Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (14 page)

Lerner and others exaggerated Truman's association with the corruption in Kansas City: the new President seems personally to have steered clear of it. Furthermore, Truman was hardly an unknown quantity to people who followed national politics. From 1935 through 1944 he had been a senator from Missouri. During World War II he impressed observers with his fair-minded leadership of a special Senate Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. Close associates found him direct, plain-spoken, and refreshingly modest. The day after Roosevelt's death he was honest to reporters about his feelings, confessing that he felt as if "the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me." Years later he recalled, "I was plenty scared, but, of course, I didn't let anybody see it."
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In coping with his fears Truman had models from a lifetime of reading military history and biography. History for him was largely the accomplishments of strong and honorable leaders: Cincinnatus, the Roman warrior who supposedly preserved the Roman state and then laid down his arms; Cato, a model of virtue; and George Washington, a patriot who led the country without being caught up in the quest for personal power.
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People who came in contact with Truman over the years were impressed with his interest in history and geopolitics and his reverence for the institution of the presidency. His idea of decisive presidential leadership, "The buck stops here," which was displayed in a sign on his desk in the Oval Office, reflected his reading about the past.

Truman had other qualities that associates came to appreciate. Unlike Roosevelt, who was often devious, playing subordinates off against one another, Truman was accessible and forthright. In this sense he was an orderly administrator. He disliked pomp and pretense, especially among the "brass hats" of the military and the "striped-pants boys" in the State Department. He was informal, plain, and unassuming, liking simple food and pleasures.
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While President he especially enjoyed climbing aboard the presidential yacht, the
Williamsburg
, and cruising up and down the Potomac playing poker with old friends like Fred Vinson, whom Truman appointed as Treasury Secretary in 1945 and as Supreme Court Chief Justice in 1946. Sometimes Truman stayed aboard from Friday afternoon through Sunday. When reporters asked him what he had been doing, he was open: "Some of the boys and I were playing a little poker." Asked what they had been drinking, he replied, "Kentucky bourbon."
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Later, when many Americans were sick of presidential excesses—lying about Vietnam, Watergate—Truman was often lionized. People especially admired his directness and decisiveness. President Jimmy Carter retrieved Truman's T
HE
B
UCK
S
TOPS
H
ERE
sign from the archives and put it on his desk in the Oval Office. This adulation, however, would have surprised many contemporaries, not only in 1945 but at most later stages of his seven-year presidency. Truman then seemed a poor contrast to FDR, with whom he was incessantly and disadvantageously compared. Bespectacled, apparently short, he looked more like a scholar than a dynamic leader of men.
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Though he could be an effective extemporaneous speaker when his partisan instincts were aroused, he more often spoke much too fast and stumbled, in part because his poor eyesight made it hard for him to read the text. Clark Clifford, a key White House aide, recalled that "he generally read poorly from prepared texts, his head down and his words coming forth in what the press liked to call a 'drone.' He waved his hand up and down as if he were chopping wood."
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Some people, then and later, also perceived Truman as truly the provincial and mostly average man that enemies often made him out to be. His background was hardly the sort to inspire large confidence. He had been raised on farms in western Missouri before his family moved to Independence, a town near Kansas City, when Harry was six. His father suffered severe financial reverses in 1900, when Harry was a senior in high school, and later returned to manage a farm. Harry could not afford college and was to became the only modern American President without higher education. Instead, he spent eight hard years—until his father's death in 1914—helping on the land.
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Efforts to make more money, including investments in an Oklahoma zinc mine and oil-drilling, failed. A member of the National Guard, Truman proved to be a remarkably successful leader of men as an artillery officer during brief combat in France in World War I. He returned and opened up a haberdashery shop in Kansas City. This, too, failed, victim of postwar recession in 1922. Truman was then thirty-eight years old, three years married, and without many prospects in life.

At this point, Truman was rescued by the Pendergast political organization in Kansas City, with which he had been associated since before World War I. In the mid- and late 1920s he rose rapidly in the machine, well aware of its corruption but apparently taking no part in it. He became a presiding judge—really an administrator—of Jackson County outside of the city, where he proved an honest and competent public official. The machine rewarded him in 1934 by making him Democratic nominee for the Senate and by getting out the vote in a dirty and hotly contested primary. (The machine found him an estimated 40,000 "ghost votes" in Kansas City.)
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When Truman entered the Senate in 1935, some of his colleagues considered him damaged goods and shunned him. Although he established himself as a hard-working and loyal New Dealer, he got no help from the White House when he faced a tough primary battle before reelection in 1940. In all, this was not an especially impressive resume for a President.
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Critics have wondered even about Truman's most widely praised trait: decisiveness. Some have speculated that he celebrated his capacity for decision as compensation for a deeper insecurity, rooted perhaps in his childhood. As a youth he had often called himself a sissy, and even at age twenty-nine he told his fiancee, Bess Wallace, that he was a "guy with spectacles and a girl mouth."
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His parents' marginal economic situation created other insecurities: the socially more prominent family of Wallace, whom he courted for years before marrying, seems always to have looked down on him. His own stumbles in finding success in life, and his ever-embarrassing association with the Pendergasts, further placed him on the defensive. Truman was honest, ambitious, and very determined. But especially on little things he could fly into rages that scared his associates. He was sometimes short-tempered, combative, resentful, and extraordinarily touchy.
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Most serious scholars do not wish to sail too far out on this sort of psychological tack. Truman was probably more insecure than some of his best-known political contemporaries—FDR and Eisenhower come to mind—but it is not clear that slights in his early years much affected his presidential actions. Indeed, Truman's decisiveness as President has been exaggerated. Having received little help from Roosevelt, he felt his way carefully for nearly two years after 1945.
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During this difficult time he depended heavily on the advice of others, and even later he frequently took his time before reaching big decisions, such as committing American ground troops to Korea in 1950 or firing General Douglas MacArthur from his Pacific command in 1951.
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In his foreign policies Truman is best described not as a heroic man-of-decision-the-likes-of-whom-we-may-never-see-again-in-the-White-House, but as a patriotic, conscientious, and largely colorless man whose fate it was to cope, sometimes imaginatively and sometimes imprudently, with some of the most difficult foreign policy problems in American history.

