Harry Truman
Page 46
I wish you the utmost success in your Administration during this most critical and baffling period in world affairs. If I should be able to come over I shall not hesitate to pay my respects to you.
With kind regards,
Believe me
Your friend,
Winston S. Churchill
Mrs. Churchill predicted your success. Sends her compliments and good wishes to your wife. . . .
Dad’s reply is also rather interesting:
November 23, 1948
Dear Winston:
I can’t tell you how very much I appreciated your cable and your good letter of November eighth.
I had a terrific fight and had to carry it to the people almost lone handed but when they knew the facts they went along with me. It seemed to have been a terrific political upset when you read the papers here in this country. Really it was not - it was merely a continuation of the policies which had been in effect for the last sixteen years and the policies that the people wanted.
I hope everything is going well with you and that sometime or other we will have a chance for another meeting.
Please remember me to Mrs. Churchill and tell her I appreciate the fact that she was a good prophet. . . .
Sincerely yours,
Harry S. Truman
Mother and I joined Dad in Key West for his vacation. We needed a rest almost as much as he did. Mother, in fact, had come down with a terrible cold and sore throat, and for two nights before we left the White House, Dad got up at ungodly hours like three in the morning to make sure she took her medicine.
The highlight of our stay in Key West, at least in my memory, was the impromptu victory parade staged by the White House reporters and aides. Everybody wore the wackiest costumes ever. Charlie Ross had on a pair of bathing trunks and an old-fashioned, Abraham Lincoln style stovepipe hat. The whole thing was a surprise, and someone snapped a picture of Mother and me laughing like a couple of lunatics. It was funny, and wholly in the spirit of that triumphant vacation.
It was on this visit, if my memory is functioning correctly, that the final installment in the saga of Dad’s unlosable eyeglasses was enacted. He was swimming, and I was sitting on the sea wall watching. The ocean was a little rough and waves were breaking on the wall. He swam over to urge me to join him. I declined, reminding him that the last time he had persuaded me to get wet, he told me the water was warm, and I came out feeling like a human icicle. Just then, a wave broke on the sea wall, and Dad went under. One of the Secret Service men standing nearby jumped in sunglasses and all. This was unnecessary heroics. Dad was perfectly all right. But the unexpected ducking had knocked off his glasses, and they vanished into the swirling depths. The loss was no special crisis. He had several reserve pairs of glasses in his quarters. But the Secret Service men thought they could find them, and several agents in bathing suits began to search the bottom. They had no luck. Later, Dad was sitting on the sea wall and happened to glance at the beach. He noticed something glinting in the sunlight on the shore. He pointed to it, and the astonished Secret Service men trotted around to examine it. There, believe it or not, were the glasses, washed up by the tide.
We flew back to Washington and Dad spent most of Thanksgiving Day signing thank you letters in response to the thousands of congratulations he had received: “At Key West I must have signed five thousand [he told his sister Mary], and since I came back here it has been terrific. . . . I went to the office at 9 o’clock and stayed until 2:00 p.m. and cleaned up a batch of so many I couldn’t count them - but I can sign from 500 to 1000 an hour.”
Two weeks later, Dad attended a kind of postscript to the campaign - the Gridiron Dinner. This traditional Washington shindig is run by the capital newsmen. It requires politicians of all stripes and types to laugh and be laughed at. Dad described the evening in rather pungent terms to his sister:
The Gridiron Dinner was quite a trial to me because I couldn’t say what I wanted to say. If I’d been beaten it would have been much easier to speak. They ribbed Dewey unmercifully. Had a lunatic engineer act, that was a scream. They took Jake Arvey, Hague, Flynn of N.Y., and old Crump for a long hard ride. But they were exceedingly nice to me.
Dewey made a speech in which he tried hard to be funny. It was funny in the beginning but he became very sneering and sarcastic in the last half.
Of course when I came to speak - the last thing on the program -I couldn’t be the least bit elated, triumphant or overbearing. I told them I’d not seen most of them for three months, supposed they’d been on a vacation from the White House. Told them they’d ridden in the wrong boat, and then made a very solemn and serious speech on the grave responsibility we are facing and told them that the country is theirs, not mine, but they’d have to help me run it. Complimented Dewey on being a good sport and sat down.
You never saw such an ovation. Had to get up three times. Some of those old hardboiled Republican newsmen openly cried. . . .
Although Dad wrote this letter on White House stationery, we were no longer living in the Great White Jail. Just in time, Dad discovered the White House was literally falling down. For more than a year, he had been prodding the Commission of Grounds and Buildings to take a good look at the place. He had begun to worry about it one night in 1947 at an official reception, when the guard of honor came in to take the colors away. As the husky young color bearers stamped across the floor in precise military unison, Dad looked up and saw the big chandelier above his head - and the heads of all his guests - swaying. A few weeks later, when the butler brought him breakfast in his study, he felt the whole floor sway as if it was floating in space. Several weeks after he reported these alarming observations to the commission, he learned his fears were well founded.
