Harry Truman (61 page)

General Bradley asked: “Could the 2nd or 3rd Division be made available to be sent over to Europe by January?”

“Yes,” General MacArthur said. “. . . I hope to get the Eighth Army back by Christmas.”

General MacArthur oozed optimism and goodwill. He urged Dad to proclaim a Truman Doctrine for the Far East, and told reporters, “No commander in the history of war has had more complete and admirable support from the agencies in Washington than I have during the Korean operation.”

My father gave the General the Blum’s candy for Mrs. MacArthur, they shook hands, and both climbed aboard their planes and headed back to work. In San Francisco the following day, Dad called the conference “very satisfactory.” In a speech at the San Francisco Opera House, he said that he talked to General MacArthur to make it perfectly clear . . . that there is complete unity in the aims and conduct of our foreign policy. . . . I want Wake Island to be a symbol of our unity of purpose for world peace. I want to see world peace from Wake Island west all the way around and back again. The only victory we seek is the victory of peace.

He called on the Soviet Union and its satellites to join in the search for peace by living up to the principles of the United Nations Charter.

Meanwhile, in Korea, alarming things began to happen. On October 26, a Chinese prisoner was captured. On October 30, sixteen Chinese were captured near Hamhung and they told an interpreter they had crossed the Yalu River on a train on October 16 - the day after the Wake Island conference where General MacArthur had dismissed the possibility of Chinese intervention. On November 1, the 8th Cavalry Regiment was attacked by masses of Chinese after receiving fire from mortars and Russian Katusha rockets. Fighting continued all night; the following day, when the regiment tried to retreat, they found more Chinese blocking the road. The regiment all but disintegrated in the chaotic fighting that ensued. Men fled into the hills and found their way south in small units. One battalion was trapped and almost completely annihilated. General Walton Walker, commander of the Eighth Army, sent a telegram to Tokyo describing “An ambush and surprise attack by fresh well-organized and well-trained units, some of which were Chinese Communist forces.”

The only response from Tokyo was an order to resume advancing.

Absorbed by the drama in Korea - and deeply concerned by the appearance of Chinese soldiers - my father paid little attention to newspaper stories reporting trouble in Puerto Rico. On October 29, fighting and shooting broke out in San Juan. The troublemakers were the tiny Independence party which numbered approximately 1,500. They had attempted to seize the government by armed force, but the insurrection - if it even deserved that word - was swiftly suppressed. It never occurred to Dad or to anyone around him that this outburst of violence would soon reach all the way to Washington.

For one thing, Harry S. Truman was very popular in Puerto Rico. On October 16, 1945, he had told Congress, “It is now time, in my opinion, to ascertain from the people of Puerto Rico their wishes as to the ultimate status which they prefer and within such limits as may be determined by Congress to grant to them the kind of government they desire.” Dad did not exclude the possibility of complete independence. On February 20, 1948, during a visit to San Juan, he said: “The Puerto Rican people should have the right to determine for themselves Puerto Rico’s political relationship to the United States.” Thanks to his urging, Congress passed laws which permitted Puerto Ricans to elect their own governor and other executive officers and create a constitution which gave the people of Puerto Rico control over their local affairs.

This did not satisfy fanatics of the Independence party. Overwhelmed at the polls by Muñoz Marin’s Popular Democratic Party, which favored the commonwealth status for the island, and the Statehood party which wanted Puerto Rico to become the forty-ninth state, the
Indepentistas
preached hatred of the
Yanquis
and called for violent revolution.

On October 31, two members of this party, Oscar Collazo and Girsel Torresola, came to Washington, D.C. The following morning, they took a tour of the city and learned, apparently for the first time, that my father was not in the White House but in Blair House. Both were armed. After lunch, they went back to their hotel, and Torresola gave Collazo a lesson in how to use a gun. Dad, meanwhile, had returned from a busy morning at the White House to lunch at Blair House with Mother and Grandmother Wallace. He then went upstairs to take his usual afternoon nap.

Ever since we had moved into Blair House, the Secret Service had worried about its exposed position. Fronting right on the street, it created nightmarish security problems. They did their best with a bad situation, stationing guards in booths at the west and east ends of the house. Secret Service men were stationed inside the house, and a White House policeman was always on the steps leading up to the front door.

