Harry Truman and Dean Acheson on February 17, 1955, during a press conference at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City.
8
Once the excitement of the campaign season had subsided and the new, young, Democratic President had moved into the White House, Truman’s and Acheson’s letters to each other began to convey less mutual engagement in the nation’s affairs. With Eisenhower gone, the two friends no longer felt an urgent need to join forces to try to change policies that they felt were deeply in error. They wrote fairly regularly during 1961, but beginning in 1962 the steady, and equal, flow of letters abated. In addition to this, with advancing age Truman was naturally becoming increasingly less interested in public life. In what is probably the saddest letter he ever wrote to Acheson, on July 7, 1961, he also worried about his ability to present himself in public as he should, and said he envied Acheson for being able to make an important contribution to the national life: “You are making a contribution, I am not. Wish I could.”
Acheson was indeed making a contribution. President Kennedy had immediately brought Acheson into his administration as an adviser on NATO and Berlin, and Acheson wrote three important policy-review reports for Kennedy on these topics, as well as one on the country’s balance-of-payments problem. During the Cuban missile crisis, the President included Acheson in the so-called ExCom group, which advised him on how to end the threat the Soviet missiles created without bringing on war.
Shortly after Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, President Johnson called on Acheson to advise him on a number of foreign-policy questions, including U.S. policy in Vietnam, and although Acheson didn’t write Truman in detail about all the highly secret work he was engaged in, he did share some gossipy accounts of Kennedy and Johnson. He called Kennedy “a sort of Indian snake charmer” who was too concerned with image and had trouble making decisions. Johnson, he said, “creates distrust by being too smart. He is never quite candid.… He yields to petty impulses.”
The subjects of illness and death crept into the men’s letters, often humorously. Truman especially attended many funerals. “At 79 you go to funeral after funeral of your friends,” he wrote in May 1963, “… and you sometimes wonder if the old man with the scythe isn’t after you.” Both friends did write each other promptly to express heartfelt sympathy about these losses.
Acheson did not write Truman about the substantial relationship he developed with President Richard Nixon. Though Acheson had mixed feelings about Nixon, he admired him—and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger—enough that on important occasions he advised Nixon and publicly supported his foreign policies. Truman had never forgiven Nixon for remarks he made during the 1952 campaign, in a speech in Texarkana, Texas. Truman, Acheson, and Adlai Stevenson, Nixon had said, were all “traitors to the high principles in which many of the nation’s Democrats believe.” On another occasion Nixon charged that “Mr. Truman, Dean Acheson, and other [Truman] administration officials for political reasons covered up the Communist conspiracy and attempted to halt its exposure.” Truman had a long memory for this kind of attack on his patriotism and on that of loyal public servants such as Dean Acheson. When he was criticized in 1958 for insulting Vice President Nixon by calling him a “squirrel head,” Truman justified his use of such a moniker by saying “character assassins cannot be insulted.”
The two friends had several opportunities to honor each other publicly. On one occasion, Truman provided a heartfelt tribute about Acheson, Yale class of 1915, to the Yale Club of Montclair, New Jersey. “No one,” Truman said, “has had a clearer sense of the times or the direction of the course this nation had to take in her relations with its friends and allies.” When Acheson learned of this tribute, he wrote to Truman, “You always touch me by your faith in me.” When Acheson’s memoirs of his State Department years,Present at the Creation, came out in 1969, the book carried a brief but moving dedication: “To Harry S. Truman, ‘The captain with the mighty heart.’ ”
· · ·
Truman is not pleased with President Kennedy’s new United Nations ambassador—Adlai Stevenson.
February 6, 1961
Dear Dean:
I have the urge to write you a personal communication, in the hope that there will be a chance to see you when I’m in Washington March 9th.
I am very much interested in what the new President will do. I hope he will do the right thing.
What a condition we are faced with! Cuba—the water shut off on our naval base, the dictatorship in Nicaragua, Santo Domingo, Haiti, Ecuador, Chile,—etc.
Wish you were the United Nations ambassador. I’m very much perturbed that Adlai Stevenson won’t know what to do, and if he does he won’t do it!
I’ll be in N.Y. Feb 10th sail for Bermuda to see Margie and the two boys on Feb. 11th and be back in N.Y. Mar 2nd, then home and in D.C. Mar. 9th.
My very best to Alice, which includes Mrs. T.
Harry
Acheson again asks Truman to allow State Department historians to see documents relating to the Potsdam Conference in the papers from his White House office file that had not yet been turned over to the Truman Library. Acheson refers to his appointment as chair of President Kennedy’s Advisory Committee on NATO. At about the time he wrote this letter, he submitted to the President a report titled “A Review of North Atlantic Problems for the Future.”
March 23, 1961
Dear Mr. President:
This letter is outside the famous HST-DA series and has to do with a matter of business which Dr. Bernard Noble of State Department has taken up with me. Today he called on me and gave me the enclosed explanatory letter. He mentioned the fact that in connection with the Department’s Potsdam papers, you had most kindly allowed offices of the Department to see papers in those files which you have not yet turned over to the Library and had given permission for some of these papers to be included in the official record. He now wishes to request similar consideration from you in regard to the regular historical series “Foreign Relations in the United States.” The volumes covering the years of your Presidency will not be published for some time but the Department is already at work on them. He would like to have permission to look at the files which I have already mentioned and if any documents appropriate for inclusion in the official volumes are found to request your permission to use them. Not only would their use be contingent upon your permission but policy offices of the Government would examine them also to see whether there were any reasons for not making them public by the time the volumes should go to press.
I think that this is a fair and proper request and hope that you will grant it. It is most important that these official volumes be as complete as propriety permits. They are widely used by scholars throughout the world and will be an important source of understanding the years of your Presidency.
Your last visit to Washington came at a time when both Alice and I were stricken with the most virulent virus which has yet come our way. Poor Alice has had a wretched winter with one of these attacks after another. I joined her at the end of a rather splendid demonstration of my own. The result was that we missed you and were full of disappointment.
As you know, I have been drafted for a tour of duty on a review of NATO. This, I think, has been useful to President Kennedy and his Cabinet officers concerned with it. The first phase of my work is about at an end. Alice and I will fly to Amsterdam on the sixth of April for an argument which I have at The Hague Court beginning April 10. By the end of the month we should be back. I hope in time for a spring visit from you.
With most affectionate greetings to you and the boss,
As ever,
Dean
March 28, 1961
Dear Dean:
I appreciated very highly your letter of the 23rd and, of course, I will be glad to do whatever is necessary with regards to the request of Dr. Bernard Noble.
I am enclosing him a copy of this letter and you tell him he will be perfectly welcome here and I will do everything I possibly can to help him.
Sincerely yours,
Harry S. Truman
Those articles of yours are dandies. Will write you about them later.
“This asinine Cuban adventure” is the Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban partisans, organized by the CIA, which was a humiliating failure. Acheson reminds Truman that they had rejected similar coup plots for Iran and Guatemala proposed by Truman’s intelligence advisers. The book Acheson sent Truman is his Sketches from Life of Men I Have Known.
May 3, 1961
Dear Boss:
I am home just in time to thank you for your birthday note and to write you one wishing you all good things for this coming year and many to follow. I have seen some recent photographs of you looking sassy and full of fight.
Our trip to Europe was interesting, hard work and fun, all mixed together. The end of it, in which first our government and then de Gaulle’s fell apart, had its grim aspect. Why we ever engaged in this asinine Cuban adventure, I cannot imagine. Before I left it was mentioned to me and I told my informants how you and I had turned down similar suggestions for Iran and Guatemala and why. I thought that this Cuban idea had been put aside, as it should have been. It gave Europe as bad a turn as the U-2. The direction of this government seems surprisingly weak. So far as I can make out the mere inertia of the Eisenhower plan carried it to execution. All that the present administration did was to take out of it those elements of strength essential to its success.
Brains are no substitute for judgment. Kennedy has, abroad at least, lost a very large part of the almost fanatical admiration which his youth and good looks had inspired.
Washington is a depressed town. The morale in the State Department has about struck bottom.
Nevertheless, I say again, “Many, many happy returns of your birthday.”
As ever,
Dean
P.S. An inscribed copy of my book goes to you today.
Truman indulges a pet peeve about daylight saving time, which he feels ruins the time-zone system. He longs for a moment to return to the Senate, and refers to the appointment in September 1960 of Missouri Lieutenant Governor Edward V. Long to the U.S. Senate to replace the deceased Senator Thomas C. Hennings, Jr.
May 13, 1961
Dear Dean:
I’m sitting here this Saturday morning at eleven o’clock wondering what you may be doing at the same time maybe two hours later by that God Awful mixed up time under which we have to live.
You know it took about fifty or sixty years to arrange the time zones and now they mean not a thing. Maybe we should have a rod in our back yards with a couple of poles on each side of it, pointing to true north, if such there is, so we may be able to tell when it is noon by old sol. But I’m thinking of you, noon, one or two o’clock.
I’ve been reading Attlee’s book and his opinions of some of his associates are as frank as I’d like to be about some of mine! Your statement about Iran, Central America and Cuba pleased me no end. You are as right as rain on “Brains are no substitute for judgment.” Sorry Washington is so depressed. I’m to be there May 27th & 28th. We must have a go around for the benefit of both of us.
The autographed and inscribed copy of your book came and I’ve read it again, and believe it or not so has the “Boss.” There has not been a better one on the people of your and my time. Sometimes I wish I’d gone back (if I could) and sometimes I wish I’d taken the appointment as Senator from Missouri a short time ago. But, I’m glad now that it didn’t happen in either case.
Tell Alice her picture still hangs in my reception room right outside the door to the private office and hundreds of customers have commented on it favorably. Hope Alice will take it as a high compliment from the clod hoppers who come to see me. Their comments are worth more than Churchill’s and all the modern artists, in my opinion.
Best of everything to both of you.
Sincerely,
Harry
June 6, 1961
Dear Mr. President:
Would you be willing to see a Sandy Spring neighbor of mine, his wife and two daughters, who will be in the vicinity of Independence between July 1 and July 5? Mr. William W. Miles is the principal of our Sherwood High School in Sandy Spring, and is a personable and persuasive man. Not only has he prevailed upon me to write you, but he had committed me to speaking to the graduating class on June 19.
He is planning to take his family after school on a motor trip through the Middle West. The Truman Library is one of the places of highest interest on their itinerary, and a chance to greet its high priest would add great joy to the interest. I do not know whether this is the sort of request you feel you can grant. If it is entirely out of line, please do not hesitate to tell me so. But if it isn’t and you would let me know a time when they could come in to see you for a moment—or would tell them to have them call Rose Conway when they arrive in the area—they and I would be most appreciative.
With affectionate greetings.
Sincerely,
Dean
At the end of this letter Truman refers to an agreement he made with a production company, Talent Associates, Ltd., to produce a series of television films based on his life and career.
June 11, 1961
Dear Dean:
Of course I’d be pleased to see Mr. William W. Miles. He must be a great man and a persuasive one! It will be a pleasure to meet him. If he can come on either the 4th of July or the 5th it will be good for me. Tell him if he comes on the fourth, he’ll have to listen to a speech by me! If he comes on the 5th he’ll miss that ordeal.
I’ll be here both days. Tell him on either day I’ll personally give him the $5.00 tour for nothing—and since the tour is free to every teacher and student that is really no inducement. Tell him to call these numbers C.L[.] 21061 or C.L. 23678 and either Rose Conway or I will answer.
