Truman

By David McCullough

The date was May 8, 1884.

Two days later, a Baptist circuit rider took the baby out into the spring air, and holding him up in the sunshine, remarked what a sturdy boy he was.

Not for a month afterward, however, did Dr. Griffin bother to register the birth at the county clerk’s office up the street, and even then, the child was entered nameless. In a quandary over a middle name, Mattie and John were undecided whether to honor her father or his. In the end they compromised with the letter S. It could be taken to stand for Solomon or Shipp, but actually stood for nothing, a practice not unknown among the Scotch-Irish, even for first names. The baby’s first name was Harry, after his Uncle Harrison.

Harry S. Truman he would be.

(McCullough 1992, pp.37)

The vault where Harry spent his days – “the zoo,” as the clerks called it – was below street level, downstairs from the bank’s cavernous main lobby with its Corinthian columns and brass spittoons. He cleared checks drawn on country banks, sometimes handling as much as a million dollars a day, while keeping all notations in longhand. It was not work calling for much initiative or imagination or that he especially cared for; and Charles H. Moore, the vice-president, appears to have been the first person Harry actually disliked. Moore, said Harry Truman years later, was “never so happy as when he would call some poor inoffensive little clerk up before him in the grand lobby of the biggest banks west of the Mississippi and tell him how dumb and inefficient he was. …” Harry continued to do his best, however, and his pay advanced steadily. In time he was earning $40 a month, which made him the family’s number one breadwinner.

(McCullough 1992, pp.69)

He had been more at home in the older era. He never learned to like the telephone, or daylight saving time, an innovation adopted during the war. He tried using a typewriter for a while, but gave it up. Mark Twain and Charles Dickens remained his favorite authors. Andrew Jackson and Robert E. Lee were to be his lifelong heroes. Until he met George C. Marshall, he wondered if the “modern” times were capable of producing a great man.

(McCullough 1992, pp.141)

You can’t make a man good by passing a law that he must be good. It’s against human nature.

The amateur failed in politics because politics was concerned with “things as they are.” Most people don’t think for themselves. They lean on newspapers.” You can’t make a man good by passing a law that he must be good. It’s against human nature.” Politics, as his brother Jum had so often professed, was primarily a business of friends. “We have the theory that if we do a man a favor he will do us one. That’s human nature.” Few people were ingrates. Ingratitude was a cardinal sin. “Let the river take its course.”

(McCullough 1992, pp.155)

The function of generals and admirals is to fight battles, and to tell us what they need to fight battles with.

In backing Nelson he was also standing by a fundamental conviction that control of the war effort must be kept in civilian hands. In just the first six months of 1942 military contracts added to the economy totaled $400 billion. He saw ambitious generals and admirals on all sides gaining influence over industry and agriculture and he worried what his could mean for the future. In the fall of 1942, on a broadcast for “The March of Time,” he called the issue of civilian control the foremost of the day and warned it could shape the whole political and economic structure of the country after the war. “The function of generals and admirals is to fight battles,” he said, “and to tell us what they need to fight battles with.”

(McCullough 1992, pp.279)

…The New York Times praised his personal qualities and said he had the advantage of having been through the political mill.

He has known the dust and heat of a political campaign, and has learned the art, not to be despised, of seeking that middle course which will appeal to a majority of the voters. He fought with distinction in the First World War; he has been a farmer; he has known firsthand the difficulties of a small businessman. He has had the kind of experience, in short, likely to make a realist sympathetic to the problems of the varied groups rather than to produce the doctrinaire or the zealot.

Astonishingly, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called him an excellent choice. Even Richard Strout in his otherwise gloomy New Republic essay took heart from the idea that Truman, while not brilliant, had character.

Reflecting on the nomination in the privacy of his diary, reporter Allen Drury wrote:

On the credit side, the Senator is a fine man: no one would do a better job of it in the White House if he had to. On the other side the Pendergast background made him entirely too vulnerable to Republican attack, and no one who knows him likes to see him subjected to that kind of smearing. …I think Senator Truman is one of the finest men I know.

