Harry Truman Read online

  Never was there a sadder illustration of the limits of a President’s power. Dad once defined leadership as the art of persuading people to do what they should have done in the first place. If they bullheadedly refuse to take this advice, there is not much the leader can do, in a free society. So, by the end of January 1946, there were 1,000,000 workers out on strike. Before the end of the year, the public would have to endure no less than 5,000 strikes. Dad was not quite as concerned about battles between employers and employees of the Bestwear Button Factory or the Dandy Hat Company. What deeply concerned him were strikes in the basic industries - coal, oil, steel, railroads - strikes that imperiled the whole American nation. In these disputes, he felt the President must act as the guardian of the people’s welfare.

  The most painful of these conflicts for my father personally was the railroad strike of May 1946. He had publicly demonstrated his deep sympathy for railroad workers more than once while a senator. They in turn had supported him in 1940, his hour of greatest need. But a railroad strike, coming on the heels of a coal strike, threatened to force a shutdown of thousands of industries and throw the country into chaos. Twenty railroad unions had been negotiating with management for months. A fact-finding board offered a settlement which management accepted and the unions rejected. At Dad’s urging, however, eighteen of the rail brotherhoods agreed to continue negotiating. But the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, headed by Alvanley Johnston, and the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, headed by A. F. Whitney, both old friends of Dad, refused to go along. They scheduled a strike for May 18.

  My father put his personal labor representative, John R. Steelman, former chief of the Conciliation Service, to work. Three days before the strike deadline, Steelman reported that the eighteen brotherhoods that had agreed to negotiate were ready to accept the original arbitration terms, but Whitney and Johnston remained immovable. Dad called them into his office and said: “If you think I’m going to sit here and let you tie up this whole country, you’re crazy as hell.”

  “We’ve got to go through with it, Mr. President,” Whitney said, “our men are demanding it.”

  “All right,” Dad said. “I’m going to give you the gun. You’ve got just forty-eight hours - until Thursday at this time - to reach a settlement. If you don’t I’m going to take over the railroads in the name of the government.”

  On Thursday, Whitney and Johnston still talked strike. My father went before Congress and asked for a law that would enable him to draft strikers against the public interest. He denounced Whitney and Johnston as men who placed their private interests above the welfare of the nation. While he spoke, John Steelman continued to negotiate with the two union leaders. Midway through his speech, Les Biffle, the secretary of the Senate, handed Dad a message. He read it and smiled grimly. “Gentlemen,” he said, “the strike has been settled, on terms proposed by the President.” Congress exploded with cheers and applause.

  An embittered Whitney declared his union would use $47 million in its treasury to defeat Harry Truman for reelection in 1948. The next day, he revised his estimate somewhat and said they would spend $2.5 million. (In 1948, he changed his mind again and supported Harry Truman for reelection.) CIO spokesmen called Dad the No. 1 strike-breaker of the American bankers and railroads.

  These pro-labor critics were baffled when, a few weeks later, my father vetoed the harshly anti-labor Case bill. In their agitation, they did not notice that in his railroad strike speech Dad had cautioned Congress against taking vengeance on labor “for the unpatriotic acts of two men.” Dad consistently baffled extremists of every stripe throughout his presidency. They did not realize he actually believed the quotation from Mark Twain which he kept on his White House desk: “Always do right. This will gratify some of the people and astonish the rest.”

  My father had no illusions about the uproar this attitude toward the presidency was likely to cause. On February 9, 1946, he wrote to his sister: “The Republicans and crackpot Democrats have started out on an organized campaign to discredit me for their own selfish ends. You must not let it worry you and I hope it won’t cause you any unhappiness. . . .”

  On February 20, he elaborated on this subject at more length: “I suppose the Republicans are happy [he was referring to the turbulent labor situation] but it won’t be for long. This situation had to develop and the sooner the better. You see Hearst and McCormick and the bitter-end Republicans had a notion they could cajole me into being something besides a forward-looking Democrat. I was elected on the Democratic platform too - and they seemed to forget that.”

  Late in February, the fire my father had been trying to build under Congress produced its first payoff - the Employment Act of 1946. It was not precisely what he had asked for - it did not give him enough money to move forcefully on behalf of a full employment policy. But the act created a Council of Economic Advisers to give the President the expertise he needed to keep employment at or near capacity. It marked a major step forward, beyond the Roosevelt Administration’s policy, and Dad made this clear in his letter to John McCormack, the House majority leader, urging passage of the bill: “It is time that the people be reassured by the Congress that the government stands for full employment, full production, and prosperity, not unemployment and relief.”

  Once more, my father was using his keen sense of the past to create a policy for the future. He was determined to avoid the terrible unemployment which shook the nation after World War I, and to a large extent, he was successful. On March 3, he wrote his sister: “Things are looking up, I think. Congress is still balky, but maybe we’ll have a few good and well deserved funerals - political and real which may help that situation. But we can only hope for the best.”