Dean, listen to me, you can’t make a request, no matter when, where or what that I won’t break a hamstring to meet. Hope you know about hamstrings.
I’ve been having a hell of a time. I’ve a fantastic offer to teach school on television and radio. If I can do it, it will save me a lot of running to schools and colleges. Hope I can. It will also finish the library building and furnish the Presidential historical gallery. Good things like that just can’t happen to me, but I hope.
My very best to Alice,
Sincerely,
Harry
There ain’t no $5.00 tour!
“My commencement speech” was at Sherwood High School, Sandy Spring, Maryland, near Acheson’s farm. Mr. Miles was the principal. Acheson was working, at the time he wrote this letter, on a report on Berlin for President Kennedy. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had precipitated a crisis over the future of Berlin by announcing that the Soviet Union would sign a peace agreement with the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) in six months if the United States did not negotiate a new agreement regarding the Allied position in West Berlin. The Soviet agreement with the GDR, if signed, would have turned over the access routes into West Berlin to the East German government, which the United States did not recognize. Kennedy had met with Khrushchev in early June in Vienna, Austria, where they spoke openly of war. Acheson submitted his report, titled “The Berlin Crisis,” to Kennedy on June 28. It recommended stern measures, including declaration of a national emergency and an immediate buildup of U.S. nuclear and conventional forces, to demonstrate the determination of the United States and its allies not to be forced out of Berlin.
June 24, 1961
Dear Mr. President,
How thoughtful you are of the simple and good people of this world. Mr. Miles, his wife and two girls are thrilled at the idea of meeting you. They have consulted me about the protocol of addressing you and are, in the current jargon, well briefed. They will call up and make a date for the 4th or 5th. If you should answer the phone and hear a dull thud, it will be because he has fainted. I told him you were likely to do it.
My commencement speech turned out to be a great success because it was to be on a dull subject—“The Political Responsibilities of Young Citizens,” of all things—and I hit on a happy device to deal with it. We have a very beautiful bit of country road leading to our village which is notoriously defaced by motorists throwing beer cans and all sorts of trash along the roadside, despite signs threatening horrendous penalties. I pointed out that the people who did this might technically be citizens but in reality they treated the home country as pigs treat their pen. But, I said, within the week I had seen truck loads of boy scouts, armed with shopping bags, picking up this trash and making land beautiful once more. They were learning the indispensable foundation of citizenship—to love some part of this land with all their heart and treat it with disciplined respect and tender care.
Apparently that meant something to the whole audience, children and parents, which generalities about patriotism and duty did not. They gave me a reception afterwards. On the whole, an interesting evening came out of an expected dull one.
I am working hard on plans to meet a Berlin crisis towards the end of the year. It is grim business, but I think that the Joint Chiefs and the State Department have now got the idea and that we shall make some progress. These Chiefs are not nearly as good as yours: nor are their staffs. In fact I am shocked—and I think the Sec. of Defense is, also—at the shoddy work which comes out of the military. For what we spend on them we deserve something better than what we get.
Kennedy’s performance worries and puzzles me. Somehow, he does not succeed in being a President, but only in giving the appearance of one, though he did do well with Khrushchev. Both Kennedy and Dean Rusk seem to me to be better when they make speeches than when they act. We have heard a lot about the necessity to make sacrifices but we haven’t been asked to make any. There are plenty to make if the Administration would just get started. Time is running out.
With warmest greetings,
Dean
Age was taking its toll on the old President, and he felt unsure of his ability to present himself as he should. In this sad letter, he envies Acheson his ability to make a contribution to the national life. The “Pop” that he’s afraid of is Joseph P. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s father. Truman is reported to have said during the campaign, when asked about Kennedy’s Catholic religion, “It’s not the Pope I’m afraid of, it’s the Pop.”
July 7, 1961
Dear Dean:
I am sitting here at the desk and wondering about things political, both nationally and internationally. It is a hell of a thought provoking situation.
Mr. Miles, his wife and the girls came in and I had a good visit with them. At least it was good from my point of view.
There couldn’t be any doubt how your commencement speech would turn out. Wish I could be as certain how my statement would come out. I have been calling off meeting after meeting on that account.
As you know I wasn’t for Kennedy at Los Angeles. But when the Convention decided that he was “the man,” what could I do but work my head off to elect him. I did just that—I’m still afraid of “Pop.”
I have the same trouble with the “litter bugs” you wrote me about. They throw beer cans, pop bottles, lipstick wipers and anything else for the trash can into my front yard; from sidewalk and the street in front.
As an early riser I pick up the trash and take a walk with most unkind thoughts for the litter bug public!
As to Berlin and Laos and Indo China and Cuba we have problems and problems. May Almighty God help us to solve them! There have been times in the history of the world that I thought “He” was looking the other way. And I suppose “He” should have been!
The performance of our Chief Executive worries me, as the Chiefs of Staff do.
You are making a contribution. I am not. Wish I could.
My best to Alice.
Sincerely,
Harry
Acheson, from his vantage point within the Kennedy administration, is able to compare it with the Truman administration. He was clearly impatient at the fumbling of the new administration. Robert McNamara was President Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense. General Maxwell D. Taylor was at this point a military adviser to Kennedy.
July 14, 1961
Dear Boss:
This, as you say, is a worrying situation. I find to my surprise a weakness in decisions at the top—all but Bob McNamara who impresses me as first class. The decisions are incredibly hard, but they don’t, like Bourbon, improve with aging.
There is also a preoccupation here with our “image.” This is a terrible weakness. It makes one look at oneself instead of at the problem. How will I look fielding this hot line drive to short stop? This is a good way to miss the ball altogether. I am amazed looking back on how free you were from this. I don’t remember a case where you stopped to think of the effect on your fortunes—or the party’s, for that matter—of a decision in foreign policy. Perhaps you went too far that way, but I don’t think so. Our government is so incredibly difficult to operate that to survive in the modern world it needs the most vigorous leadership.
I will say for Kennedy that getting any good clear work out of the present Joint Chiefs is next to impossible. But McNamara and General Taylor can help him mightily; and, as Holmes said, every day we must make decisions on imperfect knowledge.
The great point is that we ought to be acting now to bring home to Khrushchev that we are in deadly earnest about Berlin, which is only a symbol for our world position. This is what Khrushchev has under attack.
Affectionately,
Dean
Truman believes his campaign appearances in several Southern states and Missouri may have helped Kennedy win those states.
July 18, 1961
Dear Dean:
I don’t know when I’ve had a letter I appreciated as much as yours of the 14th.
Your discussion of the “image” approach is correct and to the point. If you can’t field that “hot drive to the short stop,” no one can. Of course you pay me the high compliment of a tried and true friend—but, you must remember that I had no “yes” men around me, particularly was that true of the great Secretary of State.
I am frankly worried about the situation. When the young man came to see me before the Democratic Convention in L.A. I asked him if he felt he was ready for what faced him. There was no answer. When the rigged convention was over he came back and asked for help in the election. Since the Democratic Party had given me everything I ever aspired to from precinct to President, I did what I could.
I am egotistical enough to think that No. Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas were helped a little in their anti-Catholic attitude, and Missouri was just saved by an inch. The State ticket went over by about 330,000 majority—Kennedy by 35,000 or there about. Same happened in No. Carolina by about the same difference. Half the electoral vote was saved in Alabama and Huey Long’s La. went in toto as did Texas. As you remember, I told the Baptists in Waco what I had in mind about their bigotry. Since I’m one myself they had to take it.
You know all this but I like to talk about it. It is like the old 88 year old who was being prosecuted for rape by a 20 year old. He made no defense. The Judge asked him why. “Well,” he said, “it sounded so nice and I was wishing so much it could happen that I enjoyed it.” He was not convicted!
Keep writing, it keeps my morale up—if I have any. My best to Alice—tell her I didn’t say Mrs. Acheson!
I told Bess I was writing and she wants to be remembered to you both.
Sincerely,
Harry
Acheson’s involvement with the Kennedy administration on the Berlin crisis continued through July. On July 25, President Kennedy, who had essentially accepted Acheson’s recommendations regarding Berlin, announced on live television and radio that the United States would immediately strengthen its conventional forces and take other measures to resist any Soviet attempt to force a change in the Allied position in West Berlin. Acheson submitted his final report on Berlin to Kennedy, titled “Berlin: A Political Program,” on August 1. After this, Acheson, as he tells Truman in this letter, decided to take a holiday from government work. He could not stop thinking, though, of all he had experienced in recent weeks and about what the future might bring. Shortly after Acheson left Washington for his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, the Soviet Union began construction of the Berlin Wall. In addition to Berlin, Acheson is also concerned about American policy toward Portugal and its African colonies. Besides his belief that the United States should support its NATO allies, including Portugal, he was personally fond of Portugal, and apparently also of its dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar, with whom he had had extensive dealings during World War II. Early in the Kennedy administration, the United States began supporting United Nations resolutions that denounced Portugal’s policies in its African colonies. Acheson strongly opposed the American position. Adlai Stevenson was at this time United States ambassador to the United Nations, and G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams was Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs. Both advocated American opposition to Portugal’s colonial policies. Acheson deplores the new President’s indecision and delay in foreign-policy decisions. David Bruce was U.S. ambassador to the U.K. “Mr. K” is Khrushchev, and Franz Josef Strauss was the leader of the Christian Social Union in West Germany.
August 4, 1961
Dear Boss,
I have just finished a job which I volunteered to do for Dean Rusk and am now going—in the current jargon—“to phase out” for a while. To work for this crowd is strangely depressing. Nothing seems to get decided. The job just finished was to get up a program of international political action—negotiation with its public opening, fall back, and very private position on Berlin and Germany, together with a propaganda campaign. The State Dept. has all sorts of suggestions but no definitive recommendations. This Rusk now has and I have bullied him into giving the President a copy. But I cannot get them to decide on this—or anything else—as our program to present to our allies. Rusk wants to approach everything piecemeal. But how you lead anyone unless you first know where you yourself want to go, I do not know.
I am told that the President wants to talk with me. But the man he ought to talk with is his Secretary of the Treasury (a curious slip) State; and he ought to demand a written program of action which he could approve, change or disapprove. Instead of this everything is kept nebulous. This is a good way to drift into trouble wholly unprepared. What is the new word? Disenchanted. I am becoming disenchanted.
So Alice and I are getting out of town. Our daughters are both going to be on Martha’s Vineyard for the last half of August and we have decided to be with them but at the other end of the island so as not to be breathing down their necks. In the autumn we might go abroad. The Chancellor wants me to come to Bonn and I would like to see the Bruces and other friends in England. Finally it just might be possible to get both Salazar and Kennedy to make a little more sense about Angola. We are about to alienate a most essential ally by our silly attitude in the U.N.; and our ally is about to go bankrupt trying to suppress an uprising which it probably can’t suppress. I think that we could help by trying to quiet things down on the basis of more participation in government by the blacks and economic development in both Portugal and Angola. This means some give by Salazar and a silencer on Soapy and Adlai.
