Harry Truman (31 page)

My father, meanwhile, had more important things to worry about. Like his first press conference.

The largest mob of reporters in White House history - 348 - showed up for it. On the whole, it was like most press conferences, a combination of the trivial and the important. My father impressed everyone by how swiftly and forthrightly he answered the reporters’ questions. Roosevelt was fond of playing hide-and-seek with the press, tantalizing them with semi-answers and evasions. Dad’s approach was drastically different. He either answered a question directly, or declined to answer it just as directly.

One reporter asked him whether the blacks in America could look forward to his support for fair employment practices and the right to vote without being hampered by poll taxes. “I will give you some advice,” Dad said. “All you need to do is read the Senate record of one Harry S. Truman.” Someone else wanted to know if he was planning to lift the ban on horseracing. “I do not intend to lift the ban,” Dad said. Another man asked his views on the disposal of synthetic rubber plants. “That is not a matter for discussion here. It will be discussed at the proper time,” was the reply. Then there was the goofball who asked, “Mr. President, do you approve of the work of the Truman Committee?” A roar of laughter saved Dad the trouble of answering that one. Perhaps his most important statement - one that drew a rare burst of applause from the reporters - was his reply to the following question: “Do you expect to see Mr. Molotov before he goes across . . .”

“Yes, I do.”

“Before he goes to San Francisco?”

“Yes. He is going to stop by and pay his respects to the President of the United States. He should.”

As his press secretary, my father had decided to retain, on a temporary basis, Leonard Reinsch, a radio newsman from Ohio. But Dad knew Reinsch, with his radio orientation, would never be acceptable to the fiercely clannish newspapermen of the White House press corps. On the morning of April 18, Dad asked the man he wanted to take the enormously important job of White House press secretary to visit him. It was his old friend Charlie Ross, valedictorian of his high school graduating class and now a contributing editor of the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch.
At fifty-nine, Charlie felt reluctant to say yes. The brutal hours and the pressures of the job required a younger man. There was also the problem of salary. The
Post-Dispatch
was paying Charlie $35,000 a year. The White House could pay him only $10,000.

“Charlie,” Dad said sadly, “I know that. But I also know you aren’t the kind of man who can say no to the President of the United States.”

If ever there was an example of my father’s remarkable ability to judge men, this was it. He was selecting for one of the most sensitive and confidential jobs in his administration a man from a paper that had always attacked him with savage partisanship. But Dad, as usual, separated the trivial from the essential, the man from the issue. He knew that he and Charlie Ross shared a common heritage, believed in the same ideals, sought the same goals. Charlie knew it too, and he backed away from his first instinct, which was outright refusal. He asked for a little time to think it over.

That night Charlie Ross decided to say yes. “This man needs help,” he told his wife.

An interesting observation, which suggests even Charlie did not know my father well at this time. He too subscribed to the average-man theory that Roy Roberts purveyed - although he did not think the word “average” was synonymous with mediocre. In an estimate of Dad written on the night FDR died, Charlie called him “better than average. . . . He may not have the makings of a great President but he certainly has the makings of a good President.”

On the evening of April 19, Charlie visited my father at Blair House and told him he would take the job. Dad was, of course, delighted, and the two graduates of the class of 1901 began reminiscing about the years they had shared.

“Say,” Charlie suddenly said, “won’t this be news for Miss Tillie?”

Dad immediately decided to call Miss Tillie and tell her the news. “I think it’s about time I got that kiss she never gave me on graduation night,” Dad said.

Miss Tillie Brown was in her eighties, but very much with it. She was tremendously pleased and flattered by the call. “How about that kiss I never got?” Dad asked. “Have I done something worthwhile enough to rate it now?”

“You certainly have,” Miss Tillie said.

Miss Tillie was so excited, she promptly called the Independence
Examiner
to tell them about her chat with the President. The
Examiner
in turn contacted the wire services, and within minutes, agitated phone calls were pouring into the White House, demanding to know what the devil was going on. Since when did the President leak his most important appointments to country newspapers in Missouri, and ignore the titans of the AP, UP, and
The New York Times
? Dad had to call a special press conference the next morning to announce Charlie’s appointment. Fortunately, Charlie’s popularity among the press corps muted any resentment the White House reporters felt about being scooped by Miss Tillie. The Washington
Post
declared: “There is no more beloved nor highly regarded newspaper man in this city than Charlie Ross.”
The New York Times
said: “It would be hard to single out a Washington writer who has been more highly regarded or better liked.”

