Truman(2)

After the oath-taking ceremony in the White House he held a short, shocked Cabinet meeting, hurriedly asked everyone to stay in their posts, had a brief word with the Secretary of War, Stimson, who told him in the broadest terms about the atomic bomb project (he had, in fact, heard about it in even vaguer terms while he was vice-president, and then not from Roosevelt but from Byrnes) and then went home to his modest apartment on Connecticut Avenue. ‘My wife and daughter and mother-in-law were at the apartment of our next door neighbor … They had a turkey dinner and they gave us something to eat. I had not had anything to eat since noon.’ Then he telephoned his mother in Grandview, Missouri. Then he went to bed and to sleep, and ‘did not worry any more.’1

The next morning he was up a little later than usual—at 6.30 -breakfasted with a ‘crony’,3 and was then driven to the White House, giving a lift to a rather derelict political reporter on the way. He had a series of mostly desultory meetings in the morning, and then went to the Capitol, for lunch with about 15 senators and congressmen. This, his diary suggests, he regarded as his most important meeting of the day, more so than briefing meetings with the Secretary of State and the Chiefs of Staff, or than exchanges of telegrams with Stalin. He also approved public arrangements for Roosevelt’s funeral and made some private dispositions for his own living. These last were done so as to cause the minimum inconvenience, both to his neighbours, who in those days had not much noticed a vice-president but did not fancy the security upheaval of a president living alongside them, and to Mrs Roosevelt. He would remove his family to the subsidiary official residence of Blair House within a few days, but not to the White House for nearly a month. And, extraordinarily, all on that first day, he twice saw ‘just to visit’ a gentleman called Mr Duke Shoop, of the Kansas City Star.

So, one might have thought, the imperial presidency came to an end, within a few years of its beginning. Truman trailed none of Roosevelt’s clouds of glory. He had none of his style, none of his prestige, none of his informal, patrician grandeur. A failed Missouri haberdasher had taken over from a Dutchess County country gentleman. Main Street had replaced the Hudson Valley. But the imperial presidency flowered with the change. Indeed in an important sense it developed only under Truman. Roosevelt had been the leader of the free world at war, when, after Pearl Harbor, the commitment of America was relatively easy to sustain, and the acceptance of its leadership automatic. Truman achieved the more difficult feat of being the leader of the free world at peace, or something fairly near to peace. He was the first president to preside over the Pax Americana. It was not immediately apparent that this would be so. There was considerable early faltering. But once he had got into his stride, his capacity for informal decision taking and for doing what he regarded as right, without regard to the personal consequence, became remarkable. ‘…his ego never came between him and his job,’ Dean Acheson wrote. Acheson firmly believed that he was a better president than Roosevelt; but Acheson, for his own reasons, neither liked nor admired Roosevelt.

Truman did admire him, though he was instinctively very critical of the prominent. Of his successors in one form or another, he despised Nixon, was unforgiving of Eisenhower for his treatment of General Marshall, thought Stevenson effete, and believed that Kennedy’s nomination, to which he was less entitled than Lyndon Johnson, had been bought for him by his father. But he admired Roosevelt as a great leader who was also a consummate politician. He tried to follow in his path without copying him. He would sometimes mock his grand voice and Harvard accent, and it is doubtful how much he liked him. But he was iron in his determination never to complain about the scant notice which Roosevelt had taken of him, and he had little of the resentment against the Eastern sophistication of his predecessor’s White House which devoured Lyndon Johnson. ‘I see red every time [the sabotage] press starts a ghoulish attack on the President (I can never think of anyone as the President but Mr Roosevelt)’ he was writing, admittedly to Eleanor Roosevelt, nearly six months after he had taken office.

Truman was in some ways the superior of Roosevelt. He did not have his style, his resonance, his confidence, his occasional sweep of innovative imagination, or his tolerance and understanding of diverse human nature. But he was less vain, less devious and better to work for. He was more decisive, and quite apart from Roosevelt’s physical disability, he had more sustained energy than the wartime Roosevelt. He could always be up at 6.00 or 6.30 in the morning and be consistently fresh and on the job until however late was required. He was mostly better briefed, and not only in an immediate and superficial sense. He was at least as well read in history and biography as was Roosevelt. He was steeped in the history of the Republic and particularly of the presidency, but he was also a considerable expert on the lives of the Roman emperors and of almost every great military commander in the history of the world. Yet his knowledge sat less easily on his shoulders. Mr Merle Miller, who published a so-called ‘oral biography’ of Truman after the death of his subject, made an interesting comment: