Authors: David McCullough
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Presidents & Heads of State, #Political, #Historical
By early February 1947 White House reporters were commenting on the President’s greater ease and relaxation. “He no longer moans to every visitor that he doesn’t want the job and never did,” wrote Joseph Alsop to a friend. After a social call on the President, the former heavyweight boxing champion, Gene Tunney, said he had never seen a more solid citizen. “His eye is clear and he is just as solid as a wall. His jaw is square and his stomach is just as flat as an athlete’s.”
Truman’s popularity in the polls, due in large measure to Marshall’s presence, was back up to 48 percent.
The whole atmosphere was different. Truman had opened the White House to sightseers again after a six-year wartime ban on all but official callers. He and Bess reinstated formal receptions and state dinners for the first time since 1941, and the contrast between the Trumans “at home” in their private quarters and their official social life was amazing.
The President, with his sense of history, wanted White House entertaining done just so, “done to the minute,” by rules that had not changed in half a century, except in wartime. “They brought back all the pageantry,” assistant head usher J. B. West remembered approvingly, “all the formality, all the pomp that we had all but forgotten how to execute.”
We [the White House staff] had to work out the details, so that all the President and his wife had to do was to be in the right place at the right time. For a reception, they’d march down the stairs to the Blue Room and receive the guests, and then march back upstairs. But behind the scenes, we spent weeks of preparation and scheduling for each detail of that “right place” and “right time.”
Attendance at the first reception, to honor the Supreme Court on December 10, had been 1,333. Dress was white tie, the Marine Band played. “The papers say today that Bess and I have shaken hands with 7,000 people this season,” Truman wrote to his mother on February 9. At a full-dress affair for Senator Vandenberg in the State Dining Room, the gold service was used. The night of the diplomatic reception again more than a thousand attended. (Before the war only about five hundred people in total had been accredited to the embassies and legations in Washington.) For one occasion Truman asked Eugene List, the concert pianist, to perform for “the customers,” and again, as at Potsdam, List played the President’s favorite Chopin Waltz in A Minor, but this time without the President’s help as page-turner.
I was somewhat nervous through the entertainment [Truman told his mother], because Mr. Grim the usher and Jim Rowley [of the Secret Service] came and told me that the engineers had found that the chain holding the center chandelier was stretching…. I let the show go and ordered the thing down the next day. If it had fallen I’d been in a real fix….
Truman was glad to see Lent arrive and put an end to such affairs, he told his mother. He was tired of “smirking at people I don’t like.” On February 19, in another letter to Grandview, he could report that “the season” was over, “thank goodness.” But the truth was he had had a fine time, every time. J. B. West would remember that “despite all the denying in the world (which he did), we could see the President enjoyed it. He was an extrovert, a friendly man, and he liked company.”
Hearings on the Lilienthal nomination were causing a sensation, meanwhile, with Senator Kenneth McKellar insisting TVA was a “hotbed of Communism” and that David E. Lilienthal was more than a little suspect. The senator thought it was General Groves who had discovered the secret of splitting the atom and failed to understand why Groves should not therefore be left in command of his discovery.
Looking down from the bench, the senator asked Lilienthal where his parents had been born. When Lilienthal was unable to answer with certainty, McKellar acted as though he had scored an important point. He pressed the issue again another day. This time Lilienthal said he had been able to determine only that it had been in Austro-Hungary, somewhere near Pressburg, in what had since become Czechoslovakia. Again McKellar smiled at the audience as if everything were going his way—Czechoslovakia being under Soviet influence. But when he turned and abruptly asked Lilienthal to explain his views on “the communistic doctrine,” the answer Lilienthal gave held the room spellbound. With his hands folded on the table in front of him, Lilienthal spoke for several minutes, his eyes not on McKellar or the committee, but on a spot somewhere just above his hands, almost as though he were talking to himself. He had felt a kind of smoldering within, he later wrote, “far from anger or temper, but some emotional tempo quite different, but definitely emotional.” As he talked he kept saying to himself, “Don’t deny; affirm.”
