This is a serious course upon which we embark…
—Truman to congress, 1947
I
Was Harry Truman an ordinary provincial American sadly miscast in the presidency? Or was he a man of above-average, even exceptional qualities and character, who had the makings of greatness?
“What a test of democracy if it works!” Roy Roberts of the Kansas City Star had written on Truman’s first day in office. Now, less than two years later, Walter Lippmann, like a great many others, was convinced the test had not worked. To Lippmann, regarded as the most thoughtful, authoritative political commentator of the time, Truman was an embarrassment. His bravado and quick decisions, Lippmann thought, were a facade for an essentially insecure man filled with anxieties. How could the affairs of the country be conducted by a President who not only had lost the support of his party, but was no longer in command of his administration?
In the years on the farm, when courting Bess—his first campaign—Truman himself had professed to being only a common everyday fellow. He could promise her no more. But he had written also that every farmer “thinks he’s as good as the President or perhaps a little better,” meaning that by the old Jeffersonian faith in which he had been raised, what was ordinary grass-roots American was as good as the best.
Questioned once by a reporter whether he considered himself the sublimation of the average man, Truman rejected the fancy phrase and asked in turn, “Well, what is wrong with being the average man?”
Since 1945 numbers of others had judged him as anything but ordinary. At Potsdam, Churchill immediately perceived the new President to be “a man of immense determination,” and in the fateful spring of 1947, from Chartwell, his home south of London, where he was busy with his memoirs, Churchill would write to tell “My dear Harry” how much he admired “what you have done for the peace and freedom of the world….” For Churchill, the presidency of Harry Truman had become the one cause for hope in the world.
Dean Acheson, who could be extremely hard, even contemptuous in his judgment of men he did not consider his equals, had described Truman, after Roosevelt’s death, as straightforward, decisive, honest, and if inexperienced, likely to learn fast. And in the time since, Acheson had found no reason to think differently. On the morning in November 1946 when Truman arrived at Washington’s Union Station, his political stock at an all-time low, Acheson alone of all the administration was waiting on the platform to greet him, a gesture that Truman, understandably, never forgot. Acheson looked to Truman as a leader. “The captain with the mighty heart,” Acheson would call him.
Arthur Krock of The New York Times, foremost of Washington correspondents, was another who had seen something “very good and human and courageous” in this unlikely President, and at a point when many political commentators were ready to write him off. Felix Belair, White House correspondent for the Times, had decided that while Truman might look as much like “the average guy on the streetcar” as ever, he was a man to rise to the occasion.
So testament from experienced observers that this was a President of considerable substance—and that It would be a mistake to count him out—was already plentiful, even before the great change that came in 1947.
David E. Lilienthal, whom Truman had earlier reappointed head of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), was a trim, agreeable-looking man in his mid-forties, the son of Jewish immigrants, a graduate of DePauw University and the Harvard Law School, and regarded still as a model New Dealer. TVA was a huge success. It had built dams, created lakes, forests, new industries, new farming methods, brought electricity to some 700,000 users, and, during the war, fueled the giant uranium plants at Oak Ridge. And Lilienthal, as much as anyone, had made TVA.
Unlike so many New Dealers who had quit since Roosevelt’s death—who had fled government, as Clark Clifford said, “so fast they were falling all over each other”—Lilienthal had chosen to stay, not once, but twice. In October he had resigned from TVA to become Truman’s designated, though still unconfirmed, head of the new Atomic Energy Commission, which Truman insisted be under civilian control. It was a position potentially as important as almost any in postwar Washington and one for which Lilienthal felt himself inadequately qualified. But then who was qualified? And the President had been extremely persuasive and patient, while Lilienthal went through days of soul searching.
Hardworking, articulate, Lilienthal was an exceptionally able man, if by some people’s standards overly liberal, and his presence in the administration—like that of Byrnes, Marshall, Harriman (who had returned from London to replace Henry Wallace at the Department of Commerce), Acheson, Bohlen, and Clark Clifford—belied the whole idea that Truman had surrounded himself only with Missouri fools and mediocrities.
Lilienthal did not entirely approve of Truman’s performance thus far. As a liberal he had been so shattered by Truman’s call to draft the striking rail workers that after hearing Truman’s speech over the radio, Lilienthal walked out into his garden in Tennessee and stood in a drenching rain, hoping it might wash away his misery. Still Lilienthal had faith in Truman, faith in the man—because Truman had shown such faith in him, but also because he saw qualities of courage and candor rare in a politician. Indeed, he felt better about working for the Truman administration, Lilienthal said, than he had working for Roosevelt, because now he could get straight answers.
