was Palestine. From the moment Dad took office, American Jews began pressuring him to support the idea of a Jewish state in Palestine. On April 20, 1945, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, chairman of the American Zionist Emergency Council, conferred with Dad at the White House, and left declaring Dad supported Roosevelt’s policy of unrestricted immigration to Palestine.
What Dr. Wise did not know was that President Roosevelt had conferred with King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia on the way home from Yalta, and promised this monarch that the United States would confer with Palestine’s Arab neighbors before supporting Jewish immigration to that part of the world. The British, who controlled Palestine, were restricting immigration to 1,500 Jews a month - all the Arabs would tolerate. My father wanted them to admit 100,000 Jews - all of them displaced persons in Europe - and behind the scenes, he worked very hard to obtain British assent to this plan. He felt with 600,000 Jews and over 2,000,000 Arabs in Palestine, another 100,000 would not unbalance the population, and at the same time, it would be a significant gesture which would stabilize the situation, quiet extremists among the Jews, and give the big powers time to work out a long-term solution. The British refused to budge, and the Arabs made it clear the 100,000 displaced persons plan was unacceptable to them, too.
While deep in this backstage diplomacy, my father had to fend off pressures from American Jews that he found personally very irritating. They simply refused to face the fact America had to consider its relations to the Arab nations as well as to a Jewish state that was for the moment only a possibility. Early in September, Dad received a letter from his mother, enclosing a request from a Jewish friend of a friend to have the Palestine problem put on the agenda of the London conference. My father came very close to blowing up at this attempt to involve his mother in international politics: “There isn’t a possibility of my intervening in the matter [Dad wrote his mother]. These people are the usual European conspirators and they try to approach the President from every angle. The London conference is for a specific and agreed purpose and if the little country referred to was in any way involved it will have its day in court, but the call will come from the State Department and through regular channels. Don’t ever let anybody talk to you about foreign affairs. It is a most touchy subject and especially in that part of the world.”
On September 27, 1945, Nathan Straus, president of radio station WMCA in New York City, spent fifteen minutes urging Dad to propose the immediate creation of a Jewish state. On September 29, Dr. Stephen Wise returned for another call, bringing with him Dr. Abba H. Silver, another member of the American Zionist Emergency Council. They warned my father he was in danger of losing Jewish votes, if he did not act promptly on behalf of Israel. On the same day, Joseph Proskauer, president of the American Jewish Committee, an anti-Zionist group, and Jacob Blaustein, chairman of the Executive Committee, called to tell Dad not all Jews supported the Zionist program, or wanted to see the creation of a separate Jewish state.
In dealing with this confusing, deeply emotional problem, my father insisted on maintaining a realistic view of Middle East politics and the interests of the United States. He felt sorry for the Jewish people, particularly those pathetic survivors of Hitler’s concentration camps who were now homeless refugees in Europe. But no President can permit his emotions to interfere with his duty to the American nation. As Dad said in a letter to his mother: “Wish I could accommodate every friend I have in every way they’d like - but I’m in such a position now that I can’t do as I please myself! They’ll have to bear with me.”
When Prime Minister Attlee came to Washington in November to discuss a common policy on atomic energy, he and my father also conferred on Palestine and agreed to set up a joint British-American committee to consider Palestine and recommend a wide-ranging solution early in 1946.
The other problem, at least as tangled as Palestine, was China. Russia showed no sign of leaving Manchuria, which she had occupied at the close of the war with Japan. She was stripping the factories of heavy equipment there and shipping it to Russia and turning over tons of captured Japanese arms to the Chinese Communists. At Yalta and at Potsdam, Stalin had promised to back Chiang Kai-shek as the ruler of China. He had piously declared he wanted a unified China, free of all foreign influence. It soon became apparent he meant free of all foreign influence - except Russian.
There were over 1,000,000 Japanese troops in China, and 50,000 American marines, sent there to help keep order and assist the Nationalist Chinese in disarming their ex-enemies. The ambassador to China, Major General Patrick J. Hurley, was an excitable, unstable man, given to wild statements and accusations of disloyalty. He came home from China accusing State Department officials in the American mission there of sabotaging his attempts to create a c
oherent policy. He had brought the Communist leader, Mao Tse-tung, to Chungking to discuss a coalition government with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists. General Hurley thought he had achieved an agreement, but by the time he arrived in Washington, the two parties were no longer speaking to each other and our Embassy in Chungking was reporting that civil war was imminent.
