The Stature of Harry Truman

by HERBERT ELEISTON

1

WELL must we all recall that April day in 1945 when Harry S. Truman made his first address to Congress as our thirtythird President. He spoke in the presence of a world still hushed by the death of his illustrious predecessor. The magical aftereffect of that event lasted for several months. This in itself cast a spell over Mr. Truman. But more than that, he had a feeling of awe and a sense of unworthiness over the twist of fate which precipitated him into the White House. On April 16 he uttered his piece to the legislative branch in jerky words that fell on the ear abrasively. It was a sad performance. Observers of the spectacle, used to the old maestro, turned to one another and said what millions of listening Americans must have said: “What have we done to deserve this?" Even to a schoolboy way below Macaulay’s prodigy, it seemed that this man did not know the score.

This was the Truman phenomenon. It fell to my particular lot to view our Chief Executive alternately with a microscope and a telescope for seven full years. My editorial window was almost opposite 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Either ocularly or in my mind’s eye I came in close contact with the pettiness of the Truman regime. There were the initial comings and goings of Jim Pendergast. And when Mr. Truman had shed the Kansas City gang, others like Pendergast came and went. Intermittently the Maragons and the Gruenwalds (not to forget General Vaughn) and the other fixers and five-percenters got the headlines for many shabby days on end. Their baggage took the form of such things as deep freezers and mink coats. The tone was set. The corner-cutters overflowed the salons of Washington and the lobbies of Congress as well as the corridors of the Executive departments. On another level the New Dealers, their youth and illusions burned up, crowded the trek from the government service to hang up their shingles for influence peddling. And you may be sure the hungry Republicans of the stripe of Bridges and Brewster did not forget theirs at the public trough.

The Romans had a word for it: amicism. The vulgate is cronyism.

And then I would go abroad once in a while and see America spreading like ancient Rome over the face of the world. Here the telescope came into use. I saw Truman from afar against a backdrop of the roadblocks which he was erecting against the Muscovite drive to make a Cossack Europe and the dams which he was putting up against the surge of the Slav into the Persian Gulf and the Aegean and the Mediterranean. My thrill at the sight of the U.S.S. Houston riding at anchor in the roads of Trieste with guns pointed at the City Hall brought Trevelyan to mind. Philip II, Louis XIV, Napoleon, the Pan-Germans— all their “grand schemes of war and diplomacy depended on the battleships of England tossing far out at sea.”Similarly, the mid-century machinations of Stalin were running up against enginery directed to the spot by “the little guy with the big job” in the White House. For in him reposed the whole Executive authority of that country of ours which alone could, and did, arrest aggression in its tracks.

In memory of this stance Truman did not lend himself so readily to examination with the microscope when one returned to Washington.

In any case the excesses of Truman’s Administration, relatively speaking, were peanuts. As anybody who has read the new life of Bonar Law will testify, other countries in the free world harbor corrupt politics, and America’s distinction is that the corruption is ferreted out by newspaper and congressional sleuths (in both houses of Congress working separately) and displayed from the housetops.

Elihu Root bespoke the “long look” at presidencies. It was sound historical advice, and the practice needs particularly to be followed in the case of Harry S. Truman, for, in spite of his juxtaposition to our times, one may say there can be few periods in history of more momentous consequence to mankind than his presidency.

2

THE Truman memoirs start out with a volume called “The Year of Decisions,” which is that annus terribilis 1945. However, even this first volume gives some “hints and indirections” from the handling of the events of a packed twelve months. A limit must be attached even to such a limitation. You may think I am overgenerous, but I submit it is unfair to Harry S. Truman to think of him in the full panoply and command of the presidency during the initial decisions up to the Potsdam conference in mid-1945.

Innumerable were the drafts drawn on the future when Franklin D. Roosevelt died. Mr. Truman cashed them all, or virtually all —the Yalta pledges, the arrangements made at Teheran and Quebec and by the European Advisory Commission, the entry of Russia into the war in the Pacific, the launching of the atomic bomb, the Nuremberg trials. On top of them, Mr. Truman inherited F.D.R.’s overtrustfulness of the Soviet Union and his umpire notions of the American role, together with faulty military staff work about the Pacific and timid generalship at war’s close.

That Truman could have reversed some of these positions was possible. But only a superman would have had the temerity to do that. For instance, the endorsement of the unconditional surrender formula — that blunder worse than a crime — was the most noisily applauded part of Truman’s first address to Congress. In addition, he had a sense of obligation to the written word, though he took for granted the military necessity advanced in behalf of persuading Russia to tear up her noutrality agreement with Japan.

Of course, in these early days he did not regard every pledge as sacred writ. F.D.R. felt, if anything, more anti-Japanese than anti-German — after all, the Delanos were in the China trade and used, he was wont to recall, to shoot tigers near Amoy; and you need no further warrant than Sinophilia in the family for Japanophobia. Would F.D.R. have spared the Mikado, the god-king whence cometh all life for the average Japanese? Most probably not. Not only because of F.D.R.’s background, but also because hanging the Mikado was the “liberal ” line, it is doubtful whether F.D.R. would have abandoned the arraignment or at least the removal of Japan’s ruling dynasty. Nevertheless Mr. Truman did.

In other respects of the peacemaking he filled in the dotted line of the handiwork which had already been done for him — the handiwork which created huge vacuums of power in Asia and Furope, and in particular presented the Bismarckian keys of Europe to the burglarious Stalin.

