Truman

by Roy Jenkins

  Roosevelt decided to have his fourth inauguration ceremony on the south porch of the White House rather than on Capitol Hill. The war provided the excuse. It was a bleak ceremony on a day of driving rain and sleet. Roosevelt had done it too often before to be much interested. He made a fairly perfunctory address to the 7,800, a high proportion from Missouri (one of his few signs of consideration for Truman) who were given the privilege of standing on a squelching lawn, and then quickly disappeared upstairs, leaving Mrs Roosevelt and the Trumans to receive these guests in their damp shoes and somewhat lowered spirits.

  In spite of this inauspicious beginning, Truman rather enjoyed being Vice-President. He only held the job for eleven weeks and five days (both Tyler and Andrew Johnson had held it even more briefly), which hardly gave him time to become bored. Of these 82 days, Roosevelt spent only 30 in Washington. His absences did not of course mean that Truman took over the government of the United States. The power of executive decision remained wholly with the Cabinet officers and with the White House staff left in Washington, subject to such instructions as they received from the other members of the staff who were travelling with the President. But it at least meant that Truman, who had not been considered for inclusion in the Yalta party, could not feel resentment at not seeing Roosevelt, who was mostly 6,000 miles away. He got on with presiding over the Senate, cultivating his congressional relationships, and, rather surprisingly, being the most social Vice-President for many years. ‘For a while,’ Margaret Truman wrote, ‘scarcely a night went by without him and mother departing from our Connecticut Avenue apartment, looking tremendously regal in evening dress.’9

  The main task, at once ironical and disparaging, which Roosevelt set him was that of getting Henry Wallace confirmed by the Senate as Jesse Jones’s replacement as Secretary of Commerce. He achieved it with great difficulty and at the price of Wallace losing a substantial part of the powers that Jones had exercised.

  The main initiative that he took was to requisition a US Army bomber to attend Tom Pendergast’s funeral in Kansas City. Pendergast died on January 26th. He was long since out of gaol, but was without influence and left only $13,000. It was six days after the inauguration and Roosevelt had already departed for Yalta. So Truman had to make his own decision about both the funeral (which he would no doubt have done in any event) and the bomber (which alone made his attendance compatible with an important Philadelphia speaking engagement). He was much criticized, but his presence meant a great deal to the Pendergast family. He had no doubt that it was a proper discharge of an old debt of political friendship.

  Roosevelt got back at the end of February. A week before Washington had been swept by a rumour that he had died at sea, but it was General ‘Pa’ Watson, his long-standing military aide, and not the President himself who had gone. March was a month of continuing allied military success, but also of gravely deteriorating relations with the Russians, with the exchange of messages of mounting complaint and acerbity between Stalin and Roosevelt. There were also several disagreeable edges to the relationship between the President and Congress. Truman had two meetings at the White House during the month, but it was only Congressional difficulties and not global problems which were even perfunctorily discussed. Truman was given no special account of the Yalta Conference. It became abundantly clear that the President had neither the energy nor the desire to bring a new face into the inner core of government.

  At the end of March Roosevelt left for Warm Springs, Georgia. There, two weeks later, at the beginning of a sunny afternoon he had his massive stroke and was dead in a couple of hours. Truman received the news in Washington in the rain. After a desultory day presiding over a desultory session of the Senate he was having a restorative drink in Sam Rayburn’s office when he was hurriedly summoned to the White House. He made the journey only half fearing the worst. When he got there he was shown to Mrs Roosevelt’s upstairs study, where she was with her daughter and son-in-law and the White House press secretary. She told him what had happened. He was sworn in at 7.09 p.m. just over three hours after President Roosevelt had been pronounced dead. So, as the news rang around the world, there began the transition described at the beginning of this book.

  5

  THE NEW PRESIDENT

  Almost all Truman’s early views about how he should handle the Roosevelt inheritance, at once splendid and frightening, turned out to be wrong.