But over all of this hangs Berlin. I don’t want to be abroad if I have to defend action of which I do not approve. I do not agree with an alleged remark of yours that Mr. K is bluffing. He has, I believe, sensed weakness and division in the West and intends to exploit it to the hilt. It wouldn’t take more than an error or two on each side to carry us over the edge into nuclear war. Or we could panic into an abject acceptance of K’s terms. “We” includes our allies. Last weekend I had over seven hours of talk with Joseph (Frantz Joseph, to be correct) Strauss. It was not reassuring. Not that he was ready to quit, but rather he just hadn’t thought the crisis through and was full of fears at one moment and utterly extravagant expectations of our nuclear power. In my judgment we shall have to run grave danger of war by preparations for ground action—in which most soldiers (Max Taylor excepted) do not believe—to convince K that by pressing too far he might force us into a nuclear response. Only in this way do I think that he can be brought to a truly sensible and tolerable negotiating state of mind.
With affectionate greetings
Dean
Acheson’s outlook here is gloomy. Fortunately his fears were not realized, because of good luck. The three European leaders who Acheson feels are going to give in to Soviet demands regarding Berlin are Paul-Henri Spaak, the foreign minister of Belgium; Halvard Lange, the foreign minister of Norway; and Konrad Adenauer, chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). John J. McCloy, a former U.S. high commissioner for Germany, was an adviser to President Kennedy at the time, and Walter Lippmann was the venerable Washington columnist.
September 21, 1961
Dear Mr. President,
This is a somber note. It is not intended to depress you, though it will. It is highly confidential. The purpose is to put you on guard for developments which neither you nor I can prevent, but which neither one of us should support or condone. Beware especially of the tendency to get you “to support the President” in syndicated newspaper articles.
I believe that sometime this autumn we are in for a most humiliating defeat over Berlin. Our own policy and preparations are increasingly weak and vacillating. Our allies are already in full retreat. Spaak is, or [will] soon be, in Moscow looking for terms. Lange of Norway will follow. The Germans are about to collapse. If Adenauer is allowed to stay on, which is doubtful, it will be only to sign the surrender. McCloy is everywhere urging an accommodation with Khrushchev. Walter Lippmann is the archangel of appeasement. The White House staff is already scuttling my recommendations.
The worst of it is not that eight years of Eisenhower inaction and one of Kennedy may have made the result inevitable, but that it will probably be dressed up as statesmanship of the new order, a refreshing departure from the bankrupt inheritance of the Truman-Acheson reliance on military power.
So count one hundred before you comment on anything, and don’t let Bill Hillman write anything for you on foreign policy. The First Amendment protects silence as well as speech. I am going underground.
If you read today’s U.S.-Soviet agreement on the principles of “general and complete disarmament” with the U.N. to have the only armed forces to be permitted, and look also at the Soviet demand for the Troika system and triple veto in the U.N., you will see the idiocy of our policy. No one means a damned thing which is said. We are all engaged in a propaganda battle of insincerities to create “images” of ourselves in the minds of people who don’t count. If we get Barry Goldwater after this—as we well may—we shall thoroughly deserve it.
This is all for your most private eye. I hope I am wrong, but do not think that there is the remotest chance that I am. The course is set and events are about to take control.
Alice sends her love to you and the Boss.
As ever,
Dean
September 24, 1961
Dear Dean:
Your letter of Aug. 4th has been read and reread. I think it is a classic. It sets out the issues. What the hell are we to do? I don’t know. Your letter sets it out.
For my part I’m happy you are trying to set the Administration on the right track. Keep it up.
I am supposed to be in Washington on the last day in October for a talk to the Washington Press Club. Then to stay all night at the White House.
I’ll let you know what time the arrival will be made. My headquarters will be at the Mayflower. Don’t know whether I should go to the White House or not.
Bess will be with me.
Sincerely,
Harry
Truman responds to Acheson’s letter of September 21. He is, unlike Acheson, always an optimist.
September 25, 1961
Dear Dean:
Your somber note gave me the most depressing viewpoint I’ve had since Jan. 20th 1953.
I can’t agree with you. We saved Berlin once. We will have to do it again. The Russian Dictator is one of those who can’t face issues when they are met head on.
You must remember that our head of state is young, inexperienced and hopeful. Let’s hope the hopeful works.
Was good to talk to you. Let’s keep working for the country. We, I hope, can do it. You know what I told you. I’m always in your corner.
Sincerely,
Harry
Joe Brown, whom Truman mentions, was a personal friend; he had been vice president and general counsel of the Kansas City Southern Railway.
October 26, 1961
Dear Dean:
Yesterday morning I received a telegram from Mrs. Joe Brown telling me that Joe had passed away the night before.
I was very sorry to hear that and I know you will be. The funeral ceremony, I think, will be tomorrow. Her address is 1030 West 59th Terrace, Kansas City, Missouri.
I am hoping to see you when I arrive back in Washington and I hope we will have the usual good visit. I am also looking forward to the luncheon with you on the date you and the Madam set, which I believe is November 1st.
Sincerely yours,
Harry
On November 1 Truman had lunch with Acheson in Washington, had dinner with President Kennedy at the White House and spent the night there. On November 2, he gave a speech to the National Press Club, which had asked him to look back on his presidency. “I don’t like to do that,” Truman said, “because I always have looked forward.” He talked mainly about the 1948 campaign, because his speech was on the anniversary of election day, 1948. He also mentioned how depressing his trips to Washington were during the Eisenhower administration, when he always knew the President was following misguided policies. He contrasted his current happy trip to Washington. Kennedy was President and the country was turning in the right direction. “I look to the days and months ahead with confidence,” he concluded.
Chester Bowles, a successful advertising man, cofounder of Benton & Bowles, was regarded by Acheson as too intellectually soft to be suited to foreign affairs and was removed as Under Secretary of State but immediately named as a special adviser to the President on Asian, African, and Latin American affairs. German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was eighty-five years old at this time and perhaps, Acheson observes, beginning to fail.
November 28, 1961
Dear Mr. President:
Mayor Richard Lee of New Haven has just passed on to me the transmission to you of his request that you speak at a fund raising dinner in New Haven. The funds are for his campaign for the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senator. The dinner could be held in late January, late February or anytime in March. Dick says that he has as yet no opposition and expects none unless Ribicoff wants the nomination. He (Dick) does not think that he does want it, but instead wants an appointment to the Supreme Court. I do not advise your doing this, since you have a good many more important things on your calendar. But if you have an urge for a political speech, here is a chance. What shall I tell him?
Washington becomes more and more puzzling to me. One day Bowles is kicked out of the State Department; the next day he is taken into the White House to advise on all foreign problems except those of Europe. Dear old Averell becomes, of all things, Ass’t Sec. of State for the Far East where he has been once.
When Adenauer was here he asked me to see him alone, which I did. He had failed a good deal since last April. I thought that he did not make much sense. I gather from Paul Nitze that the Chancellor made the same impression in his conferences. The whole Berlin and German policy becomes bewildering to me. One of my friends will brief me on it soon and I shall try to give you a more coherent account than I could now.
Alice is hard at work for an exhibition of her new paintings here in January, early in the month. We plan then to go to Cambodia on Prince Sihanouk’s invitation, and then on for a visit to Australia, principally to see Bob Menzies—and to get a month away from winter in Washington, a frivolous reason but the true one.
Affectionately,
Dean
At the Yale Club’s annual dinner in Washington, D.C., on March 27, 1962, held at the National Press Club, Truman presented an award called the Yale Bowl to Acheson (Yale class of 1915). He gave a brief speech about his old friend, reading from a draft handwritten on hotel stationery. When he got back home, he handwrote a somewhat more polished draft of the speech and sent this to Acheson (reproduced below). Acheson in turn sent Truman the notes, quite rough in this case, which he had used in making his acceptance speech. Although Acheson began by saying he was going to talk primarily about Yale, he then spoke about “my beloved Chief” on the pretext that “Mr. T. is a Yale man by our adoption.” He addressed the “mystery” of why Truman was such a great success as President, citing three reasons. First, his vitality, a priceless gift “for which ancestors, not he, are responsible.” Second, the clear and competent decision-making procedure he followed. All the people involved in a decision understood their mutual responsibility; all their points of view, including adversarial ones, were heard in the presence of one another; the President worked hard to be well informed on all issues; he made decisions promptly, clearly, and in writing; and he adhered to his decisions once he had made them. The third reason was Truman’s combination of good judgment and good luck. “Judgment easy to admire, but don’t despise luck,” Acheson concluded.
March 27, 1962
I am here this evening to perform a duty that I like very much. I more than appreciate the privilege you have given me to help honor my good friend of many years standing, the Honorable Dean Acheson.
Dean is one of the greatest men of this period and he will go down in history as one of the greatest of the great Secretaries of State of the United States. When history is written he will be placed in that galaxy of the men who saved the free world.
He will be in the same class as Washington and his Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, and as Lincoln and his great Secretary of State William Seward.
He is among the greatest of the great public servants in every capacity in which he served—and he served in many capacities from the 1930s to 1953.
He furnished me with the information needed to end two wars—one in Europe and one in the Pacific.
I wish I had command of the English Language such as Dean has, so I could adequately state his record to this great government. Present the bowl
Harry Truman
Truman did not accept the lecture invitation Acheson speaks of.
April 9, 1962
Dear Mr. President:
Ned Hall sent me a copy of his letter to you of April 6, asking you to give a lecture at the Hill School in April 1963 on the new foundation which they have gotten this year. He mentions in his letter that I did it this year. So I am writing to say that indeed I did, and that Alice and I enjoyed our experience very much. It is no trouble to get to the school, which is only an hour away from Philadelphia by car, which the school will provide. It is also a simple way to pick up fifteen hundred dollars without much pain.
I can’t tell you what a delightful time we had with you and Mrs. Truman a week ago last weekend. It was wonderful to see you both looking so well and to have a chance for a little, though not much, talk. We must make up for the crowded scene by having some private talk when you are in these parts next.
Alice is off on Sunday for Cyprus and southern France. I join her in London at the end of the first week in May for a short stay there and then a visit to Sweden. We are really establishing the all-time record for travel in 1962.
Our warmest greetings to you both.
As ever,
Dean
Acheson came to the Truman Library on March 31 to attend a meeting of the board of directors of the Harry S. Truman Library Institute for National and International Affairs and the presentation ceremony for a bust of himself commissioned by the foundation that had raised the funds to build the Truman Library. Acheson also spoke at a conference of scholars held in conjunction with the board meeting. The bust of Acheson has been installed for many years in the Truman Library’s research room, where scholars pore over the papers of both Truman and Acheson.
April 20, 1962
Dear Dean:
Miss Conway brought me the picture which you sent to her to be signed for Mr. Gardner Jackson and we are sending it to him direct, as you requested, in the self-addressed, stamped envelope you enclosed. I can’t understand why in the world you would send a stamped envelope to one who has been signing his name in the right-hand corner and letting it go free.
You really made the meeting here for the Heads of the Universities and Teachers. Everybody in Independence is still talking about it.
I don’t know when I will be in your neighborhood again but I certainly want to spend some time with you discussing conditions as they are and what they ought to be in the future. I have refused to give any interviews on the present administration as to the welfare of the country and the world. I always tell them we can’t judge a President when he has served only one-eighth of his term.
I hope everything is going well with you and I sincerely hope, when conditions work out as they should, I will have an opportunity to have another visit with you.
Sincerely yours,
Harry S. Truman
David K. E. Bruce, with whom Acheson mentions having lunch, was the American ambassador to the United Kingdom. Archbishop Makarios III of the Greek Orthodox Church was president of the Republic of Cyprus at this time.
