Harry Truman (51 page)

Although most of the boys were ten to fifteen years younger than Dad, there was a groan at the thought. They had been up until 3:00 a.m. the previous morning at the inaugural gala in the National Guard Armory, enjoying the show put on by musicians, actors, dancers, and other show-biz politicians.

After we attended services at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Dad drove to the Capitol to take the oath of office. His inaugural speech was memorable to me for many reasons. Although he served almost two full terms, it was the only Inaugural Address he ever gave. More important, he enunciated what I still think is the best definition of the difference between communism and democracy.

He then spelled out four cardinal points of American foreign policy, which the United States followed for the next twenty-five years. First was unfaltering support of the United Nations; second, the achievement of Europe’s recovery through the Marshall Plan; third, military assistance to strengthen freedom-loving nations against the dangers of aggression. Fourth came the policy that caught everyone by surprise. Dad called for “a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth” of the underdeveloped parts of the world.

Point Four, as the proposal was immediately dubbed by the press, fired the imagination of the globe. Excited farmers in the Middle East sent letters to the local American Embassy, addressed to “The Master of the Fourth Spot.” Arnold Toynbee predicted Dad’s call for the wealthy nations to come to the aid of the world’s poor “will be remembered as the signal achievement of the age.” Before the program was killed by unimaginative Republicans in the middle 1950s, more than 2,000 Americans from Boston, St. Louis, and Seattle and a hundred other towns and cities taught people in Indonesia, Iran, and Brazil better ways to grow their food, purify their water, educate their children. When the Democrats returned to office in 1960, Point Four became John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps.

The Point Four Program was suggested by Benjamin Hardy of the State Department, who first aroused White House aide George Elsey’s enthusiasm for it. But the President’s enthusiasm was the decisive factor. It was a feeling that came naturally to an ex-senator who knew and admired the achievements of the TVA in bringing prosperity to the underdeveloped valleys of Tennessee and an ex-farmer who had seen the miraculous rise in productivity wrought by the scientific and educational programs of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In spite of his enthusiasm for the idea, Dad’s modesty almost persuaded him to omit it from his Inaugural Address. In fact, his desire not to seem to crow over his victory inclined him to make the Inaugural Address as simple and matter-of-fact as possible. In his mind, he at first bracketed it with the State of the Union address which he made to Congress a few days before the inauguration. He was inclined to limit the Inaugural Address to domestic affairs and concentrate on international matters in the State of the Union.

George Elsey, who was assigned the job of drafting both speeches, became more and more unhappy with this approach. He stayed behind in the White House, working, while Dad and other aides were relaxing in Key West. “I finally wrote a long memorandum in which I argued as persuasively, and as forcefully as I could,” George says, “that the President had one and only one inaugural opportunity and that he had other state of the union messages and would have still future state of the union messages.” In the inaugural, George argued, Dad was addressing the world and ought to make a speech that suited the occasion. After thinking it over, Dad agreed. With this background, it is even easier to see why Point Four was greeted with enthusiasm in the White House. Benjamin Hardy had had no success whatsoever selling his idea within the Department of State. At this point, with the memory of the Palestine double cross still fresh, Dad and his aides took special pleasure in finding so much genuine merit in an idea that the striped pants boys had pooh-poohed.

After a quick lunch in Les Biffle’s Senate office, Dad led the inaugural parade from the Capitol down Pennsylvania Avenue to the reviewing stand in front of the White House. The boys of Battery D strutted proudly beside his car in two long lines. Before they got started, Dad had to settle an argument which almost ended in a brawl. No one could remember - or at least agree - on who had carried the guidon in France and “Captain Harry” had to issue a ruling to settle the dispute. The aging artillerymen made it to the reviewing stand without a man falling out, but I heard later they were not very lively at the inaugural ball that night. One man told his wife as he limped to the table, “The Germans never came so near killing off Battery D as their captain did today!”

The inaugural parade was great fun. Drucie Snyder and I salaamed like a couple of happy screwballs when the George Washington University float went by. When Strom Thurmond, the defeated Dixiecrat candidate, rode past as part of the South Carolina delegation, Dad turned aside and became deeply involved in conversation with others on the reviewing stand. Tallulah Bankhead acted out what politicians wanted to do, but didn’t - she gave Thurmond a long, lusty boo. Among the many things Thurmond undoubtedly disliked about this Inaugural Day was its completely integrated character. On direct orders from Dad, for the first time in history, black Americans were admitted to all official and unofficial functions. Walter White, head of the NAACP, praised Dad for “recognizing the new place of all ordinary Americans.”

After three and a half hours of West Point cadets, Annapolis midshipmen, Missouri Mules, and bare-legged girl drum majorettes, we dashed to the National Gallery of Art for a reception, arriving an hour late. Dad and Vice President Barkley each made two speeches and shook hands with about 1,000 VIPs. Then we raced back to Blair House to dress for the inaugural ball.

For the inauguration, I had worn a scarlet suit and hat. Now I donned a tulle and brocade gown, called “Margaret pink” - a phrase which did not catch on like Alice blue, but you’ll never hear me complaining about it. Who needs a color named for her? The inaugural ball was so jammed, real dancing was impossible. People simply got out on the floor and swayed to the music of Xavier Cugat, Benny Goodman, and Guy Lombardo. I had my own box, and Drucie Snyder and two other girlfriends joined me, all of us escorted by White House aides. (The aide who danced with me, Bill Zimmerman, was decorated for heroism in Korea. Years later, he ruefully told me people remembered him more for the picture someone snapped of him dancing with me at the inaugural than for his feats of courage under fire.) That night, Bill and the other White House military aides were ablaze in gold braid, gold lace epaulets, and decorations. But no amount of artificial splendor could outshine the smile on Dad’s face. I am sure if he had to pick the happiest day of his political life, this would have been it.