The time and place in which he learned it makes an almost incredible story. The news arrived in the middle of the last official reception of the 46-47 winter. Dad was listening to Eugene List, the young pianist he had discovered at Potsdam, play for “the customers,” as he called the guests in a letter to his mother: “I was somewhat nervous through the entertainment because Crim the usher and Jim Rowley came and told me that the engineers had found that the chain holding the center chandelier was stretching. Well, the survey had been made three or four weeks ago and it was a nice time to tell me. I let the show go on and ordered the thing down the next day. If it had fallen, I’d been in a real fix. But it didn’t.”
Early in 1948, Dad told his sister what the engineers had finally concluded: “I’ve had the second floor where we live examined - and it is about to fall down! The engineer said that the ceiling in the state dining room only stayed up from force of habit! I’m having it shored up and hoping to have a concrete and steel floor put in before I leave here. The roof fell in on Coolidge and they put a concrete and steel third floor on to take its place and suggested that the second floor be done the same way. But Old Cal wouldn’t do it. He wanted it to fall like the roof did I guess.”
The shoring up was quite an operation. For months, we had to live with a forest of pipes running up through our private rooms. They were particularly thick in Dad’s study, my sitting room, and Mother’s bedroom. We had to walk around them to get out the doors. It was not what I called gracious living. Meanwhile, Dad appointed a committee of experts to examine the entire house from roof to foundations and tell him what needed to be done. Their report made hair-raising reading. The foundation was sinking into the swampy ground beneath it. There was no visible support for the ceiling in the Green Room but a few very rusty nails.
In the summer of 1948, the old house just started to fall apart. One of the two pianos in my sitting room - a spinet - broke through the floor one day. My sitting room, I should add, was just above the family dining room. Dad jotted on his diary-calendar: “How very lucky we are that the thing did not break when Margie and Annette Wright were playing two-piano duets.” A few days later he told his sister: “The White House is still about to fall in. Margaret’s sitting room floor broke
in two but didn’t fall through the family dining room ceiling. They propped it up and fixed it. Now my bathroom is about to fall into the red parlor. They won’t let me sleep in my bedroom or use the bath. I’m using Old Abe’s bed and it is very comfortable.”
On November 7, 1948, when we returned from Missouri, the White House engineer and architect refused to let us into the place. Dad told his sister he found the White House in one terrible shape. There are scaffolds in the East Room, props in the study, my bedroom, Bess’s sitting room and the Rose Room. . . . We’ve had to call off all functions and will move out as soon as I come back from Key West.
At that time, he thought it would “take at least ten months to tear the old second floor out and put it back.” By the time we came back from Key West, the experts had taken a harder look at the situation and decided there was nothing that could be saved but the outside walls. The entire house would have to be gutted and rebuilt.
This meant we had to move across the street to Blair House. There were no complaints on my part, except the usual moans during the packing and unpacking days. As I’ve explained earlier, I much preferred Blair House to the White House. But Blair House created serious entertainment problems for Dad and Mother. As he told his sister Mary, “It is a nice place but only half as large - so we have no place to put guests.” This applied not only to overnight guests but the standard official visitors at White House receptions. Instead of being able to entertain 1,200 or 1,500 at a single reception, everything had to be scaled down to half size, and this meant poor Mother was in perpetual motion as a hostess. But Mother “met the situation” Truman-Wallace style. There was, Dad pointed out in a letter he wrote toward the end of 1948, one consolation: “It’s a shame the old White House had to fall down. But it’s a godsend it didn’t when we had 1,500 people in it.”
Between moving out of the White House, getting settled in Blair House, and answering the tens of thousands of letters that poured in congratulating Dad on his victory, we found Inaugural Day on top of us before we realized it. Of course, numerous aides and a committee had been working to make the day a smash, even before the election. They had plenty of money to spend because the Republican Congress, expecting a Dewey victory, had abandoned its public parsimony and voted a whopping sum for the event.
The weather on January 20 was perfect, very cold, but with bright winter sunlight pouring down from a clear blue sky. Dad started the day at 7:00 a.m. by eating breakfast with ninety-eight members of Battery D and their wives. Mother and I came along and watched while he was presented with a gold-headed cane and a leather book in which each man had signed his name. Mother remarked that the cane would obviously last long enough for Dad to give it to his grandson. Dad promised to use it faithfully on his morning walks and then issued his marching orders for the parade. They were to be the guard of honor around his car on the ride from the Capitol down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House reviewing stand. He wanted them to maintain their old World War I cadence - 120 thirty-inch steps per minute. “I’m sure you can still do it for a mile and a quarter,” he told them.
Although most of the boys were ten to fifteen years younger than Dad, there was a groan at the thought. They had been up until 3:00 a.m. the previous morning at the inaugural gala in the National Guard Armory, enjoying the show put on by musicians, actors, dancers, and other show-biz politicians.
