Fifties (4 page)

Their main target was now Acheson. When Hiss was convicted of perjury, Acheson knew he would be asked about his onetime associate. Feeling that his own beliefs concerning loyalty and obligation were at stake, Acheson thought of what he would say long before the question was asked. He was the son of an Episcopal bishop, and he believed honor had to be placed above political expediency. There were times when a man had to be counted. He chose his words carefully. “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss,” he told a reporter from the
Herald Tribune.
Pressed further, Acheson said to look in their Bible for Matthew 25:36, a passage in which Christ called upon His followers to understand that anyone who turns his back on someone in trouble turns his back on Him:
“Naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me; I was in prison and ye came unto me.” Later he explained that he was following “Christ’s words setting forth compassion as the highest of Christian duties.” His words were those of a very brave man, but they were also political dynamite. Had he, mused Scotty Reston of
The New York Times
years later, phrased his thoughts in terms ordinary men could understand, had he simply said he would not kick a man when he was down, a great deal less damage might have been done. Acheson’s words were, historian Eric Goldman wrote, “a tremendous and unnecessary gift to those who were insisting that the foreign policy of the Truman Administration was being shaped by men who were soft on Communism.” As Goldman noted, Richard Nixon almost immediately responded: “Traitors in the high councils of our own government have made sure that the deck is stacked on the Soviet side of the diplomatic tables.”

A month later Acheson did something very un-Achesonian; realizing that he had not only damaged himself but, far more important, wounded his President, he tried to explain himself. “One must be true to things by which one lives,” he said, changing few if any opinions. That someone as innately suspicious of Russian intentions as Dean Acheson was to become the primary target for the right-wing isolationists was in itself a reflection of the Alice-in-Wonderland quality of that time. Years later he would loom as the quintessential Cold Warrior, the architect of a hard, edgy, anxious peace with the Soviets.

Carving out a policy that drew a line and limited Soviet expansion, creating a consensus for that policy and at the same time contending with but not overreacting to Soviet moves, demanded skill and resolve and vision. Americans might have dreamed of a Europe which much resembled that of the pre–World War Two map, but the Russians were already in place in the East. In 1946 George Kennan was asked about denying Soviet ambitions in Eastern Europe. “Sorry,” he answered, “but the fact of the matter is that we do not have the power in Eastern Europe really to do anything but talk.” For many Americans, that reality was almost impossible to accept. Acheson himself despaired of America’s difficult new role of international leadership. “We have got to understand that all our lives the danger, the uncertainty, the need for alertness, for effort, for discipline, will be with us. This is new for us. It will be hard for us.”

All of this profoundly affected Truman. He had come to the presidency unprepared in foreign affairs, barely briefed on major foreign policy issues by the Roosevelt people. He had, he came to
realize, arrived at a historic moment. To him and to his closest foreign policy advisers, it was like a replay of the days right before World War Two. In March 1948, after what seemed to him a series of catastrophic foreign-policy events, he wrote to his daughter, Margaret, “We are faced with exactly the same situation with which Britain and France were faced in 1938–39 with Hitler. Things look black. A decision will have to be made. I am going to make it.”

TWO

T
O THE COMPLETE SURPRISE
of the nation’s political establishment and journalists, Harry Truman’s fellow citizens elected him to the presidency, and yet it was only after he was out of office that people truly came to appreciate the full measure of the man and his virtues. History tended to vindicate many of his decisions—some of them, such as the intervention in Korea, made under the most difficult circumstances—and as the passions of the era subsided he came to be seen as the common man as uncommon man.

In the beginning, his lack of pretense and blunt manner worked against him, standing in stark contrast to Roosevelt’s consummate elegance; later those same qualities were seen as refreshing proof of the rugged character of this fearless small-town man, and, by implication, of all ordinary Americans. As President he was accused of
demeaning the Oval Office by turning it over to Missouri roughnecks and poker-playing back-room operators who drank bourbon and told off-color jokes—his “cronies,” as
Time
magazine, then the semiofficial voice of the Republican party, called them. To some extent that charge was true, although Truman was old-fashioned enough not to permit off-color jokes. He liked to call the White House “the great white jail.” Even that came to be viewed with tolerance and a certain amount of amusement; after he spent every day grappling with the difficult issues of government, who could begrudge him the pleasure of seeking out old friends in order to relax? To the degree that he could, he continued as he had before, above all to be true to himself in all friendships.

