Affection and Trust: The Personal Correspondence of Harry S. Truman and Dean Acheson, 1953-1971

by David McCullough

  The last paragraph on page 116 also bothers me. It raises the question whether Marshall agreed with the Communist appraisal of the situation. My guess is that he did not because, if he did, he was playing into their hands.

  My worry would be eliminated if the middle of it read: “And it was his impression that the Communists were more ready to take their chances in a struggle conducted in the political arena than were the Nationalists. The Nationalists so it seemed to Marshall, appeared to be determined to pursue a policy of force which he believed would be their undoing.”

  Chapter 7. Pages 148–149. The first paragraph and the first sentence of the second bother me. In the first place, are you sure of the facts? Was such a message sent to Stalin? If it was, and since you quote other important messages, I think you should quote this one. If you do not have the message, do you know that it was sent and, if so, what it said? Unless your anecdote about the message can be supported one hundred percent by documents, I strongly urge leaving it out. It gives an impression of impetuous and not too well considered judgment. Would we really have moved into Iran and, if so, with what? What would the United Nations have said, and how would this square with your support of the UN? What would our allies have said? Furthermore, was Stalin a man to respond to messages of this sort? I should not have thought so. Please reconsider this paragraph.

  At the bottom of page 148 and on page 149, you jump from Iran directly into the delivery of the message to Congress on Greece and Turkey on March 12, 1947. As a literary device, this seems to me a mistake. It gives the impression of a two-gun man in the White House shooting with both hands in all directions at the same time. You tell Stalin off at the top of the page. You are on the rostrum of the House, intervening in Greece and Turkey, without any explanation at the bottom of the page. Things didn’t happen that way and you didn’t decide things that way. I think these paragraphs, as indicated in the manuscript, should come out, and you should go along more calmly with the development of the Greek-Turkish story. Perhaps the transition could be something like this: “It was not long before the same issue was presented to us again in the same part of the world.” And then pick up the story at the bottom of page 149.

  Page 151. In the middle of the page you mention the Turkish request for advice when they received the notice from the Soviets on the Straits, and say, “I instructed Acheson to inform the Turks, etc.” Again this does not do you justice. It sounds as though you read the telegram and barked out the orders without more ado. It was in fact far more complicated, and an example of the very thorough governmental administration which you conducted. The whole story is spelled out in Joe Jones’s galley proof. What you did was to direct State, War, and Navy to study the matter. This was done smoothly and quickly and resulted in a unanimous recommendation which was brought to you at a meeting where the Secretaries of the three departments and the Chiefs of Staff were all present. General Eisenhower was Chief of Staff. It was all thoroughly discussed with you. I remember your pulling the big map out of your desk drawer and entering in a most impressive way into the discussion of the strategy of power in the Middle East. You approved the recommendation. We then coordinated our views with our allies and ended up with a strong position, which was communicated to the Turks. At the same time they received similar views and support from the British and French. This is a much more impressive story than what appears on page 151.

  Page 155, last sentence of next to last paragraph. You say that the British note on Greece and Turkey stated that they would take all their troops out of Greece. My rather clear recollection is that this is not right. I think again you will find this discussed in Joe Jones’s galleys. My recollection is that the note was silent on this point and that Marshall took it up personally and orally with the Ambassador, who reported that the British were planning to take their troops out as soon as this could be conveniently done and that, after some talk back and forth, we got them to delay it for a considerable space of time.

  Page 189, first paragraph. This discussion of the currency problem does not seem right, and this is important, because the currency problem was pretty close to being the heart of the Berlin issue at the outset. In other words, although the Russians undoubtedly had embarked upon a program of making our occupation of Berlin difficult by harassments, it was the introduction of our currency into West Berlin which really produced action on their part. You give the impression that the row arose because the Russians were counterfeiting our money and did not want to stop. It may be that the trouble over the plates continued until 1948, but it was my recollection that we had stopped that some time before by changing the plates. I think that the real difficulty was much deeper. The reformed West German currency was good currency; the Eastmark was not. Since the Eastmark would not be legal tender in West Berlin, everybody wanted the good currency, which was ours; and this was producing difficulty for the Russians, both in East Berlin and in East Germany. The blockade was their first response to this economic threat. After it had started, I think their ideas grew and they began to see the possibility that the blockade might get us out of Berlin altogether. But the beginning of it was economic and I do not think this has been adequately explained at the point noted.

  Page 191. For the reasons given immediately above, your explanation of the reason for the blockade of Berlin seem to me incorrect. Again you oversimplify. I think the Russians blundered into the blockade, rather than choosing it as their counter-attack.

  Page 201, bottom. It is a small point, but as I recall it, [Howard] Kingsbury Smith had written out the questions which Stalin answered, or questions something like them, quite a while before and had left them with the Foreign Office. I do not think that the interview was by telegram. The practice which I have suggested would, of course, have been a good one with the Communists, since, by it, they always had questions on hand which they could answer when it suited them to do so. I assume that, if they changed a question a little, the favored correspondent would not complain.