My father was learning the hard way that everything a President says and does is news. During one of these first hectic weeks, he decided to stroll down to his bank. No one argued with him. People are not in the habit of arguing with the President about minor matters. Only when he was in midpassage did he realize he was creating a public disturbance. An immense crowd swarmed around him. The Secret Service men were aghast and called for help. Sirens screamed as Washington police rushed to respond. A monumental traffic jam, plus a mob in which women and children might easily have been trampled, was the result of Dad’s first - and last - stroll to the bank.

Even his 100-yard trips from the White House to Blair House became a problem. The first day or two he was startled to discover that as he reached Pennsylvania Avenue, lights in all directions turned red - a little gambit the Secret Service had worked out with the capital police. Traffic jammed, and Dad felt guilty about it. So he ordered the practice to cease. “I’ll wait for the light like any other pedestrian,” he said. But the day he tried this, a big crowd immediately gathered around him, making the Secret Service extremely nervous and slowing the traffic to a crawl. So he gave up and let the Secret Service guide him on a circuitous path from the rear door of the White House to a car that took him to an alley entrance behind Blair House.

My father worried a good deal about the problems he was creating for the rest of the family. “It is a terrible - and I mean terrible - nuisance to be kin to the President of the United States,” he told his mother and sister. “Reporters have been haunting every relative and purported relative I ever heard of and they’ve probably made life miserable for my mother, brother, and sister. I am sorry for it, but it can’t be helped.”

If the Trumans were having their troubles with the press, the press was also having trouble with President Truman. One daily habit Dad absolutely declined to abandon was his preference for getting up early and taking a long walk. A. Merriman Smith, the UP White House correspondent, one of the wittiest and most delightful men in the press corps, described his own and his colleagues’ reactions to this aspect of the Truman Administration: “At first I thought there might be something of a farm boy pose in Mr. Truman’s early rising. That was before I got up every morning at six o’clock for the next three weeks in order to record his two minute walk across Pennsylvania Avenue. Slowly and sleepily I began to realize that this man was in earnest. He
liked
to get up early. He wasn’t doing it for the publicity or the pictures.”

Smitty, as everyone called him, described Dad’s walking speed as “a pace normally reserved for track stars.” The combination of exercise and farmer’s hours wreaked havoc on the White House scribes, who had a predilection for a playboy lifestyle and had been spoiled by Roosevelt’s preference for starting the day late. “If I stayed up after nine thirty,” Smitty mournfully reported, “I was a yawning wreck and by ten thirty in the morning I was ready for lunch.” Glumly, Smitty concluded that getting to know the new President depended entirely upon one’s “physique and endurance.”

Privately, Dad enjoyed wearing the press boys down a little. Some months later he wrote his mother about a similar workout he gave the photographers: “I took the White House photographers for a stroll yesterday morning and most wore ‘em out. I go every morning at 6:30 to 7:00 for a half hour’s real walk usually doing two miles. I told them that I’d let them take pictures provided they walked the whole round with me. Most of ‘em made it, some did not. I invited all of them to come again this morning without their cameras but none of ‘em did.”

From behind his desk, my father was surprising a lot of other people who were inclined for one reason or another to underrate him. Our ambassador in Moscow, W. Averell Harriman, rushed to Washington, because, he said: “I felt that I had to see President Truman as soon as possible in order to give him as accurate a picture as possible of our relations with the Soviet Union. I wanted to be sure that he understood that Stalin was already failing to keep his Yalta commitment. Much to my surprise, when I saw President Truman I found that he had already read all the telegrams between Washington and Moscow and had a clear understanding of the problems we faced. For the first time I learned how avid a reader President Truman was. This was one of the reasons he was able to take on so rapidly the immense problems he had to deal with at that time.”