He neither flattered nor responded to flattery. On the rare occasions he showed his anger, it was not over issues of state but rather because he had personally taken offense. Once he wrote a letter threatening to kick a music critic in the genitalia because the critic had panned a concert by his daughter. Even here he was sure that ordinary people would be on his side. “Now, you wait and see,” he told his angry wife and daughter after they found out about the letter. “Every man in the United States that’s got a daughter will be on my side.” And they were, he added later in an interview with Merle Miller. He did not like people who put on airs—“stuffed shirts” and “fuddy-duddys,” as he called them. He used simple words in his speeches, never “two-dollar words” or “weasel words.” His experiences in the military as an artillery officer made him wary of many generals; he liked his generals modest and thought of such men as MacArthur and Patton as big-brass fancy hats. Much to the annoyance of Dean Acheson, he referred to the State Department people as “striped-pants boys.”

He had virtually no personal income, and he and his family always lived modestly. He knew the value of a dollar and would complain loudly if he thought he had been overcharged, as on the occasion of a breakfast at the famed Peabody Hotel in November 1941: “Had breakfast in the coffee shop downstairs and they charged me fifty-five centers for tomato juice, a little dab of oatmeal and milk and toast. I don’t mind losing one hundred dollars on a hoss race or a poker game with friends, but I do hate to pay fifty-five centers for a quarter breakfast ...” The straightforward simplicity of his style would come to seem marvelously human compared to that of the subsequent inhabitants of the White House, ever more image-conscious and isolated from the public by a growing number of handlers, public relations men, and pollsters.

He was the last American President who had not been to college
and yet he was quite possibly the best-read President of modern times. His unusually bad eyesight (he was as “blind as a mole,” in his own words) had precluded his participation in sports, so as a boy, he had read prodigiously. His broad knowledge of history often surprised his White House aides, a good number of whom had been to elite boarding schools and colleges and were at first inclined to think of themselves as better educated than he.

He was a late bloomer. His early life had been filled with failure, and it was only as a National Guard captain in World War One that he distinguished himself. His entry into the political arena came late in life—he won his first race for a local office at age thirty-eight, and with the help of the Pendergast machine, he narrowly won a Senate seat when he was fifty. As he wrote Bess in 1942, upon the occasion of their twenty-third wedding anniversary, “Thanks to the right life partner for me we’ve come out pretty well. A failure as a farmer, miner, an oil promoter, and a merchant, but finally hit the groove as a public servant—and that due mostly to you and Lady Luck.”

Within the world of Kansas City politics he had a sterling record for honesty. “Three things ruin a man,” he liked to say: “power, money, and women. I never wanted power, I never had any money, and the only woman in my life is up at the house right now.” He certainly never wanted to be President, but thanks to the considerable muscle of the machine, he slipped into Washington as a senator and soon thereafter, somewhat to his own surprise, was given the 1944 vice-presidential nomination. Then a few months after his inauguration, Roosevelt died and he became the accidental President. Unprepared he may have been, but he turned out to have the right qualities: the ability to take considerable pressure, and, if need be, to wave aside momentary political advantage to do what he thought was right in the long run. In a way his early failures helped him later to empathize with his fellow Americans and allowed him to arrive in the White House without the overweening ambition and distorted values that often distinguish those who devote themselves to the singular pursuit of success.

From the start, he realized that he would be competing not so much with his Republican opponents but with the ghost of his predecessor. Roosevelt had revolutionized the presidency with his use of radio; his seductive Fireside Chats had made it seem like he was visiting with ordinary Americans in their own homes. Roosevelt’s voice—warm, friendly, filled with confidence—suited the medium perfectly. Truman, on the other hand, had no skill with radio. His voice—twangy and simple—was disappointing. Not surprisingly, his
most effective venue for communicating with his constituents was the whistle-stop—speaking from the rear platform of a train stopping in small towns. There he could attack the opposition in simple but cutting language, and his audience, knowing he was one of their own, would yell back, “Give ’em hell, Harry.”