  While he was conducting these domestic battles, my father was by no means ignoring the rest of the world. News from Russia was, as usual, in the forefront of his thoughts. All of it was dismaying in the light of his continuing hope that he could work out a settlement with Stalin. On February 9, 1946, the Russian dictator had made a speech in Moscow on the eve of a so-called election. It was a brutal, blunt rejection of any hope of peace with the West. Stalin blamed World War II on capitalism and declared that as long as capitalists controlled any part of the world, there was no hope of peace. The Soviet Union must rearm, and forget all about producing consumer goods. He called for trebling Russian production of iron, steel, and coal and doubling all production to “guarantee our country against any eventuality.”

  A few days later, a long dispatch from George F. Kennan, the chargé d’affaires in Moscow, arrived in the State Department. An expert on Russia, who had been studying that country for over thirty years, Kennan analyzed the Russian approach to the world, not from the viewpoint of communism but from the far more profound viewpoint of Russian history. “At the bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is the traditional and instinctive sense of insecurity,” Kennan wrote - an insecurity based on the feeling which Russia’s Communist rulers shared with the czars that “their rule was relatively archaic in form, fragile and artificial in psychological foundations, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries.” Stripped of their Marxist justifications, Kennan said the Soviet leaders would “stand before history, at best, as only the last of that long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced the country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee the external security of their internally weak regimes.”

  This report, eventually published as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in the July 1947 issue of the magazine Foreign Affairs, signed by “X,” has been considered one of the primary documents of the cold war, and the assumption seems to have been made by numerous historians that it profoundly shaped the thinking of the Truman Administration. I can say without qualification such an assertion is nonsense. George Elsey, who had by this time emerged from the obscurity of the map room to become one of Dad’s administrative assistants, confirms
my impression the Kennan Report did not strike anyone in the White House as particularly surprising. “Essentially it didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know,” Elsey says. Whatever shock value the report achieved was on those wishful thinkers who bought the gospel preached by Henry Wallace and Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, that the trouble with Russia was all America’s fault. It was terribly tempting to believe peace could be achieved, if only we were more agreeable. At this point in 1946, Wallace and his imitators had a very large following.

  My father attempted to defuse Wallace politically by bringing into his Cabinet a man whom he was told would be a moderate liberal voice - Justice William O. Douglas. He sent James Forrestal, his Secretary of the Navy, to ask Douglas to become Secretary of the Interior. Forrestal, who himself had no doubts about Russia’s aggressive intentions, noted in his diary that Douglas called Stalin’s speech “the declaration of World War III.” But he could not persuade the Justice to accept the President’s invitation.

  While the professional liberals were creating the illusion of easy compromise, my father was getting reports of continuing Russian pressure, all over the world. Lieutenant General John R. Hodge, commanding the American forces in Korea, warned that the Communists showed absolutely no interest in reuniting the country, except on their own terms. They had launched a brilliant propaganda campaign, selling themselves as saviors of the 30 million Korean people. On May 3, 1946, Dad received a query from General Joseph T. McNarney, commander of the United States forces in Europe, asking for instructions if - it seemed very likely at the time - the Communists should attempt a coup d’état in France. In Iran, they were playing the same game, fomenting civil strife through a Communist front organization. My father authorized Secretary of State Byrnes to begin making speeches telling the American people the truth about Russia. But he himself did not feel ready to commit the immense prestige of the presidency behind an anti-Russian position. He wanted peace in the world too deeply to give up hope, even though hope was ebbing fast.

  In the midst of this mounting tension, Dad had to take a trip to Missouri with his good friend Winston Churchill. To understand how this happened, I have to backtrack a little. Not long after Dad returned from Potsdam, the president of Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, paid a visit to General Vaughan in the White House. The president’s name was Frank McCluer, and he and General Vaughan had been classmates there. Dr. McCluer, who was known as “Bullet” because he was only five feet tall and shaped, so General Vaughan says, like a projectile, wanted to invite Winston Churchill to speak at the college. General Vaughan brought Dr. McCluer in to see Dad. He read the letter Dr. McCluer was sending to Churchill and scribbled on the bottom of it: “Dear Winnie, This is a fine old school out in my state. If you come and make a speech there, I’ll take you out and introduce you.”

  So, on March 3, at 3:00 p.m., Dad, General Vaughan, Churchill, and the usual entourage of Secret Service men and aides boarded the B&O at the Silver Spring, Maryland, station. They had a delightful time on the way out. Dad assigned General Vaughan to keep Churchill liberally supplied with his favorite liquid refreshment. When the General delivered the first drink, Churchill held it up to the light, and said, “When I was a young subaltern in the South African war, the water was not fit to drink. To make it palatable we had to add whiskey. By diligent effort I learned to like it.”

  Dad proposed to teach Churchill the intricacies of poker, about which he claimed to know nothing. He soon had the poker-playing Missourians doubled up with comments such as, “I think I’ll risk a few shillings on a pair of knaves.” But their laughter dwindled as he displayed a startling knowledge of the game, plus some sly remarks he had played something like it during the Boer War.

