Truman (12 page)

All this must be seen against the background of the death, starvation and disease on an unprecedented scale, not in America, but over much of Europe and Asia, which was Truman's inheritance as President, and which he had just observed in Germany. Truman's state of mind was not perhaps of central practical importance. The bomb was dropped. The war was won. Truman was back in Washington after five weeks. He had survived his first -and last—international conference. His popularity was still high. But his honeymoon was over. The hard slog of routine presidential life was beginning.

September 1945 to November 1946 was the nadir of Truman's presidency. Most things went wrong. His Gallup poll rating achieved a spectacular decline from 87% to 32%, and this sustained plunge in the popularity of himself and his administration culminated in a crushing Democratic defeat in the mid-term Congressional elections. The Republicans gained control of both chambers for the first time since 1928. They were 246 to 188 in the House and they edged ahead by 51 to 45 in the Senate.

All this was bad enough, although popularity, except crucially in November 1948, was rarely the hall-mark of the Truman achievement. What made it worse, however, was that during this early period a large proportion of the misfortunes were his own fault. It was rarely a case of statesmanlike decisions, deliberately taken and courageously sustained, being too longsighted for the short-term whims of a war-weary electorate. Much more was it a question of an administration ill at ease with itself, both at Cabinet and at White House staff level, allowing an uncertain president to stagger from one ill-prepared decision to another.

The Cabinet was inexperienced after the changes of the summer of 1945. It became more so with the retirement of Stimson that September, the resignation of Ickes in February 1946, the promotion of Vinson in April, and the sacking of Wallace in September. Thereafter, of Roosevelt's Cabinet officers, only Forrestal remained, and he knew little of domestic politics. Byrnes was not inexperienced, but his relationship with Truman never recovered from his failure to keep the President informed of the
developments at the long Moscow meeting of foreign ministers in December 1945. Thereafter he was always operating on borrowed time, with Truman anxious to replace him with Marshall as soon as was propitious after the completion of the General's China mission. Byrnes privately submitted his resignation, ostensibly on medical grounds, on April 16th, 1946, and on May 9th Marshall in Shanghai agreed, through the agency of Eisenhower, to become Secretary of State when the President wished. Although Byrnes had set a date of July 1st, the changeover was allowed to drag on, as was Marshall's mission, until early 1947.

It would have been much better for the change to have been made much more quickly after Truman lost confidence in Byrnes. In a curious way the damage was exacerbated by the fact that there was no consistent policy difference between President and Secretary of State. They were both in mid-stream without a paddle. They had left the bank of belief in the unity of the wartime alliance, but neither had reached the other bank of wishing to create a new Western alliance, with Britain, basically enfeebled by the war but undevastated and with a continuity of political régime even if not of government, inevitably the initial second partner. Truman had taken Churchill to Fulton, Missouri, in March and had presided benevolently over the ‘iron curtain' speech with its remedy of an Anglo-American partnership. A few days later, however, he had distanced himself from it, and in September he swallowed without difficulty the passage in Henry Wallace's Madison Square Garden speech which said: ‘I am neither anti-British nor pro-British—neither anti-Russian nor pro-Russian.' Nonetheless he had initially thought Byrnes too soft with the Russians, and then perhaps too hard. Throughout the summer of 1946 the President was playing with the idea of giving them a substantial loan. The fact of the matter was that Truman and Byrnes had become too suspicious of each other ever to be in exactly the same ideological place at the same time.
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The mutual distrust compounded what would in any event have been a uniquely difficult period of adjustment for American foreign policy.

