Harry Truman

by Margaret Truman

  My father did his utmost to cooperate with Stevenson, in spite of these problems. In a letter he wrote to him on August 16, 1952, he could not have been more forthright about his motives: “Again, I want to say to you that I am at your disposal to help win the election and I also want you to understand that there is nothing further that can add to my career as a public servant. As I told you when you were here . . . I think there comes a time when every politician whether he be in a County, State or Federal office, should retire. Most of them find it impossible to do that - they either have to be carried out feet first or kicked out. I made up my mind in 1949 that that would not happen to me if I could get the national picture on a basis that would prevent world war three and maintain a domestic program that would give all sections of the population fair treatment.”

  Most of the time Stevenson’s mistakes made my father more sad than mad. It was General Eisenhower who really aroused his wrath. Eisenhower tried, for a while, to confine himself to glittering generalities and stay above the battle. But one of his biggest supporters, the Scripps-Howard newspapers, warned him his campaign “was running like a dry creek.” Then Senator Taft had a famous conference with the General, in which he extracted from him a promise to attack the Democratic Party’s foreign and domestic policies. When Ike started accusing the Democrats of betraying the United States at Yalta and failing to foresee the menace of Russian aggression thereafter, Dad boiled. He promptly quoted Ike’s words before a committee of Congress in 1945. “There is no one thing,” Ike said, “that guides the policy of Russia more today than to keep friendship with the United States.”

  When I was going to school [Dad said], we had an old professor who was interested in teaching us how to make up our minds and make decisions. The lesson was on the history of battles of the War between the States and the discussion was on the battle of Gettysburg. And some kid in class got up and said what Lee should have done and what Meade should have done and this old professor said, “Now, young man, that’s all very fine, but any schoolboy’s hindsight is worth a great deal more than all General Lee’s and General Meade’s foresight.”

  I can say the same thing about Ike. His hindsight may be extra good, but his foresight isn’t any better than anybody else’s.

  This was one of my father’s strongest convictions. More than once, he said to reporters and others who criticized his administration, “Any schoolboy’s hindsight is worth a President’s foresight.”

  What troubled my father was the fact that Ike was attacking policies he had helped to formulate and carry out. This seemed to Dad the worst kind of hypocrisy. But what really drove the Truman temperature right off the thermometer was Ike’s endorsement of Senators William Jenner and Joe McCarthy, men who spent hours in the Senate vilifying Ike’s old commander, George Marshall. Without General Marshall’s help, Ike would have remained an obscure colonel, at most a brigadier or major general, perhaps commanding a division before the war ended. When Ike appeared on the same platform with William Jenner, and deleted a personal tribute to General Marshall from a speech he planned to make in Milwaukee because Senator McCarthy would have been offended by it, my father just about gave up on Candidate Eisenhower.

  In late September, we launched a whistle-stop tour to Hungry Horse, Montana, to dedicate a new dam there. After almost eight years as President, Dad was as tireless as ever, making six and eight speeches a day and wearing out everyone else on the train, including yours truly.

  In the Public Papers of Harry S. Truman, 1952, the following entry appears on page 648:

  HUNGRY HORSE, MONTANA (Rear platform, 9:45 a.m.)

  Thank you very much for this souvenir of the horse.

  That makes a pair of them.

  I appreciate the privilege of being here. It has been a fine morning - had a good look at the project down here, and I am going to tell you something about it when I get “downtown.”

  Where’s Margaret?

  Margaret had committed the unpardonable sin of not getting up that morning. I was teased unmercifully all the way across the rest of the country. But I got even with him in Ohio, later in the campaign. There, Mike Disalle, who was running for the Senate, introduced Dad as “Margaret Truman’s father.”

  As always, Dad could take it as well as dish it out. “I’m a back number already,” he said, ruefully.

