Harry Truman

by Margaret Truman

  The Taft-Hartley bill was passed by overwhelming majorities in both the House and Senate early in June 1947. The House voted 320 to seventy-nine, with 103 Democrats joining 217 Republicans, and the Senate voted fifty-four to seventeen, with seventeen Democrats joining thirty-seven Republicans. The vote reflected the strong anti-labor sentiment of the country. Most people didn’t really know what was in the bill. They just felt labor unions needed to be cut down to size.

  There were many moments in my father’s administration which would qualify him as a subject for a profile in courage. But Taft-Hartley is among my favorites because it was one of his loneliest as well as his most courageous moments. His Cabinet, reflecting the mood of the country, urged him almost unanimously to sign the bill. Only two Cabinet members, Secretary of Labor Schwellenbach and Postmaster General Hannegan, urged a veto. His closest friend in the Cabinet, Secretary of the Treasury Snyder, strongly favored signing it. This was one of those times when a President has to look himself in the mirror, remember what the presidency means, and let his conscience - and nothing but his conscience - be his guide. Dad decided to veto it.

  He did not arrive at this decision overnight, by any means. He spent two full weeks studying the bill. He had it analyzed by his Secretary of Labor and his Attorney General, the Secretary of Commerce, and the Secretary of the Interior. The National Labor Relations Board chairman made a study of the enormous administrative problems posed by the bill. Presidential counsel Clark Clifford prepared an exhaustive study of the bill’s legislative history and worked with Dad’s chief labor adviser on condensing hundreds of sheets of memoranda into concise reports for each provision of the bill. Dad carefully sifted through this evidence as it reached his desk, and thus made his decision to veto on the widest possible view of the facts.

  While he was responding to his presidential conscience, my father did not stop being a politician. The two are by no means incompatible. Dad was convinced he was right on the Taft-Hartley bill, and he was determined to convince the American people. He sent his veto back to Congress with a 5,500-word message that used such terms as “startling,” “dangerous,” “far-reaching,” “unprecedented,” “unworkable,” “unique,” “complex,” “burdensome,” “arbitrary,” “unnecessary,” “impossible,” “clumsy,” “drastic,” and “unwarranted.” He followed this up with a radio message to the nation, denouncing the bill as “a shocking piece of legislation . . . bad for labor, bad for management, and bad for the country.” Senator Taft came blazing back in a radio rebuttal, and in both the Senate and the House proceeded to muster more than the required two-thirds majority to override Dad’s veto.

  On June 28, 1947, four days after the vote to override, Dad wrote to his mother: “The situation here is very bad. I am afraid the Taft-Hartley Law will not work. But I’ll be charged with the responsibility whether it does or does not work. I’ve come to the conclusion that Taft is no good and Hartley is worse. . . . Isn’t it too bad that public men can’t always be public servants?”

  Sharp as the exchanges between Congress and the President were over the Taft-Hartley Act, my father never stopped working for good relations between the President and the legislative branch. He remained in close touch with Les Biffle, the secretary of the Senate, and on July 23, 1947, he went up to the Capitol for a luncheon with senators of both parties. At the end of the meal, one of the senators asked him if he would dare to break a precedent, and walk onto the Senate floor, and take his old seat. Dad said he had broken so many precedents already, he could see no harm in breaking one more. So he strolled into the Senate chamber and took his seat. There was applause from both sides of the aisle, and the Senate’s presiding officer, Arthur Vandenberg, remarked: “There are few situations in the life of a Senator for which there is not some available precedent. The present happens to be one, however, for which no precedent is known. The chair is very happy to welcome the former Senator from Missouri to his old seat in the Senate. . . . The ex-Senator from Missouri is recognized for five minutes.”

  Dad rose and gave a brief off-the-cuff speech, affirming the best ten years of his life were spent in the Senate.

  Les Biffle had carefully planned the entire incident in advance, a necessity because Dad would never have risked a rebuff to the dignity of the presidency. Though his appearance was only a gesture, it did help soothe senatorial feelings and take much of the bitterness out of the Taft-Hartley controversy.

  My father wanted to close the breach between him and the Republican Congress, not merely for his own political good but for the survival of the free world. Even while he was pushing the Greek-Turkish aid bill through Congress, he was receiving more and more alarming reports about the condition of the other nations of Western Europe. The worst winter in the history of Europe, months of freezing weather, snow and sleet storms, followed by floods in the spring, had all but wiped out the modest postwar recovery that France, Italy, England, and the other free nations of the West had begun. Most shocking was the British situation. On August 1, my father received a report from the Secretary of State, which informed him the British had drawn $2.75 billion of the loan we had given them the previous summer, leaving less than $1 billion in their account. This meant that in another six months, the British would be bankrupt. Lewis Douglas, ambassador to England, wrote: “We run the serious risk of losing most of Western Europe if the crisis here develops as it now seems almost certain to develop.” Writing to his sister in August, Dad expressed his deep concern: “It looks as if my work never ends. When one crisis is over we have another one. The British have turned out to be our problem children now. With Palestine on one side and Ruhr coal on the other, they’ve decided to go bankrupt and if they do that, it will end our prosperity and probably all the world’s too. Then Uncle Joe Stalin can have his way. Looks like he may get it anyway.”