Again at Chicago, as so consistently through the Truman career, it had been the system of politics, the boss system, that counted in deciding his fate. There had been no popular boom for him for Vice President. Nor had personal ambition figured. As Richard Rovere wrote, no one ever contrived less at his own elevation than Harry Truman at Chicago. And as time would tell, everything considered, the system, bosses and all, had produced an excellent choice.

(McCullough 1992, pp.321)

There was little subtle about Truman. He was never remote, rarely ever evasive. He had been raised on straight answers by people who nearly always meant what they said. Roosevelt wasn’t that way. “You know how it is when you see the President,” Truman once told Allen Drury. “He does all the talking, and he talks about what he wants to talk about, and he never talks about anything you want to talk about, so there isn’t much you can do.”

To Republican Owen Brester, Truman said he had but one objection to the President and that was “he lies.”

Such feelings, however, would never be publicly expressed, not by Senator Harry Truman of his President, his Commander in Chief and leader of the Democratic Party. That would be unthinkably disloyal, not to say politically unwise and unprofessional. On occasion Truman could also rise to Roosevelt’s defense and in a manner not unlike that of his father. At a meeting in Boston in a room at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel that fall, halfway through the campaign, Joe Kennedy began vilifying Roosevelt. “Harry, what the hell are you doing campaigning for that crippled son-of-a-bitch that killed my son Joe?” Kennedy said, referring to his oldest son, who had died in the war. Kennedy went on, saying Roosevelt had caused the war. Truman, by his later account, stood all he could, then told Kennedy to keep quiet or he would throw him out the window. Bob Hannegan had to step in and take Truman aside to remind him of how important Kennedy’s money was to the Democratic Party.

(McCullough 1992, pp.328)

In the private quarters, across the center hall, in her sitting room, Mrs. Roosevelt was waiting. With her were Steve Early and her daughter and son-in-law, Anna and John Boettiger. Mrs. Roosevelt stepped forward and gently put her arm on Truman’s shoulder.

“Harry, the President is dead.”

Truman was unable to speak.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he said at last.

“Is there anything we can do for you,” she said. “For you are the one in trouble now.”

(McCullough 1992, pp.342)

Franklin Roosevelt had died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the “Little White House” in Warm Springs, Georgia, at 4:45 in the afternoon (3:45, Warm Springs time). Two hours earlier, sitting at a card table signing papers, he had complained of a terrific headache, then suddenly collapsed, not to regain consciousness. As many accounts stated, his death at age sixty-three came in an hour of high triumph. “The armies and fleets under his direction as Commander-in-Chief were at the gates of Berlin and the shores of Japan’s home islands … and the cause he represented and led was nearing the conclusive phase of success.”

(McCullough 1992, pp.345-346)

The responsibility of a great state is to serve and not to dominate the world.

“Our demand has been, and it remains – Unconditional Surrender,” he declared, his voice rising suddenly in pitch on the last two words, which brought a storm of applause.

He spoke of the necessity for a “strong and lasting” United Nations organization. Isolationism was a thing of the past. There could be no more safety behind geographical barriers, not ever again.

“The responsibility of a great state is to serve and not to dominate the world.”

(McCullough 1992, pp.359-360)

Jonathan Daniels, who at first had considered Truman “tragically inadequate,” began to see him in new light. Here, Daniels decided, was no ordinary man. “The cliche of the ordinary American in the White House was a snob phrase,” Daniels would write, “invented by those who, after Roosevelt’s death, hoped to minimize the Presidency.” Further, Truman was not poorly prepared for the presidency, as commonly said. Because he knew so much of American life, because he had experienced himself so many of the “vicissitudes of all the people,” he was really exceptionally well prepared. (In time to come the historian Samuel Elliot Morison would take the same view, calling Truman as well prepared for the residency as any of his immediate predecessors.) It was Truman’s “too evident modesty” that was so misleading, Daniels decided. Asked by the President to stay on a while longer, he gladly agreed.

(McCullough 1992, pp.364 )

Truman asked for a rundown of the most urgent problems concerning the Soviet Union.