  The paragraph beginning at the bottom of page 202 condenses some protracted negotiations, and I think condenses them incorrectly. As I recall it, one of the principal items in the reply by [Jacob A.] Malik [Soviet representative to the United Nations at the time of the Berlin crisis, 1948–49] was that the West should call off its actions to create the West German Government. I can look this up if you want me to, but I remember my conferences and standing very firm on this issue.

  Chapter 10. I shall restrict comments on this chapter, because I never was enthusiastic about the policy and, therefore, am not a sympathetic critic. Some things, however, seem clearly wrong.

  Page 206. You say that the Balfour declaration has always seemed to you to go hand-in-hand with the noble principles of Woodrow Wilson, especially with the principle of self-determination. It seems to me that if there was one principle in the world which was absolutely and directly violated by the Balfour Declaration and the resulting policy it was the principle of self-determination. Self-determination, I believe, would entitle the Arabs living in Palestine to decide whether they wanted to be inundated by Jews. Instead, what was done was to bring the Jews in over the objections of the Arabs. However noble the policy may have been, it certainly was not one justified by self-determination. The whole sentence, which I have noted, could be profitably eliminated.

  Page 208, next to last paragraph. Here self-determination crops up again. Isn’t it enough that commonsense and fairness required that the Arabs, as well as the Jews, should be consulted, without [b]ringing in self-determination?

  In the last paragraph on this page and several times thereafter you say that you believed the solution in Palestine should be reached peaceably. Looking at this from the point of view opposed to yours, the statement has a sanctimonious ring. Of course you wanted the solution to be peaceably reached, but you insisted that the solution should be the immigration of Jews. This was what the Arabs were not prepared to accept peaceably. Therefore, what you are saying is that you thought the
Arabs should surrender rather than fight for what they regarded as their country. I think you can make a good enough argument for your case without this sort of assistance. Therefore, I am for eliminating your hopes for peaceable solutions of an issue where the line of policy precluded it.

  Page 242. On this page, again, we have American policy designed to bring about by peaceful means the establishment of the promised Jewish homeland. This occurs in the second paragraph and it occurs in the next to last paragraph. The next to last paragraph really shocks me, and I hope it can be eliminated. You say the simple fact is that our policy was an American policy. The reason that it was an American policy was that it was aimed at a peaceful elimination of a world trouble spot. Really this seems to me to go too far. Advocacy is one thing, but this is not advocacy. Would this policy, which you say was American policy, have been ours if there were no Jews in the United States? Please leave out these instances when you protest too much.

  Page 254. The last sentence of the first paragraph I hope you will take out. I know the officers who worked on the Palestine question and can honestly say that I do not think that they were anti-Semitic. They were irritated just as you say you were, at the Zionist pressure tactics and blew up about this from time to time. A part of the pressure was to insinuate that those who advised contrary to Zionist wishes were anti-Semitic. But it seems unfair to them to add the great weight of your authority to the charge.

  Chapter XIII. Here, Mr. President, I shall try your patience and good nature. The part up to and through page 277 should—I strongly urge—be wholly re-written. To me it does not ring true at all. The very opening words are all wrong—“If I had consulted my personal impulse … I should have made plans to leave the White House at the end of my first term.” This is not the fighting man that we all loved and love and who led the damnedest knock-down and drag-out in political history. The first thirteen pages do not impress the reader as Harry Truman speaking but as someone writing what Horatio Alger might have said under the circumstances.

  I don’t believe your “impulse”—what one of my partners calls your “gut reaction”—was concerned with F.D.R.’s unfinished business, or the danger from reaction, or the state of world affairs. These were, of course, the important background. 1948 was not 1924. But all of these intellectual considerations were applicable also in 1952, when your decision was different.

  The truth seems to be nearer this: Your first term was brought about by the accident of death. You had never sought the job, you didn’t want it. You hadn’t been elected to it. But you had it and you tackled it as hard and conscientiously as you tackled everything. After a brief honeymoon, the tough boys wrote you off as of no account. They flouted your policies and began to reverse FDR’s as hard as they could. They won the Congress in 1946. They overrode your vetoes. The press belittled you. The pollsters said you hadn’t a chance. Many of your own party went back on you. Reaction seemed to them to be in full swing. It was all personified in the 80th Congress.

  You have never run from a fight in your life. You knew damn well that the everyday American believed in what FDR and you had stood for. Your Dutch, or Irish, or Missouri was up. You believed Americans would respond to fighting leadership and to the facts stated simply and powerfully. If the tough boys wanted a fight—and they didn’t even believe there would be one—you would give them the goll-darndest fight they had ever had. You might get licked—you didn’t think so, but you might—but, if you did, the other guys would go to the Inaugural Ball with the biggest pair of shiners seen around these parts since Old Hickory put away his shillelagh.

