Look at little Truman now
Muddy, battered, bruised—and how!
—Chicago Tribune
I
“Everybody wants something at the expense of everybody else and nobody thinks much of the other fellow,” Truman wrote to his mother and sister at the beginning of autumn, 1945.
There were more prima donnas per square foot in public life in Washington than in all the opera companies ever to exist, he told them another day, writing at his desk in October when the trees outside the White House had begun to turn.
On a bunting-draped platform at an American Legion fair at Caruthersville, Missouri, he said that after every war came an inevitable letdown. Difficulties would follow. “You can’t have anything worthwhile without difficulties.” Mistakes would be made. No one who accomplished things could expect to avoid mistakes. Only those who did nothing made no mistakes.
All Americans must cooperate, he said, dedicating a dam at Gilbertsville, Kentucky. It was time for everyone to “cut out the foolishness” and “get in harness.”
A war President no longer, he was finding the tasks of peace more difficult and vexing than he ever imagined. “We want to see the time come when we can do the things in peace that we have been able to do in war,” he had said with such conviction in July, at the small military ceremony in the cobbled square in Berlin. “If we can put this tremendous machine of ours…to work for peace, we can look forward to the greatest age in the history of mankind.” But how? How possibly now, when no one wanted to cooperate any longer?
His troubles had begun with his first postwar message to Congress, only days after the Japanese surrender ceremonies on board the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay. Sent to the Hill on September 6, the message was 16,000 words in length (the longest since the Theodore Roosevelt era) and presented a 21-point domestic program that included increased unemployment compensation, an immediate increase in the minimum wage, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee, tax reform, crop insurance for farmers, a full year’s extension of the War Powers and Stabilization Act, meaning the government would keep control over business, and federal aid to housing to make possible a million new homes a year.
We must go on. We must widen our horizon further. We must consider the redevelopment of large areas of the blighted and slum sections of our cities so that in the truly American way they may be remade to accommodate families not only of low-income groups as heretofore, but every income group….
It was an all-out, comprehensive statement of progressive philosophy and a sweeping liberal program of action that Truman had begun work on, dictating his thoughts to Sam Rosenman, on board the Augusta returning from Potsdam, and that he had since put in a full ten days of concentrated effort on, adding new sections, editing and revising. He had no wish to wait for his State of the Union address to present his domestic program. Nor did he intend to go to Congress with it on a piecemeal basis. He wanted one big message, and as time would tell, its significance was enormous, setting his domestic program on a liberal path at the very start. It was one thing to have voted for this kind of program in the Senate, when he was following the head of his party, Rosenman told him. It was quite another to be the head of the party and recommend and fight for it.
For those Republicans and conservative Democrats who had been happily claiming that the New Deal was as good as dead, that the “Roosevelt nonsense” was over at last, because they “knew” Harry Truman, it was a rude awakening. Not even FDR had ever asked for so much “at one sitting,” complained House Minority Leader Joe Martin, and many of Truman’s own party in Congress were equally distressed, equally disinclined to go along with him. The same conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats that had stymied Roosevelt since 1937 stood ready now to block his successor. The House Ways and Means Committee, with fourteen Democrats and ten Republicans, voted to reject the unemployment compensation proposal, and shelved any further consideration of aid to the jobless. As the newspapers were saying, Truman’s anticipated six-month “waltz with Congress” was over before it began.
Labor leaders demanded an end to wage controls, but a hold on prices. Business leaders demanded the opposite. Nobody wanted more inflation of the kind the war had brought. Yet while most everyday commodities were in short supply, nearly everyone seemed to have money to spend—billions of dollars put aside in war bonds and savings accounts.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon rushed to cancel billions of dollars—$15 billion in less than a month. Boeing aircraft laid off 21,000 workers, Ford laid off 50,000, at the very moment when hundreds of thousands of soldiers were pouring home expecting to find jobs. Fully 12 million men and women were in uniform and hoping to return to “normal” life as soon as possible.