Since November, Lilienthal had been extremely concerned about the effect so humiliating a defeat in the elections might have on Truman’s self-confidence and thus on his program. Lilienthal’s own appointment, as a prime example, was bound to stir up a hornets’ nest, once the confirmation process began on the Hill, since the aging, vituperative Senator McKellar of Tennessee, who had fought to deny Lilienthal’s reappointment at TVA and despised him no less than ever, had just been reelected to another term.
Not for a month after the elections did Lilienthal actually see the President, and then only by chance. It was at about five o’clock on an afternoon in early December, when Lilienthal and Clifford were working quietly in the Cabinet Room. The day was nearly over, it was growing dark outside. Clifford nudged him to look up at the French doors that opened to the outside passage to the main house. The President was standing on the other side of the glass, looking in at them and smiling. Not knowing what else to do, Lilienthal rose and bowed awkwardly. Truman waved, still smiling, then moved quickly on, a Secret Service man a half step behind.
Nothing had been said, the whole incident occupied only seconds, but to Lilienthal it was a moment of encouragement worth recording in his diary, as he would also record the hearty welcome Truman gave him a few days later in the Oval Office, when, with the four others on his new commission, Lilienthal came to make a brief progress report. The Army would relinquish no more control over atomic energy than it could possibly avoid, Truman warned. “I know how they are, they are trained not to give up. I know because I am one of them.” Again he was smiling.
As the meeting ended and the group wished the President luck, Truman, thanking them, replied that his luck had been improving lately, this in reference to a recent test of wills with John L. Lewis. But what impressed Lilienthal was “the kind of grim gaiety in his tone and manner….”
The change in the President became more obvious by the day. There had been a “showdown” with John L. Lewis, just after the November elections. At Clark Clifford’s urging, Truman had challenged the legality of still another threatened coal strike. Except this time it was to be a “fight to the finish,” as Truman said. “Oh, God, it was the chance of a lifetime,” Clifford would remember. “ ‘Be right, be strong. Nobody’s bigger than the President of the United States.’ All the signs were right. It looked like Lewis had violated the law…. Roosevelt had toadied to him time and again. But now he pushed the President the wrong way. And he just said one day, ‘Okay, we’re going to go!’ ”
The administration took the powerful labor boss to court, on the grounds that he was violating the Smith-Connally Act, which prohibited strikes against government-held facilities, the coal mines being still technically under government seizure. An injunction was served, and when Lewis let the strike begin on November 20, a federal district judge ordered him to stand trial for contempt. Lewis refused. On December 4, the judge hit the United Mine workers with a stunning $3 million fine, and fined Lewis personally $10,000. Truman, meanwhile, had been to Florida and back, for a few days of vacation at the Key West naval base. On December 7, Lewis gave up and ordered his men back to the mines, pending an appeal to the Supreme Court. (In March 1947 the Supreme Court upheld the contempt ruling, though the fine against the union was later reduced.)
It was a resounding victory for the administration and another step up for Clifford. Established now in Sam Rosenman’s old office, the second largest and best office in the West Wing, Clifford was only twenty paces from the President’s desk and saw him six or seven times a day. Often they ate together in the basement lunchroom.
Truman was hugely pleased by the collapse of Lewis. For the first time in months, he was being praised by the press—“Harry S. Truman stood fast, where Franklin Roosevelt met [Lewis] halfway,” said Newsweek—and this, too, of course, he greatly enjoyed. But the real change, in the view of his old friend Charlie Ross and others, had come with the elections. It was the sweeping Republican triumph, ironically, that had given Truman a new lease on life, freeing him at last from the shadow of Franklin Roosevelt as perhaps nothing else could have. He owed no one anything any longer. He was free to take charge, to be himself, and show what he could do if he had to. He was on his own again, much as he had been in the 1940 Senate race, when Tom Pendergast was out of the picture and Roosevelt had abandoned him; or as he had been on the farm when his father died, or in France in 1918, when, with his new captain’s bars, he stood alone, trembling, and speechless before his new command.
The President was “now a free man and can write a fine record,” Ross wrote to his sister. “The real Truman administration,” Ross told White House reporters, “began the day after the elections.”
