V

Truman’s distress over the choice of a Democratic standardbearer had grown extreme. Firm in his belief that any red-blooded Democrat ought to be ready and willing to run against any Republican, he had become increasingly annoyed with Adlai Stevenson, whose reluctance to commit himself had begun to strike Truman as not only tiresome but perhaps something of an act.

As the press was saying, nearly all the old Democratic bosses were gone now. Jim Farley was long past his prime. Tom Pendergast and Bob Hannegan were dead. Ed Flynn was ill. Frank Hague no longer ruled in New Jersey, and Kefauver, with his primary campaigns, had eclipsed Ed Crump of Tennessee. “There was no one to supply party-wide leadership except the President,” reported Newsweek, and he was “under tremendous pressure to name his preference for the nomination….”

Truman continued to wait, holding out for Stevenson. It was only a week before the convention, his patience gone and resolved to do almost anything to stop Kefauver, that he at last suggested that Barkley would be a good choice—and then wished he hadn’t because Averell Harriman, having declared himself a candidate, was proving a spirited champion of the whole New Deal—Fair Deal program in a way that made Truman glow.

When someone raised the point that Harriman had never run for public office, and so might not be up to a sustained campaign, Truman remarked, “You never know what’s in you until you have to do it.”

The Republicans opened their convention in Chicago on July 7. Taft had the largest number of committed delegates. Attacking what he called the “me-too” Republicanism of the party’s eastern liberals—the Dewey people who were backing Eisenhower this time—Taft said it was time to give the American people a clear choice. The floor fight before the balloting turned bitter. “We followed you before and you took us down the road to defeat,” declared Senator Everett Dirksen from the podium, shaking his finger at the New York delegation, where Dewey sat. “And don’t do this to us again.” But such were the tactical skills of the Eisenhower managers, combined with the glamour of the Eisenhower bandwagon, that the general swept to victory on the first ballot—as no doubt he would have done at the Democratic Convention, too, had he been willing.

Of the Democratic candidates, on the eve of the Democratic Convention, Kefauver was far in the lead, claiming 257 delegates, or nearly half what was needed for the nomination. Richard Russell, running as the candidate of the South, had 161, Harriman 112, Stevenson a mere 41 while Truman, it was believed, could swing at least 400 votes to whomever he chose. As Time reported, Truman’s hold on Democratic leaders continued remarkably strong because they saw him as the smartest practical politician around. “If Harry Truman turns out to have an enormous influence on the convention, it will not be a case of delegates doing his bidding, but of their following his highly respected judgment.”

A Barkley boom began and gathered surprising force, only to be abruptly terminated when the leaders of organized labor met with Barkley and told him the blunt truth. It was not that they objected to him on issues, as they had with Jimmy Byrnes in 1944, he was just too old.

Barkley called Truman to say he was withdrawing, and on the afternoon of July 24, the day of the steel strike settlement at the White House, Stevenson telephoned from Illinois to ask Truman if it would embarrass him were he, Stevenson, to allow his name to be placed in nomination. Truman, as he later said, chose some “rather vigorous” words. “I have been trying since January to get you to say that,” he told the governor. “Why would it embarrass me?” Stevenson could count on his full support. As far as Truman was concerned, Stevenson was as good as nominated.

On the floor of the immense international amphitheater at the Chicago Stock Yards, a headlong Stevenson boom was already under way, as a result of the governor’s own brilliant welcoming address to the convention. James Reston in The New York Times called Stevenson “a leaf on a rising stream.” When, during the first ballot the next afternoon, Friday, the 25th, the Missouri delegation was polled, the President’s own alternate, an old Pendergast stalwart named Tom Gavin, was seen voting for Stevenson just as the President and First Lady were leaving from Washington on the Independence. On television the two events were shown simultaneously on a split screen.

Heading west, Truman watched the convention on television “all the way” in flight, something no President had done before. He saw the results of the first ballot—Kefauver 340, Stevenson 273, Russell 268, Harriman 123—and the start of the second. By the end of the second ballot, at 6:00 P.M. Chicago time, with Stevenson gaining but still no decision, Truman was at the Blackstone working on his speech in Room 709, the same corner suite where he had taken the fateful call from Franklin Roosevelt eight years before. To others in the presidential entourage, he appeared in high gear.