The Russians had two contradictory policies, Harriman began. They wanted to cooperate with the United States and Great Britain, and they wanted to extend control over their neighboring states in Eastern Europe Unfortunately, some within Stalin’s circle mistook American generosity and readiness to cooperate as a sign of “softness” and this had led Stalin to think he could do largely as pleased. Nonetheless, it was Harriman’s view that the Soviets would risk no break with the United States. Their need of financial help after the war would be too great, and for this reason the United States could and should stand firm on vital issues.

Truman said he was not afraid of the Russians and intended to be firm. And fair, of course. “And anyway the Russians need us more than we need them.”

(McCullough 1992, pp.370-371)

May 8 was his sixty-first birthday. He had been President for three weeks and four days. The day before, Mrs. Roosevelt had moved out of the White House and the Trumans moved in, “with very little commotion,” as he later wrote, “except that Margaret’s piano had to be hoisted through a window of the second-floor living room.” To move Mrs. Roosevelt out had required twenty Army trucks. To move the Trumans from Blair House across the street had required only one.

(McCullough 1992, pp.382)

It is a very, very hard position to fall into as I did. If there ever was a man who was forced to be President, I’m that man. … But I must face the music, and try to the best of my ability. You just keep on praying and hoping for the best.

Writing to an old friend in Independence on May 13, a month to the day since he took office, Truman said, “It is a very, very hard position to fall into as I did. If there ever was a man who was forced to be President, I’m that man. … But I must face the music, and try to the best of my ability. You just keep on praying and hoping for the best.”

Calling on Truman on May 14, to discuss the joint meeting with Stalin, Anthony Eden was struck by his “air of quiet confidence in himself.”

“I am here to make decisions,” Truman said, “and whether they prove right or wrong I am going to make them.”

“To have a reasonably lasting peace the three great powers must be able to trust each other and they must themselves honestly want it,” he wrote privately. “They must also have the confidence of the smaller nations. Russia hasn’t the confidence of the small nations, nor has Britain. We have.” Then, in frustration, he added, “I want peace and I’m willing to fight for it.”

(McCullough 1992, pp.384)

After much discussion, the [entirely civilian and highly secret Interim Committee] and scientific panel reached three unanimous conclusions:

1. The bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible.

2. It should be used against war plants surrounded by workers’ homes or other buildings susceptible to damage, in order “to make a profound psychological impression on as many inhabitants as possible.” (Oppenheimer had assured them the “visual effect of an atomic bombing would be tremendous.”)

3. It should be used without warning.

Byrnes went directly from the meeting to the White House to report to Truman, and Truman, according to Byrnes’s later recollection, said that “with reluctance he had to agree, that he could think of no alternative. …”

Stimson, in the meantime, had received a long letter that impressed him greatly and that he passed on immediately to Marshall, calling it a “remarkable document” from an honest man. It was addressed to the President and had come through regular security channels. “I shall take the President’s copy to him personally,” Stimson wrote in reply, “or through Byrnes. …”

Dated May 24, it was from an unknown engineer named O.C. Brestwer of 23 East 11th Street, New York, who had worked on uranium isotope separation for S-1, but who, since the defeat of Germany, had become tormented over what the release of the energy “locked up in the atom” might mean for the future. “The idea of the destruction of civilization is not melodramatic hysteria or crackpot raving. It is a very real and, I submit, almost inevitable result.” In the early stages of the project, like many others, Brewster had hoped it would be conclusively proved impossible. “Obviously, however, so long as there was any chance that Germany might succeed at this task there was only one course to follow and that was to do everything in our power to get this thing first and destroy Germany before she had a chance to destroy us. … So long as the threat of Germany existed we had to proceed with all speed. … With the threat of Germany removed we must stop this project.” He urged a demonstration of one atomic bomb on a target in Japan, but then no further production of nuclear material.

I do not of course want to propose anything to jeopardize the war with Japan but, horrible as it may seem, I know it would be better to take greater casualties now in conquering Japan than to bring upon the world the tragedy of unrestrained competitive production of this material. … In the name of the future of our country and of the peace of the world, I beg you, sir, not to pass this off because I happen to be unknown, without influence or name in the public eye. …

The letter reached the White House, but whether Truman saw it is not known. It was, however, returned shortly with no sign of presidential reaction.

