The Yanks Are Coming! (30 page)

Nevertheless, he felt his ambitions were thwarted. He wanted to run for governor; Pendergast said no. He had his eye on a congressional seat; Pendergast had promised the seat to someone else. But luck finally turned up trumps for Truman. The popularity of President Franklin Roosevelt made the U.S. Senate seat held by Republican Roscoe Patterson vulnerable. Moreover, the likely Democrat challenger came from a rival political camp to that of Pendergast. After riffling through his own roster of talent, Pendergast insisted that Truman run. Truman had just turned fifty. In the hours before he made “the most momentous announcement of my life”—to run for the United States Senate—he wrote, “I have come to the place where all men strive to be at my age and I thought two weeks ago that retirement on a virtual pension in some minor county office was all that was in store for me.”
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Fate had much more in mind.

Truman won an upset victory in the primary and went on to win big in the general election in 1934 as a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal policies for ameliorating the economic depression. Still, for all his ambition—now apparently gratified—Truman was uncertain he could be reelected, fretted he was unworthy of the job, and knew the press, and possibly others, regarded him as the “rube from Pendergast land.”
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Democrat senator J. Hamilton Lewis of Illinois tried to reassure his new colleague: “Harry, don't start out with an inferiority complex. For the first six months you'll wonder how the hell you got here, and after that you'll wonder how the hell the rest of us got here.”
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Truman was right that his reelection would be difficult; the chief problem was his loyalty to Pendergast, who was convicted of tax evasion in 1939. Truman refused to abandon his patron, convinced that Republican judges had railroaded Pendergast, though the FBI and IRS had provided a wealth of evidence against him. Truman even ranted against federal district attorney Maurice Milligan, claiming he was corrupt and a “personal appointment”
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of President Roosevelt (whose policies Truman otherwise supported). The result was that in 1940 Truman ran for reelection with his patron in jail, the administration unsupportive, and the Missouri press opposed to him. He won anyway, though much more narrowly than before.

His signature issue became ferreting out waste in rearmament programs, which brought him public recognition (the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program even became known as the “Truman Committee”), congressional clout, and a grudging, annoyed respect from the administration, which accepted that Truman strongly backed the administration's policies even as he investigated embarrassing cost overruns and inefficiencies. The press rallied to him and declared that his committee was a major boost to the war effort, saving billions of dollars. It also shot him onto the 1944 Democrat ticket as the vice presidential candidate—his nomination regarded as the “Second Missouri Compromise,” rallying conservative and moderate Democrats who opposed the sitting vice president, the very liberal Henry Wallace.

WARTIME PRESIDENT

Truman was vice president for only eighty-two days. Summoned to the White House on 12 April 1945, he was greeted by Eleanor
Roosevelt. With her hand on his shoulder, she announced, “Harry, the president is dead.”

After a moment of stunned silence, Truman replied, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

The president's widow responded, “Is there anything we can do for you, Harry? For you are the one in trouble now.”
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General Patton, in Europe, thought it was America that was in trouble now. He said of Truman, “It seems very unfortunate that in order to secure political preference, people are made Vice President who are never intended, neither by Party nor by the Lord to be Presidents.”
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In deeper trouble, however, were the Axis Powers. In less than a month, Germany surrendered. Japan had no hope for victory in the Pacific but was instead girding itself to make unconditional victory for the Allies extraordinarily costly.

In Truman's arsenal was one weapon of which he had known nothing when he was vice president: the atomic bomb. Another weapon that he hoped to use against Japan was Soviet military power. Truman met the Soviet leader, Marshal Joseph Stalin, at the Potsdam Conference on 17 July 1945. He liked him (he thought him a Slavic version of Tom Pendergast) and was convinced he could work with him, even as he regarded the Soviet Union as a police state and was bluntly opposed—in principle if not in force—to the export of Communism into Eastern Europe.

It took the dropping of two atomic bombs—one on Hiroshima on 6 August and one on Nagasaki on 9 August (the same day that the Soviet Union declared war and invaded Japanese-held Manchuria)—and a massive conventional air raid on Tokyo on 13 August before the Japanese issued a formal statement of surrender on 14 August. Truman had calculated that by dropping the atomic bombs
he could end the war swiftly—and by ending it, save hundreds of thousands of lives.

THE TRUMAN DOCTRINE

Truman's great and immediate postwar challenge was how to handle the Soviet Union, which appeared intent on forcibly extending its totalitarian system everywhere, from North Korea to Eastern Europe. Truman had every intention of trying to find an accommodation with the Soviets, but their intransigence and global aggression left him fuming. To his secretary of state, James Byrnes, Truman vented his frustration at the Soviets' behavior in Poland, their imposition of Communist tyrannies on Romania and Bulgaria, and their occupation of northern Iran. “There isn't a doubt in my mind,” he wrote, “that Russia intends an invasion of Turkey and the seizure of the Black Sea Straits to the Mediterranean. . . . Only one language do they understand—‘how many divisions have you?' I do not think we should play compromise any longer. . . . I'm tired of babying the Soviets.”
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That was in private. In public, he was more cautious. He introduced Churchill at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, where the former prime minister delivered his speech about a Communist Iron Curtain descending across Central and Eastern Europe. While Truman privately approved Churchill's remarks, his administration did not officially endorse them. Most of Truman's advisors shared and reinforced his strong anti-Communism, but there were others on the left of the Democrat Party, including his commerce secretary, former vice president Henry Wallace, who very much believed the Soviets deserved to be babied, indulged, and appeased.