Joseph C. Grew, the Under Secretary of State who was appointed Acting Secretary while Stettinius was at the United Nations Conference, had been in the diplomatic service since 1904. He wrote to a friend: “If I could talk to you about the new President you would hear nothing but the most favorable reaction. I have seen a good deal of him lately and I think he is going to measure up splendidly to the tremendous job which faces him. He is a man of few words but he seems to know the score all along the line and he generally has a perfectly clear conception of the right thing to do and how to do it. He is personally most affable and agreeable to deal with but he certainly won’t stand for any pussyfooting in our foreign relations and policy, all of which of course warms my heart.”

Perhaps the most interesting reaction to the new President came from a man who had worked intimately with President Roosevelt for a long time - Harold D. Smith, the director of the Bureau of the Budget. His hitherto unpublished diary is in the files of the Truman Library. Here are some excerpts from it describing his first meeting with Dad on Wednesday, April 18:

One week later, Smith returned for another forty-five-minute conference which ranged over a wide variety of problems, more money for the Tennessee Valley Authority, the problem of using Lend-Lease money for postwar rehabilitation, the G.I. Bill of Rights. Summing up back in his own office, Smith wrote: “The whole conference was highly satisfactory from my point of view. . . . The President’s reactions were positive and highly intelligent. While he agreed with nearly all of our propositions, I did not feel that I was selling him a bill of goods. Rather I felt that the propositions were sound because he agreed with them.”

MY FATHER’S OVERRIDING concern in these first weeks was our policy toward Russia. There is a school of historians in our universities that is attempting to rewrite the history of the postwar world according to the following scenario. Under the wise guidance of Franklin D. Roosevelt, American-Soviet relations were perfect. Then Harry S. Truman arrived in the White House and proceeded to provoke the eager-to-cooperate, disinterested, peace-loving Russian statesmen into the antagonism known as the cold war. To prove I’m not making this up, allow me to quote from a statement by Yale professor Gaddis Smith, described as a specialist in diplomatic history: “The times demanded a philosopher, a humane skeptic. Instead the United States got a dedicated battler with the outlook of a company commander who never reasoned why.”

Here is a so-called historian who ignores all the years of achievement and experience that filled Harry Truman’s life between 1918 and 1945. He ignores his accomplishments as head of the Truman Committee; he ignores, above all, Dad’s dedication to international peace, so clearly visible in his fight for civilian control of the war effort and for a Senate commitment to the United Nations. Finally, he ignores the truth about the historical situation which my father faced as President.

Relations between Great Britain, Russia, and America were deteriorating months before Roosevelt died. As early as September 9, 1944, Ambassador W. Averell Harriman cabled the President from Moscow: “Our relations with the Soviets now that the end of the war is in sight have taken a startling turn evident during the last two months. The Soviets have held up our requests with complete indifference to our interests and have shown an unwillingness even to discuss pressing problems. . . . I have evidence that they have misinterpreted our general attitude toward them as an acceptance of their policies and a sign of weakness. . . . This job of getting the Soviet Government to play a decent role in international affairs is . . . going to be more difficult than we had hoped.”

The brawl over the number of votes Russia would have in the United Nations, Stalin’s insistence on the right of the great powers to exercise a veto over decisions of the international organization, his insistence on a puppet government in Poland, the ruthless suppression of non-Communists in other countries of Eastern Europe which the Red Army controlled had been a series of shocks to President Roosevelt’s hope for postwar cooperation. He went to Yalta, almost in desperation, risking his fragile health in a final effort to restore the tottering alliance.

But at Yalta, FDR was negotiating not from strength but from weakness. He was hampered by the conviction - shared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and almost every other member of his administration except Admiral Leahy - that Russian aid was essential to the final defeat of Japan. America had been crashing through the island defenses of the Japanese Empire and raining bombs on the home islands at a prodigious rate. But the main Japanese armies in China, Manchuria, and in Japan were relatively untouched, unconquered, and still imbued with fanatical determination to fight to the last man.