Prophecies of economic doom had become commonplace. His own downfall as a post-World War I haberdasher vivid in memory, Truman reminded Congress of what the country had experienced then. “We found ourselves in one of the worst inflations in our history, culminating in the crash of 1920 and 1921. We must be sure this time not to repeat that bitter mistake.” Worse by far and closer to mind was the Great Depression, which had never really ended by 1939, when the war began in Europe. If the end of the war truly meant a return to what had been “normal” before the war, then the prospect was grim indeed.
As everyone knew, the nation had thrived on the war. Production of goods and services in 1945 was more than twice what it had been in 1939. If the cost of living was up by some 30 percent, the income of the average worker had also doubled and unemployment was less than 2 percent, an unbelievable figure. Farm income was five times what it had been when Truman was running the farm at Grandview. Never had Americans known such prosperity. Yet the certainty that hard times would return was also widespread and deeply ingrained. For a whole generation of Americans, fear of another Depression would never go away. It was coming “as sure as God made little green apples,” fathers warned their families at the dinner table, and next time it would be “bad enough to curl your hair.” Nor were the supposed experts any less pessimistic. In his report to the President at a Cabinet meeting on October 19, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace estimated that the drop in the gross national product in the coming months would be $40 billion, the drop in wages $20 billion, which by spring could mean 7 or 8 million unemployed—1939 all over again.
Even had there been time to plan and prepare, even if it had been possible to ignore the clamor to “bring the boys home” and demobilize in a slower, more orderly fashion, the problems of “reconversion” would have been staggering. As it was, sudden peace had caught the country almost as ill-prepared as had sudden war. A populace that had been willing to accept shortages and inconveniences, ceilings on wages and inadequate housing since 1941—because there was “a war on”—seemed desperate to make up for lost time, demanding everything at once.
By October, the country was facing the biggest housing shortage in history. In Chicago alone, reportedly, there were 100,000 homeless veterans. (The city of Chicago would shortly offer old streetcars for sale, for conversion into homes.) Among the letters pouring into the White House was one from a man in Los Angeles who told of meeting a homeless veteran, a medical sergeant, his pregnant wife and small child, and described how he had taken them in for the night because they had no place to go. “Do something,” the writer urged the President.
Labor unions, free of their wartime pledges not to strike, called for “catch-up” pay hikes. Strikes broke out in nearly every industry. In New York, 15,000 elevator operators went out. Elsewhere 27,000 oil workers and 60,000 lumber workers walked off their jobs. In Washington, meantime, New Dealers were leaving the government in droves.
For Truman all this was extremely difficult to understand. He knew relatively little of economics and the economics of reconstruction were complicated. He failed to comprehend how a people who had shown such dedication and will through the war could overnight become so rampantly selfish and disinterested in the common good. “The Congress are balking, labor has gone crazy and management isn’t far from insane in selfishness,” he reported to his mother, who in her small frame house in Grandview remained an indispensable sounding board. He believed as ever in the ancient republican ideals of citizenship. Cincinnatus, the legendary Roman warrior who, after saving his country, laid down his arms and returned to the farm, remained a personal hero. As he liked to point out to visitors, he had replaced the model cannon on his desk with a shiny model plow.
His response was to work harder than ever, as if by keeping a fuller, busier schedule, moving faster, seeing more people, traveling more, he could at least set an example. On one not untypical morning he saw more than a dozen visitors in two hours, including Congressman Albert Gore of Tennessee, who brought him a bottle of Jack Daniel’s; Senator Wheeler; his old Truman Committee aide, Max Lowenthal; the governor of the Virgin Islands; another congressman, Pat Cannon of Florida, who wanted to talk about hurricane damage; the young Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey, and his wife; and a group of women sponsoring an Equal Rights amendment. (“A lot of hooey about equal rights,” Truman noted on his appointment sheet as the last of these went out the door.) He “zipped” through work in what one account called “the decisive style that is now recognized as typically Truman.” He made changes with “hurried” strokes of the pen, seldom anything earthshaking, “but everything brisk.” At one press conference he took all of five minutes to announce that he was reorganizing the Labor Department, transferring authority over the Office of Economic Stabilization to the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion under John Snyder, appointing Stuart Symington of St. Louis to a new Surplus Property Administration, accepting the resignation of Secretary of War Stimson, appointing Under Secretary Robert Patterson as Stimson’s replacement, and naming Senator Harold H. Burton of Ohio to the Supreme Court. “Anything else, Mr. President?” asked a reporter, and the room erupted with laughter.
