First built as one of a series of half a dozen luxury train cars named for famous explorers, Truman’s train, the Ferdinand Magellan, had been refitted in 1942 for presidential use. New three-inch thick bulletproof glass windows were installed and the car’s entire body was plated with 5/8th-inch-thick nickel steel. It had two escape hatches. It retained its luxury heritage inside. Walking from front to back, one would pass through a galley, a pantry, servants’ quarters, and the oak-paneled dining room. Around the table Truman conferred with his top aides, all sitting in matching chairs upholstered with gold-and-green damask. Continuing back, one would pass four bedrooms, A through D. Rooms B and C were the presidential suite, with the first lady staying in B. Finally came the observation lounge at the rear, opening onto the platform from which the president spoke.
The one thing the train lacked as it pulled out of Union Station that September day was a stock of speeches. One speech had been prepared ahead of time: the first major address, on farm policy, for the next day at Dexter, Iowa. The other 133 talks on the two-week swing were assembled on the fly, a pattern that held for all three of his whistle-stop trips during the campaign. At no point would Truman’s staff get more than two days ahead of schedule in terms of preparation.
“It is surprising to me that these speeches were not conceived, drafted and polished weeks ago, so that they did not have to be whipped into shape on the midnight before mailing, without time for mature consideration and inspirational touches,” Albert Z. “Bob” Carr, who was brought on board to bolster the speechwriting corps during the campaign, wrote in September.
Campaign speechwriting worked on two tracks. The major speeches that Truman gave in big cities, which were typically carried over the radio, were fully written out ahead of time. Murphy, working from the White House, produced first drafts of those, with help from David Lloyd, who was brought on from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), and David Bell, a Harvard-trained economist who had joined the White House staff from the Bureau of the Budget in late 1947. In the second term, Lloyd, who also had a flair for humor, specialized in foreign policy speeches. Bell, a tall ex-Marine, would take a lead role in economic speeches in the second term.
These drafts would be flown out to meet the campaign train, where Clifford would work them over with the president and others. “Never use two words when one will do best,” Truman would admonish his writers, going over the major speeches as the landscape rolled by. Striking out language he did not like, he might say: “That’s not the way I would say it,” or, “Let’s just say what we mean.”
But Truman’s rear-platform, off-the-cuff speeches were the heart of the campaign. These were the province of Elsey on the train and Bill Batt in Washington. Batt and his DNC research team were holed up in a small house near Dupont Circle. They would write detailed briefs on every community where the president was scheduled to speak. They had a “secret weapon”—a complete set of Works Progress Administration guides for the country, which featured detailed descriptions of every city and town in a given state.* And Truman had his own store of facts about small towns across the country that he had visited while investigating defense contractor waste and fraud in the early 1940s.
Elsey had boarded the train with briefcases filled with thorough, Batt-profiles of the first few stops on the trip—and promises of daily updates. These files were complete and detailed: background and history of the town, its leaders, information about the congressional incumbent, including his voting record and data regarding his opponent; hot issues in the local race; suggested speaking topics for Truman. Elsey would start with two or three full sentences to get the president rolling, follow with bulleted topics from which he could extemporize, and close with full sentences. Sometimes Elsey handed the draft to Truman just as the train was stopping in the station.
The work was grueling. Truman would give eight, ten, twelve, in at least one case fifteen whistle-stop addresses in any given day, none repeated. Elsey tried to hit as many different issues over the course of a day as possible. But from outside the campaign bubble, the whistle-stop trips had the air of a carnival of the sort that used to meander from town to town, or an old-time political procession where a famous orator would come to town—popular entertainment in the days before radio and television.
The train’s arrival stirred the waiting crowd, whose excitement rose as the president emerged. “Now, in 1946 just one-third of the people who were entitled to vote in this country elected that ‘do-nothing,’ good-for-nothing 80th Congress,” he said in Efaula, Oklahoma, on September 28. “And see what you got. I won’t feel a bit sorry for those people who stay at home and don’t vote and then complain about what they’re getting out of this Republican Congress. They haven’t got a kick coming. Don’t do that this time.”