May 3, 1962
Dear Boss:
Alice and I will be in London with the Bruces on your birthday. We shall drink your health and raise a loud cheer for you in the company of good men and true everywhere. All good wishes and many more years to spread the word and hearten the brave. We need it now more than ever these days.
I have a curious and apprehensive feeling as I watch JFK that he is a sort of Indian snake charmer. He toots away on his pipe and our problems sway back and forth around him in a trance-like manner, never approaching, but never withdrawing; all are in a state of suspended life, including the pipe player, who lives only in his dreams.
Some day one of these snakes will wake up; and no one will be able even to run.
So we are going away again. Alice has been in Cyprus doing some painting and being received by his Grace of the whiskers, Archbishop-President Makarios. (What a President you would have made if you had been an Archbishop into the bargain and had had whiskers down to your waist! The idea is a novel one but quite intriguing.) I am to meet her in London after she has a week or ten days in Southern France, in the small town of Vence near Grasse, a place for painters. After ten days we go on to Sweden when I attend a conference presided over by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. Then we shall both visit the Bohemans for a few days. You will remember him as the Swedish Ambassador, a tall able fellow who always believed that agriculture would prove the Achilles heel of the Soviet system—that is, the limiting factor.
Again our most affectionate remembrances and greetings go to you and Bess.
Most warmly,
Dean
Years before this letter was written, when Truman’s presidency was into its sixth year and he was starting to think of his place in history, he wrote a memorandum to an assistant: “The lies are beginning to be solidified and made into historical facts. Let’s head them off now while we can. The truth is all I want for history. If I appear in a bad light when we have the truth that is just too bad. We must take it. But I don’t want a pack of lying so called historians to do to Roosevelt and to me what the New Englanders did to Jefferson and Jackson.” Truman, who was a devoted reader of history and felt he understood something about historians, always worried that false or biased accounts of him and his administration would be accepted as factual.
July 6, 1962
Dear Dean:
Well, it came about at last. My historical outfit insisted that I call you. I did, and you answered as I knew you would.
But, Dean, if there is anything in the world I dislike to do, it is to put my good friends on the “spot.” Under no circumstances would I have called you, but because I am most interested in having the facts properly stated for the future.
Andrew Johnson, James Monroe, James Madison, Rutherford Hayes, Grover Cleveland and even Calvin Coolidge have been placed in a most embarrassing position by people who want to make them appear as ridiculous characters.
Maybe I am one. But I am anxious that my good friends help me to prevent that from happening. You know, better than anyone, how hard I worked to meet the decisions it was necessary to make.
Now, articles are coming out, along with books, showing I could never make a decision unless some smart boy told me how to make it. That may have happened—but I didn’t know it.
Dean, my best to you and Alice.
Sincerely,
Harry
Truman did not accept the invitation that Acheson mentions.
August 6, 1962
Dear Boss
Early in July Jack Wheeler-Bennett, the only friend I have with an office in Buckingham Palace, asked me to urge you to accept an invitation which he sent you on July 5th to give a lecture at Ditchley House next spring. I decided to mind my own business, an unusually rare and wise decision for me. Now he writes again asking whether his earlier letter went astray. Thus we are chivvied to chivy our friends.
But I do not urge you to do this, but only say that if you and the boss would like a free ride to Europe and back to fix up any damage that Ike may have done, this is a pretty painless way to get it. Ditchley House is a most beautiful eighteenth century great house, the Foundation represents the crème de la crème of England, and the subject they want to hear about you know backwards and forwards.
This does my duty and, I hope, puts not even the pressure of a thistle down on you.
Alice and I have been getting the greatest satisfaction from the first class job which our David has done for over a year now as U.S. attorney for the D.C. He is becoming a wise and effective force in the community, understanding the problems and respected by judges, police and citizens. It is very gratifying to see his fine qualities blossom.
With deep affection.
As ever,
Dean
August 8, 1962
Dear Mr. President:
Six years ago I took up with you, at Dr. Bernard Noble’s urging, the request of the Department of State for access to your reserved papers relating to the Potsdam Conference, in aid of compiling for publication a volume or more of papers on that Conference. You readily agreed and were of immense help in the preparation of the work. In fact, it would have been woefully incomplete without your help.
Dr. Noble, who is retiring because of the trouble which we are all having with the calendar, now asks me to appeal to you in aid of another request—for access to your reserved papers for 1945 and 1946. The request for the former year is urgent. The professional staff of the Historical Section of the Department is now compiling the 1945 volumes of Foreign Relations of the United States, an official publication of this Government. Section officials have already gone through pertinent papers of the same character as yours in the files of the Department of State and the Roosevelt Library. The projected volumes cannot achieve the purpose for which Congress authorized them unless all repositories of relevant diplomatic papers for the period have been examined.
Dr. Noble is not asking permission to examine all reserved papers but only those pertaining to foreign relations in 1945 and, later, 1946. He is not asking authority to publish all that his section thinks relevant. Policy officers determine what it is in the public interest to publish, subject—if you wish it—to your veto over the publication of any of your papers.
You have always been the leading exponent of the view that the practice, sanctioned by history, which permits a retiring President to take with him the papers collected in the White House during his term of office is justified by preserving them in trust for the Government in the service of which they were created. So I know you will agree that, when that Government in the course of publication directed by Congress finds need to examine these papers, it should not be denied the opportunity of doing so.
Before he packs up and joins the “Has Been” Club, may I tell Dr. Noble that you will help him again? If you give me the word, his successor, Mr. William M. Franklin, will get in touch with anyone you say to arrange the working details.
We are doing what you never do—having a lazy summer. This year Washington, or rather Sandy Spring, has been an ideal resort, on many days almost too chilly to swim.
With warmest greetings.
As ever,
Dean
Homer Capehart was at this time a Republican senator from Indiana. Truman was on the campaign trail in, among other places, the senator’s home state, where Capehart lost his bid for re-election. The “Mississippi situation” Acheson refers to involved the admission of African American James Meredith to the University of Mississippi. The governor of Mississippi for a time prevented Meredith’s admission, but Attorney General Robert Kennedy persuaded the governor to allow Meredith to enroll and on October 1, 1962, a heavily guarded Meredith entered the university. A large, violent mob gathered, and President Kennedy had to send in federal troops to restore order.
October 8, 1962
Dear Boss,
I hope that you have not answered my note of August 8th because you have been so busy getting Senator Capehart’s blood-pressure up, and not because you thought that I was off-side in pleading good old Dr. Noble’s case for a look at your reserved papers for 1945 and 1946. If you are fed up with the whole subject, I shall not press it further.
Alice and I are off in two weeks for a visit to Berkeley and Pasadena (Cal. Tech) in both of which I lecture and then hold meetings and seminars with faculty and students. Then on Dec. 15th we go off for a month in the West Indies with the MacLeishes and the John Cowleses of Minneapolis. This shows, at least, that our life holds interest still.
The Mississippi situation was, I imagine, inherently pretty bad. But it seems to me that the mob was allowed to get out of hand by too long temporizing by JFK. He seems to have been thinking too much of possible criticism and not enough of the calming effect and vigor and decisiveness on those who are working themselves into hysteria. I hope he doesn’t treat Mr. K this way over Berlin.
Cuba is a problem that I am glad I don’t have to deal with. Two Presidents have pretty well messed it up.
Our warmest greetings.
Yours,
Dean
Truman cites instances from American history when Presidents—Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln—took decisive action to force the South to obey the law of the land. Recent Presidents had not always, in Truman’s opinion, been so decisive. The “damfool” comment in the postscript probably refers to his own foolishness in going on the campaign trail again, at age seventy-eight, when he didn’t have to. This was to be his last trip along the campaign trail, and he cut it short because of the Cuban missile crisis. “In calling off my appearances as a partisan Democrat,” he said in an October 25 statement, “I appeal to everyone regardless of his party affiliation to support the Chief Executive and the Commander in Chief.”
October 12, 1962
Dear Dean:
My being fed up with you is an impossibility. I have been from Philadelphia to San Francisco, Los Angeles to Boise, Idaho, and back again to Youngstown, Ohio—to Clarksburg, West Va., and Evansville, Indiana. All, I hope, in the interest of the Democratic Party. That’s the reason you haven’t heard from me.
You tell Dr. Noble to come to see me and he’ll get what he wants. These archives boys are trying to obtain what Dr. Noble wants to see before I’m ready to turn them over. Dr. Noble will have no trouble—but tell him to come to see me—not the Archivists!
I’m glad you are going on a vacation—wish I could.
Arkansas and Mississippi are bad examples of what can happen when the man in charge (in Washington) is not sure of his powers. You remember what old Andy did to So. Carolina and what Old Abe had to do in ’61.
As to Cuba the man in the White House when it started should have stopped it at the beginning. Grover Cleveland acted in Venezuela and without, I hope, your thinking I’m haywire and an egotist, Berlin, Greece and Turkey were in the same category.
Damn it, Dean, you are one man who can say to me what you please anytime, anywhere on any subject.
You and George Marshall had the keenest minds I ever came in contact with. What a hell of a fix I’d have been in without the two of you.
Most sincerely,
Harry Truman
“Ain’t a man a damfool to do what I’m doing when he don’t have to.” That’s a quotation from Sen. Holman of Oregon when I gave him permission to fly over Attu in World War II with Mon Wallgren. I stayed in Seattle and they went on a jaunt which they wished they hadn’t taken. At least Holman thought that.
Truman did not accept the invitation Acheson mentions. “British Public Enemy No. 1” refers to the outcry in Britain over Acheson’s recent speech at West Point, where he said, “Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a new role.… Great Britain, attempting to work alone and to be a broker between the United States and Russia, has seemed to conduct policy as weak as its military power.” Acheson had trouble understanding how a very small and not very important part of a speech delivered to a student audience could give rise to headline news expressing outrage and hurt pride.
December 14, 1962
Dear Mr. President:
I am for my sins Vice President under Chris Herter of the Atlantic Council of the United States, which is a merger of all the NATO and Atlantic Community organizations, brought about at the State Department’s request.
It is giving on January 14 a dinner in honor of Laurie Norstad, the retiring Supreme Commander in Europe. Chris has asked General Eisenhower to come and has asked me to ask you. A formal invitation will be com[ing] along in course. I think this is a matter which you can deal with as most convenient to you. I see no pressing reason why you should turn from more important engagements for this salute to a retiring General. If it fits in with your plans and you would find it pleasant, everybody, including myself, would be delighted to see you there.
Alice and I are off today for a brief vacation in the West Indies to get away form this cold and feel the sun and water of the Tropics once more.
With warm greetings from British Public Enemy No. 1.
As ever,
Dean
The article Truman refers to is “My Morning in America,” published in the Saturday Evening Post, on December 15. Truman and Acheson were both devoted autobiographers, and both possessed a streak of nostalgia for bygone days. The most personal and revealing part of Truman’s memoirs is a long section about his early life. He also wrote several autobiographical manuscripts, the most important of which were published by historian Robert H. Ferrell as The Autobiography of Harry S. Truman (1980). Acheson wrote two volumes of memoirs: Morning and Noon (1965), about his early life, and Present at the Creation (1969), about his State Department years. Truman acknowledges in this letter his debt to the many books he has read in his lifetime, particularly books of history and biography. “Terrible trial” refers to the burden of the presidency, which fell upon him on April 12, 1945.
December 18, 1962
Dear Dean:
I’ve been reading your Saturday Evening Post article. Tried to call you soon as I read it. It gave me many memories of my growing up.
