by Roy Jenkins
Throughout the spring and summer Stevenson played very hard to get. To a large extent his reluctance was genuine. But this did not make it any less irritating to Truman, who had his own troubles during these months. On March 28th his Director of Defense Mobilisation, Charles E. Wilson, the former head of General Electric,8 resigned in dudgeon against a policy of profit squeeze on the steel industry and brought a great deal of business and press approbrium upon the head of the administration. On April 3rd McGrath, the delinquent Attorney-General, had to be dismissed for quite separate reasons. On April 8th, almost as though to keep up the interest, Truman seized the steel mills. He had been encouraged to take such action by the private, certainly rash, and doubtfully proper counsel of Chief Justice Vinson. Congress declined to give him power to operate the mills, and a Federal Court declared their seizure unconstitutional. The Supreme Court then announced that it would hear the case. This all happened within a week. After that there was an interval until June 2nd, when the Court declared Truman’s action unconstitutional by the crushing majority of six to three. Vinson had been overruled in his own Court, and had carried only one, not very notable, Truman appointee (Minton) with him. Much of the indignity lay in the fact that the majority was stuffed with Democrats who were mostly liberals as well. It was quite unlike 1936 when Roosevelt could portray himself as battling against a fossilized Court of ‘horse and buggy’ reactionaries. In 1952 there was not a single one of the nine justices who was not a Roosevelt or a Truman appointee. Amongst the majority six were Hugo L. Black, who delivered the majority judgment, Felix Frankfurter, Robert H. Jackson, William O. Douglas, and, almost the unkindest cut of all, Tom Clark, the Attorney-General who had been elevated beyond his deserts by Truman a couple of years before.
The immediate result was that Truman allowed the separation of powers to produce the disorganization of government. With the Korean War simmering away, he had a seven week steel strike on his hands. How much harm to national interests it did is open to question. Indeed one of the factors in the adverse judgment was quantitative rather than qualitative: steel stocks were too high to justify presidential high-handedness. But its pressures, leading up to a settlement on July 24th, no doubt increased his feeling that he was grappling with real issues while Stevenson, to quote Joseph Chamberlain’s satirical lines on Gladstone, ‘left us repining while he is, no doubt, still engaged in refining’.
When, therefore, on that same day of July, Stevenson telephoned the President, the first direct communication between them for several months, and asked Truman whether it would embarrass him after all if he allowed his name to be put forward, he got a fairly rough although favourable reply. That is exactly what I have been trying to urge upon your over-elegant mind for the past six months was the essence of the President’s response. In fact this was not wholly true. It had been so, but after the double rebuff of March Truman had switched to Barkley, semi-senile or not, and had sent him out to Chicago with full presidential backing. Barkley, however, in Truman’s view mishandled his essential canvassing of labour leaders, and got a turn-down as firm as Byrnes had received in 1944. He then withdrew, in reality in dismay but in form under the happy smokescreen of a splendid valedictory oration, and left Truman once again fancy free when Stevenson telephoned.
The President thereupon threw himself with almost excessive enthusiasm into a campaign of support for the Governor’s nomination. He believed that his support was decisive. But the surge towards Stevenson was such that he would almost certainly have been swept in whatever Truman had done. He was the first ‘drafted’ Democratic candidate since Garfield in 1880, and that had been on the 36th ballot, whereas Stevenson achieved it on the 3rd. Nor did he make much obeisance to Truman. He excused himself from meeting him at the airport or from dining with him on the evening of his arrival in Chicago. He did, however, allow himself to be escorted by the President down the aisle of the convention hall and introduced by him before delivering at 2.00 a.m. his memorable if unusually humourless and somewhat florid acceptance speech. Truman, like most other people, was moved by the speech. He pledged himself‘to take my coat off and do everything I can to help him win’. He wrote him a warm letter at 6.40 the next morning. He invited him to Washington for strategy discussion and policy briefing, and Stevenson, perhaps without much alternative, accepted. It was the brief high point of their relationship.
