Truman(26)

5

THE NEW PRESIDENT


Almost all Truman’s early views about how he should handle the Roosevelt inheritance, at once splendid and frightening, turned out to be wrong.

His initial ideas, I believe, were roughly these. First, his perceived inferiority would be greater than he himself thought it to be. (His real view of Roosevelt stood well short of idolatry; in view of the treatment he had received it would have been a miracle had this not been so.) He would therefore respond by exaggerating his own very considerable modesty. This reflected itself in his early statements to the press: ‘I don’t know whether you fellows ever had a load of hay or a tree fall on you. But last night the house, the stars and all the planets fell on me. If you fellows ever pray, pray for me.’ The trouble with this was that he was in danger of publicly under-valuing himself.

Second, on policy issues, particularly in the, to him, largely hidden fields of strategy and inter-Allied relations, he would discover Roosevelt’s designs and continue to execute them. The trouble with this was that Roosevelt had at the end very few designs. He had always relied heavily on improvisation. This tendency became still greater as he grew more tired, and in any event the circumstances were changing so fast as the strains with Russia increased and the discipline of the single objective of victory was removed.

At the same time Truman believed that he should exploit his few obvious areas of greater strength: notably his natural accessibility, and the fact that (Harding, who hardly counted, apart), he would be the first president from the Congress since McKinley. He symbolized both by going to lunch on Capitol Hill almost as ‘one of the boys’ on his first day in office. The trouble with this was that it was very time consuming, and combined with his self-deprecation looked as though he was putting the presidency into commission. There was more real danger of time loss than of making himself a cipher of the legislature. In domestic policy he turned out to have more battles with the Congress than any president since Andrew Johnson. But his appointment sheets were full of ‘Judge X—to pay respects’ and ‘Representative Y—just to visit’.

This combined with the development of an almost obsessive desire to leave no decision untaken—another area where he believed he could improve upon Roosevelt—meant that he left himself inadequate time for reflection and discussion. It was not that he was ill-briefed. He read his papers meticulously and impressed those around him with the thoroughness with which he mastered facts. But he was so determined to be decisive on the issues of the day, and then to have an untroubled night’s sleep before awakening fresh and early for the separate decisions of the next day, that he was in danger of not fully considering the options, and not seeing one decision’s impact upon another, or indeed its relation with a coherent general policy. A classic early example was his acceptance of a recommendation to cut off Lend-lease within a few days of the end of the war in Europe.

There was also a risk of his losing the advantages of the remarkable quality of many of the people who were assembled in wartime Washington. First he lurched towards continuity by asking all the members of the Roosevelt Cabinet to stay in office. The trouble with this was that it was not where Roosevelt had assembled his most useful talent. He took scant notice of his Cabinet. After Pearl Harbor it rarely met. In accordance with American practice it did not engage in serious collective discussion. And by 1945 the older members were becoming played out. This was true of Frances Perkins at Labor and even of Harold Ickes at the Interior. Stettinius, who as the holder of the most senior post should have been the most important of the newer ones, was a handsome nonentity. Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury since 1934, was in a separate position. He was intellectually vigorous, but the author of a singularly silly plan for the post-war treatment of Germany. Wallace was Wallace. Forrestal, Secretary of the Navy for the past year, had more brio than balance.1 The Cabinet officer with the most authority was probably Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of War since 1940, but as a 78-year-old Republican2 he was certain not to stay long in a post-war Democrat Cabinet.

Truman balanced this temporary obeisance to continuity at Cabinet level by the replacement (with only one senior exception, old Admiral Leahy) of Roosevelt’s staff with his own in the White House. Probably no one would have expected him to have done otherwise, although nearly twenty years later Lyndon Johnson, for all his Texan chips, was to keep far more Kennedy men.

There were far more to keep, and this White House change was not as important in 1945 as it would have been in 1963 or still more so 1985. Truman’s own White House staff was never more than thirteen, compared with the many times that number who served President Johnson in the 1960s and the more than 300 who serve President Reagan today. The biggest growth was under President Nixon. Quality did not however make up for quantity. Truman liked cronies immediately around him, and there was mostly a strong whiff of the second-rate about the immediate entourage. Poker players from Missouri got too many places. For a number of reasons this did not do as much harm as might have been expected. First there were exceptions, most notably Clark Clifford, who although a Missourian arrived by accident as an assistant naval aide, and emerged after a year as an outstanding top staff man, who effectively ran Truman’s White House until 1950.