The one hint of Truman’s state of mind to be found in his own hand is a diary entry on Sunday, June 3: “Have been going through some very hectic days,” is his only comment. Later, he would say that of course he realized an atomic explosion would inflict damage and casualties “beyond imagination.”

Actually, no one was very clear on what power the weapon might have Forecasts provided by the scientific panel for the explosive force varied from the equivalent of 2,000 tons of TNT to 20,000 tons.

Estimates by the scientists on how long it might take the Soviets to develop such a weapon ranged from three to five years, although General Groves personally reckoned as much as twenty years.

Simson was thinking more of the larger historic consequences. At the final meeting of the committee he had said how vitally important it was to regard the bomb not “as a new weapon merely but as a revolutionary change in the relations of man to the universe,” and like O.C. Brewster, he warned that the project might mean “the doom of civilization.” It might be a Frankenstein monster, or it might mean “the perfection of civilization.” (Ernest O. Lawrence of the scientific panel had forecast the day when it might be possible to “secure our energy from terrestrial sources rather than from the sun.”) But no one knew.

(McCullough 1992, pp.391-392)

That Stalin was also secretive to the point of imbalance, suspicious, deceitful, unspeakably cruel, that he ruled absolutely and by terror and secret police, that he was directly responsible for destroying millions of his own people and the enslavement of many millions more, was not so clearly understood by the outside world at this point as it would be later. Still, the evil of the man was no secret in 1945. In a February issue, published just before Yalta, Time magazine had noted that Stalin and his regime had deliberately caused the deaths by starvation of at least 3 million peasants and liquidated another 1 million Communists who opposed his policies. Facts are stubborn things, said the article, borrowing a line from Lenin, and these were the facts. Actually the facts were more horrible. Probably 5 million peasants had died; probably 10 million had been sent to forced labor camps. “I was remembering my friends,” the composer Shostakovich once remarked, “and all I saw was corpses, mountains of corpses.”

Stalin himself had told Churchill in 1942 that “ten millions” of peasants had been “dealt with.” At one point in 1940, during the Hitler-Stalkin Pact, he had had many thousands of Polish officers murdered, in what became known as the Katyn Forest Massacre. In truth, “Uncle Joe” was one of the great mass murderers of all time, as much as Ivan the Terrible (his favorite czar), as much nearly as Adolf Hitler.

Yet, wrote Bohlen, “There was little in Stalin’s demeanor in the presence of foreigners that gave any clue of the real nature and character of the man.” Stalin had perfected a talent for disguise:

At Teheran, at Yalta, at Potsdam and during the ten days I saw him during the spring of 1945 with Hopkins, Stalin was exemplary in his behavior. He was patient, a good listener, always quiet in his manner and in his expression. There were no signs of the harsh and brutal nature behind this mask. …

The mask was the artifice of an accomplished actor and it rarely slipped. Once was at Teheran. Churchill had been arguing that a premature opening of a second front in France would result in an unjustified loss of tens of thousands of Allied soldiers. Stalin responded, “When one man dies it is a tragedy. When thousands die it’s statistics.”

Twenty years in politics had taught him a thing or two about people, Truman thought. He had only to look a man in the eye to know. “I was impressed by him,” he would write of Stalin, remembering this first meeting. “… What I most especially noticed were his eyes, his face, and his expression.”

With the lunch over and the opening session of the conference not scheduled to begin until five o’clock, Truman went upstairs in the “nightmare” house and took a nap.

(McCullough 1992, pp.419-420)

Had the bomb been ready in March and deployed by Roosevelt, had it shocked Japan into surrender then, it would have already saved nearly fifty thousand American lives lost in the Pacific in the time since, not to say a vastly larger number of Japanese lives.

Nor had anyone ever doubted that Roosevelt would use it. “At no time, from 1941 to 1945, did I ever hear it suggested by the President, or by any other responsible member of the government, that atomic energy should not be used in the war,” wrote Stimson. “All of us of course understood the terrible responsibility involved … President Roosevelt particularly spoke to me many times of his own awareness of the catastrophic potentialities of our work. But we were at war. ….”

