Truman (96 page)

Once, that spring, at lunch on the
Williamsburg,
during a brief cruise down the Potomac, Truman and Bill Hassett, the correspondence secretary, began talking about the Civil War. As the others at the table listened, the conversation ranged over several battles and the abilities and flaws of various Union and Confederate generals, Truman, as often before, impressing everyone with how much he had read and remembered.

He would like to have been a history teacher, Truman said.

“Rather teach it than make it?” Clifford asked.

“Yes, I think so,” Truman replied. “It would be not nearly so much trouble.”

Clifford had, become particularly important to Truman, in much the way Harry Hopkins had been to Roosevelt, and it was vital, they both knew, that Clifford understand Truman and what he was trying to accomplish in the long run. He did not want an administration like Roosevelt’s, Truman said. Too many of those around Roosevelt had been “crackpots,” he thought. “I want to keep my feet on the ground, don’t feel comfortable unless I know where I’m going. I don’t want any experiments. The American people have been through a lot of experiments and they want a rest from experiments.” He disliked the terms “progressive” and “liberal.” What he wanted was a “forward-looking program.” That was it, a “forward-looking program.”

Perhaps more than Truman knew, they all appreciated the respect he showed them. Charles Murphy, a shy man who spoke only when spoken to, would later remark, “In many ways President Truman really was as tough as a boot, but with his personal staff he was extremely gentle…and his staff returned his kindness with an extraordinary amount of hard work, voluntary overtime, and wholehearted, single-minded devotion.”

By later presidential standards the staff was small and unlike the White House staffs of some later presidencies, those serving Truman made no policy decisions. As George Elsey would remember, no one on Truman’s staff would have dreamed of making policy or making decisions on fundamental economic or political issues, “or any other kind of issue.”

The loyalty of those around Truman was total and would never falter. In years to come not one member of the Truman White House would ever speak or write scathingly of him or belittle him in any fashion. There would be no vindictive “inside” books or articles written about this President by those who worked closest to him. They all thought the world of Harry Truman then and for the rest of their lives, and would welcome the chance to say so.

For Charlie Ross, the senior member of the staff and the one who had known Truman the longest—longer than anyone in the administration—serving with him, for all the strain of the job and the drastic cut in income it had meant, was the privilege of a lifetime, as Ross would write privately to Truman later that year, on Christmas Day, 1947:

Truman had rarely received a letter that meant so much to him.

To Dean Acheson it was Truman’s “priceless gift of vitality, the life force itself,” that was his strongest, most inspiriting quality, and always in the darkest, most difficult of times. The President’s supply of vitality and good spirits seemed inexhaustible, wrote Acheson, who, to make his point, would quote from Shakespeare’s
Henry V
the lines delivered the night before Agincourt:

It was this “little touch of Harry” that “kept all of us going,” Acheson would remember.

In addition, there was the example of General Marshall, who lent everyone confidence and raised morale not just at the State Department but throughout the administration. “Gentlemen, enlisted men may be entitled to morale problems, but officers are not,” Marshall would tell those who served with him. “I expect all officers in this department to take care of their own morale. No one is taking care of my morale.” Morale improved steadily.

As Acheson would stress, he and others at the State Department felt they were being led by two men of rare quality, the President and the Secretary. On Capitol Hill, in his speech in support of the Truman Doctrine, Sam Rayburn had said the nation “again has leaders asking for certain action,” and his emphasis on leaders in the plural did not go unnoticed.

Marshall’s entire personality inspired confidence, Truman would write. It was Truman’s long-held conviction that men make history. Clearly in the spring of 1947, with the Marshall Plan following on the heels of the Truman Doctrine, things of immense importance happened principally because a relative handful of men made them happen, almost entirely on their own, against great odds, and in amazingly little time.

On Saturday, April 26, 1947, Secretary Marshall returned to Washington from Moscow gravely worried and upset. His sessions with Molotov had been an ordeal, dragging on day after day with little purpose, Molotov acting all the while as if time and the frustrations of the Western Allies were of no concern. Marshall wanted an agreement on the future of Germany. Hoping he might do better dealing directly with Stalin, he made a courtesy call at the Kremlin. But Stalin had asked what difference it made if there was no agreement. “We may agree the next time, or if not then, the time after,” Stalin said, as he idly doodled wolves’ heads with a red pencil.

Stalin’s indifference made a profound impression on Marshall. The Soviets, it seemed, were quite content to see uncertainty and chaos prevail in Europe. It served their purposes to let matters drift. Particularly, they had no wish for a return of order and stability in Germany, let alone a revived prosperity there. Marshall had thought the Russians could be negotiated with, but at Moscow he decided he had been mistaken.

Before leaving Washington, he received an urgent memo from Under Secretary for Economic Affairs Will Clayton warning that conditions in Western Europe were more serious than generally understood. During stops in Paris and Berlin, while going to and from Moscow, Marshall was stunned by what he saw and heard. On the plane back to Washington, he talked of little else but what could be done to save Western Europe.