Truman was quickly offended by Stevenson’s replacement of the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, by other campaign appointments, by the setting up of his campaign headquarters in Springfield, Illinois, and not in Washington, and by his generally detached behaviour. By early August Truman was writing one of his famous unsent letters to Stevenson, but the tone was more hurt and complaining and less aggressive than usual:
‘Dear Governor,
I have come to the conclusion’, he began, ‘that you are embarrassed by having the President of the United States in your corner in this campaign. Therefore I shall remain silent and stay in Washington until Nov 4th.’
He retailed all the efforts he had made to get Stevenson the candidature, and continued:
‘You were nominated and made a grand acceptance speech. Then you proceeded to break up the Democratic Committee, which I had spent years in organizing, you called in the former mayor of Louisville [Wilson Wyatt] as your personal chairman and fired McKinney, the best chairman of the National Committee in my recollection … I have tried to make it plain to you that I want you elected –in fact I want you to win this time more than I wanted to win in 1948. But—I can’t stand snub after snub from you and Mr Wyatt … I shall go to the dedication of the Hungry Horse Dam in Montana (due in late September), make a public power speech, get in a plane and come back to Washington and stay there. You and Wilson can now run your campaign without interference or advice.’5
Within a couple of weeks matters got still worse. Stevenson, maybe carelessly allowing an instinctive assumption of his mind to come to the surface, committed Truman’s old fault of allowing a questioner to put words into his mouth. It was more reprehensible, however, for it was a written exchange. ‘Can Stevenson really clear up the mess in Washington?’ the Oregon Journal asked him. ‘As to whether I can clean up the mess in Washington’ he answered, ‘I would bespeak the careful scrutiny of what I inherited in Illinois and what has been accomplished in three years.’ The reply reverberated around the continent. The Democratic candidate had accepted the validity of one of the main Republican catch phrases of the campaign. Truman was affronted, and returned to the writing table within a few days. On this occasion he started with more raillery and less rancour than before:
‘My Dear Governor,
Your letter to Oregon is a surprising document. It makes the campaign rather ridiculous. It seems to me that the Presidential Nominee and his running mate are trying to beat the Democratic President instead of the Republicans and the General of the Army who heads their ticket. There is no mess in Washington except the sabotage press …’
However, he soon jerked himself up on to a sharper note:
‘You fired and balled up the Democratic National Committee Organization that I’ve been creating over the last four years.
‘I’m telling you to take your crackpots, your high socialites with their noses in the air, run your campaign and win if you can. Cowfever could not have treated me any more shabbily than you have …
‘Best of luck from a bystander who has become disinterested.’6
It was bitter stuff (again not sent of course) and although it represented a part of Truman’s feelings he gave no public vent to them and he in no way carried out his threat (which would have inflicted more deprivation upon himself than upon Stevenson) to remain silent, stationary and sullen. The Hungry Horse expedition, for instance, turned into a full-scale campaign trip, with the presidential train, and a pattern of six or eight speeches a day which was similar to that of 1948, except that the full blast of public attention was not on the President, who was not
a candidate.