We had almost the same experiences. Only your experiences were in the great state of Connecticut and mine were in Missouri. You had white people who helped out and we had black and brown—but the experiences were almost the same!
At the time of the Spanish American War, the twelve and fourteen year olds organized a company. That company marched, carried 22 rifles, killed the neighbor’s frying chickens and camped out until our parents put a stop to it. Then I had to study whether I wanted to or not. Read the Old & New Testaments—King James translation—three times before I was fifteen, and all the histories of world leaders and heroes I could find. Our public library in Independence had about three or four thousand volumes, including the ten encyclopedias!
Believe it or not, I read them all—including the enclo’s. Maybe I was a damphool but it served me well when my terrible trial came.
You know better than anyone. Hope your trip abroad was a happy one.
Sincerely, your friend and great admirer,
Harry Truman
December 20, 1962
Dear Dean:
If you are punished for your sins by association with Christian Herter—I am of the opinion that you are not punished! He needs your brains and ability. No one knows that better than an old man who—by accident—became President of the United States.
You were one of my greatest assets. Marshall was the other. How in the world could a man be as lucky as I was—with two such able men!
I don’t know what to do about January 14th. I am told that the Dam Democrats at Kennedy’s suggestion are putting on a $1,000 dinner! If and when that happens we’ll quit being democrats with a little d!
I was not consulted about the “thousand dollar dinner.” If I had been, I’d have told them that Democratic dinners should start at $25.00. A thousand seats at $25.00 would be $25,000.00, two thousand seats at $10.00 would be $20,000.00 and 4,000 seats at five dollars would still be $20,000.00. Therefore more real Democrats would take a hand! That’s the way Democrats have won.
To hell with these multimillionaires at the head of things. Maybe I’m just a poor retired farmer.
Sincerely,
Harry S. Truman
Truman underwent an operation to correct an abdominal hernia on January 18. The vacation partners Acheson mentions are Mr. and Mrs. Archibald MacLeish. Acheson’s memoir Morning and Noon covered his life from 1893 to 1941. The two troubled alliances Acheson refers to are those of the communist nations and of the Western powers. Besides learning of Truman’s operation in his morning newspapers, Acheson read about a fracas at the East German Communist Party congress, where a Chinese delegate said the “Tito group” of communists in Yugoslavia had “surrendered to the imperialists.” This was understood to be a veiled attack on the Soviet Union’s policy of peaceful coexistence with the West. Acheson also read about France’s adamant opposition to British entry into the European Economic Community, a predecessor entity to the European Union. Jean Monnet was the intellectual father of the European unification movement, of which President de Gaulle was the chief enemy. Harold Macmillan was prime minister of Great Britain.
January 19, 1963
Dear Boss:
I was distressed to read in the press that you were to fall victim again to Dr. Graham’s sharp knives, and then reassured this morning that your condition was reported as “excellent.” Alice and I send you a large case of love and devotion—all in full quarts—to take you home to a leisurely (I hope) recuperation. If I know Boss Bess, you are going to take a rest and a good one. Why isn’t this the time for you both to visit Ed Pauley in southwestern sun? Alice and I are just back from three weeks in the West Indian sun, partly being lazy with the MacLeishes at Antigua, and part of the time cruising on a sailboat from St. Lucia to Trinidad through waters more exotic than any that Ulysses saw. So we are experts on the value of sun and relaxation.
Thank you so much for reading, liking, and writing me about the piece I wrote about my childhood. The memories it evoked from you about your own are fascinating. They confirm a suspicion about you which has been growing on me for over fifteen years. It is nothing less than that you are a shrewd old fraud. All this talk about you being a simple retired farmer, untroubled by what Cordell Hull used to call “book larnin”, is part of a deep conspiracy to mislead the gullible electorate and probably violates the Hatch Act. Unless silenced by bribery of regular letters from you, I shall—at a moment carefully chosen to rock the John Birch Society to its foundations—disclose the shattering truth that you are, in fact, the most unmitigated intellectual, who, before he was out of short pants, had read four thousand volumes and three encyclopedias. One has to go back to Drs. Sam Johnson and Ben Franklin to equal that. If this is blackmail, as one of our patriots said to George III, make the most of it.
Today’s press tells me also that both the alliances are in trouble. China is trying to divide the children of darkness; and France, the children of light. My guess is that neither will succeed. Jean Monnet has always said that the unification of Europe can only take a step forward in an atmosphere of crisis. At the urging of my German friends, and with the approval of the State Department, I have been urging Adenauer by cable to move General de Gaulle from the disastrous course he has charted, which, if followed, will go far to destroy the Chancellor’s life work. My guess is that de Gaulle’s purpose was to needle MacMillan into making the break. The General is too conscious of history’s judgment to make it himself.
With all get well messages and our love to both bosses.
Yours,
Dean
February 15, 1963
Dear Dean:
You don’t know how very much I appreciated your letter of the 19th, and I don’t want you to consider this a reply to it. I just want you to know that I received your letter and it brought me much pleasure when I needed it most. I hope to get around in a week or two to answering it.
Mrs. Truman and the doctor are still insisting that I not do very much for a while longer, you will be hearing from me before too many days go by, in the manner in which you ought to hear.
Give my best to Alice.
Sincerely yours,
Harry
Truman sent with this letter his two most recent NANA articles, one on Cuba, which appeared on February 24, and one about France, which would appear on March 16. Truman argued that the United States had a responsibility to make the Cuban people free again. He imagined a conversation between himself as President and Castro, at which an understanding was reached that would result in free institutions in Cuba. He concluded that the recent Cuban crisis was useful in that it gave the United States an opportunity to show the Soviets that when a line was clearly drawn, as it was during the Cuban missile crisis, the United States stood firm. His article about France, though intended to reflect on de Gaulle’s refusal to allow the United Kingdom to join the European Economic Community, was drawn largely from his presidential papers. He recounted de Gaulle’s action at the end of World War II to establish by force an occupation zone in Germany around Stuttgart. The United States ordered him to remove his French forces, and when he refused, Truman cut off supplies to his troops. De Gaulle hadn’t changed, Truman implied. Truman concluded by holding out a dream of “a unified international community under the United Nations—devoted to the common good of all people.” Acheson would have liked the next sentence better: “As we keep on trying to organize the whole world for peace, we must remain alert to the realities of the situation—and that we live in a period of ruthless power.”
March 9, 1963
Dear Dean:
Your good letter of the 19th was heartwarming. I have been working a couple of hours a day on a Cuban release and a De Gaulle squib. I am sorry to say I haven’t had the nerve to talk to the White House. If you know of any reason why I should I might consider doing it.
Why in hell a successor would not consider things which happened three Presidential generations before hand—well, I’ll never understand. I am sending you a copy of the Cuban release and one on De Gaulle which will come out a week from tomorrow. You see I kept a transcript of the conversations with the interim President of France. What luck that was! De Gaulle has not changed from Stuttgart. He was told what was in view by all the people between me and what had to be done (I have the record!) and the President finally cut off U.S. Supplies to France and the Provisional President of France came across and moved to the occupation positions that France was supposed to take!
But Dean, why rehash all this past history stuff? I suppose it is because I want to show off to my able, distinguished and brainy Sec. of State! Please don’t believe that. Dean, I never had a man in my immediate White House family or anywhere else in my political career that I thought more of than I did of Dean Acheson. You know why? Because he always told me the truth and the facts whether I liked it or not!
I’m still a little under the weather, seventy-eight is not twenty-eight—so—I’ll have to stop. Don’t you stop writing me those wonderful letters. My best to Alice. The “Boss” joins me.
Most sincerely,
Harry
Truman refers to a speech Acheson gave at Berkeley, California, on March 13, 1963, titled “Europe: Kaleidoscope or Clouded Crystal.” Acheson argued that, despite France’s unwillingness to be a cooperative member of the Western alliance, the United States’ European defense policy “was right and should be continued.” Truman’s enclosure is apparently the article about de Gaulle enclosed with his March 9 letter but may have been slightly different or in a different format. Truman mentions the theft from the Truman Library of a very fine collection of coins, including a type set of every American coin made during every presidency. The coins have never been recovered.
March 18, 1963
Dear Dean:
It was with great pleasure and satisfaction that I read your Berkeley, Calif., speech on the “Great” De Gaulle. In return I’m sending you a release I made for the North American Newspaper Alliance on the same fellow.
Yours was much better than mine because it is a character analysis and mine is a historical statement of some years back.
Luckily I have kept those documents of that period—and they are available to you and anyone you suggest for any use you want to make of them. There were two sets of all these important reports of those important meetings in 1946–47–48–49 & 50. I’ve no idea what the State, Defense, Commerce and Agriculture did with their copies—but I have mine and expect to keep them for the use of my friends—you at the top of the list!
I said two sets—there were two official sets and copies for all the others interested. Every effort has been made by the General Services and some department to obtain my copies. Those copies are in an Archives Building for which I raised $1,750,000.00 to construct and for which Independence gave me a 13 acre site. I turned over 4,500,000 documents and more than $300,000.00 worth of presents which had come to me as President from Heads of State. They are now the property of the people and Government of the U.S.A.
But you understand the said Govt. of the U.S.A. doesn’t take very good care of the articles. A short time ago $50,000.00 in coins and engravings of the Presidents’ pictures in whose time the coins were made disappeared from this Government Institution and have not been heard of since. The whole FBI has made an attempt to catch the thieves and are still working on it. They may catch the thieves but they’ll never find the coins nor the pictures.
Looks to me as if the President of France is way out in field left of 3rd base and nothing to catch!
Sincerely,
Harry
Acheson had recently been working on a report on the United States’ balance-of-payments problem for President Kennedy. He submitted the report, titled “Recommendations Relating to United States International Payments Problem,” to the President on February 25.
March 20, 1963
Dear Boss,
Two letters from you in quite short order give me the comforting assurance that you are moving on to complete recovery from your recent operation. You please me very much by liking the Berkeley speech. I worked very hard on it, trying to cull out any distracting and troublesome statements, such as got into the West Point speech and prevented the main theme from coming though. As a result, it seems to have forced a good deal of attention onto the substance of what was said.
Your own historical review of your discussions with the General were most interesting to me. I do not remember having known at the time what you two actually talked about, so it had all the interest of new discovery.
You must have been very distressed at the theft of that most unusual collection of coins, which—as I recall—John Snyder gave to the Library. The whole thing, as framed, was so large that it seems almost impossible that it could be taken away without any alarm at all. The guards surely do not suffer from insomnia.
I have, at the President’s request, been doing some work for him to get agreement within the Administration on a matter which might be regarded as outside my field of competence. But one can understand even unfamiliar subjects as no one knows better than you, if one works at them. So I went to work and soon was able to report that the departments concerned would go along happily with a paper I had prepared if the President crushed the first sign of revolt which all good bureaucrats try on just for luck. A big meeting was held, the rebel standard was raised, but the President did nothing. In no time at all the cell block was in a riot, and we are starting anew. I suppose it takes time to learn that just as there is a time to permit discussion, there is also a time to end it. Don’t delay in reading the riot act too long or no one will hear it!
Alice sends her most affectionate greetings to you and the Boss, as do I.
As ever,
Dean
Truman was asked by the president of the Yale Club of Montclair, New Jersey, to provide a message for a ceremony at which Acheson would be honored. “The judgment of history …,” Truman replied, “will mark Dean Acheson among the top three or four of the great Secretaries of State. No one has had a clearer sense of the times or the direction of the course this nation had to take in her relations with its friends and allies, as well as to meet the threat from the new enemy.”