With the convention in recess until nine o’clock, Truman went by motorcade and booming motorcycle escort to the Stockyards Inn and dinner in a private dining room with Jake Arvey, Sam Rayburn, and Democratic Chairman Frank McKinney. From there, he also sent word to the governors of Massachusetts and Arkansas, as well as to Averell Harriman, to release their delegates to Stevenson. Charlie Murphy was the messenger sent to see Harriman, who, as it happens, had already decided on his own to withdraw in favor of Stevenson.

The convention’s dramatic turn to Stevenson came on the third ballot, with the release of the Harriman delegates. But it was past midnight before the vote was made unanimous, and not until 1:45 in the morning, as late nearly as four years before, when the nominee and the President entered the hall arm in arm, down the floodlit runway to the rostrum, Truman exuberant, a spring to his step, Stevenson, a short, rather dumpy figure, looking slightly uncertain.

They had picked a winner, Truman assured the crowd. “I am going to take my coat off and do everything I can to help him win.”

Stevenson spoke briefly and eloquently. “The people are wise,” he said, “wiser than the Republicans think. And the Democratic Party is the people’s party, not the party of labor, not the farmer’s party—it is the party of no one because it is the party of everyone.” The ordeal of the twentieth century was far from over. “Sacrifice, patience, understanding and implacable purpose may be our lot for years to come. Let’s talk sense to the American people….”

Later, Stevenson, Truman, Rayburn, McKinney, and four or five others met backstage. Stevenson asked for advice on a running mate. The Republicans had chosen Senator Richard Nixon as their vice-presidential candidate. Stevenson mentioned Kefauver, but when Truman vigorously objected, Rayburn and McKinney backed him. Barkley and Russell were also mentioned and rejected. Finally, the choice was Senator John Sparkman of Alabama. “Stevenson made his decision with Harry Truman’s help,” one of those present explained afterward to a reporter.

In his room that morning at 6:40, Saturday, July 26, having slept perhaps an hour, if at all, Truman wrote a warm letter to the nominee on a sheet of Blackstone Hotel stationery; a letter such as he himself had never received from Franklin Roosevelt.

Dear Governor:

Last night was one of the most remarkable I’ve spent in all my sixty-eight years. When thousands of people—delegates and visitors—are willing to sit and listen to a set speech and introduction by me, and then listen to a most wonderful acceptance speech by you, at two o’clock in the morning, there is no doubt that we are on the right track, in the public interest.

You are a brave man. You are assuming the responsibility of the most important office in the history of the world.

You have the ancestral, political and educational background to do a most wonderful job. If it is worth anything, you have my wholehearted support and cooperation.

When the noise and shouting are over, I hope you may be able to come to Washington for a discussion of what is before you.

But though Stevenson sent a gracious reply and would eventually meet with Truman at the White House, he was no less determined than before not to be seen as Truman’s candidate. “He was affronted by the indifferent morality and untidiness of the Truman Administration and was frantic to distance himself from Truman,” his friend George Ball would remember. In quick succession, Stevenson replaced Truman’s party chairman, McKinney, with a Chicago friend, Stephen A. Mitchell, an attorney with little political experience, and announced that Democratic headquarters henceforth would be in Springfield, Illinois, not Washington—decisions certain to offend Truman. Nor did he make any effort to solicit Truman’s advice on plans for the campaign.

Stevenson’s attitude toward him was a “mystery,” Truman would write in his Memoirs. But in a letter he never sent, Truman told the nominee, “I have come to the conclusion that you are embarrassed by having the President of the United States in your corner…. Therefore I shall remain silent and stay in Washington until Nov. 4.” He did not like being treated as a liability. Frank McKinney, he wrote, had been the best party chairman in his memory. “I can’t stand snub after snub by you….”