The celebrating tapered off with a few more parties and receptions in the next few days, and then the Truman cousins trekked back to Missouri, and the Washington Trumans settled into Blair House and went to work. Dad had a Democratic Congress, but there was still the old tendency of Southern and Western conservatives to vote Republican on a dismaying number of issues. The world was still seething volcanically in various places, and there were several major changes to be made in the Cabinet. The most important was the retirement of Secretary of State General George C. Marshall, after a serious kidney operation, and his replacement by Dean Acheson.

I was very sorry to see General Marshall leave our official family. I shared Dad’s enormous admiration for him. Among my fondest memories are the Sunday visits we made to the General and Mrs. Marshall, in their lovely house in Leesburg, Virginia. I usually did the driving. Dad was inclined to drive with his mind on affairs of state. When there were problems to discuss, the President and the General would retire to his study, while I visited with Mrs. Marshall. Sometimes, however, the visit was purely social.

The General’s farm was on the site of the battle of Ball’s Bluff, one of the first serious engagements between the North and South in the Civil War. One day Dad and General Marshall roamed the rather rough terrain discussing the battle, in which Senator Edward Baker of Oregon, a close friend of Abraham Lincoln, was killed leading the Union forces. They found a little cemetery, about 40 by 20, with twenty-one unknown dead buried in it. Rambling farther into the woods, they found a little stone marker which said, “Colonel Edward Dickenson Baker was killed here.” Both Dad and General Marshall were so intrigued, they persuaded Wayne Morse of Oregon to find out where Senator Baker was buried. Was it on the battlefield? No, he turned out to be interred in San Francisco, in a cemetery which he owned, and had promoted into a handsome fortune. The oddities of history are almost endless.

Dean Acheson, the new Secretary of State, was tall and aristocratic, the quintessence of the so-called Eastern Establishment. Yet he shared with George Marshall and Harry Truman an uncompromising honesty and a total dedication to the goals and best interests of the United States of America. When you think of how different these two Secretaries were, it becomes one more tribute to Dad’s ability to work harmoniously with men of almost opposite temperaments and background. I responded to these two men in very different ways. With General Marshall, my affection was tinged with awe. With Acheson, a very definite attraction had just a touch of acid in it, for reasons we shall soon see.

It was Acheson who assumed the greatest and most important legacy of Secretary of State Marshall’s tenure, that logical but crucial - and angrily debated - step beyond the Marshall Plan, known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The historic pact - America’s first peacetime military alliance - was signed on April 4, 1949, by the foreign ministers of twelve nations. But my father had been working on the problem of winning Senate approval for this major innovation in American foreign policy for over a year. On March 17, 1948, Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg had signed a fifty-year political, economic, and military alliance in Brussels. In his address to Congress on the same day, urging the swift passage of the Marshall Plan, Dad had praised this significant step toward European unity, and declared that “the determination of the free countries of Europe to protect themselves will be matched by an equal determination on our part to help them to protect themselves.”

Throughout the spring of 1948, Dad and Under Secretary of State Robert M. Lovett spent long hours working with Senator Arthur Vandenberg on the problem of persuading Congress. It was formidable. There was a deep prejudice, buttressed by the warning in Washington’s Farewell Address against “entangling alliances.” But Dad had labored since he took office to persuade Americans this prejudice no longer made sense, because the world had simply grown too small for any country, even one as protected by ocean barriers as America, to remain isolated. So, slowly and carefully, a resolution took shape, which Dad wanted Senator Vandenberg to propose to the Senate.

Arthur Vandenberg was a great senator and a great American. But he was something of a prima donna, who required very special handling. Dad understood this, of course. He had an amazing ability to read the character of almost every man in the Senate. Bob Lovett, another outstanding American, who made a great contribution wherever he served, from Under Secretary of State to Secretary of Defense, had won the senator’s friendship and confidence. With extraordinary patience, he worked through draft after draft of what eventually became the Vandenberg Resolution. Introduced as Senate Resolution 239 on June 11, 1948, it declared the “sense of the Senate” supported “regional and other collective arrangements for individual and collective self-defense” and the “association of the United States by constitutional process” with these regional defense organizations. It was, in essence, the application of the concept developed by Dad and General Marshall for the Americas -the treaty we went to Brazil to sign - to the rest of the world. Equally important to Dad, the resolution carefully pointed out that the right of individual or collective self-defense was affirmed under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. The Vandenberg Resolution was approved by a resounding sixty-four-to-four vote. Thus, the Senate - a Republican Senate at that - was on record as supporting the general principles on which NATO was based.

But even with the support of the Vandenberg Resolution, NATO did not sail smoothly through the Senate. It was violently attacked by Robert Taft because he was opposed to the idea of giving military assistance to our allies. Other senators, notably Forrest Donnell of Missouri, denounced it because it might involve us in a war we did not want. As if we ever wanted one. Dean Acheson did a magnificent job of defending the treaty against these and other attacks. He was well supported by Senator Vandenberg, who rightly called the treaty “the most important step in American foreign policy since the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine.”

Equally crucial was the support that came from Dad. He sent the Secretary of State a telegram from Key West, lavishly praising his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and authorized him to publish it. When the treaty was signed, Dad insisted Acheson was the one who should do it. Dad and Vice President Barkley stood on either side of him, but my father wanted the man who had done the most work to have his name on the historic document.

The impact of the treaty in Europe was what counted. The Senate’s advice and consent to it by an eighty-two to thirteen vote made it clear to our friends and our enemies we were determined to defend the free nations of Western Europe against the kind of aggression that had swallowed Czechoslovakia.