And clearly Truman agreed. In a letter to Bess from Key West, he had vowed, “I’m doing as I damn please for the next two years and to hell with all of them.”
Far from being downcast or tentative about his new role as a “minority” President, he had returned from Florida tanned, rested, eager to get going. He had accepted the verdict of the people in the spirit, he said, that “all good citizens accept the results of any fair election.” The change in Congress did not alter the country’s domestic or foreign problems, and in foreign affairs especially it must be “a national and not a party program.” Of course, conflicts would arise between a Republican Congress and a Democratic President. That was to be expected. But he, Harry Truman, would be guided by a simple idea: “to do in all cases…without regard to political considerations, what seems to me to be for the welfare of all our people….”
In the new 80th Congress, Joe Martin would replace Sam Rayburn as Speaker of the House. In the Senate, instead of Alben Barkley, Taft and Vandenberg would hold the reigns of power, and with the tacit understanding that Taft would attend to domestic issues, Vandenberg to foreign affairs, as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Truman knew the three Republican leaders from years of experience. Vandenberg, whom he knew best and liked best, had been a friend since Truman’s first days in the Senate, and Truman considered him both able and trustworthy. A former newspaper editor from Grand Rapids, “Van” had been an all-out isolationist until the war, but Pearl Harbor, he liked to say, had ended isolationism for any realist. (Once in London during an attack of German robot bombs, Vandenberg remarked to a friend, “How can there be immunity or isolation when men can devise weapons like that?”) It was a conversion of far-reaching consequence. Not only was Vandenberg one of the Senate’s inner circle, and among Republicans the undisputed authority on foreign affairs, but he was a formidable force as a speaker. Large and hearty, he had the mannerisms of a somewhat pompous stage senator—the cigar, the florid phrase, and more than a little vanity, carefully combing a few long strands of gray hair sideways over the top of his bald head. When making a point on the Senate floor, he favored the broad gesture, grandly flinging out one arm in a sweeping arc. His prestige reached beyond national boundaries, and like Truman during his years in the Senate, he had made no enemies.
Vandenberg was the son of a harnessmaker, Joe Martin the son of a blacksmith, backgrounds Truman could identify with, as he could not with the privileged world of Robert A. Taft, whose father had been President William Howard Taft. Martin, who came from North Attleboro, Massachusetts, a factory town south of Boston, had arrived in Congress first in 1925, when his friend Calvin Coolidge was President. And for forty-two years Martin’s outlook had remained fundamentally that of Coolidge. No legislation of importance had been attached to his name, no memorable declaration of political philosophy, but he was a good cloakroom organizer and known as dependable and fair-minded, “straight as a string,” as was said in the home district. A short, square man, he wore poorly fitting three-piece navy blue suits and boxy black policeman’s shoes. Even when speaking to small groups at home he would stand on a chair in order to be seen. A lock of dark hair that fell over the right side of his forehead had become a trademark.
Like his Democratic counterpart, Sam Rayburn, Martin was a bachelor. He neither drank, nor smoked, nor showed much interest in anything beyond politics and the hometown newspaper he owned, the North Attleboro Chronicle. Whatever was good for the district, Joe Martin held, was “pretty much good” for the nation.
On New Year’s Day, busy placing calls to his Cabinet to wish them a Happy New Year, Truman decided to phone Vandenberg and Martin as well, and was encouraged by the results. Vandenberg was “very pleasant,” Martin even more so, assuring the President that cooperation was uppermost in his mind. “He told me that he would be most happy to talk to me any time on any subject,” Truman recorded. “I am inclined to believe that he meant what he said.”
Taft, whom Truman did not call New Year’s Day, was a remote, self-absorbed man, “a cold fish” in the view of many. (“Bob is not austere,” his wife once explained. “He’s just departmentalized.”) Younger than Truman by five years, Taft had been born into affluent, cultivated surroundings in Cincinnati. He had stood first in his class at Yale and later at the Harvard Law School. Though he had served in the Senate since 1938, he looked more like a banker than a politician. He wore rimless spectacles and, like Harry Truman, his hat at dead center. His Cheshire Cat grin was famous.