At about two o’clock on the afternoon of November 1, Torresola and Collazo approached Blair House from opposite directions, Torresola from the west, Collazo from the east. They planned to meet at the house steps and charge inside together. When Collazo was about eight feet from the steps, he whipped out his gun and began firing at Private Donald T. Birdzell, who was stationed on the steps. The pistol misfired on the first shot, but the second pull of the trigger hit Private Birdzell in the right leg. He staggered into the street, drawing his gun. Collazo bolted for the front door, which was wide open. Only a screen door with a light latch on it was between him and the interior of the house. But the guards in the east booth were, thank God, on the alert, and their shots cut Collazo down on the second step. From the west booth, Private Leslie Coffelt fired another shot as Collazo tried to rise, and he toppled face down on the sidewalk.

A moment before he fired, Private Coffelt was struck in the chest and abdomen by two bullets from Torresola’s gun. Crouched in the hedge in front of Blair House, Torresola began blazing away at everyone. Another shot struck Private Birdzell in the left knee, toppling him to the street. Private Coffelt, in spite of his mortal wounds, managed to fire one more shot. The bullet struck Torresola in the head, killing him on the spot.

In three minutes, twenty-seven shots were fired. Upstairs in the front bedrooms, Dad and Mother were dressing to attend the dedication of a statue of Field Marshal Sir John Dill, the British member of the World War II Combined Chiefs of Staff. Mother, hearing the noise, strolled to the window and saw Private Birdzell lying in the street, blood streaming from his shattered leg. “Harry,” she gasped, “someone’s shooting our policemen.” My father rushed to the window while gunfire was still being exchanged with Torresola. A Secret Service agent looked up, saw him, and shouted: “Get back! Get back!”

Dad obeyed with alacrity.

Washington was swept by panicky rumors that the President and seven Secret Service men were dead. Dad remained perfectly calm and departed on schedule for the dedication of Field Marshal Dill’s statue in Arlington Cemetery. “A President has to expect these things,” he said.

Those words may be true enough, but a President’s daughter does not expect such things. I was scheduled to sing that night in Portland, Oregon. One firm rule I always followed on tour was seclusion on the day I sang. This practice was not my invention. Every concert singer shuts out all distractions and uses his or her voice as little as possible for ten or twelve hours before facing an audience. I spent that day following this routine, going over my program with my accompanist, having a light lunch of soup and toast and lying down after it, mentally rehearsing the phrasing of my selections. I spent the rest of the afternoon reading a book. I avoided the radio because I did not want to be distracted by music other than what I was planning to sing - or by more bad news from Korea. Toward the end of the afternoon. I got a phone call from Mother. She had decided it would be better if I didn’t hear about the assassination attempt before I sang that night. “I just wanted you to know that everyone is all right,” she said.

“Why shouldn’t everyone be all right?” I asked, immediately alarmed. “Is there anything wrong with Dad?”

“He’s fine. He’s perfectly fine,” Mother said.

I hung up with an uneasy feeling
something
was wrong. I don’t blame Mother for trying to keep the news from me. Fortunately, Reathel Odum and my manager talked it over and decided it would be a mistake to let me go to the concert hall without knowing the truth. If a local reporter started questioning me, minutes before I stepped on the stage, the shock would inevitably have a devastating effect on my singing. Not without some trepidation, they told me the news and showed me the afternoon papers. As soon as I found out Dad was all right, I was quite calm. But the thought of someone trying to kill him made me uneasy for days.

I learned in the course of my research for this book that there had been other attempts on Dad’s life, which he never mentioned to me. One of the most serious - at least it was so regarded by the Secret Service - was a warning they received from the mayor of a large city. His police had received a tip someone would try to kill Dad with a high-powered rifle as he crossed the field at the Army-Navy football game. It is customary for the President to sit on the Army side of the field during one half and on the Navy side of the field during the other half. The Secret Service watches the White House mail closely, and they can often relate such a warning to other crank threats which have not been carried out and can, therefore, to some extent at least, be disregarded. But this one was obviously from a lone wolf - the most dangerous kind. Dad insisted he was going to walk across the field, come what may. So the Secret Service men could only double their usual precautions. They had men stationed at every conceivable point throughout the stadium where a rifleman might position himself. Dad strode across the field, smiling and waving to the crowd, unbothered by the incident. Surely the Secret Service men held their breath until he was safely seated on the other side of the field.