In August, to make matters worse, Stevenson carelessly signed a letter prepared by an assistant in answer to a question from the Oregon Journal. “Can Stevenson really clean up the mess in Washington?” the editor of the Portland paper had asked. “As to whether I can clean up the mess in Washington,” read the Stevenson reply, “I would bespeak the careful scrutiny of what I inherited in Illinois and what has been accomplished in three years.” The Republicans quickly made the most of the letter, as confirmation by Stevenson himself that there was truly a mess in Washington, and Truman, in another letter he never mailed, said Stevenson had now made the whole campaign “ridiculous.”

I’m telling you to take your crackpots, your high socialites with their noses in the air, run your campaign and win if you can. Cowfever could not have treated me any more shabbily than have you.

At a later point, Stevenson sent Chairman Mitchell to tell Truman that it would greatly help the campaign if Dean Acheson were to announce his plan to retire as Secretary of State once the election was over—an idea Truman bluntly rejected.

But as his daughter Margaret would recall, Truman was more sad than angry. “Oh, Stevenson will get straightened out,” he told his staff. “The campaign hasn’t really started.” And in time to come, he would write that Stevenson conducted himself magnificently in the campaign:

His eloquence was real because his words gave definition and meaning to the major issues of our time. He was particularly effective in expressing this nation’s foreign policy. He made no demagogic statements…. While some felt he may have talked over the heads of some people, he was uncompromising in being himself. His was a great campaign and did credit to the party and the nation. He did not appeal to the weakness but to the strength of the people. He did not trade principles for votes. What he said in the South he would say in the North, and what he said in the East he would say in the West. It will be to his credit that, although given provocation by the opposition, he stayed away from personalities and accusations…. I hold him in the highest regard for his intellectual courage.

On August 12, Stevenson came to the White House at Truman’s invitation to have lunch with the Cabinet and be briefed at length on the state of the Union. In the course of three hours of discussion, Truman said more than once that he wanted to do everything possible to be of help. He did not wish to direct or dominate the campaign in any way. Stevenson was the boss, Truman stressed. “I think the President wants to win this campaign more than I do,” Stevenson remarked. “As much as you do,” interrupted Truman, who appeared to be greatly enjoying himself, until the meeting ended and he and Stevenson stepped outside to talk to the press.

Truman came out the door first, as customary, only now the photographers shouted to him, “Wait for the Governor, Mr. President.” A new order had clearly begun. “That’s your point of contact right there, Governor,” Truman said, gesturing to the microphones.

Stevenson joked about the size of the lunch he had just enjoyed, saying if he had another he would be too fat to campaign. Truman, usually the first to laugh at such banter, barely smiled, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. “There was just a hint of tension in the atmosphere,” wrote Andrew Tully of The New York Times, “and of sadness—as Harry Truman watched this man taking over….” When Stevenson finished, Truman did not linger, but turned and walked back to his office, “slowly, head erect.”

Several of the White House staff watched in pain. Secret Service Agent Floyd Boring turned to Roger Tubby and remarked, pointing to the President, “There’s a man of granite. And him [pointing to Stevenson], he looks like a sponge.”

With the campaign under way in September, Truman quickly forgot any injured pride he felt and joined the fray with all his old zest. Though not the candidate, he saw the election as a referendum on his presidency. Nor, constituted as he was, could he possibly have stayed out once the fight was on. “We didn’t have to ask Mr. Truman to get into the campaign,” remembered the new party chairman, Stephen Mitchell. “He was raring to go…and he put on a great show.”

He took to the rails, crisscrossing the country again in the Ferdinand Magellan. Stevenson traveled by plane and they kept entirely different schedules, never appearing on the same platform. Stevenson was eloquent as no presidential candidate had been in more than a generation. Truman was the fighter, the believer. “When you vote the Democratic ticket…you are voting for your interests because the Democrats look after the interests of the everyday man and the common people,” he said, sounding very like the candidate of 1948. He praised Stevenson. He evoked the memory of Franklin Roosevelt, heaped scorn on the Republican Party, stoutly championed his own Fair Deal programs. Toward the Republican candidate He was unexpectedly gentle at first. It was Taft he attacked.