Often tactless, habitually brusque with those less intelligent than he, Taft was a poor “mixer,” a poor public speaker. He had trouble remembering names. His reputation for hard work and standing by principle, however, his fund of knowledge and ability to cut to the heart of an issue were considered second to none in the Senate. He was “Mr. Republican,” incorruptible, extremely conservative, and, unlike Vandenberg, a confirmed isolationist. But he could also be highly independent—and exasperate the old guard of his party—by advocating such liberal programs as federal aid to education, health, and housing. Senator Wallace H. White of Maine, a quiet, colorless figure, was to be the Republican majority leader in name only; Taft would be the one running things.
Taft, Vandenberg, and Martin were all determined to restore Congress to the prestige and authority that had been lost during the Roosevelt era. Martin would insist in his first address as Speaker, “Our American concept of government rests upon the idea of a dominant Congress.” All three men, furthermore, were considered presidential prospects for 1948, and Taft in particular. Determined to follow in his father’s footsteps, Taft had already tried for the Republican nomination in 1940. Now, with Harry Truman in office, his opportunity looked greater than ever.
Nor, importantly, was Taft interested in cooperating with the administration. “The purpose of the opposition is to oppose,” he was fond of saying. And unlike Vandenberg and Martin, he had little regard for Truman, who to Taft was truly an ordinary man, deficient in background and education, ill-equipped in nearly every way for so heavy a responsibility, in addition to being overly susceptible to the bad advice of liberals.
Among the new faces in Republican ranks in the 80th Congress were Representative Richard M. Nixon of California, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts, and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Among the relative handful of new Democrats elected was Representative John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the twenty-nine-year-old son of Joe Kennedy.
For all the labor strife of the year before, the country was prospering as it never had, just as Truman declared in his State of the Union message on January 6, 1947. Food production was at a new high. The national income was higher than ever before in peacetime. “We have virtually full employment,” he said with satisfaction.
He looked like a man befitting the message, healthy and purposeful. At seven that morning he had walked from the White House to Union Station to meet the train from Missouri bringing Bess and Margaret, who sat now listening in the gallery.
He called for far-ranging improvements in labor-management relations, a strengthening of the anti-trust laws, a national health insurance program, including support for mental health, child care, and hospital construction. He wanted a “fair level of return” for farmers, aid to veterans, an “aggressive” program of home construction. He promised new progress in civil rights.
In no way was the speech a retreat from the domestic programs he had set forth in his message of 1945. Yet the tone was different, more reasonable, more optimistic. He advocated a balanced budget, a streamlining of the military establishment, international control of atomic energy. He ended with what would later seem a prescient line, about sharing America’s bounty with the war-stricken peoples over the world.
Also, notably missing this time was any mention of Franklin Roosevelt.
Written in large part by Clark Clifford, with help from George Elsey, who like Clifford was in naval uniform no longer but serving as Clifford’s assistant, the speech went far to raise Truman’s standing with Congress. Even greater was the effect of the surprise announcement he made at the White House the following evening: George C. Marshall was to be the new Secretary of State. Jimmy Byrnes had resigned. Marshall was already en route from China.
The appointment of Marshall was one of the best, most important decisions of Truman’s presidency. One wonders, as Truman must have in later years, how differently history might have unfolded had Marshall declined to serve as Secretary of State at that particular moment in world affairs. The reaction everywhere was immediate, virtually unanimous approval. Henry Stimson might have been speaking for the whole nation when he wrote to Marshall: “Your appointment as Secretary of State has filled me with a great sense of security so far as our country is concerned. Mr. Truman made a wise as well as a very shrewd appointment.”
On Capitol Hill, Arthur Vandenberg pushed the nomination through the Foreign Relations Committee without a hearing or opposition, and by calling for a suspension of the rules, ran it through the Senate for unanimous approval the same day. The one possible shadow on the appointment, in the view of some Republicans, was the chance that it might set Marshall up as a future candidate for President, an idea Marshall himself put to rest the same morning he arrived in Washington. He would never be a candidate for any political office, he said, and being Marshall he was taken at his word.
He was sworn in at the White House by Chief Justice Vinson later that morning, Tuesday, January 21, 1947. When a beaming Truman shook his hand and said how much he appreciated Marshall’s willingness to accept “this burden,” Marshall replied simply that he would do his best.
