Harry Truman

by Margaret Truman

  Dad looked up at him in complete astonishment. “Have you lost your mind?” he asked.

  The next twelve months did not change his thinking. On April 16, 1950, he wrote himself one of his most important memoranda:

  I am not a candidate for nomination by the Democratic Convention.

  My first election to public office took place in November 1922. I served two years in the armed forces in World War I, ten years in the Senate, two months and twenty days as Vice President and President of the Senate. I have been in public office well over thirty years, having been President of the United States almost two complete terms.

  Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Madison, Andrew Jackson, and Woodrow Wilson, as well as Calvin Coolidge, stood by the precedent of two terms. Only Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, and FDR made the attempt to break that precedent. FDR succeeded.

  In my opinion, eight years as President is enough and sometimes too much for any man to serve in that capacity.

  There is a lure in power. It can get into a man’s blood just as gambling and lust for money have been known to do.

  This is a republic. The greatest in the history of the world. I want this country to continue as a republic. Cincinnatus and Washington pointed the way. When Rome forgot Cincinnatus, its downfall began. When we forget the examples of such men as Washington, Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson, all of whom could have had a continuation in the office, then will we start down the road to dictatorship and ruin. I know I could be elected again and continue to break the old precedent as it was broken by FDR. It should not be done. That precedent should continue not by a constitutional amendment, but by custom based on the honor of the man in the office.

  Therefore, to re-establish that custom, although by a quibble I could say I’ve only had one term, I am not a candidate and will not accept the nomination for another term.

  On November 19, 1951, while Dad was vacationing at Key West, he took this memorandum out and read it to his staff. He wanted to let them know his decision, he said, so they would have plenty of time to plan ahead on their careers. However, he made it clear he had no intention of making the announcement public for some time. It was a tremendous tribute to the loyalty Dad’s staff felt for him that the secret, one of the hottest in the history of the presidency, was kept for almost six months. Bill Hassett said it was “one of the most amazing things I recall from all my years in Washington.”

  That night at Key West, the conversation immediately turned to the problem of selecting a Democratic nominee for 1952. Just before Dad made his announcement, Adlai Stevenson’s name had come up in the conversation. Dad proceeded to express himself very bluntly on him as a candidate. He said he hoped the Democratic Party “would be smart enough to select someone who could win. And by that I don’t mean the Stevenson type of candidate. I don’t believe the people of the United States are ready for an Ivy Leaguer.”

  The talk then veered to the man who my father had always hoped would succeed him - Chief Justice Fred Vinson. But Dad had recently had a long talk with “Papa Vin” and had been unable to persuade him to run. He had two good reasons. He hesitated to embroil the Supreme Court in politics, and neither he nor his wife felt his health was strong enough to enable him to sustain a grueling presidential campaign.

  Beyond Chief Justice Vinson, my father and his aides faced the rather grim fact there weren’t very many prospective Democratic candidates. Alben Barkley wanted to be President, but he was too old. Estes Kefauver, the junior senator from Tennessee, had a virulent case of White House fever, but Dad considered him a lightweight. He had also alienated most of the big city Democratic leaders with his traveling television circus in 1950, which seemed to specialize in exposing crime and corruption in cities where Democrats were in the majority. Averell Harriman was capable of doing the job, and he wanted it, but he had never campaigned for political office. He could muster only nominal support from Democrats in his home state of New York.

  Then, on January 6, 1952, came a shock from abroad. General of the Armies Dwight Eisenhower announced from his NATO headquarters he was ready to accept a call to “duty” higher than his present responsibilities.

  My father had sensed for some time Ike was thinking of running for office. When he made one of his periodic visits to Washington early in November 1951, to report on NATO, he had aroused intense political discussion. Ike commented wryly on the hubbub as another “great debate,” and Dad replied, “I’m not interested in that. You can see anybody you want to and do anything you want to while you are here.”