He greatly enjoyed such moments. He loved rewarding a loyal old friend like Snyder with the prestige and power of an important job. It was among the prime satisfactions of the successful politician’s life, not to say what was expected of him as a good Jacksonian Democrat. He had always taken care of his own with jobs large and small, as best he could. He had hated firing Eddie McKim and eventually arranged a vague job for him with the Rural Finance Commission. When Jake Vardaman, the naval aide, began flaunting his supposed authority beyond bounds, irritating too many people at the White House, including Bess Truman, and Vardaman, too, had to be eased out, Truman put him on the Federal Reserve Board, a position for which Vardaman was plainly ill-suited. Even former Senator Bennett Clark of Missouri, who had so often made life difficult for him over the years, was not forgotten. On September 12, Truman made Clark a Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and shortly afterward, when Clark was remarried in the little northern Virginia town of Berryville, Truman stood beside him as best man, something he had never done before.
Two official ceremonial duties that fall moved him deeply, which made both occasions especially memorable.
Before a small, sunny gathering in the Rose Garden on September 21, the day of Henry Stimson’s retirement, Truman presented the elderly Secretary of War with the Distinguished Service Medal and did so with great simple dignity. As his staff had come to appreciate, it was at such occasions that Truman excelled. He was at his best with small groups, close-up and entirely himself, yet keenly aware of the meaning of the occasion. It was Stimson’s seventy-eighth birthday and his last day in Washington. “If anyone in the government was entitled to one [a medal] it is that good man,” Truman wrote to Bess, who was back in Independence.
In November, in the courtyard at the Pentagon, at another no less moving farewell, this for General Marshall, Truman again presented the Distinguished Service Medal, which was the general’s only American military decoration of the war. (Marshall had refused repeatedly to accept any such honors, saying it would be improper for him while men were dying overseas.) To Truman, Marshall, more than any other man, had been responsible for winning the war, and he spoke now of Marshall as a tower of strength to two presidents. “He takes his place at the head of the great commanders of history,” Truman said, clearly meaning that exactly. Later, Truman said there wasn’t a decoration big enough for General Marshall.
But such occasions were rare. More often he was feeling close to despair over how much needed to be done and how little real say he had, how little time there was ever to focus on any one problem. The strain began to tell. “The pressure here,” he told his mother, “is becoming so great I hardly get my meals in, let alone do what I want to do.”.
His speaking trips around the country, intended as a way to bring his message to the people, too often resulted in adverse publicity that was seen as his own doing. At the American Legion fair at Caruthersville, Missouri, talking of the “difficulties” to be faced, he spoke seriously and thoughtfully of the atomic bomb. He had asked Congress for the establishment of a new Atomic Energy Commission under civilian, not military, control, saying, “the release of atomic energy constitutes a new force too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas.” Sounding like the naive Mr. Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, he told the crowd that the way to get along in the world was to apply the Golden Rule.
We can’t stand another global war. We can’t ever have another war, unless it is total war, and that means the end of our civilization as we know it. We are not going to do that. We are going to accept that Golden Rule, and we are going forward to meet our destiny which I think Almighty God intended us to have.
But at Caruthersville, in the cotton country of Missouri’s southeastern “Boot Heel,” he also paused on a morning walk to spit in the Mississippi River—an old local rite, he explained to astonished reporters. He played the piano in the little hotel dining room, held open court in a drugstore, went to the races, signed autographs on napkins and blank checks, posed with Legionnaires on a mock locomotive, rang the bell, “did everything,” said the Washington Post, “except have himself shot from the mouth of a cannon.”