He and Stevenson never appeared together, which was perhaps as well for there was a fairly wide gulf of style and substance between them. Truman was happy to provide the rough stuff for which he thought that Stevenson was too mealy-mouthed. Some of it he did very well. He had a good joke about the initials GOP really standing not for Grand Old Party but for the Generals’ Own Party. ‘The Republicans,’ he said, ‘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 … [but] general welfare is with the corporals and the privates in the Democratic Party.’7
On the whole however he made the mistake of striking too persistent and strident a note of abuse of Eisenhower. From the beginning he resented his candidature. John Snyder, who was the closest link between them, was probably right when he said that Truman thought Eisenhower should have run as a Democrat. It was Democratic presidents who had given him the opportunity to build up his reputation.8 This initial resentment provided the seed-bed from which there sprouted his violent reactions to any politickings which Eisenhower indulged in during the campaign. Some of them were admittedly discreditable, most notably the General’s excision of a pro-Marshall section from his speech when he appeared on a platform with McCarthy in Wisconsin. However, Truman treated almost everything the General did, from this craven act to his only mildly demagogic undertaking to go to Korea himself and see if he could dig out the bogged down negotiations, as being intolerable, and denounced him in immoderate terms. His responses to the Wisconsin episode, while strong -Eisenhower had ‘betrayed his principles’, ‘deserted his friends’, and amazed Truman by ‘stoop[ing] so low’, were perhaps justified. But it was clearly a mistake to send a message to the Jewish Welfare Board accusing Eisenhower, on a somewhat convoluted argument about immigration, of having endorsed the practices of the ‘master race’, and discriminated against Jews and Catholics. Rabbis and cardinals responded by denouncing Truman. He was hit hard by the boomerang which he had thrown. But what was more interesting was that he should have been surprised at Eisenhower’s resentment. He had an engagingly innocent belief that Eisenhower should expiate his sin of seeking the Republican nomination by going round the country paying tribute to Roosevelt, Truman, Marshall and Acheson, under or with whom he had served during Democratic administrations, but that his own denunciations of Republicans were the legitimate ammunition of healthy, hardhitting politics. As a result he drove Eisenhower into muttering that he would break a precedent which had stood since 1801 and refuse to drive down Pennsylvania Avenue with Truman on Inauguration Day. He would meet him at the Capitol steps.
This menace was no more carried out than was Truman’s own threat that he would not campaign. But the fissure was never healed. It at least had the advantage that it took Truman’s mind off his Stevenson resentments. Strong though these were, he would still have much preferred the Governor to beat the General. He was one of the few major politicians whose commitment to his party was much deeper than any personal dislikes. At least from mid-October onwards there was little doubt that Eisenhower would win. There was no foolish boasting in his talking about what he would do at the inauguration ceremony. The result gave him a majority of about 10% or 6½ million votes over Stevenson. He carried 38 out of 48 states, defeating the Governor in Illinois and leaving him mostly only with a South eroded around the edges.
It was not as overwhelming a victory as those achieved by Roosevelt in 1946, Johnson in 1964, Nixon in 1972, or Reagan in 1984, but it was very substantial. Truman disliked the result but was not surprised by it. He indulged in no public recrimination against the defeated Stevenson. He had a small White House dinner party for him in early December and worked out with him future dispositions in the Democratic Party machine.9 In his Memoirs, published in 1955, he wrote a detached but not bitter criticism of Stevenson’s conduct. ‘His was a great campaign and did credit to the party and the nation … His ability to put into inspiring words the principles of the Democratic Party earned him fame and world-wide recognition. I hold him in the highest regard for his intellectual courage.’9 However, he also calmly rehearsed his objections of the time to the shape of Stevenson’s candidature and came to the conclusion that, had Stevenson gone straight for the nomination from January 1952 and worked more closely with the traditional Democratic base, he might have won at least 3 million more votes, hardly enough to win but enough to make the result close. As the 1956 election approached, Truman withheld his support from Stevenson and gave it unwaveringly to Harriman, up to and over the Convention, once more in Chicago, at which Stevenson was comfortably re-nominated, but certainly not drafted.
Between the 1952 election and Inauguration Day Eisenhower came once to the White House. It was on November 18th, and was a mutually unsatisfactory meeting. Eisenhower was all buttoned up, and Truman superficially at least, tried a little too easily to let bygones be bygones. He offered Eisenhower some commemorative paintings of local heroes given by Latin American governments, which were refused, a globe which Eisenhower had given to Truman in Germany in 1945, the return of which was ‘not very graciously’ accepted, and some fairly gratuitous bits of advice about how to run the presidential office, which Truman thought ‘went into one ear and out of the other’.10
After that they did not see each other again until January 20th. That was a spectacularly prickly occasion. Eisenhower declined the supposedly traditional luncheon invitation from the Trumans.10 He did, however, resile from his earlier intention to make Truman pick him up at the Statler Hotel. He drove to the White House but did not get out of the car. During the drive the only conversation exchanged seems to have been about Eisenhower not having seen a previous inaugural, for he had not been there in 1948 in order, so he is alleged to have self-regardingly said, not to attract attention away from the re-elected President. ‘You were not here in 1948,’ Truman emolliently replied, ‘because I did not send for you … if I had … you would have come.’11 Eisenhower is then said to have complained that the outgoing President had ordered his son, John Eisenhower, home from Korea to attend the ceremony and, no doubt by so doing, embarrass the incoming one. The fact that, three days later, Eisenhower wrote to Truman to thank him for this act of consideration, and indeed for his general courtesy during the handover, does not invalidate the unfortunate picture of two gentlemen in their sixties, both outstanding servants of the greatest democracy in the world, behaving in a way which would have been discreditable to two small boys of eight.