In the summer of 1947, the so-called Stern gang of Palestine terrorists tried to assassinate Dad by mail. A number of cream-colored envelopes, about eight by six inches, arrived in the White House, addressed to the President and various members of the staff. Inside them was a smaller envelope marked “Private and Confidential.” Inside that second envelope was powdered gelignite, a pencil battery and a detonator rigged to explode the gelignite when the envelope was opened. Fortunately, the White House mail room was alert to the possibility such letters might arrive. The previous June, at least eight were sent to British government officials, including Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and former Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. The British police exploded one of these experimentally and said it could kill, or at the very least maim, anyone unlucky enough to open it. The mail room turned the letters over to the Secret Service, and they were defused by their bomb experts.

Let us return to that equally painful subject, the war in Korea. Throughout the last days of October and the first days of November, the situation continued to slide toward disaster. Other American units began reporting contact with the Chinese. There were obviously large numbers of them already in action. On November 6, the day before the 1950 elections, General MacArthur issued a demand to bomb the Yalu River bridges. Men and material were pouring across them, and he said, “This movement not only jeopardizes but threatens the ultimate destruction of the forces under my command.” With great reluctance, Dad gave him permission to destroy the Korean end of the bridges. But General Bradley pointed out to my father that within fifteen to twenty days the Yalu would be frozen, and the bombardment, so frantically insisted upon by General MacArthur, was hardly worth the risk of bombs dropping in Chinese or Soviet territory. The following day General MacArthur reported enemy planes were engaging in hit-and-run raids across the Yalu and demanded the right to pursue them into their “sanctuary.” Panic reigned in the UN until my father categorically rejected this request, which could only have widened the war. General MacArthur did not seem to realize our planes were flying from privileged sanctuaries in Japan which could have been attacked by Russian or Chinese aircraft if we gave them the pretext by bombing targets in Manchuria.

The Election Day timing of these remarks, and General MacArthur’s subsequent actions, made Dad and many members of his staff wonder if their intention was not largely political. They cost the Democrats votes in the election - a lot of votes. The Senate majority leader, Scott Lucas, lost in Illinois. Senator Francis Myers, the Democratic whip, lost in Pennsylvania, and Millard Tydings lost in Maryland in one of the most scurrilous campaigns in American history. The really evil genius in that election was Joe McCarthy and his aides, who circulated faked pictures purporting to show Senator Tydings conversing with Earl Browder, head of the Communist party. It was a triumph of hatred and of fear.

After sounding the alarm about Chinese intervention in the gravest possible terms, General MacArthur now did a complete flip-flop. He decided he could resume his advance to the Yalu. The Joint Chiefs of Staff nervously asked him to remember he was under orders to use only Republic of Korea troops in these northern provinces. General MacArthur replied he was using Americans for the advance but would withdraw them as soon as he had cleared the area. This was a definite act of disobedience. But the Joint Chiefs were far more worried about MacArthur’s appalling strategy. He had divided his army into two parts, sending one up the eastern side of Korea, the other up the west, separated by a massive mountain barrier that made liaison impossible. He called it “a general offensive” to “win the war” and predicted the troops “will eat Christmas dinner at home.” In one communiqué, he described his advance as “a massive compression envelopment.” In another report, he called it “the giant U.N. pincer.”

During these fateful weeks, my father did not receive the kind of support and advice he deserved, either from the Joint Chiefs or from the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense. Dean Acheson admits as much in his memoirs. General Matthew Ridgway revealed, a few years ago, the kind of atmosphere that prevailed in the Pentagon. He told of sitting through hours-long discussions in the Joint Chiefs War Room reviewing the alarming situation in Korea. Everyone feared MacArthur was plunging toward disaster, but no one had the courage to speak out. Finally, General Ridgway, who was not a member of the Joint Chiefs and therefore without a vote, asked for permission to speak. He declared they owed it “to the men in the field and to the God to whom we must answer for those men’s lives to stop talking and to act.” The only answer he received was silence.