Leahy later said, “I know FDR would have used it in a minute to prove that he hadn’t wasted two billion dollars.”

(McCullough 1992, pp.440)

“We are asking for the reorganization of the satellite governments along democratic lines as agreed upon at Yalta,” Truman said.

Stalin’s calm rejoinder was very simple: “If a government is not fascist, a government is democratic,” he said.

Churchill pointed out that Italy was an open society with a free press, where diplomatic missions could go freely about their business. At Bucharest, by contract, the British mission was penned up as if under arrest. An iron fence had descended, said Churchill darkly.

“All fairy tales!” exclaimed Stalin.

“Statesmen may call one another’s statements fairy tales if they wish,” answered Churchill.

As Bohlen was to write, no moment at the conference so revealed the gulf between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies.

(McCullough 1992, pp.445)

On the morning Nagasaki was bombed, a crucial meeting of Japan’s Supreme Council for the Direction of the War had been taking place in Prime Minister Suzuki’s bomb shelter outside the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The meeting was deadlocked, with three powerful military commanders (two generals and one admiral) arguing fervently against surrender. It was time now to “lure” the Americans ashore. General Anami, the war minister, called for one last great battle on Japanese soil – as demanded by the national honor, as demanded by the honor of the living and the dead. “Would it not be wondrous for this whole nation to be destroyed like a beautiful flower?” he asked. But when news of Nagasaki was brought in, the meeting was adjourned to convene again with the Emperor that night in the Imperial Library. In the end, less than twenty four hours after Nagasaki, it was Hirohito who decided. They must, he said, “bear the unbearable” and surrender.

The Japanese government would accept the Potsdam Declaration with the understanding that the Emperor would remain sovereign.

(McCullough 1992, pp.459)

One of the primary objectives of American policy, Truman said, was “the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free of coercion.” This had been a fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan, countries that had tried “to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other countries.”

(McCullough 1992, pp.547)

The staff was continuously amazed by the President’s knowledge of the country, acquired from years of travel by automobile and from the territory covered at the time of the Truman Committee investigations. Charlie Ross claimed that truman could look out of his plane at almost any point and name the exact region he was flying over.

They liked his sense of humor. “An economist,” he told them, “is a man who wears a watch chain with a Phi Beta Kappa key at one end and no watch at the other.” And all of them, it seems, admired his sense of history, which they saw as one of his greatest strengths. “If a man is acquainted with what other people have experienced at this desk,” Truman would say sitting in the Oval Office, “it will be easier for him to go through a similar experience. It is ignorance that causes most mistakes. The man who sits here ought to know his American history, at least.” When Truman talked of presidents past – Jackson, Polk, Lincoln – it was as if he had known them personally. If ever there was a “clean break from all that had gone before,” he would say, the result would be chaos.

Once, that spring, at lunch on the Williamsburg, during a brief cruise down the Potomac, Truman and Bill Hassett, the correspondence secretary , began talking about the Civil War. As the others at the table listened, the conversation ranged over several battles and the abilities and flaws of various Union and Confederate generals, Truman, as often before, impressing everyone with how much he had read and remembered.

He would like to have been a history teacher, Truman said.

“Rather teach it than make it?” Clifford asked.

“Yes, I think so,” Truman replied. “It would be not nearly so much trouble.”

Clifford had become particularly important to Truman, in much the way Harry Hopkins had been to Roosevelt, and it was vital, they both knew, that Clifford understand Truman and what he was trying to accomplish in the long run. He did not want an administration like Roosevelt’s, Truman said. Too many of those around Roosevelt had been “crackpots,” he thought. “I want to keep my feet on the ground, don’t feel comfortable unless I know where I’m going. I don’t want any experiments. The American people have been through a lot of experiments and they want a rest from experiments.” He disliked the terms “progressive” and “liberal.” What he wanted was a “forward-looking program.” That was it, a “forward-looking program.”