In domestic policy, Truman had nothing but headaches, in part because of postwar circumstances, in part because of his attempt to tread a middle path. On the one hand, he knew he had to rapidly reduce government expenditures; on the other, he felt obliged to try to advance the liberal domestic policies of Franklin Roosevelt—including the creation of a national health insurance program—against strong congressional opposition. Truman understood the need to demobilize America's massive Army and Navy, to bring the boys home, but he worried about the foreign policy consequences and whether the postwar economy could absorb so many men without a spike in unemployment, and as commander in chief he fretted about the “disintegration of our armed forces.”
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He tried to play the arbiter between labor and management but pleased neither one, and the nation suffered from so many strikes, including among steelworkers (the largest in American history), that when the railway workers went on strike he tried to get Congress to approve legislation (the House actually did) that would allow him to draft striking workers into the military.

The 1946 election delivered a Republican majority to the House of Representatives for the first time since 1930. Instead of recoiling from the rebuke, he took fire from it. No longer would Truman worry about trying to hold the disparate factions of the Democrat Party together. He intended to go his own way and trust that if it was the right way, others would follow; he would be a leader rather than a conciliator. That did not mean that political calculations never entered into his considerations. They manifestly did; indeed, in Truman, as in most politicians, there was no stark divide between what he believed was right and what he believed was politically advantageous. He was a practical man.

In 1947, financially battered Britain informed the United States that it would have to withdraw British troops supporting the
anti-Communist government in Greece and end its financial aid to Turkey, which was under pressure from the Soviet Union. In response, Truman enunciated what became known as the Truman Doctrine: that the United States should “help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes. This is no more than a frank recognition that totalitarian regimes imposed upon free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.”
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Congress agreed to provide the requested aid to Greece and Turkey. But that was only the beginning.

In June 1947 in a speech at Harvard University, General George Marshall, now secretary of state, sketched the outlines of what became known as the Marshall Plan for the restoration of the economies of Europe, including the Soviet bloc, if the Communists would participate, which they would not. Truman, who had done his part to restore the peace of Europe in two world wars—as a captain of artillery and commander in chief—now committed the United States to the economic and political well-being of Europe and the containment of a hostile power larger and even more menacing in its ideological and geographical reach than the recently defeated Axis Powers.

In addition, Truman committed the United States to the creation of a Jewish homeland in a Palestine partitioned between Arabs and Jews, though in typical Truman fashion he lashed out at Jewish-American pressure on the administration: “Jesus Christ couldn't please them when he was on earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck.”
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In May 1948 Truman issued a statement recognizing the new state of Israel. He was the first world leader to do so, and acted against the advice of the State Department.

In his 1948 campaign for president, Truman did not try to reconcile liberals and Southern conservatives in his own party. Instead he split them, with leftists breaking off to support a run by Henry Wallace, carrying the banner of the Progressive Party—or “Henry Wallace and his Communists,” as Truman called them
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—and Southern conservatives backing South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond and his “Dixiecrats,” who opposed Truman's support for federal legislation to protect the civil rights of black Americans.

In foreign policy, Truman's warnings about Soviet aggression appeared further vindicated when the Soviets blockaded Berlin in 1948. The Western Allies responded with the Berlin airlift—a bit of inspiring Cold War heroism that kept Berlin supplied and eventually forced the Soviets to lift the blockade in 1949.

Americans supported the airlift, but they did not appear to support the commander in chief who ordered it. The Republican nominee, New York governor Thomas Dewey, was the sizable favorite among the pollsters. But Dewey had lost to Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 and was not an ideal candidate: he had a stiff, uninspiring, and unhelpfully dapper and conceited image. His moderate positions—which drew no stark contrast to Truman—and his obvious belief that he could coast to victory didn't help him either.
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In the event, he coasted to a stunning landslide defeat, with the Republicans also losing both houses of Congress. A grinning Truman, in one of the great moments of American politics, held up the front page of the
Chicago Daily Tribune
with its glaring and egregiously wrong headline: “D
EWEY
D
EFEATS
T
RUMAN
.”
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As the newly reelected president, Truman said he wanted to offer Americans a “Fair Deal,” which amounted to a laundry list of new or expanded federal government programs to make life more equitable or secure, or to promote, as he saw it, the common good. His domestic
agenda, however, was too liberal even for the Democrat majorities in Congress. His foreign policy agenda met with more success. In 1949, the United States founded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) uniting the West in a military alliance stronger than any since the Reformation had divided Christendom.

Which is not to say that all was going swimmingly for American foreign policy. In fact, in short order the Soviets broke America's nuclear monopoly (thanks in part to Communist spies) by detonating their own atomic bomb, dubbed “Joe 1” by Americans; China fell to the Communists; and the Soviets' postwar occupation of North Korea, a country about which Americans knew little, looked to be no more temporary than their postwar occupation of Eastern Europe. The question for some administration critics was whether the administration was shot through with Communist spies and fellow travelers or simply blundering. The reality was a bit of both, combined with the fact that Washington could not control events around the world. (No one in the United States had “lost” China; America's Nationalist Chinese ally, Chiang Kai-shek, had managed that himself.) What Truman could do, and did, was authorize the development of the hydrogen bomb.

KOREA

In June 1950, the Cold War turned hot in an unexpected place, Korea. The Communist North invaded South Korea, which Secretary of State Dean Acheson, in a January speech to the National Press Club, had placed outside of America's national security interests in the Far East. American policy was that South Korea was of little strategic importance—but what was important was not giving a free hand to Communist aggression. Korea now seemed, in the words of Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk, like “a dagger pointed at the
heart of Japan.”
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Truman was cautious but furious at the same time, and committed to stopping “the sons-of-bitches no matter what!”
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The Soviet Union's boycott of the meetings of the United Nations Security Council (over the United Nations' refusal to recognize Communist China) allowed the United States to get a UN resolution condemning the attack and authorizing what became known as a “police action” to repel Communist aggression.