Truman (82 page)

But thinking better of it, he never mailed the letter. It was tucked in a desk drawer together with its unused envelope.

The grim weather held as he struggled to keep control of events, his chief aggravation now the behavior of his Secretary of State.

Before returning from Independence, Truman had been notified by Charlie Ross that Byrnes, in winding up the Moscow conference, had released a communiqué in advance of any summary report to the President. To make matters worse, Byrnes, en route home, notified Ross to arrange air time on all the radio networks, so that he could report to the nation before seeing the President. Clearly, Byrnes had forgotten his manners.

Senator Vandenberg, disturbed that Byrnes had been too conciliatory with the Russians, rushed to the White House demanding to know what was going on.

This was on Friday, December 28, the day of Truman’s plaintive letter to Bess. Afterward, he left for a cruise down the Potomac on the presidential yacht,
Williamsburg,
again disregarding the miserable weather. When Byrnes landed in Washington the following day, Saturday the 29th, a telegram from Truman was waiting for him: “Suggest you come down today or tomorrow to report your mission…. We can then discuss among other things the advisability of a broadcast by you….”

The relationship between the two men had never been easy or entirely candid. Byrnes did indeed consider himself better equipped and more deserving than Truman to be President and he was not always successful in concealing that. Though Truman considered Byrnes extremely bright, his experience in government unequaled, he had never felt he could entirely trust him. En route to Potsdam, Truman had referred to him in a diary entry as his “able and conniving” Secretary of State. “My but he has a keen mind,” Truman wrote. “And he is honest. But all country politicians are alike. They are sure all other politicians are circuitous in their dealings.”

After a hurried flight by special plane, Byrnes went aboard the
Williamsburg
at Quantico, Virginia, and met with Truman privately in Truman’s stateroom. A cold rain was falling on the river. Everything outside was gray and forbidding.

By Truman’s account, written much later, he closed the door and gave Byrnes a sharp dressing down:

Byrnes, however, would insist the conversation was entirely pleasant, and according to others on board, it was not so much Truman as Admiral Leahy who gave Byrnes a hard time. (Leahy, as was known, considered Byrnes “a horse’s ass.”) Dean Acheson, who was not present, but who developed an understanding of both Truman and Byrnes, later speculated that both their impressions were genuine; that Truman, in recalling such encounters, was inclined to exaggerate his “bark,” when in reality he was nearly always extremely considerate of the feelings of others; and that Byrnes, as a veteran of South Carolina politics, would never have taken as personal criticism Truman’s demand to be kept informed.

In any event, the meeting marked a change in the relationship. There was no open break, but Truman’s confidence in his Secretary of State was not to be the same again. Six days later, still steaming mad, he wrote longhand letter to “My dear Jim,” saying that while he wanted to give members of his Cabinet ample authority, he had no intention of relinquishing the authority of the President or “to forego the President’s prerogative to make the final decision.” He was intensely concerned about Russia, tired of “babying” the Soviets. “Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making. Only one language do they understand, ‘How many divisions have you?’ ”

According to an account that Truman wrote years later, he then called Byrnes to his office and read the letter aloud. But again Byrnes declared that no such scene occurred—if it had, Byrnes said, he would have resigned at once. But for the record Truman noted on the letter in his own hand at the time: “Read to the Sec. of State and discussed—not typed or mailed.” Later, in a conversation with Eben Ayers, Truman said he had most definitely read the letter to Byrnes, “right here in this office with him sitting right where you are. I told him I was not going to give him the letter but wanted to read it to him.” Byrnes’s face, said Truman, had turned “fiery red.”

It was a letter like others to come in Truman’s presidency. He called them his “longhand spasms,” and there appears indeed to have been something sudden and involuntary about them. They seemed to serve some deep psychological need, as a vent for his anger, and were seldom intended for anyone to see. They cleared the air for him. He felt better almost immediately and, unsent, they did no one any harm. Yet in tone and content they bore little or no resemblance to the way he was ordinarily with people. “I have never heard him say, or heard of him saying a harsh, bitter, or sarcastic word to anyone, whatever the offense or failure,” Dean Acheson would write.

With the new year under way, there was little time for brooding, seldom time enough for anything. A steel strike loomed, threatening the whole economy. Hurried meetings were held. Official cars came and went in the White House drive. “1946 is our year of decision,” Truman had told the country in a radio broadcast. “This year we lay the foundation for our economic structure which will have to serve for generations.”

The steel workers’ union, headed by Phil Murray, called for a wage increase of 19½ cents an hour. The steel companies, represented by Benjamin Fairless of U.S. Steel, offered 15 cents. At the conclusion of a long, arduous session at the White House on January 12, Truman was able to announce that Murray had agreed to postpone the strike for one week. After another session on the 17th, and still no agreement, Truman proposed that the steel companies grant an increase of 18½ cents. Both sides wanted time to consider and were told that they had until noon the following day.

Murray accepted the President’s proposal, but Fairless refused. On January 19, 1946, at more than 1,000 mills across the country, 800,000 steel workers walked off the job in the biggest strike in history.

The whole country was in the grip of strikes. Some 200,000 meatpackers had struck by now. There was a glass workers’ strike, a telephone strike, a coffinmakers’ strike, a huge strike at General Electric. In Pittsburgh a strike of 3,500 electric company employees caused plant closings that affected 100,000 other workers. Streetcars stopped running, office buildings closed. “This is a disaster,” said Pittsburgh’s Mayor David Lawrence in a radio plea to the strikers to go back to their jobs—and Mayor Lawrence, a Democrat, was long considered a solid friend of labor.

Pressed for a statement about the steel strike at his next press conference., Truman replied, “I personally think there is too much power on each side, and I think it is necessary that the government assert the fact that
it
is the power of the people.”