At sixty-six, George C. Marshall was the first career soldier to become Secretary of State. He had been born on the last day of 1880 in Union-town, Pennsylvania, south of Pittsburgh, where through boyhood, from his businessman father, he heard repeated accounts of his distinguished Virginia ancestry, including the distantly related John Marshall, the great Chief Justice. “I thought that the continuing harping on the name John Marshall was kind of poor business,” he later said. “It was about time for somebody else to swim for the family.” Graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1901, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry and advanced steadily thereafter, serving in the Philippines, Oklahoma Territory, and Fort Leavenworth, until World War I when, as Pershing’s aide, he directed the American advance to the Argonne. Between the wars, he had served three years in China. In 1939, Roosevelt made him chief of staff.
He was slightly under six feet tall, with sandy-gray, close-cropped hair and light blue eyes. His long face, with its long upper lip, had a homespun, fatherly quality and often, in repose, he looked quite sad. With age his shoulders had begun to stoop slightly. As Dean Acheson would write, there was little military glamour about him, nothing pretentious. Rather it was an intangible aura that affected people. Like George Washington, with whom he was often compared, Marshall was a figure of such flawless rectitude and self-command he both inspired awe and made description difficult. Churchill called him “the noblest Roman.” Bill Hassett on Truman’s staff spoke of the “reverence” Marshall inspired. Imperturbable under pressure—“the imperturbability of a good conscience,” George Kennan called it—invariably courteous, he was without a trace of petty vanity or self-serving ambition.
As one of his staff at the State Department later wrote, Marshall did not possess the intellectual brilliance of someone like Acheson, or the gift of eloquence, but he could distinguish what was important from what was unimportant, and this made him invaluable.
Acheson liked to recall in later years that the moment Marshall entered a room, one could feel his presence. “It was a striking and commanding force. His figure conveyed intensity, which his voice, low, staccato, and incisive, reinforced. It compelled respect. It spread a sense of authority and calm.” At the Pentagon some lower-ranking officers had been known to exit from Marshall’s office backwards, and no one of any rank, not even the President, called him “George,” only “General Marshall,” a title, as Acheson said, that suited him as though he had been baptized with it. Once, reportedly, when Roosevelt had called him “George,” he responded, “It’s General Marshall, Mr. President.”
Truman described Marshall as “astute,” “profound,” and more of a listener than a talker. “He never made any speeches at you,” Truman would gratefully recall. “Sometimes he would sit for an hour with little or no expression on his face, but when he had heard enough, he would come up with a statement of his own that would invariably cut to the very bone of the matter under discussion.” But it was Marshall’s rock-bound sense of duty, his selflessness and honesty that Truman especially prized. “He was a man you could count on to be truthful in every way, and when you find somebody like that, you have to hang on to them.”
As Truman the politician also appreciated, Marshall stood high with Republicans on the Hill in a way almost no one else did, and this irrespective of the fact that he had worked so closely through the war with the Democrat they all liked least, Franklin Roosevelt. It had been Marshall who got the first peacetime draft past Congress, Marshall who had confided the secret of the atomic bomb to the congressional leadership, trusting them to keep the secret.
For Marshall, his recent mission to China had been a heavy disappointment. Trying to mediate a peace between the two Chinas of the Nationalist Kuomintang government under Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists of Mao Tse-tung, he had achieved only a tentative cease-fire. “I hate failure,” he told a friend. But failure was what he had had to announce on the eve of his departure from China. “On the one hand the leaders of the Government are strongly opposed to a communistic form of government,” he reported. “On the other, the Communists frankly state that they are Marxists and intend to work toward establishing a communistic form of government in China….” His efforts with the Kuomintang had been frustrating in the extreme. It was a government riddled with corruption, overburdened with too many generals. “Though I speak ‘as a soldier, I must deplore the dominating influence of the military.” But the Communists fostered only chaos and violent anti-American propaganda, and with more than a million men under arms, their power was gaining.
Marshall had failed in his mission to China, yet no one blamed him for the failure, such was the scale of the problem and his own reputation. No one looked on his new assignment as anything but a very large step forward for the troubled Truman administration.
Marshall assumed his new duties at once and at once the difference was felt. Jimmy Byrnes had been a hardworking Secretary of State, and more effective than generally acknowledged, or than Truman would portray him in his later reflections. But Byrnes had been maddeningly independent, determined to do everything himself, and continuously, uncurably on the move. In 546 days as Secretary, Byrnes had been away 241, and had shown little interest in the department itself. Under Marshall all that changed. “He gave a sense of purpose and direction. His personality infected the whole Foreign Service,” Bohlen remembered. “There was greater clarity in the operation…than I had ever seen before…[and] Marshall never forgot, as Byrnes did, that Truman was President.”