To extract from Stalin a promise to enter the Pacific war, Roosevelt made many concessions to the Russian dictator at Yalta. When Admiral Leahy protested giving the Russians control of Dairen, the Chinese port in Manchuria, Roosevelt shook his head in resignation and said, “Bill, I can’t help it.” Leahy was even more shocked by the agreement on Poland. “Mr. President,” he said, “this is so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without ever technically breaking it.” The President replied, “I know, Bill, I know it. But it’s the best I can do for Poland at this time.”

Roosevelt had scarcely returned from Yalta when he began getting telegrams from Prime Minister Churchill about the Russian communization of Poland. On March 13, the prime minister cabled: “Poland has lost her frontier. Is she now to lose her freedom? I do not wish to reveal a divergence between the British and the United States government, but it would certainly be necessary for me to make it clear that we are in presence of a great failure and utter breakdown of what we settled at Yalta.”

Anxiously Roosevelt cabled Stalin: “I must make it quite plain to you that any such solution which would result in a thinly disguised continuation of the present Warsaw [Communist] regime would be unacceptable and would cause the people of the United States to regard the Yalta agreement as having failed.”

Stalin’s reply was a series of scorching telegrams, bluntly accusing Roosevelt and Churchill of treacherously negotiating with the Germans to sign a separate peace on the western front so they could continue to fight the Russians on the eastern front. The telegrams, sparked by American attempts to persuade the German army in Italy to surrender, were grossly insulting. Roosevelt replied: “I cannot avoid a feeling of bitter resentment toward your informers, whoever they are, for such vile misrepresentations of my actions or those of my trusted subordinates.”

On March 24, 1945, President Roosevelt received a cable from Harriman describing further difficulties with Stalin. A mutual friend, Anna Rosenberg Hoffman, who was with him at the time, described the President’s reaction:

As this book was being completed, another hitherto unknown Roosevelt cable to Churchill was discovered in the files of the Roosevelt Library. Dated April 6, it emphatically supported a cable which Churchill had sent the previous day, urging “a firm and blunt stand” against the Russians. “We must not permit anybody to entertain a false impression that we are afraid,” FDR wrote. “Our Armies will in a very few days be in a position that will permit us to become ‘tougher’ than has been heretofore advantageous to the war effort.”

In the evening hours during his first weeks in office, my father read these cables between Prime Minister Churchill, President Roosevelt, Marshal Stalin, and Ambassador Harriman. He saw, as James MacGregor Burns, Roosevelt’s biographer, has recently written, that “the edifice of trust and good will and neighborliness that Roosevelt had shaped so lovingly was crashing down around him” at his death.

Still Roosevelt refused to lose hope. On April 12, the day of his death, he sent two cables, one to Ambassador Harriman for Stalin saying he wished to consider the “Berne misunderstanding” - Berne was the Swiss city where the negotiations for the surrender of German forces in Italy began - “a minor incident.” The other cable went to Prime Minister Churchill: “I would minimize the general Soviet problem as much as possible because these problems in one form or another seem to arise every day and most of them straighten out in one form or another as in the case of the Berne meeting. We must be firm, however, and our course thus far is correct.”

This was precisely the balance my father attempted to achieve in his dealing with the Russians. He was determined to insist on Russia’s fulfilling the Yalta agreements. At the same time, he made every attempt to maintain - perhaps the more correct word would be revive - the high hopes of postwar cooperation with which America had joined Russia in the fight against Nazism. His first attempt to achieve this difficult balance came less than two weeks after he took his oath of office. Foreign Minister Molotov arrived in Washington to pay his respects to the President, as Dad had made it clear he expected him to do. Before he arrived, my father had a series of top-secret conferences with his chief foreign policy advisers to inform them he intended to be “firm but fair.” He realized we could not expect to get 100 percent of what we wanted in dealing with the Russians, but on important matters he felt we should be able to get 85 percent.

On Sunday, April 22, the Soviet foreign minister arrived in Washington. He called on my father at Blair House that evening after dinner. Dad told him he “hoped that the relations which President Roosevelt had established between our two countries would be maintained.” Molotov expressed a similar sentiment and said he thought the Crimean decisions were “sufficiently clear” to overcome any difficulties which had arisen. He also wanted to know whether the agreements in regard to the “Far Eastern situation” still stood. Dad replied that he intended to carry out
all
of the agreements made by President Roosevelt.