  His initial ideas, I believe, were roughly these. First, his perceived inferiority would be greater than he himself thought it to be. (His real view of Roosevelt stood well short of idolatry; in view of the treatment he had received it would have been a miracle had this not been so.) He would therefore respond by exaggerating his own very considerable modesty. This reflected itself in his early statements to the press: ‘I don’t know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay or a tree fall on you. But last night the house, the stars and all the planets fell on me. If you fellows ever pray, pray for me.’ The trouble with this was that he was in danger of publicly under-valuing himself.

  Second, on policy issues, particularly in the, to him, largely hidden fields of strategy and inter-Allied relations, he would discover Roosevelt’s designs and continue to execute them. The trouble with this was that Roosevelt had at the end very few designs. He had always relied heavily on improvisation. This tendency became still greater as he grew more tired, and in any event the circumstances were changing so fast as the strains with Russia increased and the discipline of the single objective of victory was removed.

  At the same time Truman believed that he should exploit his few obvious areas of greater strength: notably his natural accessibility, and the fact that (Harding, who hardly counted, apart), he would be the first president from the Congress since McKinley. He symbolized both by going to lunch on Capitol Hill almost as ‘one of the boys’ on his first day in office. The trouble with this was that it was very time consuming, and combined with his self-deprecation looked as though he was putting the presidency into commission. There was more real danger of time loss than of making himself a cipher of the legislature. In domestic policy he turned out to have more battles with the Congress than any president since Andrew Johnson. But his appointment sheets were full of ‘Judge X—to pay respects’ and ‘Representative Y—just to visit’.

  This combined with the development of an almost obsessive desire to leave no decision untaken—another area where he believed he could improve upon Roosevelt—meant that he left himself inadequate time for reflection and discussion. It was not that he was ill-briefed. He read his papers meticulously and impressed those around him with the thoroughness with which he mastered facts. But he was so determined to be decisive on the issues of the day, and then to have an untroubled night’s sleep before awakening fresh and early for the separate decisions of the next day, that he was in danger of not fully considering the options, and not seeing one decision’s impact upon another, or indeed its relation with a coherent general policy. A classic early example was his acceptance of a recommendation to cut off Lend-lease within a few days of the end of the war in Europe.

  There was also a risk of his losing the advantages of the remarkable quality of many of the people who were assembled in wartime Washington. First he lurched towards continuity by asking all the members of the Roosevelt Cabinet to stay in office. The trouble with this was that it was not where Roosevelt had assembled his most useful talent. He took scant notice of his Cabinet. After Pearl Harbor it rarely met. In accordance with American practice it did not engage in serious collective discussion. And by 1945 the older members were becoming played out. This was true of Frances Perkins at Labor and even of Harold Ickes at the Interior. Stettinius, who as the holder of the most senior post should have been the most important of the newer ones, was a handsome nonentity. Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury since 1934, was in a separate position. He was intellectually vigorous, but the author of a singularly silly plan for the post-war treatment of Germany. Wallace was Wall
ace. Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy for the past year, had more brio than balance.1 The Cabinet officer with the most authority was probably Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of War since 1940, but as a 78-year-old Republican2 he was certain not to stay long in a post-war Democrat Cabinet.

  Truman balanced this temporary obeisance to continuity at Cabinet level by the replacement (with only one senior exception, old Admiral Leahy) of Roosevelt’s staff with his own in the White House. Probably no one would have expected him to have done otherwise, although nearly twenty years later Lyndon Johnson, for all his Texan chips, was to keep far more Kennedy men.

  There were far more to keep, and this White House change was not as important in 1945 as it would have been in 1963 or still more so 1985. Truman’s own White House staff was never more than thirteen, compared with the many times that number who served President Johnson in the 1960s and the more than 300 who serve President Reagan today. The biggest growth was under President Nixon. Quality did not however make up for quantity. Truman liked cronies immediately around him, and there was mostly a strong whiff of the second-rate about the immediate entourage. Poker players from Missouri got too many places. For a number of reasons this did not do as much harm as might have been expected. First there were exceptions, most notably Clark Clifford, who although a Missourian arrived by accident as an assistant naval aide, and emerged after a year as an outstanding top staff man, who effectively ran Truman’s White House until 1950.

