Harry Truman (66 page)

My father knew this was only a first step. He had been negotiating with the Communists for almost six years now, and he was well aware that attrition was one of their favorite tactics. They were prepared to lie and bluster and talk endlessly about nothing, hoping in the end that the other side would grow weary and make concessions. It was terribly difficult to communicate this to the American people, who were inclined to think a negotiation was a prelude to an early peace. When the truce talks droned on, and the fighting continued, the war became more and more divisive.

McCarthyism spread like a virus through the nation. The Sons of the American Revolution, at their annual convention, passed a resolution condemning the UN as a “thoroughly un-American and sinister organization” and called upon the United States to withdraw from it. One past president said: “Joe Stalin could ask for nothing better than the United Nations for taking over our country.” Bill Hassett laid a clipping from the Kansas City
Star,
telling the story, on Dad’s desk, on July 14, 1951. He replied: “The
Star
clipping which you handed me regarding the Sons of the American Revolution is really an eye-opener. These so-called investigators of un-American activities usually succeed in being more un-American than the people they want investigated.”

My father asked Bill Hassett to prepare a letter to the SAR, and he did it with alacrity. The draft read as follows:

Dad decided this missive would only add to the general uproar and never sent it.

Henry Wallace was one of those thoughtful Americans who was outraged by the McCarthyist attacks on Dad’s foreign policy. On September 19, 1951, Wallace wrote Dad a very strong letter, offering to speak out on what really happened at Yalta, and set the record straight. Dad replied in the following letter:

My father tried to be philosophical about the abuse he was taking. Earlier in the year, he wrote an interesting letter to Max Lowenthal, his old aide on the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee. Max had drawn an interesting parallel between the eighteenth-century British Parliament’s reluctance to support Dutch troops fighting in Belgium against the French with the Senate’s inability to understand our security was now a global problem. Dad replied:

Along with his global worries and the war in Korea, my father also fretted about a traveling daughter during the spring and early summer of 1951. I went abroad for six weeks visiting England, France, Holland, Luxembourg, and Italy. I had an absolutely marvelous time, lunching with British and Dutch royalty, spending twenty minutes in private with Pope Pius XII, and, in between, trudging like a typical tourist through cathedrals and palaces. Even the St. Louis newspapers said I did a useful job as a “good will salesman.” That really amazed and delighted Dad. Seldom did St. Louis papers say anything good about a Truman.

The high point of my visit was lunch with Winston Churchill at Chartwell, his lovely country home. Churchill wore an outfit which only he could have carried off with aplomb - one of his wartime siren suits and an American cowboy’s ten-gallon hat. He took me on a tour of his gardens and fish ponds, discussing fish, shrubs, and other living things with so much affection and knowledge you almost thought they were people. At the fish pond, he sat down on a stool, took some bread crumbs out of his pocket, and said something that sounded like “Hike. Hike. Hike.” The fish immediately swam to him and took the crumbs he had thrown in the pond.

At the end of our lunch, Churchill announced he had a painting which he wanted me to take back to Mother and Dad, as a present. “I’ll be glad to,” I said, “if you put my name on it so that eventually it will be mine.”

The great man was caught off guard. He harrumphed and wondered if I ought to talk to my father before he did a thing like that. “Just put my name on it,” I said. “I can handle him.”

Churchill’s two daughters, Sarah, who was my friend, and Mary and her husband, Christopher Soames, were part of the luncheon party. They watched open-mouthed while he capitulated and put my name on the painting, which was a lovely view of his favorite North African landscape, around Marrakech.

Only later did Sarah tell me I was the first person who had accomplished the feat of extracting one of his paintings from him. Not even the members of the family had been able to manage it.

In Holland, I had to practice a little polite diplomacy. Queen Juliana remarked that they were looking forward to a visit to the United States, which seemed, in her mind, to be imminent. I had to think fast and assure her we would be delighted to see her in the new White House - which was not yet finished.

On June 19, Dad wrote me the following letter, expressing his pleasure with this response, as well as other aspects of my trip:

Toward the end of 1951, the picture in Korea began to brighten dramatically. The Communists had finally realized we were not going to be pushovers at the conference table. General Ridgway and his field commander, General James A. Van Fleet, had carved out a solid line across the peninsula, including a sizable hunk of North Korea which made the 38th parallel militarily defensible for the first time. We gave away a small hunk of South Korea, at the other end of the line. We made it clear to the Communists we were not interested in withdrawing to the literal 38th parallel, thereby surrendering all the crucial high ground from which South Korea could repel an invader. After much screaming, the Communists yielded to our insistence on this point. A supervisory truce team composed of neutral nations was finally worked out. Only one point remained to be decided, the exchange of prisoners.

We had 132,000 Chinese and North Korean prisoners. Under strict instructions from Dad, our negotiators proposed that all prisoners of war who wished to be returned should be exchanged. He was keenly aware that 2 million people had fled from North Korea into South Korea when the Communists took power there. Grimly, my father declared: “We will not buy an armistice by turning over human beings for slaughter or slavery.” For the Communists, propaganda victories were as important as military victories. When they found out that 60,000 of the 132,000 did not want to return to Communist territory, they became enraged and refused to sign the truce agreement. If Dad had given way on this point, he could have ended the Korean War well before the 1952 elections. But Harry Truman never surrendered a principle to gain a political advantage. Although it grieved him that the fighting continued, and American soldiers were still dying on Korea’s barren hills, he would not waver from his stand, all through the year 1952.