At a conference of several hundred Democratic congressmen and senators at a clubhouse on Jefferson Island in Chesapeake Bay, he encouraged everyone to call him Harry and joined a game of stud poker on the porch. An unnamed senator later reported that Harry Truman played “a damn good game,” while another eyewitness (also unnamed), describing what a good time everyone had, said, “There was all we could eat and more than we could drink—only two people passed out.”
The word “cronies” appeared with increasing frequency to depict the President’s friends and associates. Harry Vaughan, his sudden eminence obviously having gone to his head, began holding his own press conferences and making speeches. Vaughan boasted of how at Potsdam he had sold a $55 watch to a Russian for $500, and in a talk before a group of Presbyterian women in Virginia, in an attempt to explain the difference between Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, he said that after a diet of caviar the country was ready for ham and eggs.
Several of the presidential staff grew concerned over the mounting confusion at the White House. Budget Director Harold Smith judged Truman to be a man of “fine keen intelligence,” but regrettably disorganized. At a staff meeting in mid-October, Truman himself admitted to being “in the doldrums” over how things were going. He would cut back on his appointments, he said, cancel some trips—news that “delighted” everyone, wrote Eben Ayers, the assistant press secretary, who worried especially over stories about Harry Vaughan and poker games and drinking, certain that sooner or later they would bring trouble. An unobtrusive, soft-spoken man who was known among the White House press as “Mumbles,” Ayers was secretly keeping a diary that would one day provide an invaluable “inside” record of the Truman years.
Outwardly, Truman appeared unchanged. Reporters described him as “chipper,” “affable,” “jaunty,” looking “rested, fresh, and bouncy,” looking always, wrote columnist Westbrook Pegler, “like his old maw just dressed him up and slicked his hair for the strawberry social.” And he was still exceptionally popular, his approval rating at about 80 percent.
If Congress balked at his requests, he just asked for more. There was nothing unusual about a President being rebuffed by Congress. What was novel was a President who, when repeatedly rebuffed, refused to change his tactics.
He asked for national compulsory health insurance to be funded by payroll deductions. Under the system, all citizens would receive medical and hospital service irrespective of their ability to pay. And with the cry for demobilization at a peak, he went before a joint session to call for universal military training, an idea that stood no chance, but that he believed in fervently. “We must face the fact that peace must be built upon power, as well as upon good will and good deeds.” Never again could the country count on the luxury of time to arm itself. He wanted mandatory training for one year for all young men between eighteen and twenty, not as members of the armed services, but as citizens who would comprise a trained reserve, ready in case of emergency.
One morning, standing at his desk, he presented to the press a new presidential flag, telling Harry Vaughan to hold it high enough so that everyone could see, “This new flag faces the eagle toward the staff,” Truman explained, “which is looking to the front all the time when you are on the march, and also has him looking at the olive branch for peace, instead of the arrows for war….” Both the flag and presidential seal had been redesigned for the first time since the Wilson years, and Truman meant the shift in the eagle’s gaze to be seen as symbolic of a nation both on the march and dedicated to peace.
On October 26, he went to New York, to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to commission a huge new aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Later, from the deck of the battleship Missouri, he reviewed a line of fifty warships in the Hudson River, while overhead flew twelve hundred Navy planes. The eagle had never held such arrows. It was a spectacle of national power such as no Commander in Chief had ever beheld. And it was all rapidly dissolving. Had he tried then, in these last days of 1945, to halt the pell-mell demobilization under way and keep American fighting forces intact, he might have been impeached, so overwhelming was the country’s desire for a return of its young men and women now that the war was won, the enemy crushed. It wasn’t demobilization at all, he later remarked. “It was disintegration.”
Riding in a caravan to Central Park to deliver a Navy Day speech (the first presidential address to be broadcast on television), he was cheered by tremendous crowds—3 to 5 million people at least, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia told Truman and Admiral Leahy as they waved from the open car. To Leahy it was a triumphal procession such as no Roman emperor could have dreamed of.
Yet the press was already judging Truman only fair at his job. He was faulted for dealing with large issues in a “small-scale way,” for too often “muddling through,” while banking on “an apparently irrepressible and often-expressed belief that everything will always work itself out.”