Time was of the essence, Marshall stressed to Truman. “The patient is sinking while the doctors deliberate,” he told the nation in a radio broadcast, April 28.

The next day Marshall summoned George Kennan, instructed him to assemble a special staff “immediately,” and to report “without delay” on what should be done to save Europe. As Kennan later recalled, Marshall had only one piece of advice: “Avoid trivia.”

The idea of economic aid to Europe had been on Truman’s mind for some while. Two years past, in one of their earliest conversations in the Oval Office, Henry Stimson had pointedly told him that an economically strong, productive Germany was essential to the future stability of Europe, a concept Truman readily accepted. In his own State of the Union message in January, Truman had struck the theme of sharing American bounty with war-stricken peoples, as a means of spreading “the faith” of freedom and democracy, and on March 6, even before announcement of the Truman Doctrine, he had said in a speech at Baylor University, “We are the giant of the economic world. Whether we like it or not, the future pattern of economic relations depends upon us.”

Early in May, Truman sent Dean Acheson to fill in for him with a foreign policy speech in a remote little town in Mississippi called Cleveland, at the Delta State Teachers’ College. Kennan and his special staff had as yet to make their report, but Truman had already made up his mind, from what Marshall had said after returning from Moscow, that Europe had to be rescued and quickly. The speech Acheson made was the alarm bell that Truman wanted sounded. The stricken countries of Europe needed everything and could afford to buy nothing. Financial help was imperative, but, as Acheson stressed, the objective was not relief, it was the revival of industry, agriculture, and trade. The margin of survival was so close in Europe that the savage winter just past had been nearly disastrous. Massive funding was needed if Europe was to be saved. “It is necessary if we are to preserve our own freedoms…necessary for our national security. And it is our duty and privilege as human beings.”

What was Europe now, Winston Churchill asked rhetorically in a speech in London on May 14. “It is a rubble-heap, a charnel house, a breeding ground of pestilence and hate.”

The Kennan Report, “Certain Aspects of the European Recovery Problem from the United States Standpoint,” was delivered to Marshall on May 25. American response to world problems must be more than defensive reaction to Communist pressure, it said. An American aid effort in Europe “should be directed not to combating Communism as such but to the restoration of the economic Health and vigor of European society.” Two days later, Under Secretary Clayton, having just completed an inspection tour of Europe, sent another urgent memo. The situation was worse than anyone supposed. Millions of people were slowly starving. A collapse in Europe would mean revolution and a tailspin for the American economy.

Long sessions followed at the State Department and around the President’s desk. With Truman’s approval, Marshall decided to make a speech at Harvard, where he had been invited to receive an honorary degree at commencement exercises on Thursday, June 5, an idea Acheson opposed for the reason that no one ever listened to commencement speeches. When the moment came, at the podium in the sunshine of Harvard Yard, before an audience of seven thousand, Marshall read his remarks in a soft voice, his head down, as though he did not care especially if they were listening.

The speech had been written by Bohlen in about two days, drawing heavily on the Kennan Report. Whether Truman saw a copy in advance is not recorded, but given Marshall’s extreme care to keep the President always informed, it is almost certain they discussed the matter.

As Marshall wanted, there were no oratorical flourishes. Nor was there any strident anti-Communist language.

Two ideas were new and distinguishing. He was calling on the Europeans to get together, and, with American help, work out their own programs. And, by inference, he was leaving the door open to the Soviets and their satellite countries to take part.

Then, speaking directly to the American people, Marshall said it was virtually impossible by merely reading articles or looking at photographs to grasp the real significance of conditions in Europe—“and yet the whole world’s future hangs on proper judgment, hangs on the realization by the American people of what can best be done, or what must be done.”

The speech caught nearly everyone by surprise, in Europe no less than in the United States. “We grabbed the lifeline with both hands,” said British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, who was the first to see the momentous import of what Marshall had said.

At a staff meeting the next day at the State Department, Marshall asked Kennan and Bohlen whether the Soviet Union would accept an invitation to join the plan. They did not think so, said the two Russian experts, but advised him to “play it straight” with the Soviets and exclude no one. It was a calculated gamble—since Congress was not likely to support any aid program that included the Soviets—but a gamble Marshall was willing to take and that Truman backed.

As kennan later wrote, authorship of the plan was variously claimed and imputed, and he, Bohlen, Acheson, and Clayton were only some of a dozen or more who had had a hand in its creation. Marshall would praise kennan’s work in particular. Clark Clifford would stress the part Acheson played. But Clifford himself had been involved at every stage. In fairness it might have been called the Acheson-Clifford-Marshall Plan.

Truman would always give Marshall full credit. When Clifford urged that it be called the Truman Plan, Truman dismissed the idea at once. It would be called the Marshall plan, he said.