Harry Truman Read online

  But you are not interested in them. You are thinking of Adelina Patti, Alice Nielsen, Melba, Tetrazzini, Sembrich and a dozen others of the great opera.

  Living in the White House does not guarantee the best available technology. When I sent Dad a record I had made in Missouri, he and Mother discovered the Victrola was as decrepit as the rest of the place. They ordered a new Capehart, but meanwhile sat around listening to me on “this wretched machine,” as Mother called it. “Your voice shows you’ve been working hard. It seems to have more volume and a beautiful tone,” Dad said.

  I was debating whether to stay in Missouri or go to New York to continue my studies there. For the moment, I opted for Missouri, to Dad’s vast relief. “I’m glad you decided to stay at home and study rather than go to the wilds of that terrible town at the mouth of the Hudson,” he wrote. Even though he was pleased by this decision, Dad simply could not resign himself to the fact that I was twenty-two years old, a college graduate, and determined to go my own way. He kept trying to lure me back to the White House. On October 1, 1946, he pulled out all the stops to describe his visit to West Point for an Army football game. “Twenty-one hundred bosoms were all aflutter when I arrived hoping to see my daughter. So just to get even I had to stand them up and make ‘em quake in the knees for me!” He then added a long list of interesting people he had met at the commandant’s house and concluded, “You see what you’ve missed besides all those fluttering hearts.” Then he turned sarcastic and added, “By the way, I wish you’d send me a late news photo so I won’t forget how you look.”

  Two weeks later he was still teasing me on the same subject.

  Dear Margie - Was glad to read your good letter which your Ma was kind enough to let me see. I think you’d better send me a picture - a late one so I’ll be sure and recognize you when I come home. I was afraid the four or five pictures I have on my desks will not be a good likeness now - particularly one on a tricycle in coat and panties.

  If you are really turning into the prima donna you want to be you may by this time weigh some two hundred ten and be as buxom as Melba or Lillian Russell by all the rules. I want to be sure.

  This place without you is very dreary. I don’t know what your mamma and I will do when you go on tour. I guess I’ll have to go to an orphan’s home and get me a substitute. How would that do? It might work.

  An interview was arranged with Metropolitan Opera star Frederick Jagel in New York. He was encouraging and constructive. I reported what he said to Dad. Although he was deep in his struggle with John L. Lewis, Dad somehow found time to take my career seriously, too:

  I am happy that he thinks you have a good chance to sing successfully. Of course if that is what you want - that is what I want you to have. It seems to me you have gone about your career in the right way.

  You have finished your college education. You have worked long hard hours to get your voice in condition for the final trials. You are willing to take the necessary advice from honest people about what to do to make your preliminary trials. Your Daddy will support you to the end on whatever it takes to make these trials. But daughter, don’t fool yourself. You know what it takes.

  Your Dad doesn’t want you to fail publicly. Not that he wouldn’t be for you win, lose or draw - but because of conditions a failure would be unbearable for you. You won’t fail! You have your Dad’s tenacity and your Ma’s contrariness - and together they should make you.

  Now you’d better tell me what the expenses are to date. We must not be charity patients of anybody.

  ONE OF THE most important letters my father ever wrote me came from Key West, Florida, on March 13, 1947:

  Dear Margie: - We had a very pleasant flight from Washington.

  Your old Dad slept for 750 or 800 miles - three hours, and we were making from 250 to 300 miles an hour. No one, not even me (your mother would say I) knew how very tired and worn to a frazzle the Chief Executive had become. This terrible decision I had to make had been over my head for about six weeks. Although I knew at Potsdam that there is no difference in totalitarian or police states, call them what you will, Nazi, Fascist, Communist or Argentine Republics. You know there was but one idealistic example of Communism. That is described in the Acts of the Apostles.

  The attempt of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, et al., to fool the world and the American Crackpots Association, represented by Jos. Davies, Henry Wallace, Claude Pepper and the actors and artists in immoral Greenwich Village, is just like Hitler’s and Mussolini’s so-called socialist states.

  Your Pop had to tell the world just that in polite language.

  I hope the historians who picture Dad as plunging recklessly and even enthusiastically into the cold war read this letter. The day before it was written, he addressed a joint session of Congress, to call for a historic departure in American foreign policy, now known as the Truman Doctrine. Dad asked Congress to back his declaration that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. . . . This is no more than a frank recognition that totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.

  To back up these words, my father asked for $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey, the two countries most immediately menaced by Russia’s imperial ambitions. But nowhere in the speech did Dad mention Russia. There were two reasons for this omission. By placing the emphasis on the fight between totalitarianism and freedom, Dad was attempting to rally the same emotional commitment that had fired America in the war against Hitler. Second, he was still hoping to avoid a complete break with Russia.

  But he knew, at the same time, Stalin would regard his step as decisive. It was the real beginning of the cold war, on our side of the Iron Curtain, the moment when the leader of the free world said, “No more” to the men from Moscow. That is why Dad called it “this terrible decision.” That explains the anguish and exhaustion he talks about in his letter. That is why he pondered and analyzed and discussed it for so many weeks.