March 29, 1963
Dear Dean:
I’m enclosing you a copy of the letter which I have received from the Montclair Yale Club of Montclair, New Jersey, and a copy of my reply to them.
Sincerely yours,
Harry S. Truman
A. Whitney Griswold was president of Yale. Acheson was the senior member of the Yale Corporation.
May 6, 1963
Dear Boss:
All hail to the 8th of May and your coming of age! I claim that you are a youth yet, and have two more years of your seventh decade. I, who have just turned seventy, am only completing my sixth. But we still aren’t as young as we were, when we struck blows for liberty, are we? Alice and I send you—and Bess, who makes it all possible—our love, affection, admiration, and all wishes for years of usefulness to the nation and joy to your friends.
Friends report that you are disappointed that it has taken longer to regain your strength after the operation than you had hoped. I can imagine you fretting to get at those morning walks again and cussing fate. But the first article of my faith is that you are indomitable and that the day will come. When it does, compromise a bit with the army regulations. A hundred paces a minute is enough for a while.
The death of our friend, Whit Griswold, of Yale, was a hard knock for all of us at Yale, but especially for me, since I had been so close to him, worked at his side, and had come to be devoted to him. We spent the afternoon before he died together, his last clear hours. He was a gallant and most lovable man.
You were most kind to write to the Montclair Yale Club so warmly about me on the occasion of their dinner to me. You always touch me by your faith in me. There are times now-a-days when I have a longing that together we might take the wheel and the bridge just long enough to set a firm course and get the crew standing to quarters, confident in the course and the command. I do not believe that the situation is as puzzling as the Administration appears to think. Germany is the present key to movement in Europe, and, I think, is ready to act with us. Instead Rusk spreads suspicion with his futile talks with the Russians, and we continue to negotiate with ourselves in Geneva over a nuclear test ban which the Russians have no intention of accepting.
Every good wish!
Affectionately,
Dean
Truman has apparently not fully recovered from his mid-January operation.
May 14, 1963
Dear Dean:
I understand that you are presiding at the dinner of the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs, on May 28th. I certainly wish I could be with you but I just can’t make it, much to my regret.
As you know, I am just as interested in what goes on now as I was when I was in the center of things but that old lady “Anno Domini” has been chasing me and I have to slow up a bit, particularly since she has a partner in Mrs. Truman.
Please remember me to Mrs. Acheson.
Sincerely yours,
Harry S. Truman
Truman presided over the twenty-second Truman Committee Anniversary Dinner in Washington, D.C., on June 13. He had headed the Truman Committee—or, more properly, the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program—from March 1941 until he was nominated as the Democratic Party’s vice-presidential candidate in the summer of 1944. Acheson was invited to the dinner, but did not attend. Nor did he and Truman have an opportunity to visit together while Truman was in Washington.
May 26, 1963
Dear Dean:
I have been reading again your good letter of May 6th a couple of days before I became within twenty one years of one hundred. If, as you suggest, I finish this 7th decade, as I hope, I am sure I can do the other twenty.
It reminds me of one of my old political stories, which my old Uncle for whom I’m named told me seven decades ago.
It seems that there was a contest as to who could eat the greatest number of roasting ears off the cob. Well, one old fellow ate thirteen. He had to send for his doctor and his doctor told him he should send for his Baptist preacher to pray for him. His preacher told him he’d have to pray for himself. The old fellow said, “I’m not in the habit of addressing the Lord, you do it.”
“No,” said the preacher, “you’ll have to ask Him for relief yourself.”
Well, the old fellow got out of bed, got on his knees and made the following petition to the Almighty: “O Lord, I’ve eaten too many roasting ears—thirteen in fact. I’m not like these Damned Methodists, if you’ll relieve me of seven ears I’ll try to rastle around the other six.” Wasn’t that a fair proposition?
Now I’d like very much to trade Him two for twenty—can you help me?!
I was very sorry to hear of the death of President Griswold of Yale, because I knew of your close association. But, as you know, we have to meet them head on and you know how to do it.
At 79 you go to funeral after funeral of your friends, most of whom are younger than 79—and you sometimes wonder if the old man with the scythe isn’t after you. I’m trying to out run him.
Your suggestion about a take over intrigues me. Wish we could try it. I’m egotistical to think the two of us together could do some good for the country. You could do it by yourself and I hope you will. It’s always a pleasure to hear from you. Glad you were pleased with my letter about you. It wasn’t as good as it should have been.
Sincerely,
HST
It looks like I’m stationery stingy—but I couldn’t help stop! [Postscript written vertically in left-hand margin of letter. The last line of the letter and Truman’s signature are squeezed tightly and awkwardly on the last bit of paper on the bottom of the page.]
I’m hoping we’ll have a long time “get together” on June 13th. I’ll be at the Mayflower all day. Get in the evening of the 12th rather late.
Truman suffered a serious fall in the upstairs bathroom at his home on October 13, 1964. He appeared never to recover fully from this fall. He grew thin and came to the Truman Library less and less often. The “bewhiskered prelate” is Archbishop Makarios III, of the Greek Orthodox Church, president of the Republic of Cyprus at this time. The Greek and Turkish populations of Cyprus had been fighting over the future of the island all through 1964, and the United Nations was attempting to mediate a peace between the two sides. Acheson spent the summer of 1964 in Geneva, where the United Nations–sponsored negotiations were taking place. Although he had no official role in the negotiations, through the strong support of the Johnson administration and the force of his personality, he came to dominate the talks. They collapsed in late August, and Acheson came home. Greece and Turkey were both NATO member states, and the problems in Cyprus threatened to weaken NATO’s southeastern flank.
October 16, 1964
Dear Boss:
Now that I have made a determined start on the decade of the seventies you have confirmed a night mare fear—the ever lurking menace of the bath tub. Far more dangerous than the submarine or the bomb, nuclear or otherwise, it is a trap set for us old codgers. It is as dangerous to get into as to get out of, or to stay in. Recently when we built a new bath room onto our guest house at the farm, I refused to have any bath tub at all. Instead a gleaming white shower cabinet with a rubber floor. But still the wretched things lie in wait for us everywhere.
My heart goes out to you, battered, black eyed, lung congested, all to pursue overrated cleanliness. Remember the Eskimo! Not a bath from the autumn to the spring solstice. And now you are having what is worse than a tub bath—certainly more humiliating—those dreadful hospital baths.
Sympathy, affection, constant thoughts—all go from me—and from Alice—to you. And to Bess. We had an interesting and very pleasant summer in Geneva trying to do in the bewhiskered prelate. I failed but Alice did some fine painting.
Poor Lyndon! What a blow from fate!
Yours ever,
Dean
January 12, 1965
Dear Dean:
I was confronted with such an accumulation of matters which required my attention, when I returned to the office after my mishap, that I had to put off replying to my important mail. I am just now getting around to answering the ones in the special folder. I had hoped to write you a longhand letter, but I will have to dictate this one, and will send you a handwritten letter a little later.
I did not fall in the bathtub, as was reported by the press. I was going into the bathroom, caught my heel on the sill which caused me to fall and hit my head against the washstand. I wasn’t satisfied with the one fall and proceeded to hit the tub on the rebound and broke some ribs as well.
It has taken me a while to come out of it but I am now getting along all right, although I must be careful for some time yet.
Best wishes to you and Mrs. Acheson for a Happy New Year in which Mrs. Truman joins me.
Sincerely yours,
Harry S. Truman
President Truman’s brother, John Vivian Truman, died on July 9. The meeting with President Johnson that Acheson describes took place on July 8. The day began with a series of meetings of several elder statesmen, called the “Wise Men,” with administration officials, who described the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam. At the end of the day the Wise Men met with Johnson. About three weeks later, on July 28, Johnson announced his decision to send American troops to fight in combat roles in South Vietnam. The Wise Men mentioned in this letter are former Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett, General Omar Bradley, and former Assistant Secretary of War and U.S. High Commissioner for Germany John J. McCloy. Henry H. Fowler was Johnson’s Secretary of the Treasury.
July 10, 1965
Dear Boss,
Just a line to say that my thoughts are very much with you these days. I know how close you and Vivian have always been and that his death has been a sad break with so much that you hold dear. Alice and I want to send you a special message of love and devotion—a message which goes also to Bess.
On Thursday a few of us, whom LBJ calls his panel of advisors, met with him for three hours to talk about Europe, Latin America & S.E. Asia. We were all disturbed by a long complaint about how mean everything and everybody was to him—Fate, the Press, the Congress, the Intellectuals and so on. For a long time he fought the problem of Vietnam (every course of action was wrong; he had no support from anyone at home or abroad; it interfered with all his programs, etc., etc.). Lovett, Bradley, McCloy and John Coutes were there with McNamara, Rusk and Fowler. I got to thinking about you and General Marshall and how we never wasted time “fighting the problem”, or endlessly reconsidering decisions, or feeling sorry for ourselves.
Finally I blew my top and told him that he was wholly right in the Dominican Republic and Vietnam, that he had no choice except to press on, that explanations were not as important as successful action; and that the trouble in Europe (which was more important than either of the other spots) came about because under him and Kennedy there had been no American leadership at all. The idea that Europeans could come to their own conclusions had led to an unchallenged de Gaulle.
With this lead my colleagues came thundering in like the charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo. They were fine; old Bob Lovett, usually cautious, was all out, and, of course, Brad left no doubt that he was with me all the way. I think LBJ’s press conference of yesterday showed that we scored.
I am reading the bound galleys of a biography of Roger B. Taney by a Walker Lewis, a very fine book on a man whom I have always admired. Houghton Mifflin is publishing it this fall.
As ever yours,
Dean
On July 31, President Johnson paid tribute to Truman’s attempt during his presidency to pass into law a national health-insurance program, by coming to the Truman Library to sign the legislation creating Medicare. He came back to Independence several months later to present to Harry and Bess Truman the first two Medicare cards issued by the government.
August 4, 1965
Dear Dean:
Thank you for your interesting letter of July 10th. I appreciate your sympathetic message regarding the death of my brother Vivian. His passing has meant a great loss to me, but we have to accept those things when they happen—and I try to console myself by the fact that he had lived a long and happy life and had performed his public service honorably and well.
I read with interest about the meeting you described and appreciate the interest you take in things in which I am vitally interested. I believe that Johnson is doing a good job.
You heard, of course, of his coming here to sign the Medicare Bill. There were about 3,000 people on hand to witness it. We could only seat about 300 inside but the rest of them were on hand to witness his arrival and departure and I believe they felt as though they had been a part of the ceremony.
Bess joins me in warm personal regards to Alice and yourself and we hope an opportunity will present itself so we can have a visit again at sometime or other.
Sincerely yours,
Harry S. Truman
Truman has read a review of Acheson’s memoir Morning and Noon, dealing with his life prior to the Truman administration. The review, by Federal Reserve Chairman William McChesney Martin, is positive throughout and concludes that in his memoir Acheson “comes through clearly as a proud, tender and sensitive man of great intellect, whose contributions to our society are very real indeed.”
November 16, 1965
Dear Dean:
I have been reading a tear sheet from the Washington Post, called “Acheson’s Contributions Reflected in Autobiography.” It is a wonderful piece and one with which I completely and thoroughly agree.
I hope everything is going well with you and that it will continue to go that way.