His essential color was gray, wrote the famed journalist John Gunther: “bright grayness. Both the clothes and hair were neat and gray. The gray-framed spectacles magnified the gray hazel eyes, but there was no grayness in the mind ...” If his language when he was young was that of a rural Missouri boy, filled with crude references to African-Americans as “niggers,” he went far beyond his predecessor in terms of activism for civil rights; if his letters had once been filled with unkind references to Jews and to New York as a “kike town,” he, more than any other politician in the world, was responsible for the creation of Israel.

Even Churchill was impressed with him, and the manner with which he set out to inform himself and the ease with which he accepted responsibility. “A man of immense determination,” said Churchill upon first meeting him at Potsdam, adding the next day, quite shrewdly, “He has direct methods of speech and a great deal of self-confidence and resolution.” “Straightforward, decisive, simple, entirely honest,” Dean Acheson wrote his son soon after meeting him. There was a certain jauntiness to his walk and his attitude toward life. He was not afflicted by inner doubts. He made his decisions quickly and cleanly by listening to the evidence and the best advice of those around him, and he did not look back. He was not particularly introspective. Politics was the art of the possible: At the poker table, you took the hand you were dealt and you played it as best you could. Then you slept well.

The backlash against his presidency and the vestiges of the New Deal grew more bitter after his election. On his desk he kept a sign that read
THE BUCK STOPS HERE
. In the midst of that difficult period, Truman once reminisced with Arneson Gordon, a State Department expert on disarmament, about how he had handled various crises. Arneson later set down Truman’s thoughts: “He mused about how many ‘bucks’ he had stopped: the abrupt termination of Lend Lease after the war: bad advice, a blooper; the Truman Doctrine, re. Greece and Turkey: good; the Berlin airlift, right again; and the Marshall Plan, a ‘ten strike.’ Over-all, the batting average was pretty good, he thought.” At that point, Arneson noted, the conversation took an interesting turn. “He wondered though whether the decision to reduce drastically the defense budget might have been unwise.
True it had been enthusiastically welcomed by the public and the Congress. But considering the unsettled state of world affairs and especially the uncooperativeness of the Russians, was it prudent? He sighed.” It was a remarkably astute assessment from Truman the amateur historian judging Truman the professional politician.

One thing he understood and demanded was loyalty. He gave it unconditionally to those who served him, and he expected nothing less in return. He admired Dean Acheson from the start for his uncommon abilities, intelligence, and courage. Their unlikely and exceptionally close friendship was forged one night in November 1946, when Truman had returned to Washington during one of the lowest moments in his political career, after the midterm sweep by the Republicans of both houses of Congress. There, alone at the train station, to meet him was Acheson. Shortly after Truman’s inauguration as Vice-President, Tom Pendergast died. By that time, Pendergast was a disgraced, bankrupt man recently let out of prison for income-tax evasion, his once considerable fortune squandered on the horses, his physical strength eroded by illnesses. The one thing that had held back Truman’s career when he had first arrived in Washington—the one taint on him—was the Pendergast connection. But Truman opted to go to the funeral, a clear sign of his determination to put obligation, as he defined it, over popularity. Some five years later when Acheson made his I-shall-not-turn-my-back-on-Alger-Hiss statement, he rushed to apologize to the president. Truman told him about the Pendergast funeral and not to worry. “Dean,” the President said. “Always be shot in front, never [from] behind.”

By the summer of 1949 America had enjoyed a four-year monopoly of the atom bomb. It had been finished too late to use against Germany. Nonetheless, it arrived in time to be a trump card in the growing tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. A few hours before the first test, Truman said to his aides, apropos of his imminent meeting with Stalin at Potsdam in July 1945: “If it explodes—as I think it will—I will certainly have a hammer on these boys.” And midway through the conference, Winston Churchill did indeed notice a change in Truman’s behavior. Subsequently, after Churchill learned of the successful test at Alamogordo, he confided to Harry Stimson, the American secretary of war: “Now I know what happened to Truman yesterday. When he got to the meeting after having read the report, he was a changed man. He told the Russians just where they got off and generally bossed the meeting.”