  Second the Missouri poker players were neither vicious nor over-ambitious. They were a little easy-going. General Vaughan was a typical example. Unlike some of their successors they did not pursue dedicated feuds either amongst themselves or with the rest of official Washington. Above all they did not try to make the President their creature or to cut him off from other advice.

  Truman did not stick long to Roosevelt’s Cabinet. By July 1945, he had replaced the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Attorney-General, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Labour, and the Postmaster-General. Only four remained, and of these Stimson went in September and Ickes in the following February. One of the changes had been arranged under Roosevelt, two or three of them were wholly voluntary, and at least one (the removal of Stettinius) was highly desirable. But on balance Truman probably reduced the quality of the Cabinet, while at the same time considerably elevating its importance. He stopped well short of turning it into a collective decision-making body. His vote, following the Lincoln aphorism, counted for more than all the rest put together. Nevertheless he assembled them, in principle at least, twice a week, once in formal session and once at lunch.

  Stettinius’s replacement was Byrnes. He was one of Truman’s two most mistaken appointments. (The other, much later, was Louis Johnson, Secretary of Defense, 1949-50). Byrnes was quick-footed, self-confident, politically astute, but at once know-all and ill-informed about foreign affairs. Above all, however, his disadvantage was that he thought he and not Truman ought to be President,3 and so behaved. As a result their relations quickly declined. This neutralized what should have been the big gain of getting someone more able than Stettinius.

  Biddle, a distinguished Attorney-General, was replaced by one of his less good assistants, Tom Clark. For the rest, as with Byrnes, Truman leant heavily upon former members of Congress, which Roosevelt had never done. Anderson, the new Secretary of Agriculture, Schwellenbach, the new Secretary of Labour, and Vinson, the new Secretary of the Treasury, were all in this category. Schwellenbach was a near disaster. Vinson was the best, certainly the one Truman most respected. Unfortunately, from the point of view of the quality of the Cabinet, Truman added friendly consideration to respect and appointed Vinson Chief Justice of the Supreme Court when Stone died in the spring of 1946. He was then succeeded by Snyder, Truman’s old St Louis banker friend, who was already in the government, and who made a thoroughly second-rate finance minister.

  Little of this either sounds inspiring or gives an adequate picture of the quality of mid-1940s Washington. This is largely because of Roosevelt’s fondness for operating outside structures. Many of the most talented officials whom he bequeathed to Truman were in neither the Cabinet nor the White House staff. They operated from somewhere between the two, and became a feature of the Washington scene which has never been wholly paralleled elsewhere. Hopkins, Harriman, McCloy, Lovett were quintessential figures of this demi-monde. When he could Truman kept them on (Hopkins was dead in nine months but Truman had probably got more hard information about what Roosevelt had done or intended out of him in the first three months than from any more formal source), often gradually drafting them and others into more structured positions. He was also extremely lucky to have General Marshall available, first for a special mission to China, then as Secretary of State after Byrnes, and finally, after a gap, as Secretary of Defense during the Korean War. He, with Dean Acheson, Under-Secretary of State from 1945 to 1947, Secretary of State from 1949 until January 1953, were the twin pillars of Truman’s international reputation.

