All this must be seen against the background of the death, starvation and disease on an unprecedented scale, not in America, but over much of Europe and Asia, which was Truman’s inheritance as President, and which he had just observed in Germany. Truman’s state of mind was not perhaps of central practical importance. The bomb was dropped. The war was won. Truman was back in Washington after five weeks. He had survived his first -and last—international conference. His popularity was still high. But his honeymoon was over. The hard slog of routine presidential life was beginning.
6
TRUMAN BATTERED
September 1945 to November 1946 was the nadir of Truman’s presidency. Most things went wrong. His Gallup poll rating achieved a spectacular decline from 87% to 32%, and this sustained plunge in the popularity of himself and his administration culminated in a crushing Democratic defeat in the mid-term Congressional elections. The Republicans gained control of both chambers for the first time since 1928. They were 246 to 188 in the House and they edged ahead by 51 to 45 in the Senate.
All this was bad enough, although popularity, except crucially in November 1948, was rarely the hall-mark of the Truman achievement. What made it worse, however, was that during this early period a large proportion of the misfortunes were his own fault. It was rarely a case of statesmanlike decisions, deliberately taken and courageously sustained, being too longsighted for the short-term whims of a war-weary electorate. Much more was it a question of an administration ill at ease with itself, both at Cabinet and at White House staff level, allowing an uncertain president to stagger from one ill-prepared decision to another.
The Cabinet was inexperienced after the changes of the summer of 1945. It became more so with the retirement of Stimson that September, the resignation of Ickes in February 1946, the promotion of Vinson in April, and the sacking of Wallace in September. Thereafter, of Roosevelt’s Cabinet officers, only Forrestal remained, and he knew little of domestic politics. Byrnes was not inexperienced, but his relationship with Truman never recovered from his failure to keep the President informed of the developments at the long Moscow meeting of foreign ministers in December 1945. Thereafter he was always operating on borrowed time, with Truman anxious to replace him with Marshall as soon as was propitious after the completion of the General’s China mission. Byrnes privately submitted his resignation, ostensibly on medical grounds, on April 16th, 1946, and on May 9th Marshall in Shanghai agreed, through the agency of Eisenhower, to become Secretary of State when the President wished. Although Byrnes had set a date of July 1st, the changeover was allowed to drag on, as was Marshall’s mission, until early 1947.
It would have been much better for the change to have been made much more quickly after Truman lost confidence in Byrnes. In a curious way the damage was exacerbated by the fact that there was no consistent policy difference between President and Secretary of State. They were both in mid-stream without a paddle. They had left the bank of belief in the unity of the wartime alliance, but neither had reached the other bank of wishing to create a new Western alliance, with Britain, basically enfeebled by the war but undevastated and with a continuity of political régime even if not of government, inevitably the initial second partner. Truman had taken Churchill to Fulton, Missouri, in March and had presided benevolently over the ‘iron curtain’ speech with its remedy of an Anglo-American partnership. A few days later, however, he had distanced himself from it, and in September he swallowed without difficulty the passage in Henry Wallace’s Madison Square Garden speech which said: ‘I am neither anti-British nor pro-British—neither anti-Russian nor pro-Russian.’ Nonetheless he had initially thought Byrnes too soft with the Russians, and then perhaps too hard. Throughout the summer of 1946 the President was playing with the idea of giving them a substantial loan. The fact of the matter was that Truman and Byrnes had become too suspicious of each other ever to be in exactly the same ideological place at the same time.1 The mutual distrust compounded what would in any event have been a uniquely difficult period of adjustment for American foreign policy.
The handling of nuclear policy was almost equally uncertain. During the war Roosevelt had made a conscious decision not to share atomic secrets with the Russians. Truman’s early post-war position was in favour of such sharing in exchange for a mutual agreement to stop further development and undertake that none of the three main powers (this was in order to include Britain) would use the bomb without the agreement of the other two. Stimson’s final act as Secretary of War was to bring a memorandum advocating such a course before a cabinet meeting on September 21st. This led to an animated two-hour discussion and a fairly even split. Stimson was supported by Acheson (in Byrnes’s absence), Wallace, Schwellenbach and Hannegan. Most of the new Truman nominees—Vinson, Clark and Anderson—argued the other way. So, with particular virulence, did Forrestal. What was more to the point was that Truman regarded himself as firmly committed to the Stimson side. ‘Anyway I’ll have to make a decision’, he wrote to his wife after describing the line-up, ‘and the Ayes will have it even if I’m the only Aye. It is probably the most momentous one I will make.’1