  This remark should not be interpreted as endorsing Ike for President. At no time did my father ever look favorably on this idea. One version of the story that Dad offered to endorse Ike has him doing it in 1945, in Germany. Neither Dad nor anyone who was with him at that time recalls such a statement. However, General Harry Vaughan does remember a 1946 luncheon at the Pentagon at which Ike entertained Dad, Charlie Ross, Clark Clifford, himself, and a few other aides. There was a good deal of lighthearted banter around the table about army politics and civilian politics. In the course of it, Dad jokingly said to Ike: “General, if you ever decide you want to get into politics, you come to me and I’ll sure endorse you.”

  No one took it very seriously. Certainly my father did not take it seriously. In fact, he came to regard references to Ike as a savior figure with considerable amusement. One day in August 1950, the White House received a telegram which read: “May I urge you to suggest to President Truman that he name General Dwight Eisenhower as assistant commander in chief of our armed forces.” Harry Vaughan put it on Dad’s desk, and Dad scribbled on it, “In a terrible quandary over this!”

  Even if my father had known Ike was planning to become a candidate, he would still have chosen him for supreme commander in Europe. He was the right man for the job. Also, Ike was humble to the point of obsequiousness in admitting how strongly he approved of Dad’s foreign policy. In the November 1951, meeting at the White House, he told Dad and ten or twelve other members of the Cabinet and staff that when he went to Europe in February 1951, he thought the idea of a European defense force was “as cockeyed an idea as a dope fiend could have figured out. I went over completely hostile to it,” he said. “But now,” he went on, “I’ve shifted.”

  Even before that remark, Ike had made a habit of flattering my father. After the 1948 election, he wrote a letter which was almost too thick for Dad’s taste. “You don’t have to reaffirm your loyalty to me,” Dad wrote back. “I always know exactly where you stand.”

  In July 1949, Ike wrote another letter, in which he commented on some stamps which the Post Office was designing for him. He remarked that Dad no doubt would be around to make the final decision on them. Dad replied: “I certainly do appreciate your belief that I’ll be able to decide on the postage stamps for 1954. As you know, that is two years beyond the end of this term, and, of course, I haven’t made up my mind yet whether to quit or go ahead and be sure these stamps are gotten out for you. I rather think this is going a little bit far in the future though, and, in all probability, it would be better to take the matter up with the then Postmaster General a few months before the 1954 budget goes into effect.”

  Even after the General all but announced his candidacy in January, my father still felt Ike was on his side in the area that mattered most, foreign policy. On January 31, 1952, he wrote the following letter to him:

  Dear Ike:

  I certainly appreciated your good letter of the twenty-third. You can rest assured that no matter what the professional liars and the pathological columnists may have to say, you and I understand each other.

  I certainly hope that Lisbon meeting [of NATO] will turn out all right. . . . I think we are approaching a condition in world affairs where we can become powerful enough to ward off a third world war, if we continue the Foreign Policy which we have been pursuing. I think you understand it as thoroughly and completely as I do.

  I hope everything is going well with you and that
it will continue to go just that way. Please remember me to Mrs. Eisenhower.

  As long as Senator Robert Taft had seemed to be the probable Republican candidate, my father thought any Democrat with a decent record could win. The emergence of Ike made Dad feel urgent about finding a Democratic candidate, early in 1952. The more he thought about it, the more he became convinced - somewhat reluctantly - that Adlai Stevenson of Illinois was the man. One of the White House aides, Dave Lloyd, had worked with Stevenson in the State Department and was constantly singing his praises. My father finally told Charlie Murphy to call Governor Stevenson and ask him to come to Washington for a talk.

  Charlie and Dave Lloyd met Stevenson at George Ball’s office, late in the afternoon of the day he arrived in Washington. They told him why the President wanted to see him, and Stevenson voiced great reluctance about running. Charlie Murphy went directly to the White House and told Dad what Governor Stevenson had said. A President never likes to be confronted by the unexpected, if he can avoid it.