(McCullough 1992, pp.558-558)

Early in May, Truman sent Dean Acheson to fill in for him with a foreign policy speech in a remote little town in Mississippi called Cleveland, at the Delta State Teachers’ College. Kennan and his special staff had as yet to make their report, but Truman had already made up his mine, from what Marshall had said after returning from Moscow, that Europe had to be rescued and quickly. The speech Acheson made was the alarm bell that Truman wanted sounded. The stricken countries of Europe needed everything and could afford to buy nothing. Financial help was imperative, but, as Acheson stressed, the objective was not relief, it was the revival of industry, agriculture, and trade. The margin of survival was so close in Europe that the savage winter just past had been nearly disastrous. Massive funding was needed if Europe was to be saved. “It is necessary if we are to preserve our own freedoms … necessary for our national security. And it is our duty and privilege as human beings.”

What was Europe now, Winston Churchill asked rhetorically in a speech in London on May 14. “It is a rubble-heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate.”

(McCullough 1992, pp.562)

“In all the history of the world,” Truman wrote privately a few days after final passage of the program, “we are the first great nation to feed and support the conquered. We are the first great nation to create independent republics from conquered territory, Cuba and the Philippines. Our neighbors are not afraid of us. Their borders have no forts, no soldiers, no tanks, no big guns lined up.”

The United States wanted peace in the world and the United States would be prepared “for trouble if it comes.”

(McCullough 1992, pp.583)

Security would be a major undertaking. Every grade crossing would have to be checked in advance by the secret Service. A pilot train – a single locomotive and one car – would run five miles ahead of the President’s train to “absorb” any possible trouble. The railroad official in charge, who had been handling presidential trips since the time of Warren G. Harding, admitted he was a nervous wreck. “Every grade crossing has to be manned when the train passes and I just can’t tell you how many switches have to be spiked until we’ve moved on,” he told a reporter. Once rolling the train would travel under the code name “POTUS,” for “President of the United States,” which gave it the right of way everywhere in the country.

Truman liked to move fast. Roosevelt, because of his infirmities, had preferred a smooth, easy pace of no more than 35 miles an hour when traveling in the Magellan. Truman liked to go about 80.

(McCullough 1992, pp.655-656)

On several major issues Dewey, as a liberal Republican, held the same or very similar views as Truman. Dewey backed aid to greece. He supported the Marshall Plan. He believed in a strong military defense, including Universal Military Training. He was for recognition of Israel. He supported the Berlin Airlift and wanted further progress made in civil rights. As he and his advisers saw things, the real struggle waited beyond November, not with the Democrats in Congress, but with Taft, whom Dewey intensely disliked. (On more than one occasion Dewey had been heard to say that the Ohio senator should have carnal relations with himself.)

The dominating strategy of the Dewey campaign, to say as little as possible, was Dewey’s own – “When you’re leading, don’t talk,” he would tell the Republican politicians who came aboard his train. The “Dewey high command,” however, had more influence than did the people around Truman. They included campaign manager Herbert Brownell, Jr., whose headquarters were in Washington, but who talked to Dewey every night by phone; Paul Lockwood, Dewey’s veteran executive assistant; and Elliot Bell, an old friend who wrote speeches and served as unofficial chief of staff on the train. These were able, experienced men. Brownell had been Deway’s campaign manager the last time, as well as chairman of the Republican Party. Lockwood had been with Dewey since his days as district attorney. Elliott Bell, a former financial writer for The New York Times, had managed Dewey’s two triumphant campaigns for governor.

And they all agreed: the campaign was going fine. Nor had other Republican politicians objected thus far. “We always asked them what our strategy should be,” remembered Bell,” and they all said that as matters stood Dewey was in and the thing to do was not stir up too much controversy and run the risk of losing votes.” The consensus was that Dewey would have done better in 1944 had he not gone on the attack as he did. So why repeat the mistake?

“The tone of his campaign was set,” wrote Time approvingly – Time, like its sister publication Life, having concluded that Dewey was as good as elected. The real concern among the Dewey staff, reported Time, was over what Truman might do between now and January to upset things, and particularly in the field of foreign policy. “The responsibilities of power already weighed on them so heavily that a newsman inquired blandly: ‘How long is Dewey going to tolerate Truman’s interference in the government?’”

