Truman (110 page)

Turning east, the train crossed Arizona, New Mexico, and Kansas, with stops the whole way, then on into Missouri, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. The crowds continued large and friendly. “Are the special privilege boys going to run the country, or are the people going to run it?” he asked. This was the theme. The election, he was sure, would ride on it.

He covered 9,505 miles through 18 states, delivered 73 speeches, and was seen by perhaps 3 million people. The train reached Union Station on a steamy Washington afternoon, Friday, June 18. Truman, his sunburned nose peeling, his lips cracked, was, as reported, “full of bounce.”

From the first day of the 1948 Republican National Convention, when former Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce told the cheering, amused crowd that Harry Truman was a “gone goose,” to the final celebration on the convention floor, there was never anything but a feeling of victory in the air.

The convention opened in Philadelphia on Monday, June 21. Of the five most publicized contenders for first place on the Republican ticket—Dewey, Taft, Vandenberg, Stassen, and Martin—Dewey, the favorite of the party’s eastern liberal wing, showed almost overriding strength from the start and won on the third ballot, after Stassen refused to release his delegates to Taft. For his running mate, Dewey chose Governor Earl Warren of California, making it a “dreamboat of a ticket”—two popular, youthful, progressive governors of the two largest, wealthiest states in the Union. If Dewey seemed overly cool and self-assured in manner, Warren had more than compensating warmth. Nor had anyone forgotten how close Dewey had come the last time to defeating the Champion, Franklin Roosevelt.
Time
and
Newsweek
agreed that only a miracle or a series of unimaginable political blunders could save Harry Truman from overwhelming defeat.

Truman thought the Republicans had made a mistake. They would have been better off with Taft, he said privately; Taft was an honorable man who deserved the nomination and would have made a tougher opponent than Dewey.

In his acceptance speech, Dewey talked of national unity. “Our people yearn to higher ground, to find common purpose in the finer things which unite us…”

Truman had little time to dwell on the Republicans and their convention. On the day Dewey was chosen, Thursday, June 24, 1948, the Russians clamped a blockade on all rail, highway, and water traffic in and out of Berlin. The situation was extremely dangerous. Clearly Stalin was attempting to force the Western Allies to withdraw from the city. Except by air, the Allied sectors were entirely cut off. Nothing could come in or out. Two and a half million people faced starvation. As it was, stocks of food would last no more than a month. Coal supplies would be gone in six weeks.

Truman faced the issue with notable caution and firmness. It was suggested that the Allies force their way into Berlin by land, with an armored convoy. It was suggested that the United States retaliate by closing its ports and the Panama Canal to Russian ships. Truman rejected such ideas. When, at a meeting in his office with Forrestal, Lovett, and Secretary of the Army Royall, the question was asked whether American forces would remain in Berlin, Truman said there was no need for discussion on that: “We stay in Berlin, period.”

Royall asked skeptically if the consequences had been thought through.

“We will have to deal with the situation as it develops,” Truman said. “We are in Berlin by the terms of the agreement, and the Russians have no right to get us out by either direct or indirect pressure.”

Lovett cabled the American ambassador in London that night: “We stay in Berlin.”

General Clay, the American commander in Berlin, had already begun shipping supplies by air, on a very limited scale, a step considered little more than a palliative. On Monday, June 28, Truman ordered a full-scale airlift.

The same day he sent two squadrons of B-29s to Germany, the giant planes known to the world as the kind that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. But in fact, these had not been modified to carry atomic bombs, a detail the Russians were not to know.

That the Berlin Airlift was about to become one of the most brilliant American achievements of the postwar era and one of Truman’s proudest decisions, strongly affecting the morale of Western, non-Communist Europe, and the whole course of the Cold War, as well as Truman’s own drive for reelection, was by no means apparent to anyone at this point. No one had any idea how things would turn out in Berlin, and Truman was no exception. General Bradley, who had replaced Eisenhower as Chief of Staff, thought the President was being far too vague, when, as Bradley later wrote, “we were nose to nose with massive Soviet military power.” It hardly seemed realistic to expect a major city to be supplied entirely by air for any but a very limited time.

In making his decision, for all the political heat and turmoil of the moment, Truman had consulted none of the White House staff or any of his political advisers. Indeed, throughout the blockade, as George Elsey would recall, the White House staff “had no direct role whatever in any decisions or in the execution of any of the carrying out of the airlift.” There was no talk of how the President’s handling of the crisis would make him look, or what political advantage was to be gained. And neither did Truman try to bolster the spirits of those around him by claiming the airlift would work. He simply emphasized his intention to stay in Berlin and left no doubt that he meant exactly what he said.

Summer had arrived in Washington and that same evening, Monday, June 28, the President and the First Lady took their dinner on the South Porch of the White House, Truman seated so he could enjoy the view. A scrap of paper on which he recorded the scene would later be found among his papers:

In imagination he pictured the old Chesapeake & Ohio Canal crossing the grounds of the Washington Monument, as it had long ago, barges anchored somewhere west of the Monument.

“I can see old J. Q. Adams going swimming in it and getting his clothes stolen by an angry woman who wanted a job,” he wrote. “Then I wake up, go upstairs and go to work….”