  There were times during the campaign when I think Dad’s humor came close to matching Adlai Stevenson’s - but I am a prejudiced witness. Defending the governor’s use of humor in his speeches, Dad said: “They have been poking fun at our candidate, Governor Stevenson, because he likes to put his audiences in a good humor. I found a quotation, I think, that will cover that. It is an admonition in Matthew 6. It says, ‘Be not as the hypocrites, of a sad countenance.’ “

  In Troy, Montana, he told his listeners the GOP stood for “the General’s Own Party,” or to put it another way, “the Party of the Generals.”

  “There’s a lot of truth in that,” Dad said. “The Republicans have General Motors and General Electric and General Foods and General MacArthur and General Martin and General Wedemeyer. And then they have their own five-star General who is running for President. . . . I want to say to you that every general I know is on this list except general welfare, and general welfare is in with the corporals and the privates in the Democratic Party.”

  When Ike tried to argue that our World War II decision not to advance to Berlin and the 1947 decision to withdraw our troops from Korea were “political” mistakes which forced later military action, my father really let him have it. “He was personally involved in our decisions about Berlin and Korea,” he told his listeners in a speech in Oakland. “He knows what happened in those cases and so do I.” Dad went on to point out the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended withdrawing our troops from Korea in 1947. “The Chief of Staff of the Army, a man who joined in this recommendation, is the man who is now the Republican candidate for President.”

  As for Berlin, my father revealed he had ordered Ike to work out with the Russians unrestricted access to Berlin as a condition to withdrawing our troops to the Occupation Zone lines. Ike delegated this job to General Lucius Clay. All Clay got from the Russians was an oral assurance, instead of a precise agreement in writing: “Our troops were withdrawn, our bargaining position was lost and our right of access was never firmly established. General Clay, in his book, admits that this was a mistake. He is honest about it. He doesn’t blame the civilian side of the government - which had nothing whatever to do with it. He doesn’t even blame the commanding officer. But his commanding officer should, I think, step up and share some of the blame. The responsibility to arrange free access to Berlin lay squarely on that commanding officer, for I put it there.”

  As for Ike’s statement that our plan of global resistance to communism was “a program of bits and pieces . . . an endless game of makeshift and make believe,” my father said he never thought he would hear words like those from the lips of the man who was now the Republican candidate: “He is a man who knows the toil and cost of building defenses, cementing alliances, and inspiring a common purpose in the hearts and minds of free peoples. He is aware of how easy and how dangerous it is to destroy the common faith and purpose on which the whole structure of our security is built, and yet he does not seem to hesitate now to utter the reckless words that can bring that structure down to ruin.”

  Ike’s problem, Dad declared, was that he had fallen into the hands of the “Republican snollygosters.” Dad fell in love with this wonderful word during this campaign. For those who don’t know the political slang of the early 1900s, a snollygoster is a politician who is all words and very little action.

  Dad had a lot of fun making Ike squirm over things he had said in earlier years. One of his favorite quotes, which Dad repeated at numerous whistle-stops, was Ike’s 1945 statement withdrawing himself from the presidential race: “Nothing in the international or domestic situation especially qualifies for the most important
office in the world a man whose adult years have been spent in the country’s military forces. At least, this is true in my case.”

  Dad would add with a grin: “It was true then. It is true now.”

  Dad had even more fun with another Eisenhower gaffe. Ike was fond of calling his campaign a crusade, and at one point, he declared his model was Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads. Dad quickly pointed out, “Oliver Cromwell may have had his points, but his crusade, as I recall it, was one that started out as a matter of principle and finished up by destroying parliamentary government and butchering women and children. God save us from a crusade like that.”

  But when my father talked about Ike and General Marshall, his tone grew harsh. “If there is any one man to whom the Republican candidate owes a great debt of loyalty and gratitude, that man is George Catlett Marshall.” He would then condemn without reservation Ike’s support of Joe McCarthy and William Jenner. “Don’t let anybody tell you that every Presidential candidate has to do that - that it is just part of politics. Franklin Roosevelt did not endorse every Democrat, and neither did Harry Truman. Governor Dewey in 1948 did not endorse Republicans who had disgraced the Republican label. But the Republican candidate this year did, with the same betrayal of principle he has shown throughout his campaign.”