The handling of nuclear policy was almost equally uncertain. During the war Roosevelt had made a conscious decision not to
share atomic secrets with the Russians. Truman's early post-war position was in favour of such sharing in exchange for a mutual agreement to stop further development and undertake that none of the three main powers (this was in order to include Britain) would use the bomb without the agreement of the other two. Stimson's final act as Secretary of War was to bring a memorandum advocating such a course before a cabinet meeting on September 21st. This led to an animated two-hour discussion and a fairly even split. Stimson was supported by Acheson (in Byrnes's absence), Wallace, Schwellenbach and Hannegan. Most of the new Truman nominees—Vinson, Clark and Anderson—argued the other way. So, with particular virulence, did Forrestal. What was more to the point was that Truman regarded himself as firmly committed to the Stimson side. ‘Anyway I'll have to make a decision', he wrote to his wife after describing the line-up, ‘and the Ayes will have it even if I'm the only Aye. It is probably the most momentous one I will make.'
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His actions did not live up to the promise of his words. He had begun somewhat badly at Potsdam when his laconic announcement to Stalin of the American possession of the bomb omitted any suggestion of shared knowledge or international control. Then under pressure of a hostile Congressional and press reaction to the Stimson proposal, probably inspired by Forrestal, which he skilfully presented as an initiative of the ‘soft' Wallace rather than of the ‘hard' Stimson, Truman resiled, or at least postponed.

His hesitation, paradoxically in view of subsequent national attitudes, was reinforced by a tripartite meeting with Attlee and Mackenzie King of Canada which took place in Washington in mid-November. Attlee had urged a meeting earlier than Truman would have wished because he was under parliamentary pressure to seek international control. But his interest was in safeguarding British access to American knowledge rather than in extending it to the Soviet Union. ‘In my view', he wrote in a preparatory memorandum, ‘an offer to do this now would not be likely to effect a change of attitude to world problems by the USSR. It would be regarded as a confession of weakness. The establishment of better relations should precede the exchange of technical information.'
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As this was also Byrnes's position it effectively precluded any
likelihood of agreement to go further along the lines of the Stimson memorandum. Whether Truman might have wished to do so at this stage is uncertain. What is the case is that in the view of Vannevar Bush, the chief technical advisor on the US side, the conference was remarkably ill-prepared by the Americans. ‘I have never participated in anything so completely unorganized or irregular', he wrote to Stimson.
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Whether or not he was aware of this, Truman consoled himself with an odd thought in relation to himself and his principal guest: ‘Mr Attlee came yesterday and we had a brilliant—most brilliant I'd say—State dinner for him and Mackenzie King of Canada.' Their great quality was that they were anglophone. ‘On the visit[s] of the President of Chile and de Gaulle it was a case of one sentence at a time to an interpreter,' he added, ‘and by the time I'd arrive at the thought I'd wanted to express I'd forgot what was to be said and gone off on a tangent maybe. ‘
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Truman's next nuclear initiative was to appoint Churchill's friend, Bernard Baruch, as US representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, and to allow him to present the Baruch Plan to the UN in June 1946. This was an exercise in cynicism on Truman's part, and of statesmanship on nobody's part. Truman had no real respect for Baruch. ‘That stuffed shirt will have something more to do than sit on a park bench and pass out impossible advice' he wrote to his wife about Baruch's appointment, adding a little surprisingly: ‘There never was a greater egotist unless it was Franklin D.'
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The appointment was strongly opposed by Acheson and by Lilienthal. And Baruch's proposals never had the slightest chance of being accepted by the Soviet Union. They were good propaganda within the United States. They were not serious diplomacy. They were based on the totally illusory view that Russia would accept, without a veto, the discipline of the then largely American-influenced UN majority. With their failure the road was open to the Soviet achievement of the A-bomb in 1949, the H-bomb in 1953 and the escalating equality of the 1960s and 70s.

A similar uncertainty of touch marked Truman's approach to domestic problems. He knew very little economics. But that was not crucial. Sensible economic policies have been followed by technically ill-equipped political leaders almost as frequently as foolish ones by those who believed they were masters of the dismal
science. Nor was there anything discreditable in the fact that as he sailed back across the Atlantic from Potsdam he had little idea whether the major domestic menace confronting the United States in the post-war world was inflation or deflation. It was perfectly reasonable to be prepared either for a threat of mass unemployment as the forces were demobilized and five million defence jobs disappeared, or for shortages and a wage explosion leading to a runaway pressure on prices. He did not foresee that it was possible to achieve both together, but had he done so he would have been 30 years ahead of his time.