As Churchill had observed at Potsdam, Truman was a man of immense determination. “Stubborn as a mule,” others often commented. And in nothing that Truman, or anyone else wrote or said as 1948 unfolded is there any indication that once having made up his mind to run for reelection he was ever tempted to withdraw, or like the mockingbird, to sing a song not his own.

“I am not a quitter,” he would say, and that was all there was to it.

Yet game as he may have been, as restored in spirit as, he may have felt after his swing west, there was by all signs no cause for hope among Democrats. On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, his prospects could not have appeared much more grim. It was not just that he faced a strong, heavily financed, supremely confident Republican opponent, or the threat of the Wallace movement cutting away at his support among liberals. The whole Democratic Party, the famous, disparate Democratic “coalition” of labor, intellectuals, city bosses, and southern segregationists fabricated by Franklin Roosevelt, was coming to pieces. Harold Ickes, as if to settle old scores with Truman, wrote to tell him:

The biggest break came now from Ickes’s own liberal side of the party, the doctrinaire New Dealers. The call for Eisenhower started by Roosevelt’s sons had swelled to a chorus, with Claude Pepper, Chester Bowles, former head of the Office of Price Administration, who was now running for governor of Connecticut, Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis, who was running for the Senate, all favoring an Eisenhower draft at the convention. The Americans for Democratic Action, the ADA, recently formed as a non-Communist liberal response to the Wallace movement and sometimes known as the “New Deal in Exile,” voiced its preference for Eisenhower over Truman, and if not Eisenhower, then Justice William O. Douglas. Such professional Democrats as Jake Arvey of Chicago, Mayor William O’Dwyer of New York, and Boss Frank Hague of New Jersey also decided it was time for Eisenhower. Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers and Phil Murray of the CIO joined the Eisenhower movement. And so did Alabama Senators Hill and Sparkman and South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond, making it appear almost as though the old Roosevelt coalition were regrouping around the glamorous general, who by this time had become president of Columbia University.

And all this was made more remarkable by the fact that no one knew anything of Eisenhower’s politics. No one could say even whether he was a Democrat, let alone what his position on issues might be—on civil rights, Social Security, taxes. Or how to keep peace with Stalin.

To Truman and those loyal to him, the revolt of the old New Dealers was especially grating. It seemed besides an act of personal betrayal, wholly unprincipled and intellectually dishonest. Truman had borne the banner of the New Deal as faithfully as any successor to Franklin Roosevelt possibly could have, was their feeling. No more progressive program had ever been put before Congress than the Truman program. That was a matter of record.

Though Eisenhower had stated publicly several times that he was not a candidate and did not want the nomination, this did little to dissuade his new admirers. Over the Fourth of July weekend, a week in advance of the Democratic Convention, the Eisenhower faction, led by Jimmy Roosevelt, wired each of the 1,592 delegates to choose the “ablest, strongest man available” as their candidate, adding that “no man in these critical days can refuse the call to duty and leadership implicit in the nomination and virtual election to the Presidency of the United States.”

Truman, concluded the veteran
New York Times
political reporter James C. Hagerty, could look forward to “a hard and possibly losing fight for the nomination….”

In six months he had faced some of the roughest abuse and difficulties of any President in history. He had been castigated by southern Democrats over civil rights, repudiated by a Republican Congress, ridiculed for his White House balcony and his Missouri cronies. He had faced the pressures of the Palestine issue, the increasing threat of war over Berlin, watched his popularity disintegrate in the polls, seen himself portrayed in the press as inept and pathetic. His party was broke. And now the New Dealers were abandoning him, and noisily. No President in memory, not even Herbert Hoover in his darkest days, had been treated with such open contempt by his own party.

“If you can’t stand the heat, you better get out of the kitchen,” Truman liked to say, an old line in Missouri that he had first heard in the 1930s, from another Jackson County politician named E. T. (“Buck”) Purcell.

To a few former New Dealers the whole spectacle was appalling. “I am simply aghast at the unfair way in which President Truman is being ‘judged,’ if the current lynch-law atmosphere can be called ‘judging’!” recorded David Lilienthal in his diary. “And the attitude of liberals and progressives, now whooping it up for Eisenhower or Douglas, is the hardest to understand or to be other than damn mad about.”

When Matt Connelly reported the defection of Frank Hague to Truman, he merely said, “All right, let him go. I never did like him anyhow.” Writing in his diary later the same day, Truman would describe Hague, Jimmy Roosevelt, Jake Arvey, and the ADA as “double-crossers all,” adding, “But they’ll get nowhere—a double dealer never does.” The Democratic leaders opposing his nomination were all acting very foolishly. He was certain Eisenhower was not a candidate, perhaps not even a Democrat. “I don’t think he would be a candidate on the Democratic ticket anyway,” he wrote to a friend. The influence of a sitting President—as leader of his party—was too great to be thwarted. Not even Theodore Roosevelt with all his popularity had been able to deny the Republican nomination to the incumbent Taft in 1912, he reminded his staff.

Did he think he would have enough pledged delegates to win on the first ballot at Philadelphia, Truman was asked at his press conference on July 1.