He liked Ike, too, Truman would say, seeing Eisenhower buttons or signs in a crowd. But he liked him as a general in the Army. As it was, Ike didn’t seem to know what he was doing. “I think Bob Taft and all the Republican reactionaries are whispering in his ear, and pulling his leg,” he told the people of Whitefish, Montana. “If you like Ike as much as I do, you will vote with me to send him back to the Army, where he belongs.”

The truth was he did still like Ike. Even when Eisenhower refused Truman’s invitation to the same kind of briefing as he had given Stevenson, Truman had written to Eisenhower privately to express his friendship as much as his distaste for those now advising the general:

What I’ve always had in mind was and is a continuing foreign policy. You know that is a fact, because you had a part in outlining it.

Partisan politics should stop at the boundaries of the United States. I am extremely sorry that you have allowed a bunch of screwballs to come between us….

May God guide you and give you light.

From a man who has always been your friend and who always wanted to be!

In conversation on board his train, Truman could swing from premonitions of Eisenhower as a dangerous President, “a modern Cromwell,” to open expressions of sympathy. “You know, I still feel sorry for Ike. He never should have gotten into this.” When it was revealed in mid-September that Eisenhower’s running mate, Nixon, had been subsidized by a secret fund subscribed by California millionaires, and others traveling with Truman were cheered by the news, he commented only, “This will help us, but I’m sorry to see it happen, for it lowers public opinion of politics.”

As so often before, the grueling business of a campaign seemed to restore and enliven him. He would be remembered rolling along at night in the dining room of the Ferdinand Magellan, eating fried chicken with his fingers, enjoying stories and “matching wits” with his staff, while every now and then in the darkness outside a lonely light flashed by. He would be remembered washing his socks in the bathroom sink in California and after a day of eight speeches from Ohio to upstate New York, sitting in a hotel in Buffalo playing the piano at 1:30 in the morning.

The pace and heat of the contest picked up rapidly.

The Republicans, campaigning under the slogan “Time for a Change,” had no intention of repeating Dewey’s bland glide to defeat. Much of what was said by both sides became very unpleasant. “I nearly choked to hear him,” Truman remarked privately after Eisenhower, stepping up the attack, assaulted the foreign policy that, as Truman saw it, Eisenhower himself, as Chief of Staff and head of NATO, had helped shape and implement. Eisenhower, Truman now charged, had become “a stooge of Wall Street.” He was “owned body and soul by the money boys.” Eisenhower, because of his career in the Army, knew little of the realities of life, didn’t “know the score and shouldn’t be educated at public expense.”

Eisenhower, for his part, deplored the “top-to-bottom mess” in Washington, “the crooks and cronies,” while Nixon hammered at what became known as “K₁C₂”—“Korea, Communism and corruption.” When Nixon accused Truman, Stevenson, and Dean Acheson of being “traitors to the high principles in which many of the nation’s Democrats believe,” Truman understood this to mean Nixon had called him a traitor, and he would not forget it.

There was no Charlie Ross to help this time, no Clark Clifford. Press Secretary Joe Short had recently been hospitalized for what was thought to have been a mild heart condition. When Truman received word that Joe Short was dead, he took it very badly, feeling acutely, personally responsible. “I feel as if I killed them,” he said, remembering Ross as well.

Stevenson “has the most wonderful command of the language and he is delighting audiences wherever he goes,” recorded Roger Tubby, who took over in Short’s place.

[Stevenson’s] humor, his gift of satire and the devastating barb are irrepressible and so, thank God, the nation is being treated as it has not in some time, perhaps not since Lincoln…. Nevertheless some observers wonder whether S[tevenson] is “getting across” to the people, and compare his style unfavorably with the President’s, which is simple, declarative sentences, blunt and hard-hitting. Ike meanwhile goes blundering along, often badly tangled in his thoughts and words, but sticking persistently to a couple of simple themes: get rid of corruption, throw the rascals out….

Most newspapers backed Eisenhower. The Republicans were also out-spending the Democrats by more than two to one. But Truman’s crowds at times were as large and friendly as in 1948. In West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, across New England, his crowds were often bigger than those that turned out for Eisenhower.

