Harry Truman (63 page)

Naturally, the person on whom this atomic flap took the most terrible toll was Charlie Ross. Inevitably, he felt responsible for his fellow newsmen’s lapse. He thought he should have anticipated the question or asked Dad to clarify his remarks before the press conference ended. Charlie had been press secretary for more than five grueling years. “This job is like a prison,” he wrote a friend on May 2, 1950. But he added, “The work remains, of course, extraordinarily interesting.”

Charlie suffered from severe arthritis, and he also had a bad heart. He was at the top of Dr. Graham’s worry list. After he wrote that letter, Charlie and the rest of the White House staff were plunged into the multiple crises of the Korean War. Then came the exhausting trip to Wake Island and the shock of the attempted assassination. Finally, on Monday, December 4, Prime Minister Attlee came hurtling into Washington for a summit conference which only increased the already impossible pressure - especially on Charlie.

The first day of my father’s talks with the prime minister made it clear Attlee’s trip had been unnecessary. There were no real disagreements on any of the world problems they were facing together. But a very garbled account of the first day’s meeting was published in a London paper. Several reporters asked Charlie to give them a more factual briefing on what was really being said. The following day, Charlie discussed this problem with Dad and got permission to tell the reporters everything that did not endanger our security. After lunch that day, aboard the yacht
Williamsburg
with leaders of Congress, Dad and Attlee spent the afternoon discussing the problem of maintaining the Allied coalition in the United Nations, in the face of the new Chinese aggression. Charlie arrived back at the White House in the early evening and gave forty reporters a detailed account of the day’s discussions. He did his usual masterful job. Then he was buttonholed by TV newsmen and asked to repeat some of the things he had said for their cameras. Charlie wearily agreed and sat down at his desk, while they set up a microphone on it. His secretary, Myrtle Bergheim, started kidding him, in the usual style of the Truman White House. “Don’t mumble,” she said.

“You know I always speak very distinctly,” Charlie replied.

Suddenly, the cigarette he had just lit fell from his lips. He slumped back in his chair. Miss Bergheim immediately dialed Dr. Graham’s number, and he sprinted from his office in the main part of the White House. In less than a minute, he was giving Charlie oxygen and administering a heart stimulant. But it was too late. “He was gone,” Dr. Graham said, “before I got there.”

Dad was shattered by the news. It seemed at the time like the last possible thing that could go wrong. He knew better than anyone how totally and unstintingly Charlie had given of himself in his job. Sadly, Dad sat down at his desk and wrote out in longhand a statement which is, I think, one of the most moving things he ever put down on paper.

After the statement was typed, Dad walked down the short corridor to the lounge where the reporters were waiting. They formed a semicircle around him, and he began to read the words, “The friend of my youth, who became a tower of . . .”

He could not go on. “Ah, hell,” he said, and threw the typed words down on the table in front of the reporters. “I can’t read this thing. You fellows know how I feel anyway.”

His head bowed, Dad walked out of the room.

I WANDERED INTO this vortex of grief and crisis. Five hours after Charlie Ross died, I gave the final concert of my 1950 tour at Constitution Hall. Although I was on a warm, first-name basis with all of Dad’s aides, I was closest to Charlie. I treated him like an uncle, and he treated me like a fresh niece. We were always exchanging wisecracks and friendly insults. From the perspective of his own grief, Dad had decided I must not be told what had happened until the concert was over. This was easy enough to achieve. When the President of the United States gives an order, there are dozens of people ready to carry it out. It was far different from keeping the news of the attempted assassination from me. Then I was in a distant city, with only a handful of people to protect me from reporters. Dad’s order was faithfully obeyed. I went onstage knowing nothing about Charlie’s death.

But Dad could not control the reaction of the audience. Charlie Ross was one of the most popular men in Washington. News of his death had spread throughout the city. I was the only one in Constitution Hall who did not know about it. Coming on top of the bad news from Korea and the phony atomic bomb scare, Charlie’s death may have made many people in the audience feel it was bad taste for me to be singing at all. At any rate, I soon sensed there was something wrong with their reaction. At the time, I blamed it on Korea. I was sure it had nothing to do with the music. In fact, I thought it was one of my better performances. At intermission, the music critic for the
Times-Herald
came backstage and congratulated me.