  The crisis in both Greece and Turkey had been simmering since the end of World War II. Russia had made outrageous territorial demands on the Turks, including the right to set up air and naval bases on Turkish territory at the mouth of the Dardanelles. In Greece, Stalin was supplying guns and ammunition to a 20,000-man guerrilla army that had the legitimate government tottering. The Turks, forced to support a 600,000-man army in the face of Russia’s threats, were on the brink of financial collapse.

  My father had been in close touch with the situation in both countries. But he and the entire nation were catapulted into a crisis when the British government handed our State Department a note informing them Britain could no longer afford to support the 40,000 troops it was maintaining in Greece or supply further aid to the Greek government. It was the first intimation of the appalling bankruptcy of the British Empire, in spite of a fifty-year loan of $3.75 billion which we had made to them in August 1946. But the stunning - one might even say outrageous - part of the British note was its deadline. Attlee and his government were pulling their troops out on March 31 - less than six weeks away. If Greece fell - and this was almost a certainty if we did nothing - Turkey, isolated in the eastern Mediterranean, would inevitably succumb in short order. Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who received the British note, immediately telephoned my father and his new Secretary of State, General Marshall, who had replaced James Byrnes on January 7, 1947.

  Three weeks of incredibly intense effort followed. My father knew extending such aid in peace time was without parallel in American history. He also knew he was faced with a hostile Republican majority in Congress. All the legislative skills he had honed in his ten senatorial years were thrown into the effort. Republican senators, led by Senator Vandenberg, were invited to the White House to hear the grim facts about these two threatened countries. They were also told that the pe
oples of Italy, Germany, and France, their economies wrecked by the war, as well as a host of small, fragile states in the Middle East, were waiting to see whether the United States was prepared to resist the onward march of communism. Simultaneously, Dad had to fend off foolish advice from his own party. The Democratic Congressional Conference called a meeting - supposedly secret but very well reported, like so many secret meetings in Washington - and voted to warn Dad against supporting “British policies” in the Mediterranean. Thank goodness, the Constitution and long tradition have made the foreign policy of the United States the responsibility of the President.

  Even with all my father’s expert cajoling, Congress took two weary months to make up their minds about giving aid to Turkey and Greece. Meanwhile, he had to supply what emergency funds he could scrape together from other aid programs. In a burst of impatience, he told his mother:

  When the Congress gets all snarled up it is necessary for them to find someone to blame - so they always pick on me. But they are not fooling anyone. The people, I’m sure, are not to be fooled by a lot of hooey put out by ignorant demagogues. Woodrow Wilson said that most members of Congress just had a knot on their shoulders to keep their bodies from unraveling.

  I don’t go that far, but I sometimes think that if Congressmen talked less and worked more for the public interest they would come out much better and so would the country.

  My father understood, from almost his first day in the White House, that a President cannot be passive, the obedient servant of Congress or the blind follower of polls. This is especially true when the nation is confronted, as it was in the 1940s, with crisis after crisis around the world, where swift action was essential. As George Elsey put it succinctly: “You can’t sit around and wait for public opinion to tell you what to do. In the first place there isn’t any public opinion. The public doesn’t know anything about it; they haven’t heard about it. The President must decide what he is going to do and do it, and attempt to educate the public to the reasons for his action.”

  Elsey also has some harsh words for the hindsight specialists who spend a year or two writing a book about decisions such as aid to Greece and Turkey, ignoring the fact they were hammered out under tremendous pressure. “You don’t sit down and take time to think through and debate ad nauseum all the points,” he says. “You don’t have time. Later, somebody can sit around for days and weeks and figure out how things might have been done differently. This is all very well and very interesting but quite irrelevant.”

  When the Greek-Turkish crisis exploded, however, my father had at his disposal a resource which was typical of the foresighted planning he brought to the presidency. After a year in the White House, he saw that the President himself, bombarded as he was day and night by people with information, problems, proposals, and schemes, could never find time to make a comprehensive study of a particular subject, such as Russian-American relations. Analyses by foreign service officers, such as the “containment” theory proposed by Kennan, were helpful, but Dad wanted even more comprehensive reports, written from the White House point of view. So, in the summer of 1946, he asked Clark Clifford, his former naval aide, whom he had made his special counsel, to prepare a “position paper” on Russian-American relations.

  Clifford passed the task along to his assistant, George Elsey, and Elsey spent most of the summer of 1946 writing it. He went to every major agency of the government - the State Department, the War and Navy Departments, the new Central Intelligence Agency. Elsey, who is now president of the American Red Cross, produced an immensely perceptive, enormously detailed document - 100 pages in length - which was handed to my father over Clark Clifford’s signature in September 1946. It analyzed Soviet foreign policy in terms of its publicly stated goals and activities throughout the world. It summarized Soviet-American agreements from 1942 to 1946 and the violations of these agreements by Russia. It analyzed Soviet activities affecting American security, pointing to the construction of air bases in northeastern Siberia from which the United States could be attacked, and the construction of large numbers of submarines for commerce raiding if war did break out. It detailed Russian attempts to weaken America’s position abroad, particularly in China, and reported on Russian subversive movements and espionage within the United States. Finally, it made recommendations for American policy toward the Soviet Union, based on this realistic assessment of the present and recent past. There was, of course, no obligation for the President to accept these recommendations, but they gave him and the men around him a background in depth against which they could judge future Russian moves and formulate an American response to them.