  In Fulton, Missouri, Churchill’s desire for liquid refreshment became something of a problem. Fulton was a dry town. Dad ordered General Vaughan to spare no effort or expense to find their speaker a drink. After some frantic scouting, the General produced the wherewithal and arrived in Churchill’s room, liquor and ice water in hand. “Well, General, I am glad to see you,” said the guest of honor. “I didn’t know whether I was in Fulton, Missouri, or Fulton, Sahara.”

  Less than an hour later, my father introduced Churchill. From the hindsight of the furor Churchill’s speech caused, Dad’s introductory words are worth repeating: “I had never met Mr. Churchill personally until a conference we had with Mr. Stalin. I became very fond of both of them. They are men and they are leaders in this world today when we need leadership. . . . I understand that Mr. Churchill is going to talk about the sinews of peace. I know he will have something constructive to say to the world. . . .”

  Churchill proceeded to denounce Russian aggression in magnificently chosen words. The most memorable of these became part of the vocabulary of our era. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. From what I have seen of our Russian friends and allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for military weakness.”

  Churchill urged an Anglo-American “fraternal association” to stop Russia’s persistent aggression.

  Up and down the United States and around the world the speech created headlines. It was the first bold denunciation of Russia’s tactics by a man of Churchill’s stature. Bert Andrews of the New York Herald Tribune echoed most of the press when he wrote that on the evidence of my father’s applause at one point in Churchill’s speech and the fact he had read the speech before delivery, “Mr. Truman went along largely with what Mr. Churchill had to say, if not entirely.”

  The truth is the precise opposite, and I have the best possible evidence - my father’s comment on the speech, in his letter of March 11 to his mother and sister. “I’m glad you enjoyed Fulton,” he wrote. “So did I. And I think it did some good, although I am not yet ready to endorse Mr. Churchill’s speech.” (The italics are mine.) Dad did not have the slightest idea what Churchill was going to say at Fulton until they met in the White House before boarding the train to Missouri. He approved of Churchill saying it, because he was not a head of state. In fact, the ex-prime minister made a point of reminding his listeners he represented no one but himself. My father in no sense considered the speech a break with Russia, nor did he want one. In fact, he later invited Marshal Stalin to come to Missouri and deliver a speech, stating Russia’s point of view on the various disputes imperiling the peace.

  There is also the report of General Walter Bedell Smith, our new ambassador to Russia, of his interview with Stalin on April 5, 1946. General Smith began the interview with a question which my father had instructed him to ask. “What does the Soviet Union want and how far is Russia going to go?” He went on to assure Stalin that America deeply sympathized with the suffering the Soviet people had endured during the war and understood Russia’s desire for security and a share of the world’s raw materials. But they could not tolerate Russia’s methods in seeking these objectives. At the same time, General Smith insisted we had no aggressive plans. He pointed out how swiftly we were demobilizing our armed forces and insisted we asked nothing of Russia but the support of the principles of the United Nations Charter.

  Stalin replied with grim evidence of his paranoia. He accused the United States of allying itself with Great Britain to “thwart Russia.” He declared that Churchill’s speech at Fulton was an unfriendly act. “Such a speech if directed against the United States would never have been permitted in Russia.” Never was there more tragic evidence of the Russian dictator’s complete inability to understand a free society.

  General Smith could only reiterate that we had no intention of allying ourselves with Great Britain. He said the Iron Curtain speech reflected no more than “an apprehension which seems to be common to both the United States and Britain.” Finally, he asked Stalin once more, “How far is Russia going to go?”

  Coolly, Stalin replied, “We�
�re not going much further.” That, it seems to me, is an admission that he had already gone pretty far and knew it.

  Stalin ended the interview by reaffirming his desire for peace and refusing my father’s invitation to visit the United States. “Age has taken its toll. My doctors tell me I must not travel, and I am kept on a strict diet,” he said. “I will write to the President, thank him and explain the reasons why I cannot now accept.”

  On the same day that General Smith was having this confrontation with Stalin, Senator Claude Pepper of Florida was denouncing Winston Churchill’s Fulton speech and warning the United States against becoming “a guarantor of British imperialism.” He urged a foreign policy based on a climactic Big Three conference that would settle everything. But before the conference began, we should “destroy every atomic bomb which we have” and dismantle our atomic factories.

  People like Senator Pepper made it immensely difficult for my father to conduct a sane, coherent foreign policy. In the Cabinet meeting of April 19, Secretary of State Byrnes complained mightily of the damage they were doing. For months, we had been negotiating with Iceland to continue the use of the immense air base we had built there during World War II. There was an active Communist party in Iceland, and the island’s premier was anxious to negotiate an agreement quietly. But Senator Pepper and Secretary Wallace suddenly rose up and denounced the idea of a base in Iceland as hostile to Russia. Immediately, Iceland’s Communists raised a terrific uproar, making an agreement with us politically impossible for the premier.