For Dad, the numerous ceremonies for Medal of Honor winners, or their survivors were the most trying part of the Korean War. He frequently told the men who won them, “I would rather wear this medal than be President of the United States.”

He scolded himself for this weakness early in 1951. Typically, it was on a day when he should have been enormously proud of himself: “Received the Woodrow Wilson Award today. A wonderful medal with a great citation on the back. Mrs. McAdoo, Sayre, and other highest of the high hats present. It was quite a ceremony. Did not deserve it but that is the case in most awards. But not in those Congressional Medals of Honor I awarded yesterday to the survivors of five Korean heroes. Hope I will not have to do that again. I am a damned sentimentalist and I could hardly hold my voice steady when I gave a medal to a widow or a father for heroism in action. It was similar to giving citations to the men who were shot protecting me at the Blair House - and I choked up just as I did then. What an old fool I am!”

ONLY A FEW days after my father began his second term, General Vaughan asked him: “Are you going to run for reelection in 1952?”

Dad looked up at him in complete astonishment. “Have you lost your mind?” he asked.

The next twelve months did not change his thinking. On April 16, 1950, he wrote himself one of his most important memoranda:

On November 19, 1951, while Dad was vacationing at Key West, he took this memorandum out and read it to his staff. He wanted to let them know his decision, he said, so they would have plenty of time to plan ahead on their careers. However, he made it clear he had no intention of making the announcement public for some time. It was a tremendous tribute to the loyalty Dad’s staff felt for him that the secret, one of the hottest in the history of the presidency, was kept for almost six months. Bill Hassett said it was “one of the most amazing things I recall from all my years in Washington.”

That night at Key West, the conversation immediately turned to the problem of selecting a Democratic nominee for 1952. Just before Dad made his announcement, Adlai Stevenson’s name had come up in the conversation. Dad proceeded to express himself very bluntly on him as a candidate. He said he hoped the Democratic Party “would be smart enough to select someone who could win. And by that I
don’t
mean the Stevenson type of candidate. I don’t believe the people of the United States are ready for an Ivy Leaguer.”

The talk then veered to the man who my father had always hoped would succeed him - Chief Justice Fred Vinson. But Dad had recently had a long talk with “Papa Vin” and had been unable to persuade him to run. He had two good reasons. He hesitated to embroil the Supreme Court in politics, and neither he nor his wife felt his health was strong enough to enable him to sustain a grueling presidential campaign.

Beyond Chief Justice Vinson, my father and his aides faced the rather grim fact there weren’t very many prospective Democratic candidates. Alben Barkley wanted to be President, but he was too old. Estes Kefauver, the junior senator from Tennessee, had a virulent case of White House fever, but Dad considered him a lightweight. He had also alienated most of the big city Democratic leaders with his traveling television circus in 1950, which seemed to specialize in exposing crime and corruption in cities where Democrats were in the majority. Averell Harriman was capable of doing the job, and he wanted it, but he had never campaigned for political office. He could muster only nominal support from Democrats in his home state of New York.

Then, on January 6, 1952, came a shock from abroad. General of the Armies Dwight Eisenhower announced from his NATO headquarters he was ready to accept a call to “duty” higher than his present responsibilities.

My father had sensed for some time Ike was thinking of running for office. When he made one of his periodic visits to Washington early in November 1951, to report on NATO, he had aroused intense political discussion. Ike commented wryly on the hubbub as another “great debate,” and Dad replied, “I’m not interested in that. You can see anybody you want to and do anything you want to while you are here.”

This remark should
not
be interpreted as endorsing Ike for President. At no time did my father ever look favorably on this idea. One version of the story that Dad offered to endorse Ike has him doing it in 1945, in Germany. Neither Dad nor anyone who was with him at that time recalls such a statement. However, General Harry Vaughan does remember a 1946 luncheon at the Pentagon at which Ike entertained Dad, Charlie Ross, Clark Clifford, himself, and a few other aides. There was a good deal of lighthearted banter around the table about army politics and civilian politics. In the course of it, Dad jokingly said to Ike: “General, if you ever decide you want to get into politics, you come to me and I’ll sure endorse you.”

No one took it very seriously. Certainly my father did not take it seriously. In fact, he came to regard references to Ike as a savior figure with considerable amusement. One day in August 1950, the White House received a telegram which read: “May I urge you to suggest to President Truman that he name General Dwight Eisenhower as assistant commander in chief of our armed forces.” Harry Vaughan put it on Dad’s desk, and Dad scribbled on it, “In a terrible quandary over this!”

Even if my father had known Ike was planning to become a candidate, he would still have chosen him for supreme commander in Europe. He was the right man for the job. Also, Ike was humble to the point of obsequiousness in admitting how strongly he approved of Dad’s foreign policy. In the November 1951, meeting at the White House, he told Dad and ten or twelve other members of the Cabinet and staff that when he went to Europe in February 1951, he thought the idea of a European defense force was “as cockeyed an idea as a dope fiend could have figured out. I went over completely hostile to it,” he said. “But now,” he went on, “I’ve shifted.”