Sincerely yours,
Harry S. Truman
The book mentioned is Acheson’s memoir Morning and Noon.
December 1, 1965
Dear Mr. President:
The book about which you have been reading should have gone to you long since, and I thought it had from the publisher. That was an unfounded belief, and a copy is now on its way to you.
Alice and I are well and looking forward to our winter vacation in Antigua, beginning January 7th. We send our most affectionate greetings to you and The Boss.
Sincerely,
Dean
Truman’s signature and his handwritten postscript on this letter are less bold and sure than they would have been in prior days.
December 10, 1965
Dear Dean:
I am happy to have your book Morning and Noon.
I started to read it and found that there are some things about you that I had not known. But, of course, you know there is nothing I could ever learn about you that would make me admire you any less.
Hope we can get together one of these days.
Sincerely yours,
Harry Truman
A most interesting book, I can hardly put it down!
Frank F. Jestrab of North Carolina asked Acheson where he should send a donation of fifty dollars, intended for a “Truman Memorial Center of some sort” that was being set up at a university in Israel. Acheson sent the letter to Truman. The former President, who did not like things to be named for him and usually denied requests to use his name in this way, allowed his name to be given to a Truman Center on the campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem provided that the center be devoted to the study of peace. The center was founded in 1966 and is today named the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace.
June 8, 1966
Dear Dean:
Thank you very much for the letter from Mr. Jestrab and your reply to him. I do not know what disposition to make of the check. I assume that it was intended for the Harry S Truman Center for the Advancement of Peace, which will be built in an area within the complex of the Hebrew University in the City of Jerusalem.
As you may have read, the project was made possible by contributions made by forty citizens here and abroad, of $100,000 each, so that there is in excess of four million dollars presently committed.
I made it clear from the outset that this institution will be international in scope and operation and will have no connection with the government or nation of Israel, or any other government.
I would assume, therefore, that if Mr. Jestrab still wishes to make this tender, it should be made to the Harry S Truman Center for the Advancement of Peace.
Hope all goes well with you and that we can have a visit soon.
Sincerely yours,
Harry Truman
“Scoop” Jackson is Democratic Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington, who chaired the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on National Security and International Operations of the Government Operations Committee. Acheson provides a statement in support of NATO which he hopes Truman will send to Jackson. Truman sent a shorter and somewhat revised version of Acheson’s draft to Jackson, though not for almost a month. Acheson had testified before the subcommittee on April 27. NATO was threatened at this time by France’s withdrawal of its troops from NATO’s integrated military command and its order that all non-French NATO troops leave France. Truman’s fourth grandson, Thomas Washington Daniel, was born on May 28.
June 28, 1966
Dear Mr. President:
Soon I shall write you a gossipy letter about my three months’ service in the State Department in the Johnson Administration. It has been quite an experience. Everything is different from when you-know-who was in the White House and in the State Department. The best description of its operation is in the words of the negro spiritual: “The big wheel runs by faith and the little wheel runs by the grace of God.” But more of that in another letter.
Today I am bothering you at the request of “Scoop” Jackson. His committee, as you know, has been holding hearings on the present NATO situation. McCloy and others, including myself, have testified, and “Scoop” has tried earnestly to create a record which will make more sense than that provided by the group of screwballs who now function as the Committee on Foreign Relations. Eisenhower wrote a letter giving some rather confused views, but on the whole supporting NATO. “Scoop” has asked me to ask you whether you would express your views in a letter for the record.
As you remember from the old days, I tried never to present a problem without suggesting a solution. In this case I know that it would be an awful nuisance for you to undertake from scratch a letter on the present NATO situation. Therefore, I have tried my hand at a draft. In it I have kept away from all controversy about General de Gaulle, about where various headquarters should be transferred, and whether or not the US contingent should be decreased or transferred in part to home bases. I do think it would be helpful, since NATO was one of the great works of your Administration, to have a word from you stressing the essential foundations of NATO, which have not changed.
If this whole matter seems to you a burden, just let me know and I will make everything all right with “Scoop.” If you like the draft, use it in any way you wish.
We congratulate you and the Boss on another grandson. Margaret is the Mother of the Year.
With love to you both.
As ever,
Dean
July 26, 1966
Dear Dean:
I was glad to comply with your suggestion and have written Scoop Jackson urging continued support to NATO.
It is always stimulating to hear from you—and I hope you will write again soon giving me your views on the shape of things.
Sincerely yours,
Harry S. Truman
Acheson’s younger brother, Edward Campion Acheson, died in late September.
September 30, 1966
HONORABLE DEAN ACHESON
BESS JOINS ME IN SENDING OUR LOVE AND SYMPATHY TO YOU AT THIS SAD TIME.
HARRY S TRUMAN
Acheson writes Truman the promised gossipy letter about Lyndon Johnson and his Secretary of State, Dean Rusk. For about three months, from April to July 1966, Acheson had coordinated the Johnson administration’s response to the crisis within NATO caused by France’s withdrawal. The book Acheson mentions is his memoir of his service with the State Department under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. He titled it Present at the Creation.
October 3, 1966
Dear Mr. President,
The message which you and Mrs. Truman sent me was most kind and thoughtful of you, as you have always been to me. My brother, who was ten years younger than I, died very suddenly, as he was reading at home. He had no history of heart trouble, though he had been in poor shape for some years from progressive emphysema. One of his proudest memories was of holding the title of your “Personal Representative” in late ’47 or ’48 when John Hilldring sent him off to Scandinavia to buy fish for the Germans to eat on Fridays. Now I am the only one left of my generation in the family, although I was the oldest.
We had hoped to go to an Army dinner in honor of you and were saddened to get word that the Boss had wisely decided to save your energy for other things. It is too long since we have seen you. I do hope that you are coming back strongly from your illness.
This year I put in five months of what Lincoln called “unrequited toil” in the State Department for LBJ and Dean Rusk on the De Gaulle NATO crisis. I found it—between you and me—a most disillusioning experience in regard to both men. I recommended Rusk to Kennedy when he wanted to appoint, of all people, Fulbright; and had high hopes of him. He had been a good assistant to me, loyal and capable. But as number one he has been no good at all. For some reason, unknown to me, he will not disclose his mind to anyone. The Department is totally at a loss to know what he wants done or what he thinks. All sorts of channels spring up between various people in the Department and White House aides which result in conflicting policies getting rumored about.
LBJ is not much better. He, too, hates to decide matters, is a worse postponer of decisions than FDR. The phrase for that now is “to preserve all one’s options.” That means to drift and let decisions be made by default. It passes for statesmanship in our town today.
Two other things about LBJ. He can’t carry on more than a few matters at once. Now-a-days his preoccupations are Vietnam and the balance of payments. So Europe is forgotten and a great deal that you, General Marshall and I did is unraveling fast. For the Chief of the world’s greatest power and the only one capable of world responsibility, this is a disaster.
The other is that he is not only devious but would rather be devious than straight forward. While I was doing my best to advise him on NATO, and while he was writing messages and making speeches I wrote for him, he was circulating rumors in the press that my views were not his. If they were not, a half hour talk could have gotten us together. But it was not until I blew up that we had it and then I never did find out what he wanted done differently.
At any rate, I am now a free man; writing a book about my years in the State Department and about another President who used to do things very differently.
It is really too bad about LBJ. He could be so much better than he is. He creates distrust by being too smart. He is never quite candid. He is both mean and generous, but the meanness too often predominates. He yields to petty impulses such as the desire to surprise everyone with every appointment. It is too childish.
Well, I have gotten a lot off my chest.
Alice who is blooming (can you believe that we shall have been married 50 years next May!) sends her love to you and Bess, as I do.
As ever,
Dean
October 19, 1966
Dear Dean:
As always I was glad to hear from you.
As you may well imagine I was disturbed by all you had to say about the situation as you found it after taking a good look at it! I can only hope that with experience and the conditioning and strength that comes to the man after he has weathered the storms of criticism, vilification, disappointments and betrayals that he will rise to the full measure of the great calling of that office.
Bess joins me in sending you and Alice our warmest greetings and our best wishes.
Sincerely yours,
Harry Truman
Joseph Alsop wrote a syndicated column called “Matter of Fact.” One of these columns, titled “ ‘Never Again Panmunjom,’ ” likened the possibility of a cessation of American bombing of North Vietnam in order to facilitate the beginning of peace talks to a “standstill order” that Truman allegedly issued to General Matthew Ridgway, the commander of United Nations forces in Korea, at the time peace talks with the communists were beginning. “The results of President Truman’s standstill order,” Alsop wrote, “were two more needless years of war and some 90,000 additional American casualties.… The standstill order—really a unilateral cease fire—was, in fact, the worst mistake that President Truman ever made.”
November 16, 1966
Dear Boss,
Will you please get Mr. Noyes to help me in a battle I want to fight to correct an error which Joe Alsop has now printed four times about you. I enclose his last rendition of it today. I think better of Joe than you once did—I remember your references to Alsop—but unless firmly corrected he will go on repeating an error until people begin to believe it.
Paul Nitze and I having compared notes, are sure that you never sent a standstill order to Ridgway. To accuse you of causing 90,000 needless casualties and two needless years of war is outrageous.
I am asking Bradley to search his memory and papers about this and also Joe Collins. Paul will have a search made in the Pentagon. Will you ask Noyes to see whether your papers show anything on the subject. I don’t want to quote anybody or any paper. I only want to assert on my own authority that after inquiries which convince me that I know the facts that you issued no standstill order in connection with any armistice talks nor interfered in any way with military operations at that time. You followed at all times your normal relations with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of State and of Defense.
These columnists try to rewrite history as much as the communists.
I hate to bother you with this, but I do think that it is important not to let this repeated misstatement continue without correction.
Alice sends her love to you both.
All your successors demonstrate what rugged health you had—yet you were never paid for overtime.
Affectionately,
Dean
Truman asked his assistant David Noyes to look into Alsop’s contention about a “standstill order.” Noyes headed a search of Truman’s papers and discovered much evidence that no such order was issued. Robert Dennison was President Truman’s naval aide at the time of the Korean War. Sidney Souers, who was a special consultant to the President on military and foreign-policy affairs at the time the order was allegedly issued, confirmed with certainty that no such order had been issued.
November 21, 1966
Dear Dean:
I have no idea where or from whom Alsop could have picked up the notion of a standstill order or how he came to make the ugly charge in his column. It was bad enough when you and I had to put up with this sort of thing in the days when it was our responsibility—but to use it now in relation to the Viet Nam situation is a little hard to take.
Dave had dug up some passages from the documents which may help. We tried to reach Bob Dennison but he is out of the country. Sid Souers suggested that the most likely source for a final check would be Omar Bradley.
Bess joins me in sending you and Alice our best.
Sincerely yours,
Harry S. Truman
Acheson sends Truman a copy of a letter he received from General Matthew B. Ridgway regarding Joseph Alsop’s allegation of a standstill order. Ridgway wrote Acheson: “My recollection is very clear and positive that no such order was ever given by the President or other competent authority.” William Bundy, who was Acheson’s son-in-law, was a State Department official during the Johnson administration who advised the President on the Vietnam War. James “Scotty” Reston was a journalist with the New York Times. Eric Sevareid was a journalist with CBS News.
December 5, 1966
Dear Boss,
I am most grateful to you and David Noyes for your letter and his memorandum on the Joe Alsop article. You will both be interested I know in the letter from Matt Ridgway which I enclose. It supports your recollection and your files in every way—so does the memory of General Bradley and General Collins’s search of the Pentagon files including the official army history of the Korean War not yet released for publication.