The next day, Dad arose at 5:00 a.m. to grapple once more with the crisis in Korea. He picked up the Washington
Post
and read a savage review of my performance by the paper’s music critic, Paul Hume. “She is flat a good deal of the time,” he wrote. “She cannot sing with anything approaching professional finish. . . . She communicates almost nothing of the music she presents.”

Dad saw red. For him,
this
was the last straw. His best friend had just died, the world situation was going from bad to awful, and now a critic was attacking his daughter with what seemed to be more malice than judgment. Dad sat down and wrote a very angry, longhand note. He told him he sounded like “a frustrated man that never made a success, an eight-ulcer man on a four-ulcer job and all four ulcers working.”

Hume published the note, and the uproar was vast. Dad never felt the slightest remorse about sending it. He always insisted he had a right to be two persons - the President of the United States and Harry S. Truman, father of Margaret, husband of Bess Wallace. “It was Harry S. Truman, the human being, who wrote that note,” he said.

A few days later, he summed up his stand on his calendar-diary. He rested his case more on his judgment of my accompanist’s performance on the piano. Dad would be the first to admit he was somewhat prejudiced in my favor. But when it came to a performance on the piano, he was confident his judgment was as good as any music critic’s in the country.

Dad discussed the letter with his aides and was annoyed to find they all thought it was a mistake. They felt it damaged his image as President and would only add to his political difficulties. “Wait till the mail comes in,” Dad said, “I’ll make you a bet that eighty percent of it is on my side of the argument.”

A week later, after a staff meeting, Dad ordered everybody to follow him, and they marched to the mail room. The clerks had stacked the thousands of “Hume” letters received in piles and made up a chart showing the percentages for and against the President. Slightly over 80 percent favored Dad’s defense of me. Most of the letter writers were mothers who said they understood exactly how Dad felt and would have expected their husbands to defend their daughters the same way. “The trouble with you guys is,” Dad said to the staff as he strode back to work, “you just don’t understand human nature.”

Meanwhile, Dad was meeting the crisis in Korea with that quiet courage he had displayed in the staff meeting on November 28. First, he coped with the defeatism of Prime Minister Attlee and his aides. They urged an immediate attempt to negotiate with the Chinese Communists. Dad absolutely refused to make such a move when we were in a weak position. Among the things the Communists were likely to demand were Formosa, including Chiang Kai-shek, complete control of Korea, and the right to participate in the Japanese peace treaty. Dad took this stand, even though his Joint Chiefs of Staff had joined MacArthur in massive pessimism, and told Attlee they did not think a line could be held in Korea if the Chinese attacked in force. “We did not get into this fight,” Dad said, “with the idea of getting licked. We will fight to the finish to stop this aggression. I don’t intend to take over military command of the situation in Korea - I leave that up to the generals - but I want to make it perfectly plain that we cannot desert our friends when the going gets rough.”

Dad and Secretary of State Acheson also gave Attlee a lesson in political consistency. They pointed out the fate of Europe was intimately connected with Korea. We could not follow a policy of appeasement and surrender in Asia, and a policy of resistance and negotiation from strength in Europe. My father also disagreed with the British desire to seat Communist China in the United Nations at this time. It would be rewarding the Chinese for their aggressive, lawless actions in Korea. At that very moment, there was a Chinese Communist negotiator at the UN, heaping abuse on the United States for their “aggression” in Korea and Formosa. Dad also rejected a rather unsubtle attempt by Attlee to win some control over General MacArthur’s command. General MacArthur was the theater commander, and he had full charge - including full responsibility - for the conduct of war in his theater within the limitations which the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had clearly spelled out to him. Wars could not be run by a committee.