  About eight o’clock that night, Governor Stevenson came to Blair House and talked with my father for over an hour. In a memorandum he made later about their conversation, Dad wrote: “I told him what I thought the Presidency is, how it has grown into the most powerful and the greatest office in the history of the world. I asked him to take it and I told him if he would agree he could be nominated. I told him that a President in the White House always controlled the National Convention.”

  Stevenson talked all around the subject in his charming, intellectual way. By the time they parted, he had created total confusion, not only in his own mind, but in Dad’s mind. The next morning, when Charlie Murphy asked my father what Governor Stevenson’s answer had been, Dad replied: “Well, he was a little reluctant, but he finally said yes.” Only a few days later Murphy was astonished to learn Stevenson was telling all his friends, including at least one prominent Washington newspaperman, that he had said no.

  “This,” Charlie Murphy says with masterful understatement, “was not a situation that you could live with.” He arranged to meet Governor Stevenson for dinner at George Ball’s house. They argued with Stevenson all evening but could not persuade him to say yes. “We left without any answer,” Charlie says, “but at least we had gotten to the point that he understood now he hadn’t said no.”

  Some weeks later, Governor Stevenson wrote Murphy a very long letter, explaining why he did not feel he could be the candidate. The sad truth is Stevenson was rather favorably inclined toward General Eisenhower and, like many liberals, even felt that perhaps it was time for a change of parties. My father, with his far greater knowledge of national politics, feared with good reason that the General would be totally unable to cope with the reactionaries in the Republican Party and would become the captive of Senator Taft and his friends.

  Another reason for Stevenson’s reluctance became apparent later in the year. He did not want to be Harry S. Truman’s hand-picked candidate. Stevenson had apparently been disheartened by an outbreak of corruption on the lower levels of Dad’s administration. He seemed to feel the President had been tainted with the weakness displayed by Internal Revenue collectors and a few wheeler-dealers in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. He was unimpressed by the fact that many of the Internal Revenue collectors had been caught and fired before the Republicans in Congress ever began screaming about them, or by the complete overhaul of the RFC my father ordered as soon as signs of corruption were detected there. An assistant attorney general, T. LaMar Caudle, who was more naïve than corrupt, was fired the moment his dubious dealings with tax-fixers came to light. When Howard McGrath, the Attorney General, attempted to defend Caudle, he too was fired. No sensible person can expect a President to do more than act swiftly and forthrightly when he finds this kind of unpleasantness in his administration.

  To my father, who had passed through the corruption of the Pendergast machine without a single taint of it adhering to him personally, Governor Stevenson’s attitude was simply incredible. Fortunately, at this time he was not aware Stevenson held this opinion. Early in March, when the governor was in Washington again, he came to the White House and told my father he had decided not to run because he was committed to a second term in the Illinois State House. “He did not think he could go back on that commitment honorably,” Dad said.

  By playing reluctant hero and attempting to maneuver the party into drafting him, Stevenson forfeited a crucial dimension of his candidacy. My father had planned to throw behind him all the resources of the Democratic Party and the presidency, to build him into a national figure well before the election.

  Meanwhile, Dad was left without a candidate. For a few weeks, he reconsidered his decision not to run again. First, he had a small dinner at Blair House, with only a few of his closest advisers, such as Fred Vinson and Charlie Murphy. Later, he convened a larger meeting, which included the whole White House staff, as well as several congressional leaders. At this meeting, he polled the entire room - a dozen or more - and asked each man what he thought. Although they gave varying reasons, not one of them thought he should run again.

  Mother felt the same way. So did I. Mother’s opinion carried a lot more weight than mine, of course. Dad decided the verdict seemed to be unanimous.