I believe in, [he said] and I conceive the Constitution of the United States to rest, as does religion, upon the fundamental proposition of the integrity of the individual; and that all Government and all private institutions must be designed to promote and protect and defend the integrity and the dignity of the individual….
Any forms of government, therefore, and any other institutions, which make men means rather than ends in themselves, which exalt that state or any other institutions above the importance of men, which place arbitrary power over men as a fundamental tenet of government, are contrary to this conception; and therefore I am deeply opposed to them…. The fundamental tenet of communism is that the state is an end in itself, and that therefore the powers which the state exercises over the individual are without any ethical standards to limit them. That I deeply disbelieve.
It is very easy simply to say one is not a Communist. And, of course, if despite my record it is necessary for me to state this very affirmatively, then this is a great disappointment to me. It is very easy to talk about being against communism. It is equally important to believe those things which provide a satisfactory and effective alternative. Democracy is that satisfying alternative.
And its hope in the world is that it is an affirmative belief, rather than simply a belief against something else….
I deeply believe in the capacity of democracy to surmount any trials that may lie ahead provided only we practice it in our daily lives.
And among the things that we must practice is this: that while we seek fervently to ferret out the subversive and anti-democratic forces in the country, we do not at the same time, by hysteria, by resort to innuendo and sneers and other unfortunate tactics, besmirch the very cause that we believe in, and cause a separation among our people, cause one group and one individual to hate one another, based upon mere attacks, mere unsubstantiated attacks upon their loyalty….
Hearsay and gossip had no place in courts of justice. If the principles of protection of an individual and his good name against gossip and hearsay were not upheld by legislatures in their investigating activities, that too would be a failure of the democratic ideal. Then, pausing, he unfolded his hands and said, “This I deeply believe.”
For a moment the room was silent. Then, almost in a rush, members of the committee and people from the audience began crowding around him to praise Lilienthal for what he had said.
From the White House Truman let Lilienthal know that he would not only stand behind the nomination but was in the fight with all he had “if it took 150 years.”
In the days following, a strain of anti-Semitism in the opposition to the appointment became increasingly apparent. Then, without warning, and without waiting for the committee report to reach the floor, Senator Taft announced he would oppose the nomination on the grounds that Lilienthal was not only a “typical power-hungry bureaucrat,” and “temperamentally unfitted” for the job of heading the Atomic Energy Commission, but “soft on the subject of Communism.” Until this point it had been McKellar’s show, and thus largely personal and predictable. (In earlier days the senator had seen Communists behind the anti-poll tax bill, too.) But now with Mr. Republican stepping in, it became a distinctly partisan issue, and, as was said, a major Capitol crisis. The phrase “soft on Communism” caught on immediately.
Lilienthal did not see how he could possibly win with the Republican majority lined up against him. The Taft speech had been “a kick in the teeth.” How long the confirming process might take, and at what toll, no one could say.
“Courage: What is it?” Lilienthal asked in his diary. “Isn’t it the capacity to hang on?”
He had been trying for days to find time to write to her, Truman told his sister in a letter in February.
He was more concerned than usual about staying in touch. Mamma had had a fall and fractured her hip. Truman had flown home to see her, but remained gravely worried—and concerned, too, about the burden of care on Mary Jane. “Now Mary, don’t you work too hard.” If she needed help, she was to get it.
“Things have been happening here in a hurry,” he told her. Foreign affairs were uppermost. Marshall was to leave for Moscow in little more than a week, for his first Foreign Ministers’ Conference. He himself would be flying to Mexico in three days, for the first visit to Mexico ever by a President of the United States. “I am spending every day with Marshall going over policy and hoping we can get a lasting peace. It looks not so good right now.”
The date was February 27, 1947. Six days earlier, on the 21st, a month to the day since Marshall took up his duties as Secretary of State, an urgent formal message, a so-called “blue paper,” from the British ambassador, Lord Inverchapel, had been delivered to the State Department. Marshall had been out of town, speaking at Princeton University’s bicentennial convocation. So it was Under Secretary Acheson who telephoned Truman that afternoon. Great Britain, its financial condition worsening, could no longer provide economic and military support for Greece and Turkey. The cost was too great. The Attlee government would withdraw forty thousand troops from Greece and all economic aid would halt as of March 31. The United States, it was hoped, would assume the responsibility.