The labor situation grew steadily worse. Picket lines became an established sign of the times. And Truman wavered. In seeming support of labor, he called for reasonable pay raises through collective bargaining. Then, under pressure from both Democrats and Republicans to get tough with the unions, he asked Congress to forbid strikes in large national industries for thirty days, until the situation could be appraised by a fact-finding board—an idea that pleased neither labor nor management nor Congress. In the meantime, 175,000 employees of General Motors, workers in plants in 19 states, walked out in a strike that would last more than three months.
His was a thankless job, Truman told the writer John Gunther, who had not seen him since he was Vice President and was struck by the change. “Tiny lines had grown around his mouth,” Gunther wrote. “He looked tired, perplexed, and annoyed.”
On another day Robert Oppenheimer came to see him privately, and in a state of obvious agitation said he had blood on his hands because of his work on the bomb. For Truman, it was a dreadful moment. Oppenheimer’s self-pitying, “cry-baby” attitude was abhorrent. “The blood is on my hands,” he told Oppenheimer. “Let me worry about that.” Afterward he said he hoped he would not have to see the man ever again.
In November the American ambassador to China, Patrick J. Hurley, who had returned to Washington for consultation, announced unexpectedly that he was resigning because of the way the State Department was siding with the Chinese Communists. Hurley broke the news in a speech at the Press Club, barely an hour after telling Truman that all was under control in China and that he would be returning there shortly. “To me, this was an utterly inexplicable about-face, and what had caused it I cannot imagine even yet,” Truman would write years later. At the time he was more explicit. Tearing a yellow news copy from the White House ticker, he stormed into a Cabinet meeting saying, “See what a son-of-a-bitch did to me.”
Clinton Anderson, the Secretary of Agriculture, suggested that the President immediately name General Marshall as the new special ambassador to China and thus take the headlines away from Hurley. It was an inspired suggestion. From the Red Room, Truman telephoned Marshall at his home in Leesburg, Virginia.
“General, I want you to go to China for me,” he said.
“Yes, Mr. President,” Marshall replied and hung up.
Truman had hated to make the call. Marshall by then had had all of six days of retirement. Marshall said later that he had ended the call abruptly because his wife walked into the room and he wished to explain to her himself, rather than have her overhear a telephone conversation.
At a Gridiron Club dinner in December, only half in jest, Truman declared that General William Tecumseh Sherman had been wrong. “I’m telling you I find peace is hell….”
His health insurance plan was getting nowhere. Another message, and of equal importance to Truman, called for unification of the armed forces, under a single Secretary of Defense, an idea the Navy vehemently opposed and that Bob Hannegan thought politically unwise, arguing that it was foolish ever to wage an unnecessary fight that he might lose. But Truman insisted. He wanted to break up the power of the West Point and Annapolis cliques, to make the armed services more democratic—a noble aspiration, many around him agreed, but impossible, they felt. It was his duty to send the message, he said, because it represented his conviction.
To Sam Rosenman, who had grown immensely fond of Truman, the chief difference between Truman and Roosevelt was that Truman “paid much less attention to what his actions were doing towards his chances for reelection…. Truman did a great many things that Roosevelt, because he knew the effect it would have, never would have done.”
To many it appeared that the President’s easy familiarity with members of Congress—their talk of good old Harry and so forth—was proving a handicap. If his program was steadfastly in the Roosevelt tradition, they could be quite as obdurate as they had been with Roosevelt just before the war, only now without the fear that, like Roosevelt, Truman might take his case to the country with powerful effect. Truman couldn’t “awe them,” and as was said, in American politics “a fearsome respect” usually achieved better results than camaraderie.
Meantime, privately, Truman felt that Jimmy Byrnes, who was in Moscow at a Foreign Ministers’ Conference, was failing to keep him sufficiently informed. To Henry Wallace he expressed concern that the peacetime use of atomic energy might so reduce the length of the working day that people would “get into mischief.” Once, at a Cabinet meeting in December, Wallace politely but pointedly lectured him for not knowing how many atomic bombs were in stock and for saying further that he really didn’t want to know. “Mr. President, you should know,” Wallace insisted. “The President retreated in some confusion and said he guessed he should know and then covered up by saying, ‘I do know in a general way,’ ” Wallace noted in his diary.