With Truman’s blessing, a new Policy Planning Staff was established under the brilliant George Kennan, who had been recalled from Moscow. Organization overall was made more orderly and efficient. When section heads fell into dispute in his presence, Marshall would tell them, “Gentlemen, don’t fight the problem. Solve it!”
Acheson, who had wished to return to private life, was persuaded to stay on as Under Secretary for another six months. Acheson found working with the general such a joy, wrote David Lilienthal after a dinner at Acheson’s Georgetown home, that he could “hardly talk about anything else.” Marshall, like Truman, was decisive. When Acheson informed Marshall that the State Department had outgrown its quarters in the old Victorian structure beside the White House, and that a new building was available near the Potomac, in the section called Foggy Bottom, Marshall said, “Move.”
To no one was Marshall’s presence more reassuring, or inspiriting, than to Truman. “The more I see and talk to him the more certain I am he’s the great one of the age,” Truman wrote not long after Marshall’s swearing in. “Marshall is a tower of strength and common sense,” he noted privately another time. It was admiration such as Truman felt for no other public figure, no one he had ever known, not Roosevelt, not Churchill, not anyone. Nor was he at all hesitant or concerned over having such a strong-minded man as his Secretary of State—Marshall, Harriman, Patterson, Forrestal, Lilienthal, Eisenhower, they were all strong-minded. Conceivably, Truman could have worried that someone of such Immense reputation as Marshall in so prominent a role would diminish his own standing with the country, that he might suffer by comparison, and Marshall be perceived as more the sort of man who ought to be President. But Truman was neither jealous nor intimidated. He was not so constructed. “I am surely lucky to have his friendship and support,” he wrote, and that was that.
By early February 1947 White House reporters were commenting on the President’s greater ease and relaxation. “He no longer moans to every visitor that he doesn’t want the job and never did,” wrote Joseph Alsop to a friend. After a social call on the President, the former heavyweight boxing champion, Gene Tunney, said he had never seen a more solid citizen. “His eye is clear and he is just as solid as a wall. His jaw is square and his stomach is just as flat as an athlete’s.”
Truman’s popularity in the polls, due in large measure to Marshall’s presence, was back up to 48 percent.
The whole atmosphere was different. Truman had opened the White House to sightseers again after a six-year wartime ban on all but official callers. He and Bess reinstated formal receptions and state dinners for the first time since 1941, and the contrast between the Trumans “at home” in their private quarters and their official social life was amazing.
The President, with his sense of history, wanted White House entertaining done just so, “done to the minute,” by rules that had not changed in half a century, except in wartime. “They brought back all the pageantry,” assistant head usher J. B. West remembered approvingly, “all the formality, all the pomp that we had all but forgotten how to execute.”
We [the White House staff] had to work out the details, so that all the President and his wife had to do was to be in the right place at the right time. For a reception, they’d march down the stairs to the Blue Room and receive the guests, and then march back upstairs. But behind the scenes, we spent weeks of preparation and scheduling for each detail of that “right place” and “right time.”
Attendance at the first reception, to honor the Supreme Court on December 10, had been 1,333. Dress was white tie, the Marine Band played. “The papers say today that Bess and I have shaken hands with 7,000 people this season,” Truman wrote to his mother on February 9. At a full-dress affair for Senator Vandenberg in the State Dining Room, the gold service was used. The night of the diplomatic reception again more than a thousand attended. (Before the war only about five hundred people in total had been accredited to the embassies and legations in Washington.) For one occasion Truman asked Eugene List, the concert pianist, to perform for “the customers,” and again, as at Potsdam, List played the President’s favorite Chopin Waltz in A Minor, but this time without the President’s help as page-turner.
I was somewhat nervous through the entertainment [Truman told his mother], because Mr. Grim the usher and Jim Rowley [of the Secret Service] came and told me that the engineers had found that the chain holding the center chandelier was stretching…. I let the show go and ordered the thing down the next day. If it had fallen I’d been in a real fix….
Truman was glad to see Lent arrive and put an end to such affairs, he told his mother. He was tired of “smirking at people I don’t like.” On February 19, in another letter to Grandview, he could report that “the season” was over, “thank goodness.” But the truth was he had had a fine time, every time. J. B. West would remember that “despite all the denying in the world (which he did), we could see the President enjoyed it. He was an extrovert, a friendly man, and he liked company.”