  This sounds like you and like the truth. What has been written does not. It is too rational, too reluctant, too pious. The “I never struck a blow except in defense of a woman” sort of thing. And the historical business on pages 268, 269, seems dragged in. You would have fought in ’48 as no President ever had before.

  Much of the stuff on the later pages about the press, Congress, etc., is usable and good, but in a more fiery setting. However, the statement on page 277 that your trip was not meant to be political; but nonpartisan; you were not even a candidate, will seem to the reader insincere. Even in professional parlance, it squeaks by on the narrowest and most technical definition of “political.” You were not on a lecture tour and you were running in the way in which at this stage a shrewd candidate had to run.

  Please put away the club you have out for me and rewrite these pages.

  If you do, then the latter part of the chapter about the impending splits in the party by which you lost your right and left wings can be pointed up to their important and great significance. They were infinitely more courageous decisions for a man who was going to pay the price for them and who wanted passionately to win, than they would have been for a retiring President or for a man who had no realization of their political consequences. It took cold nerve to do what you did, as you show later on by the fact that Ohio had the deciding votes.

  Chapter XIV. There are minor notes on the manuscript.

  Pages 292–29L as marked. I would omit this. Almost everyone has become familiar with the workings of national conventions through television. These pages slow the story.

  Pages 294–5. 295–6. I strongly urge the omission of these conversations with Douglas, instead merely stating that you made him the offers and that, after considering them, he decided to remain on the Court. It is bad for the Court and for you to have reported this sort of back and forth between a President and a Justice. It will offend many people—it gives me a shudder—and it does no good.

  Pages 298–326. Here again I am going to step on your toes. These pages ought to come out. I do not think they are good either as a literary device by which you review your predecessors, or on the merits. And they slow up the story.

  As a literary device they strain credulity. It may be that with a critically important speech to make from notes only, you did not think about it, but reviewed in detail the fortunes of every President of the United States. I am sure no one will believe it. Every few pages you have to reassert the improbable fact that you did (pp. 298, 304, 308, 309, 310, 317, 319, 323, 325). The effect is forced, like someone trying to entertain [at] a dinner when the guest speaker is late or the hour for radio has not arrived.

  On the merits, the material is open to the criticism that there is very little of your own views and opinions, which a reader would want to know, and a good deal of elementary history—that Washington presided over the Constitutional Convention, etc.,—which everyone knows. Nor does all of this historical review lead anywhere; no conclusions emerge. The reader feels stuck on the fly paper for thirty pages.

  My suggestion is this: Take these pages out of the book. They don’t belong here at all. Save them, and later on, when your income tax is not so much of a problem, do them over into articles—“Harry Truman Sizes Up His Predecessors.” This would take a little more work than you [have] done on these thirty pages, but ought to make at least three good articles for which you should be well paid.

  Don’t give the customers too much in this book—which is about you and not your predecessors.

  Pages 342–357. The Vinson “Mission” to Russia. [Truman had planned to send Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson to Moscow as his personal emissary to Stalin to break the deadlock over Berlin, but the mission was halted.] These pages do not—to this reader—come off. They seem disingenuous, not wholly frank, unconvincing.

  The theme is that the Vinson mission had nothing to do with politics, was a good idea as foreign policy, and was spoiled by misunderstanding. Is this supportable?

  In the first place, no one will believe that it had nothing to do with politics. If, in fact, it did, why be ashamed of it? The present meeting at the summit had everything to do with politics. Winston proposed it on May 11, 1953, as an answer to the Labor Party’s charges of war mongering. He completely spiked their guns by his speech, and the Conservatives probably won the election by ensuring that it would take place.


  If Wallace’s attacks were giving liberals and middle-of-the-roaders the idea that you would not negotiate, a gesture to prove them wrong would have been perfectly proper politics.

  So why defend ground which is nearly indefensible and unnecessary to defend?

  Second, as to the mission, I did not understand it at the time, and the account does not help me. The issue in the autumn of 1948 between the Russians and us was Berlin. What was Fred [Vinson] to do about that and what effect would the proposal of the mission have upon the firmness of our position? Not a word is said about Berlin. The “big” issue you speak of on pages 341–4, 347 is control of atomic energy. That was a pretty sick issue by that time.

  The analogy of Lord Reading has, to be sure, one similarity—he was Chief Justice of England. But England was not blockading U.S. forces, and the problems between the two countries were susceptible to method in a way which was not true of USA-USSR relations. I don’t think an analogy helps when it suggests more differences than similarities.

  Finally, in this text your relations with Marshall on the proposal are not clear. On page 350 you were going to talk with him on “Monday morning before we do anything further.” But on Sunday you reached agreement with Vinson, alerted the networks and Lovett. Then came a leak. On page 351, “I had another talk with Secretary Marshall and found him upset over the misrepresentations by other delegates of the purpose of the mission.”