T
RUMAN DID NOT KNOW
much about world affairs in 1945. Aside from his European service in 1918—and a trip to Central America in 1939—he had never left the United States. As a senator he had concentrated on domestic issues in the Depression years and on defense policies during the war. Perhaps his best-known venture into foreign policy questions had come in June 1941, when he offered his reaction to Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union: "If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don't want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances."
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This statement has received a fair amount of attention from historians, some of whom argue that it revealed Truman to be among other things a shrewd (or cynical) practitioner
of Realpolitik
. That makes too much of an off-hand remark—one that many Americans in 1941 found attractive. Other evidence in fact points to traces of Wilsonian idealism in his thinking. For many years he carried in his wallet a copy of part of Tennyson's "Locksley Hall," a poem that foresaw a "Parliament of Man, the Federation of the world." Truman explained, "We're going to have that some day. . . . I guess that's what I've really been working for ever since I first put that poetry in my pocket."
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Although Truman needed experience in foreign policy concerns in 1945, he did have strong feelings. Like most people, he hated repressive dictatorships and aggressive behavior by other nation-states. That much was clear from his comment in 1941, and it remained clear throughout his presidency. That the Soviet Union was Communist bothered him; that it was "totalitarian" bothered him more. Well before entering the Oval Office he mistrusted the Soviets because they crushed dissent and freedom. His mistrust was controlled: Truman, like most Americans in 1945, did not want to fight the Soviets. But it strongly affected his thinking. Moral concerns about freedom abroad pervaded his presidency.

Truman felt especially deeply about another thing in 1945: it was his duty to carry out the foreign (and domestic) policies of his predecessor. This made sense; Vice-Presidents generally do this, or think they are doing it. But following FDR's ideas in foreign policy was much easier said than done, for Truman had little idea of what those ideas were. For this reason, and because he lacked experience, he turned to top advisers for guidance. The influence of these advisers, often called the Establishment in later years, became powerful by 1946 and had extraordinary staying power that lasted well beyond the Truman administration.

Like any so-called Establishment, the elite had a varied cast of characters.
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One of its leading lights in 1945, Secretary of War Stimson, was aging but still a force to be reckoned with in government. Stimson had a very long pedigree. He had been War Secretary under President William Howard Taft and Secretary of State under Herbert Hoover. Stimson was a Republican, a New York corporate lawyer, and a conservative, brought into the highest councils of state by Roosevelt to lend an air of bipartisanship to foreign policy in 1940. It was Stimson who stayed around after a Cabinet meeting in April 1945 and told Truman—eleven days after he became President—about the Bomb.

Stimson's influence extended well beyond his own office. Thanks to his good reputation, he attracted to the War Department a number of businessmen, bankers, and lawyers who dominated foreign and defense policy-making then and later. One was Robert Lovett, a decorated aviator in World War I, a Yale graduate, and a Wall Street investment banker with Brown Brothers, Harriman. Stimson made him Assistant Secretary for Air during the war. Lovett was shy, self-effacing, and deadpan but confirmed in his belief that the United States must maintain a strong defense posture in the postwar years. Widely respected by men in his circle, he served as Undersecretary of State in 1947–48, as Deputy Defense Secretary during the Korean War in 1950–51, and as Defense Secretary from then until early 1953. He remained a major power-broker then and for many years thereafter. One of his proteges during World War II, Robert McNamara, was too junior to sit in on high-level meetings at that time. But his experiences during the war, supervising the logistics behind bombing raids, deeply affected his thinking about the potential for air power. McNamara was soon to become a "whiz kid" at the Ford Motor Company, moving up to be its president in 1960, and later to be Secretary of Defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

Other members of the Establishment had equally strong ties with the military. Chief among these was General George Marshall, army chief of staff during the war. Marshall was an aloof, grave, and unusually formal professional soldier who rarely addressed even close associates by their first names. Though possessing a fierce temper, he struggled successfully to keep it under control, and he almost never raised his voice, preferring instead to listen carefully and to seek consensus. As a major architect of military victory during the war, Marshall elicited admiration bordering on adulation among most of his contemporaries. Many younger officers, including Dwight D. Eisenhower, owed their rapid advancement and preferment to him. Like many others, Eisenhower found Marshall uniquely temperate and coolly impersonal in his judgments. Stimson told Marshall, "I have seen a great many soldiers in my day, and you, sir, are the finest . . . I have ever known." Winston Churchill considered him "the greatest Roman of them all." Truman was awed by Marshall, calling him "the greatest living American." He picked Marshall as a special envoy to China in 1946, as Secretary of State in 1947, and as Secretary of Defense after the Korean War broke out in 1950.
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