The searing moment of the campaign for Truman came in early October, when Eisenhower went into Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy’s home state, where McCarthy in a drive for his own reelection continued to vilify George Marshall. Many of Eisenhower’s backers, many of his own aides, were confident he would eventually repudiate McCarthy and speak up for Marshall, and as he crossed Illinois, heading for Wisconsin, Eisenhower decided now would be the time, “right in McCarthy’s backyard.” A personal tribute to Marshall was prepared for a speech at Milwaukee. But then Eisenhower’s political advisers adamantly objected. McCarthy himself flew to Peoria, Illinois, and crossed into Wisconsin on board the general’s train. Reportedly, when McCarthy argued against any mention of Marshall, Eisenhower reacted with “red-hot anger.” Still, in a speech at Green Bay, Eisenhower expressed his gratitude to the senator for meeting him in Illinois and told his audience it was only in methods, not objectives, that he and McCarthy differed. Then in the speech at Milwaukee, with McCarthy seated behind him on stage, Eisenhower declared that a national tolerance of communism had “poisoned two whole decades of our national life,” thus creating “a government by men whose very brains were confused by the opiate of this deceit.” The fall of China, he charged, the “surrender of whole nations” in Eastern Europe could be attributed to the Reds in Washington. There was no mention of Marshall; the tribute had been cut. But because Eisenhower’s aides had been telling reporters all day about the Marshall tribute they would hear, its removal made more news than the rest of the speech. Even staunch Eisenhower supporters were appalled.

“Do I need to tell you that I am sick at heart?” Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, wired Eisenhower’s personal campaign manager, Sherman Adams.

To Truman, with his devotion to George Marshall, Eisenhower had committed an act of unpardonable betrayal. Truman tried to contain his fury. The spectacle of the Republican candidate campaigning against his own record, his own better nature and principles, was “very sad and pathetic,” Truman said in Oakland, California.

And I wish for the sake of history, and for the sake of future generations who will read about him in the schoolbooks, that he had not so tarnished his own bright reputation as a commander of men. And I mean that with all my heart.

Heading east, Truman remarked to his staff that probably he should “lay off Ike for a while…got to be very careful we don’t overdo the attacks.” But the outrage within seemed to gather force by the day, the more he thought about Marshall, the more he thought about Eisenhower and McCarthy, the more Eisenhower attacked his foreign policy and handling of the Korean War.

“The general whose words I read, whose speeches I hear, is not the general I once knew. Something, my friends, has happened to him,” he told the crowd at Colorado Springs. “I thought he might make a good President,” he said at Muncie, Indiana, “but that was a mistake. In this campaign he has betrayed almost everything I thought he stood for.”

Finally, in a rear platform speech at Utica, New York, Truman lashed out full force. Eisenhower, he said, had betrayed his principles, deserted his friends.

He knew—and he knows today—that General Marshall’s patriotism is above question…[he] knows, or he ought to know, how completely dishonest Joe McCarthy is. He ought to despise McCarthy, just as I expected him to-and just as I do.

Now, in his bid for votes, he has endorsed Joe McCarthy for reelection—and humbly thanked him for riding on his train.

I can’t understand it. I had never thought the man who is now the Republican candidate would stoop so low. I have thought about this a great deal. I don’t think I shall ever understand it….

And he never did, never really got over Eisenhower’s ingratitude to the man who had made him. For years to come Truman would harbor intense anger. “Why, General Marshall was responsible for his whole career,” he would say. “When Roosevelt jumped him from lieutenant colonel to general, it was Marshall’s recommendation. Three different times Marshall got him pushed upstairs, and in return…Eisenhower sold him out. It was just a shameful thing.”

Eisenhower, stunned by Truman’s attack, was enraged. “Just how low can you get?” He would never ride down Pennsylvania Avenue with Truman on inauguration day, he vowed.

The polls showed Eisenhower well in the lead. The polls also showed that the stalemate in Korea was what worried most voters. The election had become a referendum on Korea, and Eisenhower stepped up the attack on the administration’s handling of the war. On October 24 at Detroit, in a blistering speech broadcast on national television he called Korea “the burial ground for twenty-thousand American dead,” and promised to end the war. If elected, Eisenhower declared dramatically, “I shall go to Korea.”