But how would the government assert itself?

“We are doing everything we possibly can,” he answered, giving no one much hope.

A week later, he could say only, “We have been working on it all the time.”

No one who had never had the responsibility could possibly understand what it was like to be President, Truman would write later, not even his closest aides or members of his family. There was no end to the “chain of responsibility that binds him, and he is never allowed to forget that he is President.” Problems and decisions of every conceivable variety wound up on his desk, as did criticism and blame. In the fall, Fred Canfil had given him a small sign for the desk. “The Buck Stops Here,” it said. Canfil had seen one like it in the head office of a federal reformatory in El Reno, Oklahoma, and asked the warden if a copy might be made for his friend the President, and though Truman kept it on his desk only a short time, the message would stay with him permanently.

What sustained him, Truman said, was the belief that there was more good than evil in human beings. Now even that was being put severely to the test. Congress and labor had let him down. Mrs. Roosevelt was telling friends he had the wrong sort of people around him, a theme struck also by columnist Walter Lippmann. The “blunt truth,” wrote Lippmann, was that the men nearest the President did “not have the brains, and have practically none of the wisdom from experience and education to help him be President….” A cartoon in the arch-conservative Chicago
Tribune
pictured the President as Little Lord Fauntleroy being baited and knocked about by a gang of tough street urchins labeled “Labor,” “Management,” “Party Radical,” “Party Conservative,” and “Foreign Diplomacy.” The caption was in verse:

The
Saturday Evening Post,
which claimed to represent the views and values of middle America, said the Truman administration, after ten months in office, could be labeled “at best, undistinguished.” Some Washington journalists, who admired the President’s fundamental decency and determination, felt sorry for him. “It was a cruel time to put inexperience in power,” wrote Richard Rovere.

In the new hit movie
The Best Years of Our Lives,
which had been written by Roosevelt’s former speechwriter, Robert Sherwood, and was to win nine Academy Awards, actor Fredric March, playing one of the three heroes of the story, three returning veterans of the war, declared bitterly, “Last year it was kill Japs, this year it’s make money,” while at another point his teenage son voiced his fear of the future—of atomic bombs, guided missiles, “and everything.”

People were “befuddled” and needed “time out to get a nerve rest,” Truman wrote to his mother. He wouldn’t mind going on strike himself, he said. As it was, he was planning a trip to Florida.

He had installed a new White House physician, a thirty-five-year-old Army doctor, Colonel Wallace H. Graham, who was the son of the Independence doctor who looked after Mamma Truman. Concerned that the President was working too hard, Graham urged a vacation. On Graham’s orders, Truman had begun taking a brisk walk of two or three miles every morning before breakfast—walks, Truman told Charlie Ross, that were helping him sleep better.

To replace Henry Stimson as Secretary of War, he had named Robert Patterson, and for Chief of Staff, to replace George Marshall, General Eisenhower, both regarded as excellent appointments. But his choice for a new Under Secretary of the Navy had suddenly blown into storm. Truman had picked Ed Pauley, the California oil man and Democratic money raiser who helped engineer his nomination for the vice presidency and who, more recently, had been working on reparation problems in Europe and Japan. Truman liked Pauley, thought him tough, straightforward, and capable of getting things done. He intended that Pauley replace Forrestal eventually, then become the first Secretary of Defense once that office was created. (“I wanted the hardest, meanest son of a bitch I could get,” Truman later said.) He also knew Roosevelt had been planning to make Pauley the Under Secretary of the Navy, and further, that Forrestal approved. But Pauley’s business and political background made him an unwise choice, as others at the White House saw at once. “An oil man should not be head of the department which has such a vital interest in the conservation of the nation’s oil reserve,” noted Eben Ayers privately, “and a politician should not be at the head of the navy.”

The trouble broke when Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes was called to testify before the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs. On the train returning from Roosevelt’s funeral, Ickes revealed, Pauley had had the nerve to question him on tidelands oil policy—Pauley’s very unsubtle implication being that huge campaign contributions would be made available if California’s jurisdiction over the tidelands went uncontested. Truman, when he heard what Ickes had said, was beside himself, for in a meeting with Ickes just prior to Ickes’s testimony, Truman had told him that while of course he must speak the truth to the committee, Truman hoped he might also be “gentle” with Pauley.

Truman felt betrayed. Ickes felt he had had no choice but to tell what he knew. Asked by reporters if he would withdraw Pauley’s nomination, Truman said he would not. Asked if his relations with Ickes had changed, he said Ickes could be mistaken the same as anyone.

Ickes resigned on February 13, declaring at his own press conference that he had been “unable to commit perjury for the sake of the party” and that he could not possibly serve in the Cabinet any longer and maintain his self-respect. He was against “government by crony,” Ickes further stated, an expression that would not be forgotten.

Outraged that Ickes had implied that he, the President, had asked him to commit perjury, Truman not only accepted the resignation but told Ickes he had three days to clear out.

Though Pauley denied under oath that he had ever made any such proposition to Ickes, the appointment was doomed, and once the committee agreed to affirm Pauley’s personal integrity, the nomination was withdrawn at his request.

The whole affair had been extremely unpleasant, recalling for many people memories of the Harding administration, with its Teapot Dome oil scandals. Ickes, celebrated as “Honest Harold” and the “Old Curmudgeon,” was incurably hard to deal with, as everyone knew, but he had been an exceptional Secretary of Interior and served longer in the job than anyone. Except for Henry Wallace, Ickes was the last of the New Dealers in the Truman Cabinet and his departure, in combination with the bitterness of his parting remarks, was taken by liberals especially as still another extremely discouraging sign. “One has the feeling,” wrote the New York
Post,
“that a poorer and poorer cast is dealing desperately with a bigger and bigger story.”