After November 4th the pace of activity began to slow down. Truman was still Chief Executive, but there was no point in trying to execute anything which would not come to fruition in the next few weeks. Already in September he had been told that the incoming mail had fallen below 5,000 pieces a day for the first time during his presidency. This was normal, he was told by the chief clerk (who must have had a long memory for similar circumstances had not occurred since the last days of Hoover) ‘when the White House occupant was not coming back’. The lack of pressure did not reduce the length of his days. But it did give him more time for committing rumination to paper. On November 24th at 5.00 a.m., allowing for a few differences of style from Waugh and background from Lord Marchmain, he was almost parodying the deathbed soliloquy in Brideshead Revisited:11
‘The White House is quiet as a church. I can hear the planes at the airport warming up. As always there is a traffic roar—sounds like wind and rain through the magnolias.
‘Bess’s mother is dying across the hallway. She was ninety years old August 4th. Vivian’s [his brother’s] mother-in-law passed on Saturday at eleven thirty. She also was ninety just a month after or before Mrs Wallace. When you are sixty-eight death watches come often …
‘Since last September Mother Wallace has been dying -even before that, but we’ve kept doctors and nurses with her night and day and have kept her alive. We had hoped -and still hope—she’ll survive until C
hristmas. Our last as President.
‘This old House is a most remarkable one. Started in 1792 by George Washington’s laying of the corner stone. Burned in 1814, by the British. Occupied by John and Abigail Adams …
‘Jefferson receiving diplomats in house slippers and dressing gown. Dolley Madison loading pictures and books and documents into a wagon and escaping just two jumps ahead of the British …
‘Then Monroe refinishing the rehabilitated old place with his own and some imported French furniture. And catching hell because he sent to Paris to buy things he could not obtain in the primitive U.S.A.!
‘Old John Quincy Adams who went swimming in the Chesapeake and Potomac Canal every morning … Then old Andy Jackson and his rough, tough backwoodsmen walking on the furniture with muddy boots and eating a 300 pound cheese, grinding it into the lovely Adams and Monroe carpets!’12
Mrs Wallace died on December 5th, the day after a rather grand farewell dinner with wives for the Cabinet, the senior White House staff and, almost inevitably, the Chief Justice. In spite of her thirty-three years of determined co-habitation, Truman seems genuinely to have mourned her. ‘She was a great lady,’ he wrote. ‘When I hear these mother-in-law jokes, I don’t laugh.’13
The family took her out to Missouri to be buried, and then came back to Washington for a White House Christmas which could hardly be regarded as the end of a tradition, for it was only the second which they had spent in what Margaret Truman liked referring to as ‘the great white gaol’.
In early January, when life might have been expected to be getting a little flat, there was a Churchill visitation. Truman had come to adore Churchill. He ought (not in a moral but in a matching sense) to have preferred Attlee, but he did not. Churchill, for Truman, represented greatness without Roosevelt’s pretension. The thought of the Hudson Valley always rather oppressed him. Blenheim and Chartwell were too remote to have any such effect. And Churchill reciprocated, with a mixture of flattery and foresight, by treating Truman as a world statesman. He, in turn, almost certainly preferred Truman to Roosevelt, with whom his relationship was much more a necessary and beneficial alliance of occasion than it was a partnership of affection. Roosevelt, in the early 1940s, accentuated the power of the United States by being mildly patronizing, even to Churchill. Truman, in the early 1950s, when in fact the power discrepancy had grown greater, mitigated it by being respectful, although not subservient.