Ambassador Hurley met with my father and discussed the situation. They parted at 11:30 a.m., agreeing he would return to China as soon as possible to see if he could restore a spirit of cooperation. Less than two hours later, Dad received a phone call from a White House reporter informing him his ambassador had delivered a scorching speech at lunch to newspapermen, attacking “professional diplomats” at the lower levels of the State Department and asserting the United States had no clear-cut policy toward China.
My father acted swiftly. He knew how much was at stake in China, and he reached out for the best possible man to tackle the immense job of bringing order out of the chaos that was threatening there. He called George C. Marshall at his home in Leesburg. The General had just retired from the army and was in fact in the process of carrying his things into the house where he hoped to spend a tranquil old age. “General,” Dad said, “I want you to go to China for me.”
“Yes, Mr. President,” General Marshall said.
That was all there was to it. Not a moment’s hesitation, not a breath of complaint about abandoning plans he had made for years. On December 15, General Marshall departed for Chungking. Dad hoped his prestige could persuade the Chinese to create a unified government - or if worst came to worst and war did break out, he could from his vast military experience give Chiang Kai-shek the advice he needed to win.
It is fascinating to look back on the year 1945 and see the emergence of all the major national and international problems with which my father was to grapple for the next seven years: our relations with Russia, the status of Palestine, the tangle in China, and, on the home front, the struggle between a President who was determined to represent all the people and a Congress inclined to serve special interests. All these gigantic headaches demanded attention, simultaneously. It was easy to see why the President worked an eighteen-hour day.
MY FATHER STARTED the new year – 1946 – off with a real bang. On January 3, he made a speech to the nation scorching congressional hides for failing to act on his program, and calling on the greatest pressure group in the world - the American people - to put the heat on their lawmakers to get some action. There were growls, howls, and snarls from Congress, of course. On January 7, Dad wrote his mother and sister: “The Thursday speech seems to have stirred up a terrible row and that was to be expected. Anyway I wouldn’t take a word of it back. We do things or we do not and I can’t sit still and not tell why nothing is done.”
To my father’s delight, since he was trying to force the Southern Democrats to vote with their party and stop acting like Republicans, the man who answered his speech with the hottest words was Senator Taft. Gleefully he wrote his sister: “If I had picked a man to answer the speech, so it would do the most good, I would have picked Taft to do it. He only added fuel to the fire I had already started.”
In this letter, he added a touching personal note: “Jim Pendergast, his wife and two daughters, were here with me for dinner last night. They are as nice as they can be and the terrible shadow which old Tom left them always haunts them. But Jim is a good man and his family are all right. They were my friends when I needed them and I am theirs.
Also on the personal side was another statement: “Margaret is working very hard on her school studies and I hope will come out all right with them.” Truer words were seldom written, even by a President. I was finally in the home stretch at George Washington University, but the combination of trying to major in history and be a White House belle at the same time was not easy. In some ways, I was finding it as difficult as Dad to face up to the fact we were living in a goldfish bowl. Everything he said and did was news; everything I said and did was gossip. I couldn’t even go to a concert at Constitution Hall and get carried away by the beauty of Lauritz Melchior’s voice without getting my name in the paper. I was sitting in the presidential box with four of my friends from George Washington, and we applauded Melchior until our hands ached. The next day, I found myself described as leading a “clapping marathon.”
“Judging from Margaret’s expression leaving the Hall, she enjoyed the concert as much as, well - ‘The Rugged Path,’” wrote the gossip columnist. “Margaret is still talking about Spencer Tracy in that play.” From there, the story discussed my possible future career as a singer, my passion for collecting shoes, and my preference in perfume. Dad enjoyed seeing my name in print instead of his own for a change and sent a clipping of the story to his mother. I hated it.