Truman issued a statement stressing that the general had been in agreement with administration policy concerning Korea from the start. To a crowd at Winona, Minnesota, Truman warned, “No professional general has ever made a good President. The art of war is too different from the art of civilian government’’

If Eisenhower had a way of ending the war in Korea, he should tell him now, Truman said. “Let’s save a lot of lives and not wait…. If he can do it after he is elected, we can do it now.” Such “demagoguery used in connection with this tragic situation is almost beneath contempt,” he would write to Stevenson. No man, Truman thought, had less right than Eisenhower to use Korea for political advantage.

At the Pentagon, Eisenhower’s old friends among the Joint Chiefs were hardly less furious than the President. “Ike was well informed on all aspects of the Korean War and the delicacy of the armistice negotiations,” recalled Omar Bradley. “He knew very well that he could achieve nothing by going to Korea.”

In the final days of the campaign, Truman was still going strong. A local reporter in Iowa noted that the President “never looked more fit or pleased with the rigorous job of ‘giving ‘em hell.’ ”

But with his dramatic promise to go to Korea, Eisenhower had decided the election, as Truman seemed to know. “Roger, we may be up against more than we can control,” he told his press secretary.

The Eisenhower victory was overwhelming—he carried all but nine of forty-eight states, including Stevenson’s Illinois and Truman’s Missouri, his percentage of the popular vote was bigger than any Democratic victory since Roosevelt in 1936—and the issue that cut deepest was Korea. But with his radiant smile, the unequaled place he held in the affections of the people, Eisenhower had also proven an exceptional candidate. His popularity had made him all but impregnable. And prevalent as the feeling may have been that a change was due in Washington after so long a Democratic reign, it was clearly an Eisenhower, not a Republican, triumph. In Congress the Republicans barely gained control. Their margin in the Senate was one seat.

As Truman would comment privately, probably no one could have beaten Eisenhower in 1952. That some observers, including the Kansas City Star, were saying that he, Truman, had done Stevenson more harm than good left him feeling deeply hurt.

He sent Eisenhower his congratulations and offered him use of the Independence to fly to Korea, but not without adding, “if you still desire to go to Korea,” a final partisan jab that not surprisingly infuriated Eisenhower, who declined the offer.

Eisenhower flew to Korea by military plane and under greatest security at the end of November. For three days he toured the front lines, then flew home having concluded only that the situation was intolerable.

“I sincerely wish he didn’t have to make the trip,” Truman had written in his diary on November 15. “It is an awful risk. If he should fail to come back I wonder what would happen. May God protect him.”

With no hesitation or the least sign of bitterness, Truman immediately invited Eisenhower to the White House to discuss the turnover of power. He was determined, as he wrote to the general, to guarantee “an orderly transfer of the business of the executive branch.” The gesture was unprecedented, and to those around Truman a vivid example of his ability to separate his personal feelings from the larger responsibilities of his office. He would do all he could to help the new President. He only wished someone had done as much for him.

Eisenhower arrived at the White House just before two o’clock, the afternoon of Tuesday, November 18, for a meeting first with Truman in his office, then an extended briefing in the Cabinet Room by Truman, his Cabinet and staff. All went very formally and without incident, though Eisenhower remained unsmiling and wary—“taciturn to the point of surliness,” thought Acheson. To Truman, Eisenhower was a man with a chip on his shoulder. He would remember Eisenhower’s “frozen grimness throughout.”

When Truman offered to give Eisenhower the big globe that Eisenhower had given him years before, and that for Truman had come to symbolize so much of the weight of his responsibilities, Eisenhower accepted it, though “not very graciously,” in Truman’s view. Nor from Eisenhower’s reactions during the briefing in the Cabinet Room did Truman feel the general truly comprehended the extent or complexity of the task that faced him. “I think all this went into one ear and out the other,” Truman recorded. Later, at his desk, talking with some of the staff, he would remark, “He’ll sit right here and he’ll say do this, do that! And nothing will happen. Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”