  Fortunately, once more my father was forewarned and ready to act. Early in the spring, he had begun the job of selling the American people their biggest peacetime challenge - a commitment to aid the free world on a scale that made the Greek-Turkish aid bill seem like petty cash. He sent Dean Acheson to keep a date he had made to speak on foreign policy in the small town of Cleveland, Mississippi, on May 8. Acheson gave a speech which sounded the alarm bell Dad wanted the nation to hear. Europe was nearly bankrupt and exhausted. They could not buy our exports - and they needed them desperately. It was time to work out a program of aid that would enable them to become self-supporting as soon as possible.

  A month later, speaking at the Harvard graduation in Cambridge, Secretary of State Marshall spelled out the details of the great program that bears his name - the Marshall Plan. He emphasized the core of my father’s idea - that it was not a program of relief but of revival, not an offer of perpetual support but of temporary cooperation. To prove it, General Marshall declared the initiative and the responsibility for the plan must be a joint effort. We wanted Europe’s best thinking on how the money should be spent. Finally, Dad insisted on leaving the door open for the cooperation of Russia and her satellites: “Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos [General Marshall said]. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”

  Many people say my father is one of the best politicians who ever lived in the White House. They may be right. I’d also like to point out that he consistently used his political expertise to further the best interests of America. It fascinates me to see how often his innate modesty and sound policy coincided. During the summer of 1947, while sixteen European nations were meeting in Paris to compose a comprehensive statement of their needs, Dad and his aides were discussing in the White House what the program should be called. Clark Clifford suggested “the Truman Plan.” He pointed out Dad had supplied most of the ideas and all of the leadership.

  “Are you crazy?” Dad said. “If we sent it up
to that Republican Congress with my name on it, they’d tear it apart. We’re going to call it the Marshall Plan.”

  “He was right, of course,” Clark Clifford told me later, when we discussed his years with Dad. “But I still think it deserved to be called the Truman Plan.”

  On September 22, the European nations delivered their report. By this time, the Russians had walked out, denouncing the Marshall Plan as a “vicious American scheme” and forbidding any of their satellites to have anything to do with it. Unfortunately, Congress had adjourned without enacting any additional foreign aid. But my father had been working hard on softening them up, and in the final days of the session, he persuaded the Republican majority in the House to send an eighteen-man fact-finding committee to Europe to see for themselves if General Marshall was telling the truth. Many of these congressmen, such as Everett McKinley Dirksen of Illinois, were isolationists when they sailed aboard the Queen Mary and internationalists - or at least backers of the Marshall Plan - when they returned. But Senator Taft and the Republican leaders of the Senate, excepting Arthur Vandenberg, of course, were fiercely critical of the whole idea and not in the least inclined to do anything about it until the new session of Congress began in January 1948.

  On October 1, Dad wrote to me: “I’ve had the most terrible and terrific ten days since April 12, 1945. I’ve worked from sun-up to sun-down and a couple of hours before and five after every day. . . . Every Republican is trying to put your pa in the hole and every Wallaceite is making a contribution in that direction - as is Old Bill Southern, Roy Roberts, Frank Kent, Bertie McCormick and his kinfolk Cissy Patterson. . . .”

  Almost as soon as he received the report from the Paris conference, my father instructed one of his newest aides, Charles S. Murphy, who had just moved to the White House after more than a decade as legal adviser to the Senate, to draw up a report for him on the advisability of summoning a special session of Congress to enact the Marshall Plan without further delay.

  On October 17, 1947, Murphy submitted his report, recommending a special session be summoned. Europe could not survive another winter without aid. The question, Murphy wrote, “took precedence over all other questions and the consequences of failure are too grave to permit the President to stop anywhere short of the full use of his constitutional powers in his efforts to meet the requirements of the situation.” The report admitted that the leaders of Congress were certain to be resentful and critical of such a decision. But quiet, soft-spoken Charlie Murphy was a man who agreed with Dad’s thinking on politics and responsibility. He pointed out Congress had the habit of postponing questions “no matter how tragic the consequences” so the sooner the issue was brought before them, the better.

  On November 17, 1947, Congress met in response to my father’s summons. In a series of special messages he told the astonished lawmakers - and the American people - that the Marshall Plan called for a total outlay of $17 billion, with an appropriation of $6,800,000,000 needed by April 1, 1948, to enable Europe to survive the following fifteen months. Between October 17 and December 19, Dad and the members of his White House team, and other toilers in the State Department, the Treasury, and almost every other executive department of the government, had spent incredible numbers of hours working out a rational balance between how much Europe needed and how much the American economy could afford to give. Three special committees - one headed by Averell Harriman, the Secretary of Commerce; the second by Julius Krug, Secretary of the Interior; and the third by Dr. Edwin Nourse, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers - synthesized massive amounts of factual information on which my father based his proposal to the Congress:

  We must now make a grave and significant decision relating to our further efforts to create the conditions of peace. We must decide whether or not we will complete the job of helping the free nations of Europe recover from the devastation of war. Our decision will determine in large part the future of the people of that continent. It will also determine in large part whether the free nations of the world can look forward with hope to a peaceful and prosperous future as independent states. . . .