From Byrnes and Wallace both, Truman got the distinct impression that each thought his own judgment considerably superior to that of the President.
To many of the holdovers from the Roosevelt years, as to prominent liberals elsewhere, it appeared the administration was going to pieces. In the stridently liberal New York newspaper PM, columnist Max Lerner offered a scathing assessment of the President, calling him one of history’s “wild accidents.” There had been leaders in the past who had greatness thrust upon them by circumstance, but never one who wore the mantle of great office so uneasily, wrote Lerner, who had been to Missouri and felt he now understood Truman’s strengths and defects. The President’s “first quality” was personal honesty. He was also loyal to his friends and a hard worker. The overriding problem, said Lerner, was his “middle-class mentality”:
In a crisis the middle-class mind falls back on personal virtues and personal relations. In a crisis the middle-class mind shows itself more fearful of labor and strikes and labor’s political power than of anything else. In a crisis the middle-class mind tries to assume a lofty detachment from the deep issues of the day, and tries to blink the real social cleavage and struggles.
These struggles are not reconcilable by a personal appeal for cooperation. In the end you have to choose your side and fight on it…. In the end, President Truman’s basic weakness lies in his failure to understand imaginatively the nature and greatness of the office he holds.
Though Bess, Margaret, and Madge Wallace departed for Independence a week before Christmas, Truman remained at the White House until Christmas morning when he decided to fly home despite dreadful weather. The first snow of winter had fallen on Washington two weeks earlier. On the 19th another five inches fell in a storm that hit much of the country. Christmas morning he awoke to a driving wind, sleet and rain. National Airport was sheathed in ice, he was told. All commercial flights were canceled. But after conferring with his pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Hank Myers, Truman decided to go, and when The Sacred Cow at last appeared out of the clouds over Kansas City, it was more than an hour overdue. Newspapers and radio commentators called the trip foolhardy—“one of the most hazardous ‘sentimental journeys’ ever undertaken” by a chief of state, said The New York Times. Had anyone known the sort of welcome he received on reaching the big gray house on North Delaware Street, the journey would have seemed even more unnecessary, his position still more pathetic. For Bess had been anything but sentimental or approving. At his desk in Washington three days later, Truman would write one of the most forlorn letters of his life:
December 28, 1945
Dear Bess:
Well I’m here in the White House, the great white sepulcher of ambitions and reputations. I feel like last year’s bird’s nest which is on its second year. Not very often I admit I am not in shape. I think maybe that exasperates you, too, as a lot of other things I do and pretend to do exasperate you. But it isn’t intended for that purpose….
You can never appreciate what it means to come home as I did the other evening after doing at least one hundred things I didn’t want to do and have the only person in the world whose approval and good opinion I value look at me like I’m something the cat dragged in and tell me I’ve come in at last because I couldn’t find any reason to stay away. I wonder why we are made so that what we really think and feel we cover up?.
This head of mine should have been bigger and better proportioned. There ought to have been more brain and a larger bump of ego or something to give me an idea that there can be a No. 1 man in the world. I didn’t want to be. But, in spite of the opinions to the contrary, Life and Time say I am. [He was on the cover of Time that week as “Man of the Year.”]
If that is the case, you, Margie, and everyone else who may have any influence on my actions must give me help and assistance; because no one ever needed help and assistance as I do now. If I can get the use of the best brains in the country and a little help from those I have on a pedestal at home, the job will be done….
Kiss my baby and I love you in season and out,
Harry
But thinking better of it, he never mailed the letter. It was tucked in a desk drawer together with its unused envelope.
The grim weather held as he struggled to keep control of events, his chief aggravation now the behavior of his Secretary of State.