  In the spring and early summer of 1945 all this lay well ahead. Truman floundered. But as is frequently the case in comparable circumstances the nation either did not notice or it decided, after twelve years of Roosevelt and with the initial shock over, that what they would most enjoy was a little presidential floundering. By mid-May Truman’s approval rating in the Gallup poll rose to 87%, three points higher than Roosevelt had ever achieved. It compensated for the frustrations of dealing with Stalin, and indeed with Churchill too. ‘… I was having as much difficulty with Prime Minister Churchill as I was having with Stalin,’ he recorded on May 19th.1

  This was broadly the mood in which he set off on July 6th for the Potsdam Conference. He was temporarily popular beyond belief. He had the sense to realize how temporary this was likely to be. He had been fully (although for the first time) informed about the atomic development and knew that there was a good chance that the bomb would be shown to work in the next couple of months. He was willing to be conciliatory with the Russians -much more so than he had been at a Washington meeting with Molotov on April 23rd, which he had handled so roughly as to be in danger of giving the impression of a big shift of policy from Roosevelt. But he was equally prepared to be tough and felt fortified for this by the news about the bomb. He approached the expedition—his first outside the Western hemisphere since 1919 -with distaste and in no over-generous mood. ‘How I hate this trip!’ he wrote in his diary on the first day out in his battle cruiser. ‘But I have to make it—win, lose or draw—and we must win. I’m not working for any interest but the Republic of the United States. I [am] giving nothing away except to save starving people and even then I hope we can only help them to help themselves.’2

  In the event he probably disliked it less than he expected. He found Berlin ‘an awful city’ and never wanted to see it again—but who would not in the circumstances—and he was impatient to get back after a month away. However, he felt that he acquitted himself well. As the only Head of State he presided over the conference. The surprise—and the misjudgment—was that he liked Stalin. He reminded him of Pendergast! To his wife he recorded it without ambiguity: ‘I like Stalin’ (July 29th).3 To his diary he was no more circumspect, ‘I can deal with Stalin. He is honest—but smart as hell.’ (July 17th)44

  He was rather less forthcoming about the British, whom he approached with a slightly ungracious suspicion. Before he sailed for Europe he told Bess: ‘George VI R.I. sent me a personal letter today by Halifax. Not much impressed.’ However, he added ‘Save it for Margie’s scrapbook.’5 This was an invitation to stay at Buckingham Palace, which visit, to save time, he managed to change to a luncheon in a British battleship. This he approached with little more enthusiasm: ‘I’ve got to lunch with the limey King when I get to Plymouth.’ However, to his diary, after the event, he was rather more forthcoming. He found the King ‘a very pleasant and surprising person’ and the lunch ‘nice and appetising’.6 Perhaps he was primaril
y concerned to assure Mrs Truman that he was not acquiring Roosevelt’s taste for European royalty.

  His first judgment of Churchill was more surprising, but also a little cool: ‘He is a most charming and a very clever person -meaning clever in the English not the Kentucky sense. He gave me a lot of hooey about how great my country is and how he loved Roosevelt and how he intended to love me, etc. etc. Well, I gave him as cordial a reception as I could—being naturally (I hope) a polite and agreeable person. I am sure we can get along if he doesn’t try to give me too much soft soap.’7

  The change of British Government on July 27th he took with less dismay than, he believed, did Stalin. But here again his comments certainly betrayed no anglomania: ‘The British returned last night. They came and called on me at nine-thirty. Attlee is an Oxford man and talks like the much overrated Mr Eden and Bevin is a John L. Lewis. Can you imagine John L. being my Secretary of State—but we shall see what we shall see. ‘8

  During his journey back across the Atlantic the Hiroshima bomb was dropped. The final decision to do so had been taken by him at Potsdam a day or so after the full results of the Alamogordo test in the New Mexican desert had been received. This is now regarded as the most controversial, some would say immoral, and therefore difficult, decision of the Truman presidency. At the time it was not so seen. The testimony of Churchill puts the contemporary view with complete authority: ‘The historic fact remains, and must be judged in the after-time, that the decision whether or not to use the atomic bomb to compel the surrender of Japan was never even an issue. There was unanimous, automatic, unquestioned agreement around our table; nor did I ever hear the slightest suggestion that we should do otherwise.’9