After drinking a toast to the three heads of state, Molotov departed with Ambassador Harriman and Secretary of State Stettinius. At the State Department, they were joined by Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, and they proceeded to get down to the hard facts about the future of Poland. The American and British spokesmen got nowhere with the stubborn Russian foreign minister. He absolutely refused to make any concessions to liberalize the Polish government. My father learned about this the next morning, and he immediately convened another top-secret meeting. For this crucial conference, he called in Secretary of War Stimson, Secretary of the Navy Forrestal, Admiral Leahy, General Marshall, Admiral King, Assistant Secretary of State James Dunn, General John R. Dearie, head of the military mission in Moscow, and Bohlen. Secretary of State Stettinius opened the meeting by reporting on his conversations with Molotov. He said it was “now clear that the Soviet government intended to try to enforce upon the United States and British governments” their puppet government in Poland and obtain its legal acceptance. Speaking very emphatically, Dad said he felt that agreements with the Soviet Union so far had been a “one-way street” and that could not continue. If the Russians did not wish to cooperate “they could go to hell.”

A great deal has been made about this statement, but we must remember this was a remark my father made in private, surrounded by his top advisers. Some historians have a bad tendency to confuse presidential remarks made in private letters or conversations and the public policy of a President. For instance, Thomas Jefferson once remarked in a private letter to James Madison that every society ought to have a revolution every nineteen or twenty years. Madison demolished this theory in his reply, and Jefferson never mentioned it again, in public or in private. When he was confronted with a real revolution, led by Aaron Burr, President Jefferson reacted with angry vigor to maintain the authority of the American government.

Similarly, although my father was privately angry with Molotov and determined to be firm, he never for a moment used intemperate or insulting language with him. He was blunt about telling him what he thought Russia should do. But this was precisely what he thought Roosevelt would have done in his place - and what all his top advisers, who had been Roosevelt’s advisers, felt he should do. His conversation with Molotov at 5:30 on April 24, 1945, makes this very clear.

Practically everything Molotov said was pure double-talk. He discoursed on the importance of finding a common language to settle “inevitable difficulties.” He said his government stood by the “Crimean decisions,” but whenever my father asked him to apply these decisions to Poland, Molotov began talking about Yugoslavia. Not once throughout this labyrinth of evasion did Dad lose his temper. He reiterated that he desired the friendship of the Soviet government, but it could only be on the basis of “mutual observation of agreements and
not
on the basis of a oneway street.”

Huffily, Molotov said, “I have never been talked to like that in my life.”

“Carry out your agreements and you won’t get talked to like that,” Dad replied.

At the end of the conference, my father handed Molotov a carefully worded statement, which he proposed to release that evening, calling on the Russians to fulfill their agreement on Poland. He asked Molotov to transmit it to Marshal Stalin immediately.

I do not see how an objective observer can find anything but the right combination of firmness and frankness in Dad’s side of this historic conversation. We must remember, too, Molotov was no shrinking violet who might wither at a single harsh word. He was a tough, blunt, sarcastic character in his own right, a man who soon demonstrated at San Francisco his enormous capacity for being unpleasant in public. There may, in fact, be some grounds for blaming him for the early stages of the cold war. Many of the Americans who dealt with him remain convinced that he invariably gave Marshal Stalin the worst possible version of his negotiations with the United States and Britain.

While he stayed in Lee House, next door to us in Blair House, Molotov provided lots of material for light conversation as well as serious reflection. He and his associates had a habit of staying up most of the night, a way of life they had apparently acquired during the revolution. They constantly startled the Secret Service by wandering into the Blair House garden at three and four o’clock in the morning. Whenever one of his suits came back from the cleaners, Molotov’s valet turned all the pockets inside out to make sure there were no concealed bombs. One of his bodyguards insisted on standing watch whenever the Blair House staff made the foreign minister’s bed. Dad noticed that Molotov never sat with his back to a door or window. His eating habits also caused mild consternation among the Blair House staff. The first morning his breakfast consisted of salad and soup. This, we later learned, was not an unusual breakfast for a Russian. But it made Molotov seem even stranger to those of us who were seeing a representative of Russia at close range for the first time.