Before returning from Independence, Truman had been notified by Charlie Ross that Byrnes, in winding up the Moscow conference, had released a communiqué in advance of any summary report to the President. To make matters worse, Byrnes, en route home, notified Ross to arrange air time on all the radio networks, so that he could report to the nation before seeing the President. Clearly, Byrnes had forgotten his manners.
Senator Vandenberg, disturbed that Byrnes had been too conciliatory with the Russians, rushed to the White House demanding to know what was going on.
This was on Friday, December 28, the day of Truman’s plaintive letter to Bess. Afterward, he left for a cruise down the Potomac on the presidential yacht, Williamsburg, again disregarding the miserable weather. When Byrnes landed in Washington the following day, Saturday the 29th, a telegram from Truman was waiting for him: “Suggest you come down today or tomorrow to report your mission…. We can then discuss among other things the advisability of a broadcast by you….”
The relationship between the two men had never been easy or entirely candid. Byrnes did indeed consider himself better equipped and more deserving than Truman to be President and he was not always successful in concealing that. Though Truman considered Byrnes extremely bright, his experience in government unequaled, he had never felt he could entirely trust him. En route to Potsdam, Truman had referred to him in a diary entry as his “able and conniving” Secretary of State. “My but he has a keen mind,” Truman wrote. “And he is honest. But all country politicians are alike. They are sure all other politicians are circuitous in their dealings.”
After a hurried flight by special plane, Byrnes went aboard the Williamsburg at Quantico, Virginia, and met with Truman privately in Truman’s stateroom. A cold rain was falling on the river. Everything outside was gray and forbidding.
By Truman’s account, written much later, he closed the door and gave Byrnes a sharp dressing down:
I told him I did not like the way in which I had been left in the dark about the Moscow conference. I told him that, as President, I intended to know what progress we were making and what we were doing in foreign negotiations. I said that it was shocking that a communiqué should be issued in Washington announcing a foreign-policy development of major importance that I had never heard of. I said I would not tolerate a repetition of such conduct.
Byrnes, however, would insist the conversation was entirely pleasant, and according to others on board, it was not so much Truman as Admiral Leahy who gave Byrnes a hard time. (Leahy, as was known, considered Byrnes “a horse’s ass.”) Dean Acheson, who was not present, but who developed an understanding of both Truman and Byrnes, later speculated that both their impressions were genuine; that Truman, in recalling such encounters, was inclined to exaggerate his “bark,” when in reality he was nearly always extremely considerate of the feelings of others; and that Byrnes, as a veteran of South Carolina politics, would never have taken as personal criticism Truman’s demand to be kept informed.
In any event, the meeting marked a change in the relationship. There was no open break, but Truman’s confidence in his Secretary of State was not to be the same again. Six days later, still steaming mad, he wrote longhand letter to “My dear Jim,” saying that while he wanted to give members of his Cabinet ample authority, he had no intention of relinquishing the authority of the President or “to forego the President’s prerogative to make the final decision.” He was intensely concerned about Russia, tired of “babying” the Soviets. “Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making. Only one language do they understand, ‘How many divisions have you?’ ”
According to an account that Truman wrote years later, he then called Byrnes to his office and read the letter aloud. But again Byrnes declared that no such scene occurred—if it had, Byrnes said, he would have resigned at once. But for the record Truman noted on the letter in his own hand at the time: “Read to the Sec. of State and discussed—not typed or mailed.” Later, in a conversation with Eben Ayers, Truman said he had most definitely read the letter to Byrnes, “right here in this office with him sitting right where you are. I told him I was not going to give him the letter but wanted to read it to him.” Byrnes’s face, said Truman, had turned “fiery red.”
It was a letter like others to come in Truman’s presidency. He called them his “longhand spasms,” and there appears indeed to have been something sudden and involuntary about them. They seemed to serve some deep psychological need, as a vent for his anger, and were seldom intended for anyone to see. They cleared the air for him. He felt better almost immediately and, unsent, they did no one any harm. Yet in tone and content they bore little or no resemblance to the way he was ordinarily with people. “I have never heard him say, or heard of him saying a harsh, bitter, or sarcastic word to anyone, whatever the offense or failure,” Dean Acheson would write.