  During most of the campaign, Dad had very little to say about General Eisenhower’s running mate, Senator Richard M. Nixon of California. He made no comment on Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, where he discussed the virtues of his cocker spaniel to exonerate himself from implications of corruption arising from some $18,000 given him by a “millionaire’s club” of wealthy Republicans. Several times Dad refused to say whether he thought this fund was ethical or not. He took the position that this was something the public could decide for themselves. Following the Biblical injunction to “judge not,” Dad always hesitated to take ethical stands on the actions of his fellow politicians. Privately, however, Dad made it clear that the fund confirmed his longstanding opinion of Nixon - that he was a spokesman for special interests.

  For a while, the election looked close. At the very least, Candidate Eisenhower knew he was in the fight of his life. Along with the smears and lies Dad was continually rebutting, the Republicans threw in a few dirty tricks aimed specifically at our campaign train. A “Truth Squad” followed us around the country, issuing statements that supposedly countered Dad’s speeches. In Buffalo, they hired a horde of school children who tried to drown out Dad with screams and catcalls, anticipating by twenty years the Students for a Democratic Society. It just proves extremists from either end of the political spectrum have more in common than they think.

  Finally, Candidate Eisenhower let one of his speech writers put into his mouth words that completely, totally infuriated my father. In a speech in Detroit, Ike announced he would “go to Korea in person if elected and put an end to the fighting.” As politics, it was a master stroke. It was exactly what millions of Americans, unhappy and worried about the deadlock in Korea, wanted to hear. As a realistic policy, it was a blatant lie. Equally fatuous was his promise that he would overnight arrange things so the South Koreans would do all the fighting, and our troops could come home. “While he is on the back platform of his train, holding out this glowing hope,” my father said angrily, “his staff are in the press car pointing out to reporters that he has not said when he would be able to do this. And he knows very well he can’t do it, without surrendering Korea - until the present Korean conflict is at an end.”

  If Ike had a solution to the war, my father wanted to know why Ike had not given it to him when he was serving the President as one of his top military advisers. Mockingly, he asked Ike to give it to him now. “Let’s save a lot of lives and not wait - not do a lot of demagoguery and say that he can do it after he’s elected. If he can do it after he is elected, we can do it now.”

  Alas, it was all in vain. On Election Day, General Ike went rampaging to a tremendous personal victory. Dad took some consolation in noting the Democrats had actually won more congressional votes - although their distribution enabled the Republicans to capture control of Congress by a very narrow margin, one seat in the Senate and twelve in the House. “The people were voting for their great military hero,” Dad concluded in a letter to Winston Churchill.

  My father sent the President-elect a telegram of congratulations, in which he made a point of saying, “The Independence will be at your disposal if you still desire to go to Korea.” Ike made the trip, which of course accomplished nothing.

  Except for that one partisan jab, my father stopped playing politics the moment the election was over. His chief concern became the orderly transfer of power. He was determined Dwight Eisenhower would not have to undergo the ordeal Harry S. Truman experienced when he was catapulted into the presidency. He remembered from his reading and observation of earlier administrations how outgoing and incoming Presidents, particularly when they were of different parties, tended to have as little as possible to do with each other. In a world on the edge of total violence, this was unthinkable. My father boldly changed the pattern, setting an historic precedent.

  In his congratulatory telegram, he made his first overture toward cooperation:

  THE 1954 BUDGET MUST BE PRESENTED TO THE CONGRESS BEFORE JANUARY 15TH. ALL PRELIMINARY FIGURES HAVE BEEN MADE UP. YOU SHOULD HAVE A REPRESENTATIVE MEET WITH THE DIRECTOR OF THE BUDGET IMMEDIATELY.