  On March 29, 1952, my father was the chief speaker at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in the Washington Armory. It was one of the biggest dinners in the history of the Democratic Party - 5,300 people contributed $100 each, to raise over half a million dollars for the Democratic National Committee treasury. Dad gave one of his best speeches. He ridiculed the “dinosaur school of Republican strategy” which wanted to go back to “prehistoric times.” Entwined in this sarcasm was a serious plea for a bipartisan foreign policy:

  Some Republicans seem to think it would be popular to pull out of Korea, and to abandon Europe, and to let the United Nations go smash. They read it this way: “The American people aren’t very bright. Let’s tell them they don’t have to build up defenses, serve in the army, or strengthen our allies overseas. If they fall for that, then we Republicans will be in - and that’s all that matters.”

  Dad warned the Democrats the Republican campaign would not be fought on the issues. They were going to wage a campaign of “phony propaganda” with Senator McCarthy as their real spokesman. “They are going to try what we might call the ‘white is black’ and the ‘black is white’ strategy.” Another branch of this strategy, Dad said, was their smear that the government was full of grafters and thieves and all kinds of assorted crooks: “Now I want to say something very important to you about this issue of morality in government. I stand for honest government. I have worked for it. I have probably done more for it than any other President. I have done more than any other President to reorganize the government on an efficient basis, and to extend the Civil Service merit system. I hate corruption not only because it is bad in itself, but also because it is the deadly enemy of all the things the Democratic Party has been doing all these years. I hate corruption everywhere, but I hate it most of all in a Democratic officeholder, because that is a betrayal of all that the Democratic Party stands for.”

  My father then summed up the Democratic Party’s record of service to the farmer, the worker, and world peace. Finally came the fateful words: “Whoever the Democrats nominate for President this year, he will have this record to run upon. I shall not be a candidate for reelection. I have served my country long, and I think efficiently and honestly. I shall not accept a renomination. I do not feel that it is my duty to spend another four years in the White House.”

  Everyone not in on the secret was utterly astonished. There were cries of “no, no” from the audience. Photographers rushed from one end of the head table, where Dad was speaking, to the other end, where Adlai Stevenson was sitting. Even then, in spite of his non-candidacy, he was the front runner.

  Meanwhile, my father continued to run the government of the United States. In the months immediately following his a
nnouncement, he made two of his most controversial decisions.

  Late in March, it became clear to the President and the rest of the country that a steel strike was threatening to cripple our economy in the middle of a war. The Wage Stabilization Board had recommended giving the Steelworkers Union a boost of 26.4 cents an hour. The companies had arrogantly refused to bargain with the union, and they now insisted, with even more arrogance, that they would not grant the increase unless they were permitted to add $12 a ton to the price of steel. My father considered this nothing less than profiteering and refused to go along, even when his Director of Defense Mobilization, Charles E. Wilson, resigned over his stand. On April 7, the unions announced they were going out on strike. The lives of our men in Korea were threatened, and our NATO buildup in Europe would be fatally undermined by a long strike. Dad acted promptly out of his conviction the nation was faced with an immense emergency. He issued Executive Order 10340 to seize the steel mills.

  The following day, he asked Congress for legislation which would give him the power he needed to operate the mills. Congress refused to act, and the steel companies took the government to court. Federal Judge David Pines ruled that Order 10340 was unconstitutional. Although the judge received a lot of publicity for supposedly defying the President, the man he really slapped down was the government attorney who handled the case. He was lamentably inept. “Our position is that there is no power in the courts to restrain the President,” he declared. This was practically an open invitation for the judiciary to assert its power as the third - and coequal - branch of the government.

  Within another week, the Supreme Court announced it would hear the case. On June 2, 1952, the Court ruled, six to three, that the President had exceeded his constitutional powers. It was one of the strangest decisions in the Court’s history. Each of the majority judges wrote separate opinions, since they could not agree on any fundamental reason why the seizure of the mills was unconstitutional. The arguments of the government’s witnesses, Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett, Secretary of Interior Oscar Chapman, and others, that a national emergency existed, were ignored. Chief Justice Vinson dissented vigorously from the majority, and expressed grave dissatisfaction with “the complete disregard of the uncontroverted fact showing the gravity of the emergency and the temporary nature” of the seizure.