At first he was more inclined to fear slump. It was the need to counteract this threat which primarily informed his long message to Congress (the longest since Theodore Roosevelt) on September 6th. Three months later he had swung round and when asked at a press conference whether he regarded deflation as anywhere near as dangerous as inflation replied unambiguously ‘No, I do not.'
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Here again a flexibility as events developed could perfectly well be justified. What was more dangerous was that Truman lacked both any instinctive philosophical approach to economic problems and any structured group of advisers who themselves shared the same basic outlook.

Was Truman a New Dealer, or was he not? He had of course voted for all its most controversial aspects in the 1930s, but that may have owed more to party loyalty than ideological conviction. He was in favour of extensions of welfare provisions, and proposed several important ones that fall. But he was alleged to be unsound from a New Deal point of view on deficit financing (but so, it could be argued were Roosevelt and his Secretary of the Treasury: they preached virtue and practised sin) and he was not instinctively at home with the liberals who had been Roosevelt's most enthusiastic supporters before ‘Dr New Deal' was replaced by ‘Dr Win the War'. ‘Same bunch of Prima Donnas who helped drive the Boss to his grave are still riding his ghost,' he wrote on his appointment sheet after a meeting with the Roosevelt National Memorial Committee on September 5th.
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And many of those who were close to him in these early days were pretty vehemently conservative. Snyder, even before his elevation to the Treasury, was probably the closest of the lot, both personally and as an economic adviser. His instincts were those of a business man and banker and they were not made any more liberal by the fact that
his outlook was that of small town business and banking rather than of the Wall Street establishment.

Snyder, with the cumbersome title of Director of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion, was constantly in dispute with Chester Bowles, the head of the Keynesian-oriented Office of Price Administration (Bowles for controls, Snyder for setting the businessman free). He was also the inspirer of a right-of-centre group within Truman's own staff, composed principally of Matthew Connelly, who had served the Truman Committee during the war, and Jake Vardaman, another St Louis banker, whose main service to Truman was to bring Clark Clifford, a vastly abler man than himself, into the White House.
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The liberal view was upheld by Samuel Rosenman (former special counsel to Roosevelt, who continued with Truman until early 1946) and Charles Ross, his old Independence classmate and current press secretary. The intellectual weight on this line-up came from Rosenman, the weight of rank and friendship from Snyder. The result was that here again Truman was buffeted about in mid-stream.

In particular he got the worst of both worlds in dealing with the food shortage which beset even the United States more in 1945-6 than during the war itself. It was a sign of America's relatively favoured position that the issue there was the non-availability of adequate sized steaks, whereas in Britain it was about adding bread to a whole list of rationed foodstuffs, and on the mainland of Europe it was about getting enough calories to keep alive. Nevertheless beefsteaks were a major issue up to and over the 1946 elections. Had Truman listened to Bowles alone he might have produced a limited quantity of cheap rationed meat for everybody. Had he listened to Snyder alone he might have achieved butchers' shops well-stocked with expensive meat. As he veered between the two he produced neither and paid a heavy price in votes. There were then few metabolic experts to convince the American people of their good fortune in not being able to dig their graves with steak knives. Many voted with their stomachs. ‘You've deserted your president for a mess of pottage, a piece of beef, a side of
bacon,' Truman wrote on October 14th, 1946, in one of the several self-pitying undelivered speeches which he had become addicted to preparing in the period, ‘You've gone over to the powers of selfishness and greed.'
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The mood had been largely fostered by the unprecedented wave of industrial trouble which he had lived through in the preceding twelve months. The labour union leaders had of course been crucial to putting him where he was. Without their pressure at Chicago in 1944 he would not have agreed to run. Without their support he would not have been nominated. This however had the curious and in many ways rather healthy effect that he regarded them as being more obliged to him than
vice versa.
If they put him in the White House, they ought to behave responsibly during his presidency. In his view they did not.