Mother disliked publicity even more than I did. She hates people to fuss over her and, unlike her daughter, dislikes performing in public. Around this time, I was her maid of honor at the christening of an army bomber. The air corps was not as efficient as the navy had been for me at the christening of the Missouri, and they forgot to score one of the champagne bottles so that it would break. Mother slammed it against the side of the airplane six times while I smiled fiendishly and said: “If Mother can’t break that bottle, nobody can.”
“Be quiet,” Mother warned me. But I was too old to shush.
“Fine thing for a tennis champion,” I told her.
If there was one thing Dad dreaded, it was the thought of someone in his family getting involved in politics. He felt deeply that the Roosevelts had made a serious mistake in this area. He also knew how angry he would get if one of us started to receive the kind of abuse which Mrs. Roosevelt had to endure. All of this feeling rushed into a letter he wrote to his sister Mary on January 16, when she asked his advice about going to an Oklahoma political meeting:
For goodness sake, refuse it. They are only using you to advertise themselves. You remember what awful places the Roosevelt relatives were in the habit of getting him tied up with. It won’t help me a bit for you to go to Oklahoma to a political meeting and it will give these columnists like Pearson and the rest of the gossips a chance to say that my family, particularly the women of my family, are courting the limelight. So please don’t go.
Now I don’t want to appear to be in the role of a tyrant - but I know politics and political repercussions better than anyone in the family.
I want you and Mamma to have everything I can possibly give you and I want to see you enjoy as many things as you desire but political appearances are not in the category of the enjoyments I anticipate for you.
I have kept Bess and Margaret out of the political picture as much as I can and I am still trying to keep them from being talked about.
This sort of appearance would give all the mudslingers a chance. I have a lot of pleasant things in mind for you if I can ever get this place to run as it should. . . .
Before the month of January was over, the country was in turmoil. Everybody seemed to be out on strike. First General Motors, then the steel workers, then the threat of John L. Lewis and his coal miners. My father was seriously disturbed by the short-sightedness of the nation’s labor leaders. He knew they were simply giving ammunition to the reactionaries in Congress and cementing the Southern Conservative-Republican coalition. On January 23, 1946, he wrote a letter to his mother and sister which gave a clear picture of his thinking:
Things seem to be going the wrong way here in labor matters but I am hopeful of an ultimate settlement. The steel strike is the worst. We can handle most of the others. People are somewhat befuddled and want to take time out to get a nerve rest. Some want a life guarantee of rest at government expense and some I’m sorry to say just want to raise hell and hamper the return to peacetime production hoping to obtain some political advantage.
The steel people and General Motors I am sure would like to break the unions and the unions would like to break them, so they probably will fight a while and then se
ttle so both will lose and in the long run only the man in the street will pay the bill.
Big money has too much power and so have the unions - both are riding to a fall because I like neither. . . .
My father’s paramount goal on the home front was a stabilization of the economy to end forever the boom and bust cycle that had brought the nation to the brink of chaos in the Great Depression. From the beginning, he insisted this could only be achieved if both labor and management exercised social responsibility. He did everything in his power to persuade both sides to do so. In November 1945, he had convened a labor-management conference to work out machinery for dealing with major labor disputes. On December 3, 1945, in a special message to Congress, he outlined a fact-finding program which would have established by impartial investigation how much money workers deserved to get, based on their productivity and how much money the company could afford to pay, based on its profits. Dad specified it was a program that should only be used “sparingly and only when the national public interest requires it.” The company would be required to open its books to the fact-finding board, and for thirty days, while the board investigated, it would be unlawful to call a strike or a lockout.
For this attempt to achieve an honest compromise, my father was abused savagely by both labor and management. Philip Murray, the head of the CIO, denounced the Truman Administration for its “abject cowardice.” George Meany, secretary-treasurer of the AFL, declared his union would never accept legislation which “compels workers to work even for a minute against their will.” The General Motors Corporation haughtily withdrew from the jurisdiction of a special fact-finding board, appointed by the White House, when the board attempted to consider its ability to pay. With their treasuries full from five years of wartime wages, the unions were almost eager to take on management in a test of strength. The corporations refused to yield unless all controls were lifted from prices - something Dad refused to do.
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