  Clark Clifford handed this report to my father one evening around five o’clock. He stayed up most of the night reading it, and early the next morning he called Clifford at his home. “How many copies of this report do you have?” he asked.

  “Ten,” Clifford said.

  “I want the other nine,” Dad said. “Get them right in here.”

  Clifford put the other nine on his desk within the hour. “This has got to be put under lock and key,” Dad said. “This is so hot, if this should come out now it could have an exceedingly unfortunate impact on our efforts to try to develop some relationship with the Soviet Union.”

  Once more we see that my father, in the face of facts that could have justified massive pessimism or even angry aggression, still hoped to resolve the conflict between Russia and America peacefully. In fact, he agreed wholeheartedly with the last sentence of the report, which in many ways was the policy he adopted: “Even though Soviet leaders profess to believe that the conflict between capitalism and communism is irreconcilable, and must eventually be resolved by the triumph of the latter, it is our hope that they will change their mind and work out with us a fair and equitable settlement when they realize that we are too strong to be beaten and too determined to be frightened.”

  One of the amusing byplays of this drama was my father’s absolute refusal to consult Bernard Baruch before announcing the Truman Doctrine. Dad never had a very high opinion of Baruch. Presidents get more advice than they can possibly use and anyone who made a career of being an unsolicited, unrequested presidential adviser had to be a phony. But Baruch had great prestige in Congress, and several members of the Cabinet urged my father to see him first and get him on his side. Dad replied: “I’m just not going to do it. I’m not going to spend hours and hours on that old goat, come what may. If you take his advice, then you have him on your hands for hours and hours, and it is his policy. I’m just not going to do it. We have a decision to make and we’ll make it.”

  In May, Congress finally passed the Greek-Turkish aid bill, with very little help from Baruch. Meanwhile, the Republican majority in Congress was doing its utmost to make things difficult for Dad on the domestic front. Partisan politics is, I know, inevitable in a democracy. But I do not think I am being too Democratic when I say the Republicans in this Congress carried partisanship to horrendous extremes. On atomic energy, for instance, my father took the position that politics and the atom simply did not mix. He appointed four Republicans and one independent - David Lilienthal - to the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission. Senator Taft and his fellow believers in yesterday immediately launched a vicious, sustained attack on Lilienthal and indirectly on the TVA. Dad was thoroughly disgusted by this performance. He recognized it for what it was - another attempt by Congress to encroach on the powers of the presidency. He sent Clark Clifford to Lilienthal to ask him if he was ready to fight to the finish. Lilienthal said he was ready. Dad said he would “stick with him if it took a hundred and fifty years.”

  Many of the charges against Lilienthal revolved around supposed Communists in the TVA. The battle was actually the first round in the ugly disloyalty issue that was to loom larger and uglier in later years. For two months, witness after witness, from Dr. Conant of Harvard to Dean Acheson, backed the appointment of Lilienthal. Finally, on April 3, 1947, Senator Bricker of Ohio moved to recommit th
e AEC nominations. It was a crucial moment. In his diary, Lilienthal tells how he waited with Dad in his office, “a grim gray look” on Dad’s face, from 5:00 p.m. until exactly 5:12, when Charlie Ross stuck his head in the door and said, “The Senate voted to reject the Bricker motion.”

  It meant the nominations were all but confirmed. My father shook hands with the slightly dazed nominees and said to Lilienthal, “You have the most important thing there is. You must make a blessing of it or” - he pointed to the large globe in the corner of his office - “we’ll blow that all to smithereens.”

  Two days later, my father wrote his mother and sister, telling them what he thought of the Republicans and Senator Taft in particular: “The Atomic Energy Commission fight finally came to a test vote. Taft has succeeded in making a real fool of himself as have several so-called leading Republicans. I am of the opinion that the country has had enough of their pinhead antics.”

  Unfortunately, the Republicans were by no means convinced of this fact. Although the wave of strikes which had plagued the nation during 1946 had largely subsided, John L. Lewis and some other labor leaders were still talking in very belligerent language. This gave the reactionaries in Congress an opportunity to put together and pass that masterpiece of negative legislation known as the Taft-Hartley Act. Once more, Congress was directly challenging the President. In his 1947 State of the Union Message, my father had specifically warned Congress not to adopt “punitive legislation.” He insisted that “industrial peace cannot be achieved merely by laws directed against labor unions.” At the same time, he was aware that the labor-management situation needed government leadership. He called for the creation of a joint commission to study the problem, a sweeping extension of the Labor Department’s abilities and powers to assist in collective bargaining, and the elimination of certain unjustifiable labor union practices, such as strikes by minority unions and some kinds of secondary boycotts.