(McCullough 1992, pp.672-673)

Most correspondents attributed it to ordinary curiosity. Truman had made his campaign a vaudeville act, said Time, so naturally people would come out to see the show. The American people had a high regard for the office of PResident and so naturally wanted to see the man who occupied it, wrote Robert Donovan of the New York Herald-Tribune, who had been on the train from the beginning. Fletcher Knebel of the Cowles papers would remember in particular the stop at Shelbyville:

The early morning haze was still hanging over the hills, and the sun wasn’t up. But gathered around the railroad tracks, as far as you could see in any direction, was this incredible crowd of people – men holding kids up on their shoulders so they could see, little boys climbing trees and roofs, old grandpappies and men in overalls. Of course, we experts in the press car talked about the crowd, and we finally decided it didn’t mean a damned thing. “Anybody will come out to see a man who is PResident of the United States, just to say they’ve seen one in the flesh. But that doesn’t mean they’d vote for Harry Truman.” He was going to lose. We believed it, because we wrote it every day.

Some correspondents, Jonathan Daniels noted, had convinced themselves that Truman’s crowds were not Truman followers at all, but people wishing to see a very nice man on his way to oblivion.

To Walter Lippmann, who, as usual, was observing the world from his ivy-covered home in Washington, all such speculation was immaterial. Lippmann deplored the whole spectacle of a President chasing about the country devoting himself to parades and hand shaking, trying to “talk his way to victory.” To Lippmann, who was secretly offering Dewey advice on foreign policy and who shared Dewey’s contempt for Harry Truman, this was no time for a President to be away from his duties, and this President had been gone sixteen days. Unwittingly, wrote Lippmann, Truman had proven how little he mattered.

(McCullough 1992, pp.682)

Among the campaign staff, the state of physical and emotional exhaustion, the sense of relief that finally the ordeal was over, all but precluded any capacity for rational judgment of the outcome. Their devotion to the President was greater than ever, but that, of course, was another matter. Yet some now honestly thought he might just make it. In Washington, after a quiet day at the White House, Eben Ayers worked out his own remarkable assessment of the situation in the privacy of his diary:

Were it not for all these predictions and the unanimity of the pollsters and experts, I would say the President has an excellent chance. All the signs that I see indicate it. The crowds which have turned out for him on his campaign trips have grown steadily. … I cannot believe they came out of curiosity alone. Other conditions are favorable to the PResident, the general prosperity of the country. It is contrary to political precedent for the voters to kick our an administration in times of prosperity.

The Dewey personality and campaign has not been one to attract voters. He is not liked – there is universal agreement on that. I have repeatedly asked individuals, newspapermen and others, if they could name one person who ever said he liked Dewey and I have yet to find one who would say “yes”.” The Dewey campaign speeches have dealt only with national “unity,” with the promise to do things better and more efficiently. He has not discussed issues clearly or met them head on at any time. I have repeatedly asked my wife if it is possible that the American people will vote for a man whom nobody likes and who tells them nothing.

(McCullough 1992, pp.704)

It was Harry Truman’s longstanding conviction that if you did your best in life, did you “damndest” always, then whatever happened you would at least know it was not for lack of trying. But he was a great believer also in the parts played by luck and personality, forces quite beyond effort or determination. And though few presidents had ever worked so hard, or taken their responsibilities so to heart in time of crisis as Truman had since the start of the war in Korea, it was luck, good and bad, and the large influence of personality, that determined the course of events time and again, and never more so than in late December 1950, in the midst of his darkest passage.

(McCullough 1992, pp.831)

Now repeatedly at press conferences when asked his views on the senator or the influence of McCarthyism, Truman, though plainly seething, would answer only, “No comment.”

Marshall, too, refused to respond, saying privately that if at this point in his life he had to explain that he was not a traitor, then it was hardly worth the effort.

To what degree the attacks by McCarthy influenced Marshall’s decision to retire is not clear. But on September 12, with great reluctance, Truman announced that the Secretary of Defense was stepping down for the final time, the extraordinary career was over. No man, said Truman, had ever given his country more distinguished and patriotic service.

(McCullough 1992, pp.861-862)

References

McCullough, David. 1992. Truman. N.p.: Simon & Schuster.

ISBN 0-671-45654-7