After we attended services at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Dad drove to the Capitol to take the oath of office. His inaugural speech was memorable to me for many reasons. Although he served almost two full terms, it was the only Inaugural Address he ever gave. More important, he enunciated what I still think is the best definition of the difference between communism and democracy.
Communism is based on the belief that man is so weak and inadequate that he is unable to govern himself, and therefore requires the rule of strong masters.
Democracy is based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and justice.
He then spelled out four cardinal points of American foreign policy, which the United States followed for the next twenty-five years. First was unfaltering support of the United Nations; second, the achievement of Europe’s recovery through the Marshall Plan; third, military assistance to strengthen freedom-loving nations against the dangers of aggression. Fourth came the policy that caught everyone by surprise. Dad called for “a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth” of the underdeveloped parts of the world.
Point Four, as the proposal was immediately dubbed by the press, fired the imagination of the globe. Excited farmers in the Middle East sent letters to the local American Embassy, addressed to “The Master of the Fourth Spot.” Arnold Toynbee predicted Dad’s call for the wealthy nations to come to the aid of the world’s poor “will be remembered as the signal achievement of the age.” Before the program was killed by unimaginative Republicans in the middle 1950s, more than 2,000 Americans from Boston, St. Louis, and Seattle and a hundred other towns and cities taught people in Indonesia, Iran, and Brazil better ways to grow their food, purify their water, educate their children. When the Democrats returned to office in 1960, Point Four became John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps.
The Point Four Program was suggested by Benjamin Hardy of the State Department, who first aroused White House aide George Elsey’s enthusiasm for it. But the President’s enthusiasm was the decisive factor. It was a feeling that came naturally to an ex-senator who knew and admired the achievements of the TVA in bringing prosperity to the underdeveloped valleys of Tennessee and an ex-farmer who had seen the miraculous rise in productivity wrought by the scientific and educational programs of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
In spite of his enthusiasm for the idea, Dad’s modesty almost persuaded him to omit it from his Inaugural Address. In fact, his desire not to seem to crow over his victory inclined him to make the Inaugural Address as simple and matter-of-fact as possible. In his mind, he at first bracketed it with the State of the Union address which he made to Congress a few days before the inauguration. He was inclined to limit the Inaugural Address to domestic affairs and concentrate on international matters in the State of the Union.
George Elsey, who was assigned the job of drafting both speeches, became more and more unhappy with this approach. He stayed behind in the White House, working, while Dad and other aides were relaxing in Key West. “I finally wrote a long memorandum in which I argued as persuasively, and as forcefully as I could,” George says, “that the President had one and only one inaugural opportunity and that he had other state of the union messages and would have still future state of the union messages.” In the inaugural, George argued, Dad was addressing the world and ought to make a speech that suited the occasion. After thinking it over, Dad agreed. With this background, it is even easier to see why Point Four was greeted with enthusiasm in the White House. Benjamin Hardy had had no success whatsoever selling his idea within the Department of State. At this point, with the memory of the Palestine double cross still fresh, Dad and his aides took special pleasure in finding so much genuine merit in an idea that the striped pants boys had pooh-poohed.
After a quick lunch in Les Biffle’s Senate office, Dad led the inaugural parade from the Capitol down Pennsylvania Avenue to the reviewing stand in front of the White House. The boys of Battery D strutted proudly beside his car in two long lines. Before they got started, Dad had to settle an argument which almost ended in a brawl. No one could remember - or at least agree - on who had carried the guidon in France and “Captain Harry” had to issue a ruling to settle the dispute. The aging artillerymen made it to the reviewing stand without a man falling out, but I heard later they were not very lively at the inaugural ball that night. One man told his wife as he limped to the table, “The Germans never came so near killing off Battery D as their captain did today!”
After three and a half hours of West Point cadets, Annapolis midshipmen, Missouri Mules, and bare-legged girl drum majorettes, we dashed to the National Gallery of Art for a reception, arriving an hour late. Dad and Vice President Barkley each made two speeches and shook hands with about 1,000 VIPs. Then we raced back to Blair House to dress for the inaugural ball.
For the inauguration, I had worn a scarlet suit and hat. Now I donned a tulle and brocade gown, called “Margaret pink” - a phrase which did not catch on like Alice blue, but you’ll never hear me complaining about it. Who needs a color named for her? The inaugural ball was so jammed, real dancing was impossible. People simply got out on the floor and swayed to the music of Xavier Cugat, Benny Goodman, and Guy Lombardo. I had my own box, and Drucie Snyder and two other girlfriends joined me, all of us escorted by White House aides. (The aide who danced with me, Bill Zimmerman, was decorated for heroism in Korea. Years later, he ruefully told me people remembered him more for the picture someone snapped of him dancing with me at the inaugural than for his feats of courage under fire.) That night, Bill and the other White House military aides were ablaze in gold braid, gold lace epaulets, and decorations. But no amount of artificial splendor could outshine the smile on Dad’s face. I am sure if he had to pick the happiest day of his political life, this would have been it.