  When Ike accepted this offer, my father sent him a second message:

  I KNOW YOU WILL AGREE WITH ME THAT THERE OUGHT TO BE AN ORDERLY TRANSFER OF THE BUSINESS OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH OF THE GOVERNMENT TO THE NEW ADMINISTRATION, PARTICULARLY IN VIEW OF THE INTERNATIONAL DANGERS AND PROBLEMS THAT CONFRONT THIS COUNTRY AND THE WHOLE FREE WORLD. I INVITE YOU, THEREFORE, TO MEET WITH ME IN THE WHITE HOUSE AT YOUR EARLY CONVENIENCE TO DISCUSS THE PROBLEM OF THIS TRANSITION, SO THAT IT MAY BE CLEAR TO ALL THE WORLD THAT THIS NATION IS UNITED IN ITS STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM AND PEACE.

  Again Eisenhower accepted the offer and a meeting was set for November 18. Ike arrived at 2:00 p.m. with Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., and Joseph M. Dodge, as his aides. First, Ike went into Dad’s office, and they had a private conversation. Here is the unadorned, rather blunt memorandum which my father made on their talk, two days later:

  The President Elect came to see me day before yesterday, Nov. 18, 1952. When he came into the President’s office he had a chip on his shoulder. . . .

  I told him when he came into the Presidential office that all I had in mind is an orderly turnover to him. . . . I offered to leave the pictures of Hidalgo, the Mexican Liberator, given to me for the Presidential office, San Martin given to me by the Argentine Government and Bolivar, given to me by the Venezuelan Government, in the President’s office. I was informed very curtly, that I’d do well to take them with me - that the Governments of these countries would, no doubt, give the new President the same pictures! Then I gave him the world globe that he used in World War II which he had given me at Frankfort when I went to Potsdam. He accepted that - not very graciously.

  I told him that I wanted to turn the Administrative Branch of the Government over to him as a going concern and that I had instructed my White House Staff and all Cabinet Officers to cooperate in this undertaking.

  Ike asked me if I had a Chief of Staff in the White House. I told him that there is an Assistant to the President, Dr. John Steelman, who coordinates the differences between Cabinet Officers and between the President’s Secretaries, but that any member of the Cabinet and any Secretary or Administrative Assistant is at liberty to see the President at any time on any subject.

  I advised him that his Appointment Secretary would be his personal contact with the public. I told him that this man must be a real diplomat, able to say “No” nine-tenths of the time and make no one angry. I told him that his Press Secretary must be able to keep press and radio-television in line. He must be familiar with reporters’ problems and be able to stand between the President and the press and radio. I
advised him to obtain a correspondence secretary who could suggest answers to 75% of the mail, keep track of birthdays, special days, proclamations and be able to write letters he could sign after reading the first paragraph.

  I told him he must have Assistants who could talk to State, Treasury, Commerce and Labor, that he must have one to act as personnel officer to head off job hunters and to investigate and make recommendations for all positions filled by Presidential appointments. I informed him that he should have a “minority group” assistant to hear complaints and assuage the hurt feelings of Negroes, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Indians and any other groups including Poles, Lithuanians, Irish and what have you.

  I think all this went into one ear and out the other.

  After this private talk, Ike, my father, and their advisers gathered for a seminar on the world problems the nation was facing. Acheson did most of the lecturing. He noted alarming weaknesses in our UN allies in regard to the principle of no forced repatriation of prisoners of war in Korea, and discussed NATO, Southeast Asia, U.S. commercial policy abroad, and other pressing matters. The Republicans just took notes and made no comment, except for one point in the statement which was issued at the end of the meeting. Henry Cabot Lodge refused to allow Ike to agree to oppose forced repatriation of the Korean War prisoners. Since this was the main reason why Dad wanted the meeting, he was very disappointed. A proposal by the Indian representative at the UN, which compromised on this vital issue through a smoke screen of double-talk, was in danger of passing. The Democrats were left to fight - and win - that battle on their own. When Ike departed, Dad had the feeling he “had not grasped the immense job ahead of him.”