Truman (155 page)

But that night Stevenson said no. “He apparently was flabbergasted,” concluded Truman, who refused to give up.

Stevenson, according to a close friend, came away filled with admiration for Truman, who had been sitting by the fire reading the Bible when Stevenson arrived.

As Stevenson later confided to James Reston, Truman had said Stevenson was the man to defeat Eisenhower, who would most likely be the Republican candidate. Eisenhower’s intentions were good, Truman had said, but he was inexperienced in politics and bound to become the captive of Taft and so destroy Truman’s foreign and domestic programs. It was therefore essential that a Democratic administration be continued in the White House. The President wanted him to save the world from Dwight Eisenhower, Stevenson told Reston, highly agitated.

According to another Stevenson friend, George Ball, who had driven Stevenson to and from Blair House that night, Truman had also observed at one point, “Adlai, if a knucklehead like me can be President and not do too badly, think what a really educated smart guy like you could do in the job.”

But Stevenson had said no to Truman. Not only did he wish to remain governor of Illinois, he was less than certain that a change in Washington, a Republican administration, would be a bad thing for the country. Privately he wondered if the Democrats had been in power too long. And, in any event, he did not feel that being Truman’s handpicked candidate would be necessarily an advantage, given the woeful state of Truman’s popularity. If Eisenhower were the Republican candidate, Stevenson told George Ball, nobody could beat him.

On March 4, Truman and Stevenson met again at Blair House, this time at Stevenson’s request.

For several weeks Truman toyed with the prospect of running again. Some of the staff felt sure he had changed his mind and was about to announce his candidacy.

On March 11, Estes Kefauver won a stunning victory in the New Hampshire primary, having stumped the state wearing his trademark coonskin cap and accusing the administration of doing too little to get rid of corruption. Truman had allowed his name to be entered, but did not campaign. He thought primaries were a lot of “eye-wash.” Still, Kefauver had challenged a President and won handily.

At a small private dinner at Blair House for a few close advisers, including the new Democratic chairman, Frank McKinney, Truman polled the table. Should he become a candidate to succeed himself? The answer, put as tactfully as possible, was no.

Truman left for Key West and on March 22 called Clark Clifford and asked him to come down. The following day, they sat alone in the garden behind the Little White House. Clifford told the President he hoped he would not run again. Truman expressed concern over the effect his withdrawal might have on the war in Korea. Clifford answered that the course of the war had long been established.

The same day from Key West, March 23, a White House aide named David Lloyd, who had once worked with Stevenson when Stevenson was with the State Department, wrote to the governor without Truman’s knowledge, urging him to reconsider, and in large part because of Truman:

On their way to the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, the huge, annual $100-a-plate black-tie gathering of Democrats held the evening of March 29 in the National Armory, Alice Acheson asked her husband if he thought the President might disclose his political future in his after-dinner speech. “Not at all,” said the Secretary of State in what, as she subsequently told him, was a notably superior manner. It would be too early for the President to announce an intention not to run again, Acheson explained, and too disappointing to many at the dinner were he to announce the contrary.

Truman appeared at the podium looking tanned and uplifted by the occasion. At the end of a lively, righting speech, having duly assaulted the Republicans and championed his own record, he put aside his prepared text and gave his answer:

“I shall not be a candidate for re-election. I have served my country long, and I think efficiently and honestly. I shall not accept a renomination. I do not feel that it is my duty to spend another four years in the White House.”

It was said without buildup, almost matter-of-factly, and for a few seconds the immense audience sat silent and confused. Then followed a strange mixture of automatic applause and shouted cries of “No,” even from some of those who had hoped he would step down. “I found myself shouting ‘No’ with vigor,” recalled Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who had tried to stop Truman’s nomination in 1948. “Then I wondered why the hell I was shouting ‘No,’ since this is what I had been hoping would happen for months. Still the shouts of ‘No’ seemed the least due to the President for a noble and courageous renunciation.”

Truman left the hall quickly, smiling, waving, yet looking somewhat tense, though the First Lady had a very different expression. “When you made your announcement,” Harry Vaughan later told the President, “Mrs. Truman looked the way you do when you draw four aces.”

At the White House, as the President and First Lady arrived, many of the household staff who stood waiting at the door were crying.

Did he plan to run for the Senate, Truman was asked a few days later, at his next press conference. No, he said. (Mrs. Truman did not want him to, he had told his staff.) Did he favor Governor Stevenson for the nomination? No comment.

From Springfield, Stevenson had written:

Replying immediately, Truman said he appreciated Stevenson’s letter “most highly.” The need was for a man who would “carry on the Foreign Policy of the United States as it was established in 1938 by President Roosevelt and carried through by me, to the best of my ability…. We must also have a President who believes in the domestic policies which have made the Foreign Policy possible,” for the one was not possible without the other. “I sincerely hope you will not take yourself completely out of the picture.”

Characteristically, whatever his frustrations with Stevenson, Truman would keep trying.

How the President got through the first weeks of April, wrote Roger Tubby, was a testimony to his amazing stamina. Tubby himself, as he wrote, felt more dead than alive.

On April 3, Truman fired Attorney General McGrath, who for months had appeared to be obstructing the investigations Truman ordered into corruption in the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Feeling he had been “sold down the river” by people whom he trusted, Truman had turned the “cleanup job” over to McGrath in January 1952, which raised charges of an attempted whitewash, since McGrath was a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. McGrath had then named a respected New York lawyer, a Republican, Newbold Morris, to head the investigation. But Morris had soon quarreled with McGrath and annoyed Congress. When Morris issued a long, intricate questionnaire to be filled out by all federal employees, including the Cabinet, listing all assets and sources of income, McGrath exploded, calling the questionnaire an invasion of privacy and a violation of individual rights. McGrath refused to fill out the questionnaire, and after reading a copy, Truman, too, decided it should not be used.

Truman despaired over McGrath’s “inability to get on top” of his job. He liked McGrath—“I don’t think there was the slightest thing wrong with Howard personally at all,” he would later say—but found his performance frustrating. When, on April 3, McGrath announced he had fired Newbold Morris, and apparently with the idea that this was what Truman wanted, Truman fired McGrath.

With this farcical denouement, as Cabell Phillips would write, the administration’s housecleaning effort seemed to have blown to pieces. “It had been a miserable performance from start to finish, almost a burlesque of executive management, and the net result was to underline ‘the mess in Washington’ as a good deal more than a gloating Republican catchphrase.” Truman felt wretched about it all. In his
Memoirs
he would say nothing of the episode, but shortly afterward he wrote to McGrath, “I want you to know that my fondness for you has not changed one bit. Political situations sometimes cause one much pain.”

And by then, Truman was caught up in telephone and telegraph strikes, land the threat of another nationwide steel strike. He was showing the strain as those close to him had seldom seen. He looked stern in repose, his face deeply lined. After one morning staff meeting, when William Hopkins put the usual stack of papers in front of him to sign, Truman begged off until later, “when I’m not so shaky.” He was tired, terribly tired, he admitted. At the White House the evening before, he had fallen asleep in his chair, something he almost never did.

He seemed overburdened by his duties and decisions in a way he had never been before. It was as if the decision not to run again, the prospect of not being President, had taken something from him.

In his diary, Roger Tubby wrote:

His appointment schedule for Tuesday, April 8, the crucial day, was typical and did not even include what was to be the most important event of the day.