Little noticed by the crowd, a figure would step down from the train and wander amid the throng. Under most other circumstances, with his height and looks Clifford would be a center of attention. But on these occasions, sometimes accompanied by one-star General Wallace Graham, the president’s personal physician, he would wander through the crowd and subtly pump up the enthusiasm (one reporter described the pair as a couple of “carnival shills”)—not that Truman needed much help on that count.
“Truman was entertainment: He not only had something to say, but he always said it in a manner that the audience liked, even if they weren’t going to vote for him, and even if they knew he was going to lose,” Elsey recalled. “He was free entertainment.”
He was also good copy for the newspaper reporters who scrambled out of the train, hoping not to miss anything the president might say. As a result, the next day’s papers would have Truman’s comments on a range of issues. The reporters were not the only ones scrambling. His writers would either listen live or get hold of transcripts to see what lines Truman had used on the stump and then write the good ones into the next speech or outline. “In this sense, I suppose he did more in writing his own whistle-stop speeches than anyone else because this was a standard technique,” Murphy recalled. “I suppose you might call it an editing job.”
Speaking from one of Elsey’s outlines, Truman would lay into his favorite target, the “do-nothing Eightieth Congress,” whipping the crowd up before asking if they would like to meet his family. Out would come “the Boss”—Mrs. Truman—followed by Margaret (“Miss Margaret,” in the border states), whom he described as the one “who bosses the bosses.” The president would then lean over the brass railing, grabbing an outstretched hand or two as the local band started to play again. A piercing toot would send reporters scrambling back on board. And slowly the train would start rolling down the tracks. As the Ferdinand Magellan trundled away, Margaret would toss a single red rose into the crowd.
They loved it: He was going to lose, but so what?
But ceaseless work for an apparently futile cause took its toll. Clifford suffered from an attack of boils during the course of the summer. “It was a real ordeal,” he said of the campaign. “I don’t know quite how I got through it except I was young at the time and strong and vigorous.” For months after the election, Clifford woke in cold sweats, sure that he was still on the train, unable to escape.
Spared the stress—and none too pleased about it—was Sam Rosenman. Although he had worked on the acceptance speech and had cleared his fall schedule to travel with the president, he was not invited on the train trip. “I know it was not an oversight but a deliberate exclusion,” Rosenman said sadly more than twenty years later. “It has always been a mystery to me…I make no secret of the fact that I resented it, was very angry about it—and still am.” Rosenman did contribute to a handful of speeches late in the campaign, but he was mostly absent.
At times it seemed as if Truman was the least affected by the stress and pace. He drew energy from the growing and enthusiastic crowds. And they responded—especially when he savaged his favorite target, the GOP Congress. “And this Republican Congress never acted until it heard its master
’s voice—the chief lobbies for whatever bill was pending before the Congress,” he told the crowd at Muskogee, Oklahoma, on September 29. “I make that charge advisedly, and if they want me to prove it and name names and give them the chapter and verse, I can give them that, too.”
A typical speech started with praise for the crowd and community. “We had quite an experience this morning down at a little town called Oxford,” Truman said in Des Moines on September 18. “They told me the town had 500 people in it, and there were 2,500 people on the platform. Now, that’s a feat that I never have known a big city to do in the history of the country—to get five times the number of the people in the town on the platform to welcome the President of the United States.”
He would site a piece of trivia or praise a local candidate before lighting into the Republicans, especially on issues important to farmers or union members, two of the groups targeted in his campaign.
