Truman(27)

Second the Missouri poker players were neither vicious nor over-ambitious. They were a little easy-going. General Vaughan was a typical example. Unlike some of their successors they did not pursue dedicated feuds either amongst themselves or with the rest of official Washington. Above all they did not try to make the President their creature or to cut him off from other advice.

Truman did not stick long to Roosevelt’s Cabinet. By July 1945, he had replaced the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Attorney-General, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Labour, and the Postmaster-General. Only four remained, and of these Stimson went in September and Ickes in the following February. One of the changes had been arranged under Roosevelt, two or three of them were wholly voluntary, and at least one (the removal of Stettinius) was highly desirable. But on balance Truman probably reduced the quality of the Cabinet, while at the same time considerably elevating its importance. He stopped well short of turning it into a collective decision-making body. His vote, following the Lincoln aphorism, counted for more than all the rest put together. Nevertheless he assembled them, in principle at least, twice a week, once in formal session and once at lunch.

Stettinius’s replacement was Byrnes. He was one of Truman’s two most mistaken appointments. (The other, much later, was Louis Johnson, Secretary of Defense, 1949-50). Byrnes was quick-footed, self-confident, politically astute, but at once know-all and ill-informed about foreign affairs. Above all, however, his disadvantage was that he thought he and not Truman ought to be President,3 and so behaved. As a result their relations quickly declined. This neutralized what should have been the big gain of getting someone more able than Stettinius.

Biddle, a distinguished Attorney-General, was replaced by one of his less good assistants, Tom Clark. For the rest, as with Byrnes, Truman leant heavily upon former members of Congress, which Roosevelt had never done. Anderson, the new Secretary of Agriculture, Schwellenbach, the new Secretary of Labour, and Vinson, the new Secretary of the Treasury, were all in this category. Schwellenbach was a near disaster. Vinson was the best, certainly the one Truman most respected. Unfortunately, from the point of view of the quality of the Cabinet, Truman added friendly consideration to respect and appointed Vinson Chief Justice of the Supreme Court when Stone died in the spring of 1946. He was then succeeded by Snyder, Truman’s old St Louis banker friend, who was already in the government, and who made a thoroughly second-rate finance minister.

Little of this either sounds inspiring or gives an adequate picture of the quality of mid-1940s Washington. This is largely because of Roosevelt’s fondness for operating outside structures. Many of the most talented officials whom he bequeathed to Truman were in neither the Cabinet nor the White House staff. They operated from somewhere between the two, and became a feature of the Washington scene which has never been wholly paralleled elsewhere. Hopkins, Harriman, McCloy, Lovett were quintessential figures of this demi-monde. When he could Truman kept them on (Hopkins was dead in nine months but Truman had probably got more hard information about what Roosevelt had done or intended out of him in the first three months than from any more formal source), often gradually drafting them and others into more structured positions. He was also extremely lucky to have General Marshall available, first for a special mission to China, then as Secretary of State after Byrnes, and finally, after a gap, as Secretary of Defense during the Korean War. He, with Dean Acheson, Under-Secretary of State from 1945 to 1947, Secretary of State from 1949 until January 1953, were the twin pillars of Truman’s international reputation.

In the spring and early summer of 1945 all this lay well ahead. Truman floundered. But as is frequently the case in comparable circumstances the nation either did not notice or it decided, after twelve years of Roosevelt and with the initial shock over, that what they would most enjoy was a little presidential floundering. By mid-May Truman’s approval rating in the Gallup poll rose to 87%, three points higher than Roosevelt had ever achieved. It compensated for the frustrations of dealing with Stalin, and indeed with Churchill too. ‘… I was having as much difficulty with Prime Minister Churchill as I was having with Stalin,’ he recorded on May 19th.1

This was broadly the mood in which he set off on July 6th for the Potsdam Conference. He was temporarily popular beyond belief. He had the sense to realize how temporary this was likely to be. He had been fully (although for the first time) informed about the atomic development and knew that there was a good chance that the bomb would be shown to work in the next couple of months. He was willing to be conciliatory with the Russians -much more so than he had been at a Washington meeting with Molotov on April 23rd, which he had handled so roughly as to be in danger of giving the impression of a big shift of policy from Roosevelt. But he was equally prepared to be tough and felt fortified for this by the news about the bomb. He approached the expedition—his first outside the Western hemisphere since 1919 -with distaste and in no over-generous mood. ‘How I hate this trip!’ he wrote in his diary on the first day out in his battle cruiser. ‘But I have to make it—win, lose or draw—and we must win. I’m not working for any interest but the Republic of the United States. I [am] giving nothing away except to save starving people and even then I hope we can only help them to help themselves.’2