Attlee went home pledging full support to Dad’s determination to stay in Korea - something he had come to Washington without the slightest desire to do. Meanwhile, our UN allies were crumpling in the face of the Chinese Communist propaganda assault. They refused to go along with a resolution condemning Chinese aggression in Korea, and, instead, created an agenda for the General Assembly in which the problem of Formosa took precedence over the problem of Korea. In Congress, hysteria was the order of the day. Twenty-four Republican senators joined in a resolution offered by Senator James P. Kem, of Missouri, demanding to be informed about any “secret commitments” my father made to Attlee - a really laughable idea, in the light of the way Dad quietly strong-armed the prime minister into supporting his policy. A majority of the Republicans in the House of Representatives passed a resolution calling for the dismissal of Dean Acheson. General MacArthur was totally exonerated for the disaster that was threatening us in Korea. It was all Acheson’s fault because he was “soft on communism.”

Nor was the hysteria confined to Congress. On December 12, Joseph P. Kennedy, known at the time only as the former ambassador to London, issued a call for immediate withdrawal from Korea, Berlin, and Europe. He called American policy “suicidal” and “politically and morally bankrupt.” Kennedy had been prominent among those Democrats advising appeasement of Hitler before World War II. He could be safely ignored, but it was harder for Dad to ignore Herbert Hoover, who issued a long, carefully thought out statement, calling for a new policy to “preserve this Western Hemisphere Gibraltar of Western civilization.” In 1944, my father cabled President Roosevelt on the night of their victory, “Isolationism is dead.” He was wrong. It had only been lying dormant, waiting for the moment when defeatism and panic gave it a new opportunity to strike at those who were trying to hold the nation steady on its course as leader of the free world.

In his next press conference, my father blasted back at the attacks on his Secretary of State.

The comment about General Eisenhower was another, equally dramatic example of Dad’s refusal to alter his fundamental policy, in spite of the trouble in Asia. The creation of an integrated European army had been patiently negotiated by Acheson and his assistants during the previous year. It was the climax to the decision to resist Stalin’s aggression in Europe in 1947 - a decision that gave Dad those six weeks of worry he described to me in his letter. He was showing Stalin that, in their duel for world leadership, the United States did not intend to allow a temporary defeat to rattle them. Those last two weeks in December were the days when my father demonstrated the essential strength and potential greatness of the American presidency. The strength of the office lies in its simplicity - the fact that its enormous power is in the hands of a single man. Legislative bodies are notoriously incapable of dealing with periods of crisis. They tend to succumb to the panicky counsels of the timid. The President, as my father has often pointed out, can be as courageous and as great as he and he alone dares to be.

To deal with the panic in Congress, Dad met with congressional leaders of both parties in the Cabinet Room at 10:00 a.m. on December 13. He brought with him to the meeting the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, and several other members of his Cabinet and White House staff. Carefully and calmly, he read to them top secret CIA reports on probable Russian moves around the world. They were, for instance, fiercely attacking our aid to Greece, Turkey, and Yugoslavia. They had also announced they “would not tolerate” the rearmament of Germany, which had become an essential part of our NATO strategy. The emphasis was on the global view of our security, not the battle in Korea. Only after the congressmen had heard these very sobering facts did Dad ask General Marshall to brief them on the situation in Korea. Speaking with the authority only he possessed, the Secretary of Defense assured the congressmen the situation was improving every day. Our army had retreated with very minor losses and was now regrouping with a good chance of making a firm stand. My father then called on each of the congressional leaders, and all of them agreed we had to increase our military strength immediately. Most of them favored declaring a national emergency - which was precisely what Dad was considering as his next step.

First, however, he decided to explain the situation to the American people. He went on radio and television at 10:30 p.m. on December 15 and called on everyone to join in a national effort to meet this crisis. “All of us will have to pay more taxes and do without things we like. Think of this, not as a sacrifice, but as an opportunity, an opportunity to defend the best kind of life that men have ever devised on this earth.”

He did not flinch from the truth about the Chinese offensive. “As I speak to you tonight, aggression has won a military advantage in Korea. We should not try to hide or explain away that fact.” He called on the American people to shoulder a responsibility greater than any nation has ever borne in the history of the world. The goal was peace, a goal that could only be achieved by cooperating with other free nations and “with the men and women who love freedom everywhere. . . .”