Even before that remark, Ike had made a habit of flattering my father. After the 1948 election, he wrote a letter which was almost too thick for Dad’s taste. “You don’t have to reaffirm your loyalty to me,” Dad wrote back. “I always know exactly where you stand.”

In July 1949, Ike wrote another letter, in which he commented on some stamps which the Post Office was designing for him. He remarked that Dad no doubt would be around to make the final decision on them. Dad replied: “I certainly do appreciate your belief that I’ll be able to decide on the postage stamps for 1954. As you know, that is two years beyond the end of this term, and, of course, I haven’t made up my mind yet whether to quit or go ahead and be sure these stamps are gotten out for you. I rather think this is going a little bit far in the future though, and, in all probability, it would be better to take the matter up with the then Postmaster General a few months before the 1954 budget goes into effect.”

Even after the General all but announced his candidacy in January, my father still felt Ike was on his side in the area that mattered most, foreign policy. On January 31, 1952, he wrote the following letter to him:

As long as Senator Robert Taft had seemed to be the probable Republican candidate, my father thought any Democrat with a decent record could win. The emergence of Ike made Dad feel urgent about finding a Democratic candidate, early in 1952. The more he thought about it, the more he became convinced - somewhat reluctantly - that Adlai Stevenson of Illinois was the man. One of the White House aides, Dave Lloyd, had worked with Stevenson in the State Department and was constantly singing his praises. My father finally told Charlie Murphy to call Governor Stevenson and ask him to come to Washington for a talk.

Charlie and Dave Lloyd met Stevenson at George Ball’s office, late in the afternoon of the day he arrived in Washington. They told him why the President wanted to see him, and Stevenson voiced great reluctance about running. Charlie Murphy went directly to the White House and told Dad what Governor Stevenson had said. A President never likes to be confronted by the unexpected, if he can avoid it.

About eight o’clock that night, Governor Stevenson came to Blair House and talked with my father for over an hour. In a memorandum he made later about their conversation, Dad wrote: “I told him what I thought the Presidency is, how it has grown into the most powerful and the greatest office in the history of the world. I asked him to take it and I told him if he would agree he could be nominated. I told him that a President in the White House always controlled the National Convention.”

Stevenson talked all around the subject in his charming, intellectual way. By the time they parted, he had created total confusion, not only in his own mind, but in Dad’s mind. The next morning, when Charlie Murphy asked my father what Governor Stevenson’s answer had been, Dad replied: “Well, he was a little reluctant, but he finally said yes.” Only a few days later Murphy was astonished to learn Stevenson was telling all his friends, including at least one prominent Washington newspaperman, that he had said no.

“This,” Charlie Murphy says with masterful understatement, “was not a situation that you could live with.” He arranged to meet Governor Stevenson for dinner at George Ball’s house. They argued with Stevenson all evening but could not persuade him to say yes. “We left without any answer,” Charlie says, “but at least we had gotten to the point that he understood now he hadn’t said no.”

Some weeks later, Governor Stevenson wrote Murphy a very long letter, explaining why he did not feel he could be the candidate. The sad truth is Stevenson was rather favorably inclined toward General Eisenhower and, like many liberals, even felt that perhaps it was time for a change of parties. My father, with his far greater knowledge of national politics, feared with good reason that the General would be totally unable to cope with the reactionaries in the Republican Party and would become the captive of Senator Taft and his friends.

Another reason for Stevenson’s reluctance became apparent later in the year. He did not want to be Harry S. Truman’s hand-picked candidate. Stevenson had apparently been disheartened by an outbreak of corruption on the lower levels of Dad’s administration. He seemed to feel the President had been tainted with the weakness displayed by Internal Revenue collectors and a few wheeler-dealers in the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. He was unimpressed by the fact that many of the Internal Revenue collectors had been caught and fired before the Republicans in Congress ever began screaming about them, or by the complete overhaul of the RFC my father ordered as soon as signs of corruption were detected there. An assistant attorney general, T. LaMar Caudle, who was more naïve than corrupt, was fired the moment his dubious dealings with tax-fixers came to light. When Howard McGrath, the Attorney General, attempted to defend Caudle, he too was fired. No sensible person can expect a President to do more than act swiftly and forthrightly when he finds this kind of unpleasantness in his administration.

To my father, who had passed through the corruption of the Pendergast machine without a single taint of it adhering to him personally, Governor Stevenson’s attitude was simply incredible. Fortunately, at this time he was not aware Stevenson held this opinion. Early in March, when the governor was in Washington again, he came to the White House and told my father he had decided not to run because he was committed to a second term in the Illinois State House. “He did not think he could go back on that commitment honorably,” Dad said.

By playing reluctant hero and attempting to maneuver the party into drafting him, Stevenson forfeited a crucial dimension of his candidacy. My father had planned to throw behind him all the resources of the Democratic Party and the presidency, to build him into a national figure well before the election.