I have had a long talk with Joe Alsop who has been so far rather difficult, but will—I hope—on reflection be more straight forward. His attitude after I stormed his outer works is that if he is wrong about you, he will retract the personal attribution, but still asserts that the whole administration, military and civil, let the enemy escape destruction by way of a quasi truce for negotiation. This, I say to him, is false. Ridgway says that the enemy was not subject to destruction except by augmentation of our land and air forces and by tactics which no one, military or civil, advised—it is Joe Alsop against the world. We shall see. Perhaps, as in his very decent letter of apology to you which David enclosed, his more gentlemanly side—which exists—will prevail.
I will see Bob Dennison when he gets back—we had lunch just before he left—and get his recollections, too.
Europe is a very worrisome spot these days. Disintegration is going so fast that it would be hard to check; and no one seems interested in doing so. The sentiments are expressed in an orthodox way by LBJ and DR but their hearts are not in the expressions, nor are their backs in any determined push.
Our son-in-law Bill Bundy went off with Rusk yesterday for another ten day visit to Asia. This part of the world, which does evoke a great deal of hearty interest in the President and Secretary, is doing much better, though the worries are still great. If everyone would stop talking and keep on plugging the results might be great.
Today Reston & Sevareid said to me that LBJ could conceivably lose in 1968. I said that first they must think up some one to whom he could lose. I saw no one and didn’t believe it anyway.
Alice joins in affectionate greetings to you and Bess. We are off to Antigua a month from tomorrow.
Yours ever,
Dean
In Joseph Alsop’s “letter of apology,” to which Acheson refers above, dated March 12, 1965, Alsop wrote to Truman: “My purpose is simply to apologize for the inexperience and bad judgment which led me to underrate your leadership of our country while you were in office. When I look back now, I must say with greater opportunities for comparison, your years in the White House seem to me a truly heroic period. Nowadays, I never lose a chance to say that in print. But I did not say it then, and that is why I think an apology is owed.” Truman replied to Alsop on March 15, 1965: “There is something in my make-up that rebels at the thought of exacting an apology from anyone who has publicly disapproved of me—and I surely would not expect to receive one from so talented an observer as yourself. But I warmly welcome your reassessment of ‘the period’ and dare hope that it might be sustained by the ultimate judgment.”
Acheson, in the midst of writing his memoirs, is trying to remember how he first came to Truman’s notice. Matthew J. Connelly was Truman’s appointments secretary from 1945 to 1953. George V. Allen served several roles in the Truman administration, including ambassador to Iran (1946–48), Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs (1948–49), and ambassador to Yugoslavia (1949–53).
December 17, 1966
Dear Boss,
May I plumb your memory? My own, I find, does unaccountable things—invents what never happened; forgets what did; gets times and places all mixed up, and so on.
For a long time I have believed that on the first morning of your Presidency, April 13th, Matt Connelly summoned me to the Cabinet room from across the street. There—so memory seems to record—he, George Allen, and two or three other people were working over a statement of some sort for you. You, he said, had remembered me from a call I made on you at the Capitol about some rascality that McCarran was up to. You came in and talked with us for a few minutes and we soon finished whatever the task was.
The strange part of this is that although the picture of the scene is clear, I can find no verification of any part of it. You made no statement so far as your book and your Public Papers reveal until your address to Congress; and I am sure I had no part in that. Do you remember my doing any kind of chore for you in those first days?
I resigned as Assistant Secretary on August 8th and you accepted it on August 9th. I had barely gotten to Saranac Lake, N.Y., where Mary was on V.J. Day, when Jimmie Byrnes telephoned me that you wished me to come back to be Under Secretary. It all seems to me so mysterious, that I have been casting around for something to explain what brought me to your attention between my call in January 1945 and your appointing me in August. It hardly seems likely to have been Jimmie since he gave you my resignation and gave me your acceptance.
Don’t disturb yourself about this but if any dim recollection stirs I should love to know of it.
Most affectionate Christmas greetings to Bess & yourself from Alice and me.
As ever,
Dean
January 23, 1967
Dear Dean:
I have searched my memory and try as I would, I cannot pinpoint the precise moment at which the decision crystallized in my mind that I wanted you in the Administration.
I had been aware of you long before I went to the White House and I am sure that my interest in you had to originate with me.
Sincerely yours,
Harry Truman
April 17, 1967
Dear Dean:
It has come to my attention that you had a birthday recently.
I hope it was a happy one, as I am sure it was, and that you will have many more like it.
Sincerely yours,
Harry Truman
April 21, 1967
Dear Boss,
The report about that birthday of mine was true and you were very kind to take note of it. My seventy-fifth year opened without noticeable pain. I am now getting accustomed to the idea, though it does run counter to an idea of myself which still hovers in my mind—that I am a promising lad and may get somewhere if I work hard and stay sober.
Poor old Adenauer is gone. Like Churchill he rather outlived his reputation and, as the British say, rather blotted his copy book in the last few years by the vindictive way he treated his less gifted successor. Both he and Churchill simply could not let go of power. Your predecessor had the same weakness but more reason for it. You were wise and right in stepping down as you did. As I look back, I know that I was tired out when we all left office. We might have saved Europe from much that has gone wrong since, if we had stayed on, perhaps two years, or even one year more. But I could not have lasted through another four.
I see John Snyder who keeps me posted on you and seems well and cheerful himself, and occasionally Harry Vaughan and Clark Clifford. The latter I think is a wise and helpful advisor to LBJ. He is better than I am at surmounting the difficulties in personal relations which make helping LBJ so difficult and disagreeable. I have about stopped the effort and dodge whenever I can. The phrase, “he is his own worst enemy”, was never as true of anyone as it is of him.
How very appropriate it was of the Greeks to give you that old helmet last month. I was struck with the changes in head sizes over two and a half millennia. After my experience in 1964 with that old fool Papandreou over Cyprus, I began to wonder whether the Greeks were worth saving after all. The Turks certainly were.
You yourself will have a birthday coming up soon and Alice and I will soon have been married for half a century. Here’s good luck to all of us, and to you and the boss much love from Alice and me.
Ever yours,
Dean
May 7, 1968
PRESIDENT HARRY S TRUMAN
WITH MUCH LOVE AND BEST WISHES FOR MANY HAPPY OCCASIONS LIKE THE PRESENT FROM
DEAN AND ALICE ACHESON
February 28, 1969
Dear Boss,
The press gave us a bad turn about your going off to the hospital in an ambulance, but has now reassured us that you came back in your old style with your policeman-chauffeur at the wheel. So all seems well. Alice and I spent five weeks in the West Indies (and went to visit the Anthony Edens—now Avons). When we got back here the combination of the cold and the Republicans are driving us off to Florida for another two weeks.
My son-in-law who is staying on until the middle of March to let Bill Rogers find a replacement for him (as no-one will come to work for these people) says that the State Department has never been so bewildered and leaderless as it is now. A poor time and preparation for Mr. Nixon’s journey to Europe. If he thinks his personality can affect negotiations with General de Gaulle, some one should tell him that better men have tried it and failed.
Affectionate greetings to Bess and to you from both of us.
Yours ever,
Dean
March 10, 1969
Dear Dean:
I was highly pleased to have your letter of February 28th, and took note of your comments with satisfaction. It was so nice to hear from you and I agree with what you had to say.
I am glad to report I am home and picking up where I left off—take a walk every morning when the weather is nice and am looking forward to the spring mornings.
Mrs. Truman joins me in sending you and Mrs. Acheson our very warmest regards.
Sincerely yours,
Harry Truman
Present at the Creation was Acheson’s definitive memoir of his service in the State Department in four successive jobs. Acheson enclosed with this letter an advance copy of an article based on the final chapter of Present at the Creation, in which he described the contributions to the Truman administration’s foreign policy made by President Truman himself and by the Department of State. He titled this article, “The Greatness of Harry S. Truman.” Acheson gave the article a kind of subtitle, running right below the title and above the author’s name: “At night, knowing he was in the White House, even he slept better.”
August 12, 1969
Dear Mr. President:
Here is an article Esquire magazine is printing in its September issue. It is taken from my book, Present at the Creation, and I thought you might like to have it. The book will deal with the years 1941–1953, two-thirds of it or more being devoted to the years of great privilege when I was your Under Secretary and Secretary of State. I shall send you a copy of the book as soon as one is off the press—sometime in August, I hope. In writing about those years I came close to reliving them again with you and hope I have captured some of our spirit and purpose that made them such a wonderfully satisfying adventure and writing about them a fine way to spend another two years.
Alice joins me in most affectionate regards to you and Bess.
As ever,
Dean
August 27, 1969
Dear Dean:
I was happy to have a copy of the article Esquire is publishing in its September issue. I read it with interest and satisfaction and you were as kind as could be.
I am looking forward to your forthcoming book and, as you well know, I have a special interest in everything you have to say.
Bess joins me in sending warm regards to you and Alice.
Sincerely yours,
Harry S. Truman
September 3, 1969
Dear Boss,
One of the first copies of my book off the press has just been put in the mail to you. Without even asking your permission, I dedicated the book to you. You inspired and supported almost everything described in it. I hope you will find it a worthy account of what we tried to do together.
Alice sends her love to Bess and to you, as do I.
Faithfully,
Dean
September 15, 1969
Dear Dean:
I began to read your book as soon as it reached me, for I am always greatly interested in everything you have to say or write.
I deeply appreciate your dedicating the book to me as I recall with pleasure and satisfaction the years we have spent together shaping the American foreign policy.
With warm regards to Alice and you, in which Bess joins me.
Sincerely and gratefully yours,
Harry S. Truman
Truman and Acheson met for the last time at Truman’s home on April 12, 1970. The occasion was a ceremonial gathering of members of Truman’s administration on the twenty-fifth anniversary of Truman’s succession to the presidency.
May 6, 1971
Dear Boss,
Our most affectionate greetings go to you with this birthday note. May you stay well and have many more of them. As the years pass your stature grows more and more imposing, not merely as the comparisons furnished are smaller and smaller, but also because what you did stands out more and more.
All of us who had the honor of serving under you will never forget the satisfaction of that experience.
Devotedly and respectfully,
Dean
May 14, 1971
Dear Dean:
I was greatly pleased by your kind and generous letter on my eighty-seventh birthday. Coming from you, this carries deeper meaning for me.
My thanks to you and Alice, in which Mrs. Truman is happy to join.
Sincerely yours,
Harry S. Truman
On October 12, 1971, Acheson suffered a heart attack. He died that same day. In his last letter to Truman, written a few months before, he expressed his abiding gratitude to his former chief.
Through his office in Independence, the President issued a final tribute:
America and the whole world have lost a great friend, diplomat and statesman. Dean Acheson was a friend of all mankind and served his country with honor and distinction. No one had a greater knowledge of world affairs and how to deal with them than he, while he was Secretary of State. Mrs. Truman and I have suffered a great personal loss in his passing.
A little over a year later, on December 26, 1972, Harry Truman died at his home. He was eighty-eight. The two friends’ deaths brought to an end one of the most remarkable series of letters in the history of American politics and government. Although the long friendship was over, its effects on American politics and policy have continued to this day.
Dean Acheson and Harry Truman visit Yale University, where Truman lectured and met with students and faculty in April 1958.