“This 80th ‘do-nothing’ Republican Congress did its best to cut the ground from under the farmer, and I want to say to you that, if this Republican outfit had control of the government of the United States, the farmer would have been out the window right now,” he said in Fort Worth, Texas, on September 27. Or in Ashland, Kentucky, on October 1: “Congressman Hartley proposed only a few days ago to bring the unions under the laws against monopolies. That’s a typical Republican Party act. They want to put the laboringman, in his fight for good wages, in the same class with the billion-dollar corporation. They want to do that so they can cut down on the workingman’s share of the national income.”
Not everyone agreed with Truman’s attack posture—his press secretary Charlie Ross thought that the president should use more dignified language. Even Clifford later conceded that some of the lines—that Republicans were “gluttons of privilege” who had “stuck a pitchfork in the farmer’s back”—could have been moderated. But Truman loved it. “You remember back in Hoover’s campaign, the slogan was: ‘Two cars in every garage,’” he said in Wilmington, Delaware, on October 6. “Apparently, the Republican candidate is running on a slogan of two families in every garage.”
One of the few Republicans he rarely mentioned was New York governor Thomas Dewey, his opponent. Starting with the “Turnip session,” Truman ignored the moderate Dewey and instead ran hard against the villainous Congress. In two months of off-the-cuff campaign talks, he mentioned Dewey by name twice. By comparison, he mentioned Ohio Republican senator Robert Taft more than three dozen times.
He would occasionally refer to Dewey obliquely. “My opponent has talked a great deal too, but he said almost nothing about where he stands on the major issues facing the American people today,” the president said in Garrett, Indiana, on October 25. “He just keeps on giving the people high-level platitudes. You know, that’s what ‘G.O.P.’ means in this day and age—it means ‘Grand Old Platitudes.’”
Truman was right. Comfortable in the certainty of victory, Dewey ran a bland, robotic campaign. Where Truman gave a new speech at as many as fifteen stops per day, Dewey repeated the same speech over and over again.* Reporters scrambled to hear Truman’s talks but stayed on Dewey’s train when he spoke. “Perhaps the best way to describe the atmosphere on the campaign train during this trip is to use the characterization of a newspaper man who rode with us,” White House aide William Bray recalled. “On the Dewey train, he said, the newspapermen played bridge and drank martinis and manhattans. On the Truman train they played poker and drank scotch and bourbon.”
An opportunity was about to be wasted, Elsey thought. Two weeks after Truman’s stunning election victory, the president planned to send a written State of the Union message up to Congress, focusing his energy on his inaugural address.† Elsey dashed off a memo to Clifford, who was vacationing with Truman in Key West, Florida. The president should deliver the State of the Union in person, Elsey wrote, focusing it exclusively on his domestic agenda while devoting the inaugural address to foreign affairs.
His memo won Elsey a trip down to Key West to make the case personally. When Truman agreed to the idea, Murphy took the lead on writing the speech, with help from Lloyd, who had impressed with his contributions in the campaign. Three days before it was to be delivered, Truman, Clifford, and the rest of the writers were arrayed around the Cabinet Room table editing. Truman made only minor changes—scratching out the occasional word or inserting a clarifying phrase. His one major edit came in the conclusion. Crossing out a paragraph about the American people’s desire that the president and Congress work together as “responsible partners,” he scribbled an insertion that read, in part, “I expect to try to give every segment of our population a fair deal.”
Historic phrases and slogans rarely come bidden. Like “new deal” seventeen years earlier, “fair deal” appeared organically as a lower-cased phrase before it became an upper-cased, agenda-defining slogan. Clifford quickly saw the potential of the phrase, however, and pointed it out to reporters in background discussions. Having broken free of Roosevelt’s stylistic shadow in the campaign, Truman was now setting his programmatic mark.
After Truman gave the State of the Union address on January 5, 1949, he and his staff incredibly took a few days’ breather before starting the serious work of the inaugural address. The development of the speech is striking first because substantial work on it was done in less than two weeks, a very short time, and second, the speech created a landmark foreign aid program almost from whole cloth, and almost entirely within the White House writing staff.