The news was both momentous and not wholly unexpected. Britain was in desperate straits. All Europe had been hit by one of the worst winters on record. In France, the cold destroyed millions of acres of winter wheat. Snow fell in Paris for the first time in years. In Berlin, where temperatures hovered around zero, people were dying of the cold. Ice clogged the Kiel Canal from the Baltic to the North Sea. Food and fuel were scarce everywhere. In Prague, electric current was being shut off for three hours a day. But Britain was hit hardest, the whole country virtually snowbound. Factories and schools closed. Huge snowdrifts blocked highways and railroads, closed coal mines, and isolated hundreds of small towns. When a bus on a main coastal road ran into a ten-foot drift and a snowplow was brought to the rescue, reported
The Times
of London, the snowplow, too, was buried. “Weather Threatens Coal Supply,” read the headline in
The Times
on. February 6. To save power, London offices were being lit with candles. And the storms continued. On February 21, the day of Lord Inverchapel’s message, it snowed again over most of the country.
On January 20, meantime, the British government had issued an economic White Paper describing Britain’s position as “extremely serious.” That Britain would soon have to cut back on its armed forces and overseas commitments was self-evident. The situation, wrote Walter Lippmann, would “shake the world and make our position highly vulnerable and precariously isolated.”
Specific warnings had been crossing Truman’s desk for weeks. As early as February 3, the American ambassador in Athens, Lincoln MacVeigh, reported rumors that the British were pulling out of Greece, where, since 1945, their troops and money had helped maintain a royalist government in a raging civil war with Communist guerrillas. On February 12, another dispatch from MacVeigh urged immediate consideration of American aid to Greece. A few days later, Mark Ethridge, publisher of the Louisville
Courier-Journal
and a member of a United Nations investigating committee, cabled from Athens that Greece was a “ripe plum” ready to fall into Soviet hands.
Warnings about Turkey had come even sooner. Turkey had “little hope of independent survival unless it is assured of solid long-term American and British support,” cabled General Walter Bedell Smith, who had replaced Averell Harriman as the American ambassador in Moscow.
Truman himself, furthermore, had already made his concern for the future of Greece clear to the Greek government, if not, as yet, to the American people. In the fall of 1946, through Ambassador MacVeigh, Truman had acknowledged that Greece was of vital interest to the United States and promised substantial aid to maintain its independence, providing the Greek government could show that democracy survived there—a question of considerable importance, since the Greek government, as Truman knew and later wrote, “seemed to encourage irresponsible rightist groups.”
But while the crisis in Greece and Turkey came not without warning, the formal announcement of British withdrawal did come, as Truman said, “sooner than we expected,” and its very formality made it seem especially dramatic and unsettling.
February 21 was a Friday. Truman asked Acheson for a report by Monday, and Acheson, Bohlen, and others worked through the weekend at the old State Department, where packing boxes cluttered the halls in preparation for the move to Foggy Bottom. On Monday, Marshall and Acheson met with the President and urged “immediate action” to provide help for Greece, and, to a lesser degree, for Turkey as well. To Marshall the British announcement of withdrawal from Greece was tantamount to British withdrawal from the whole Middle East. He, too, saw the situation as extremely serious. The sum needed for Greece alone just for the remainder of 1947 was a quarter of a billion dollars.
Truman agreed. Greece would have to be helped, quickly and with substantial amounts.
But aid to Greece was only one aspect of the problem. It had been a year now since Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech at Fulton. Something more than a simple aid bill was called for. On this Truman, Marshall, Acheson, Clifford—virtually all who had a say in policy—were agreed. One ranking State Department official, Joseph M. Jones, urged that Secretary Marshall, not the President, go before Congress, to rouse the nation to the reality of the crisis, because, as Jones wrote in an internal memorandum, Marshall was “the only one in Government with the prestige to make a deep impression.”