  I recommend this program . . . in full confidence of its wisdom and necessity as a major step in our nation’s quest for a just and lasting peace.

  The tremendous pressure Dad was under at this time can be seen in this letter he wrote to his sister:

  Nov. 14, 1947

  Dear Mary: - I’ve been trying to write you all week but have been covered up with work and am so tired when night comes, I just fall into bed and go to sleep. Went to bed at 8:30 last night and I’m still tired after sleeping at least eight hours.

  Have been trying to get the message ready for the special session and it is a job. The Republicans and Republicats, their helpers in the Democratic Party are of course doing what they can to put me in a hole.

  But I’ve got to face the situation from a national and an international standpoint and not from a partisan political one. It is more important to save the world from totalitarianism than to be President another four years. Anyway a man in his right mind would never want to be President if he knew what it entails. Aside from the impossible administrative burden, he has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues. . . .

  The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make ‘em behave. Well all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.

  Then the family have to suffer too. No one of the name dares do what he’d ordinarily be at liberty to do because of the gossips. They say I’m my daughter’s greatest handicap! Isn’t that something? Oh well take care of yourself and some day the nightmare will be over and maybe we can all go back to normal living.

  Love to you Harry

  The device of calling a special session captured the initiative from Taft and his fellow negative thinkers. Internationalist Republicans, such as Arthur Vandenberg in the Senate and Charles Eaton in the House, rallied to Dad’s support. His leadership won almost unbelievable unanimity from the nation’s press. The sheer courage of his performance inspired his old friend Charlie Ross to write one of the most wonderful letters my father ever received. Charlie had come to work at Dad’s request, with a certain feeling of pity for the accidental President. On Christmas Day 1947, Charlie told Dad what thirty months with Harry S. Truman had taught him:

  Dear Mr. President:

  There is nothing in life, I think, more satisfying than friendship, and to have yours is a rare satisfaction indeed.

  Two and a half years ago you “put my feet to the fire,” as you said. I am happy that you did. They have been the most rewarding years of my life. Your faith in me, the generous manifestations of your friendship, the association with the fine people around you - your good “team” - all these have been an inspiration.

  But the greatest inspiration, Mr. President, has been the character of you - you as President, you as a human being. Perhaps I can best say what is in my heart by telling you that my admiration for you, and my deep affection, have grown steadily since the day you honored me with your trust.

  May this Christmas, and all your Christmases, be bright!

  Sincerely yours,

  Charles G. Ross

  The Russian reaction to the Marshall Plan was savage. Throughout Europe, Stalin sent orders to his Communist leaders to redouble their efforts to seize power before the plan could begin its restorative work. The possibility of civil war in Italy and France was discussed in my father’s office. B-29s had to be rushed to Greece to support the central government. The Italian government, grappling with a severe food shortage, appealed desperately for immediate shipment of all available supplies. Then in February 1948, while Congress was still debating the Marshall Plan, the government of Czechoslovakia was toppled by a Communist coup. Leaders who looked to the West, such as Jan Masaryk, were murdered or imprisoned.

 
In London in December 1947, Secretary of State Marshall had tried one last time to reach agreement on Germany. The Russians sang their old song about reparations, dredging up the $10 billion figure my father had absolutely ruled out at the Potsdam Conference. They followed this up with a barrage of charges, accusing America, France, and Britain of every sort of treachery in Germany. General Marshall calmly informed Molotov he considered further discussion useless and began meeting with Britain and France to plan the merger of their zones in Germany and the creation of the West German federal government. Ominously, early in March, the Russian-controlled press in Eastern Germany began warning West Germans not to cooperate with the Americans because the “unavoidable withdrawal of the Allies which will come about very suddenly in the near future” would leave them in a very exposed position. From Berlin, General Lucius Clay flashed a warning that war “may come with dramatic suddenness.”

  At the center of things, my father, of course, was grimly aware of what seemed to be coming. From Key West, on March 3, 1948, he wrote me one of his most extraordinary letters:

  Dear Margie,

  I’m going to give you a record for yourself regarding these times. It will be a terrible bore. But some time in the future you may want to know the facts.

  He then recounted his career from the 1940 election to his election as vice president, emphasizing the seeming inevitability of it all, how he won in 1940 against all odds, and was forced to take the vice presidency against his will:

  As you know I was Vice President from January 20th, to April 12th, 1945. I was at cabinet meetings and saw Roosevelt once or twice in those months. But he never did talk to me confidentially about the war, or about foreign affairs or what he had in mind for the peace after the war.