Hearings on the Lilienthal nomination were causing a sensation, meanwhile, with Senator Kenneth McKellar insisting TVA was a “hotbed of Communism” and that David E. Lilienthal was more than a little suspect. The senator thought it was General Groves who had discovered the secret of splitting the atom and failed to understand why Groves should not therefore be left in command of his discovery.
Looking down from the bench, the senator asked Lilienthal where his parents had been born. When Lilienthal was unable to answer with certainty, McKellar acted as though he had scored an important point. He pressed the issue again another day. This time Lilienthal said he had been able to determine only that it had been in Austro-Hungary, somewhere near Pressburg, in what had since become Czechoslovakia. Again McKellar smiled at the audience as if everything were going his way—Czechoslovakia being under Soviet influence. But when he turned and abruptly asked Lilienthal to explain his views on “the communistic doctrine,” the answer Lilienthal gave held the room spellbound. With his hands folded on the table in front of him, Lilienthal spoke for several minutes, his eyes not on McKellar or the committee, but on a spot somewhere just above his hands, almost as though he were talking to himself. He had felt a kind of smoldering within, he later wrote, “far from anger or temper, but some emotional tempo quite different, but definitely emotional.” As he talked he kept saying to himself, “Don’t deny; affirm.”
I believe in, [he said] and I conceive the Constitution of the United States to rest, as does religion, upon the fundamental proposition of the integrity of the individual; and that all Government and all private institutions must be designed to promote and protect and defend the integrity and the dignity of the individual….
Any forms of government, therefore, and any other institutions, which make men means rather than ends in themselves, which exalt that state or any other institutions above the importance of men, which place arbitrary power over men as a fundamental tenet of government, are contrary to this conception; and therefore I am deeply opposed to them…. The fundamental tenet of communism is that the state is an end in itself, and that therefore the powers which the state exercises over the individual are without any ethical standards to limit them. That I deeply disbelieve.
It is very easy simply to say one is not a Communist. And, of course, if despite my record it is necessary for me to state this very affirmatively, then this is a great disappointment to me. It is very easy to talk about being against communism. It is equally important to believe those things which provide a satisfactory and effective alternative. Democracy is that satisfying alternative.
And its hope in the world is that it is an affirmative belief, rather than simply a belief against something else….
I deeply believe in the capacity of democracy to surmount any trials that may lie ahead provided only we practice it in our daily lives.
And among the things that we must practice is this: that while we seek fervently to ferret out the subversive and anti-democratic forces in the country, we do not at the same time, by hysteria, by resort to innuendo and sneers and other unfortunate tactics, besmirch the very cause that we believe in, and cause a separation among our people, cause one group and one individual to hate one another, based upon mere attacks, mere unsubstantiated attacks upon their loyalty….
Hearsay and gossip had no place in courts of justice. If the principles of protection of an individual and his good name against gossip and hearsay were not upheld by legislatures in their investigating activities, that too would be a failure of the democratic ideal. Then, pausing, he unfolded his hands and said, “This I deeply believe.”
For a moment the room was silent. Then, almost in a rush, members of the committee and people from the audience began crowding around him to praise Lilienthal for what he had said.
From the White House Truman let Lilienthal know that he would not only stand behind the nomination but was in the fight with all he had “if it took 150 years.”
In the days following, a strain of anti-Semitism in the opposition to the appointment became increasingly apparent. Then, without warning, and without waiting for the committee report to reach the floor, Senator Taft announced he would oppose the nomination on the grounds that Lilienthal was not only a “typical power-hungry bureaucrat,” and “temperamentally unfitted” for the job of heading the Atomic Energy Commission, but “soft on the subject of Communism.” Until this point it had been McKellar’s show, and thus largely personal and predictable. (In earlier days the senator had seen Communists behind the anti-poll tax bill, too.) But now with Mr. Republican stepping in, it became a distinctly partisan issue, and, as was said, a major Capitol crisis. The phrase “soft on Communism” caught on immediately.
Lilienthal did not see how he could possibly win with the Republican majority lined up against him. The Taft speech had been “a kick in the teeth.” How long the confirming process might take, and at what toll, no one could say.
“Courage: What is it?” Lilienthal asked in his diary. “Isn’t it the capacity to hang on?”