“The circumstances of the President’s re-election thrilled the free world, and the dramatic occasion of his inauguration on January 20 will insure [sic] world-wide attention to what the President may say on that occasion,” Elsey had written in November 1948. “No other occasion in the foreseeable future offers the President so great an opportunity to speak to the entire world. His election on November 2 confirmed his role as the leader of the free peoples of the world in their search for peace, and I believe his words on January 20 should match the dignity and responsibility of that role.”
Clifford, Elsey, and Lloyd met at ten thirty in the morning on Monday, January 10, in Clifford’s office—ten days before Truman would be sworn in—to outline the inaugural. They contemplated a half-dozen ideas, discarding a pair outright (one, according to Elsey’s handwritten notes, was a discussion of what would happen if the Soviets and the United States “clashed”; the other was “Why clash…unnecessary”).
On the list of ideas, along with references to the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the United Nations, Clifford had added in pencil: “Hardy’s idea.” The first three items were well known and well developed, and formed the heart of a typically overwritten first draft that the State Department produced. That draft was a grand philosophical statement about the nature of democracy and the rights of man, containing decidedly non-Trumanesque rhetoric. (“Today we find world democracy, adding to its bright record of progressive achievement, not only challenged by tasks of sobering magnitude but also under calculated assault by doctrines dedicated to the proposition that men cannot be trusted to govern themselves.”)
Enter Benjamin Hardy. A former reporter for the Atlanta Journal, Hardy had joined the State Department and, during the war, served in Brazil. The New Deal’s accomplishments in his home state of Georgia having shown him new technologies’ power to transform underdeveloped economies, he realized the same lessons could work abroad. At the midlevel in the department’s public affairs division Hardy had seen a mid-November Clifford memorandum requesting new ideas for the inaugural. Hardy suggested to his superiors that the United States give technical aid to Third World countries to help their development. “This is the way to make the greatest psychological impact and to ride and direct the universal groundswell of desire for a better world,” he wrote on November 23 to Francis Russell, the department’s head of public affairs. The Department of State reacted in the classic bureaucratic manner: The proposal required mor
e study.
And the idea likely would have disappeared into Foggy Bottom’s musky innards but for Hardy’s initiative. On December 15, he picked up the phone and called Elsey directly, asking to see him. Assuming that it was official, “in-channels” business, Elsey agreed. He was surprised when Hardy arrived in his White House office and launched into a passionate plea for his idea. Elsey liked it, as did Clifford. It was “a speech in search of an idea, and an idea in search of a speech,” Elsey later said.
Grouped with the three familiar pillars of foreign policy, this program became known as “Point Four.” Bureaucratic maneuvering ensued. In order to protect Hardy, Clifford and Elsey made a pretense of officially asking the department for suggestions on a technical assistance program for the address. Though at least five drafts of a response circulated inside the department, the only one Clifford or Elsey ever received was leaked to them by Hardy.
Despite State Department resistance, a draft of the inaugural, including Point Four, was ready for a presidential read-through on the afternoon of January 14. Truman immediately grasped the importance of the program, saying that he wanted to emphasize that it was not a sop to Wall Street but that the development would be in the interests of the countries concerned.
“H.S.T.” was “All for point 4,” Elsey penciled in his notes. “But just don’t play into hands of crackpots at home—no ‘milk for Hottentots.’” This was a reference to Henry Wallace’s 1942 comment as vice president that the object of the war was to “make sure that everybody in the world has the privilege of drinking a quart of milk a day.” The remark had led to critics derisively referring to his aims as “Milk for Hottentots.”
Told that neither State nor the Bureau of the Budget had signed off on the new program, Truman laughed. “I’ll announce it and then they can catch up with me!” he responded. He gave the speech on a crisp, clear, cold January afternoon and was enthusiastically received. “We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas,” Truman said. “More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas. For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and skill to relieve suffering of these people.”
White House Ghosts: Presidents and Their Speechwriters Page 7