The authentic Truman, I think, peeped out at Potsdam in his proposal to Europeanize the inland waterways of Europe. It was a tentative gesture. Stalin would have none of it, though Air. Truman returned to the point a couple of times. One gets the impression he would have kept it up but for his confounded anxiety a VAmericain to wind up t lie mammoth map-making and get home to his chores. Nevertheless the preoccupation, tangential though it was, was a sign, to be realized in later years in the Truman Doctrine and Point Four, that Truman had “the rapture of the forward view.” In addition to his Dantonesque boldness in meeting the foe, he had the const motive mind which is rare in a man of action. In this respect I think of him as corresponding in some measure to Alexander I when that half-crazed monarch, as Ferrero shows, led the crusade to re-establish the European order after Napoleon had smashed it to smithereens. If only there had been a shadow of a Talleyrand at Truman’s elbow!

The strange paradox is that the memoirs give no glimpse at all of Mr. Truman’s thinking processes. He acted, and here he chronicles. But did this Godfearing man, for instance, commune with his Maker when he let loose the atomic bomb? He doesn’t say. He simply dashed off a letter of chitchat to bis mamma. This lack of revelation, these trivia, all help to make fascinating grist for the writer of history — meaning, if we accept Emerson’s definition, biography.

Still one would like to read something of the manner in which Truman pondered and the manner in which he indulged in retrospection. Was he only a man of action ? No. He read avidly: Plutarch, the lives of the Presidents, the Federalist papers, much modern history, and, I should guess, Ferrero. Here and there, there is a fugitive bit of cogitation. For instance, Truman smelled a rat when the wily Stalin (whose greatness is here to behold) urged him to write a letter asking Russia to fight Japan alongside America. However, he does not add that he fell into what later proved to be a trap. Though Truman did not put the matter as bluntly as Stalin wished, a point of Truman’s communication at Potsdam to Stalin asking for Russian participation was that Articles 103 and 106 of the proposed Charter of the United Nations constituted inter alia a legal basis for the Soviet Union to violate its neutrality pact with Japan!

Nevertheless, few Presidents learned the score and to be themselves more quickly than Mr. Truman. A tribute both to his native abilities and to his book larnin’! The man from Missouri sets out the lessons he had drawn as a guide to action in a remarkable letter to Secretary Byrnes on January 5, 1946: —

I do not think we should Id play compromise any longer. We should refuse to recognize Rumania and Bulgaria until they comply with our requirements; we should let our position on Iran be known in no uncertain terms and we should continue to insist on internationalization of the Kiel Canal, the RhineDanube waterway and the Black Sea Straits and we should maintain complete control of Japan and the Pacific. We should rehabilitate China and create a strong central government there. We should do the same for Korea. Then we should insist on the return of our ships from Russia and force a settlement of the Lend-Lease obligations of Russia. I am tired of babying the Russians.

Muted bugle of the cold war! You might say that the damage had already been done. That is true enough. But after Russia had shown her aggressive hand, the President moved swiftly to stop the rot, eventually building up at home as well as abroad the positions of strength needed to re-establish a balance of power.

For the American posture in the titanic trial of strength with the Communist coalition required more than men under arms. It required the dynamic and stable management of an economy in the course of dismantlement and reconversion after the most tremendous convulsion in our history. It required social reform, especially in the matter of racial discrimination. It required moral example.

In all these respects, except perhaps moral example, Mr. Truman exhibited skill in leadership, though the bubble of inflation which marred the miracle of economic readjustment was due in part to Truman’s leaning too much on Secretary Snyder and too little on the Federal Reserve’s Marriner S. Eccles. A practicing politician himself, he knew how to handle politicians. He turned out to be a public personality marked by plain and idiomatic talk and by a human pugnacity. A much better administrator than F.D.R., he made a team out of his Administration, though he had his own share of intramural crises in personnel.

I happen to disagree with Truman’s definition of presidential leadership as making others do what they don’t want to do. “ When you cease to contradict me,” said Henry IV, “I shall believe you have ceased to love me.” Seward was more difficult and independent than Mr. Byrnes — far more. Ickes was an asset that Henry IV would have treasured. Still the sprawling mechanism in the American capital did not creak under the man who would be boss as it used to creak in F.D.R.’s time. With Truman’s leadership a body of interventions called the Fair Deal was spread upon the statute books. Most of them were essential to the domestic requirements of a world’s leader at a turning point in history. The Employment Act and the Atomic Energy Act were two of the most significant pieces of legislation in the annals of the Republic.

Greatness is all that we are not —so says the great Burkhardt. Whence then Truman? He was us — yet he had what Burkhardt calls “relative greatness.” Oh, the mystery of greatness! Out of office Mr. Truman has become, by a paradox, a rabble-rousing demagogue over issues which he himself transformed as our thirty-third President. If Harry S. Truman was not to the manner of greatness born, we must take refuge by way of explanation in the eternal laws of history, in the conjuncture of men and opportunity, in the evocation of the men of the moment out of our Constitution and our institutions. Take your choice. Whatever the key to the riddle, Truman was the man without whom the world would be incomplete, because certain great achievements became possible only through him. A good man he was, a strong Chief Executive he turned out to be. I feel his stature as our President is already moving ahead of the illustrious F.D.R.’s.