Truman(35)

He was not much enjoying it himself. Throughout the fifteen months between his return from Potsdam and the mid-term elections such buoyancy as he retained was largely confined to his famous elasticity of step. There was little in his mind. In November 1945, Ickes recorded after a bilateral meeting: ‘Once again he repeated that he had not wanted to be President. He says this to me practically every time that I see him and I wish that he wouldn’t. The state of mind of which that is evidence is not good for him or for the country.’14 Three weeks later Truman told the Gridiron Dinner: ‘Sherman was wrong. I’m telling you I find peace is hell …’3 As a joke this was a little too near to the bone to be wise. As an expression of the President’s mind it was joyful compared with his December 28th letter to his wife after a brief and apparently not very successful Christmas visit to Independence: ‘Well I’m here in the White House, the great white sepulchre of ambitions and reputations. I feel like a last year’s bird nest which is on its second year. Not very often I admit I am not in shape. I think maybe that exasperates you too, as a lot of other things I do and pretend to do exasperate you.’15

In February Harold Smith, the Director of the Budget, wrote of Truman’s expression of ‘various notes of despair about the avalanche of things that were piling up on him. ‘While I did not express despair … I came away … with my own despair, accentuated because of the President’s inability to use staff as yet.’16 This was not a wholly accurate diagnosis. Truman’s problem was at least as much that of choosing good staff as of using them properly. Ickes, on his removal from the Department of the Interior in that same month, delivered a damaging blow when he announced ‘I am against government by crony.’4 This problem began to cure itself during 1946. Some of the cronies departed. Others found their level. And Clark Clifford, moving into a more senior position and well seconded by George Elsey, began to establish some sort of cohesion in the small White House staff.

Inevitably this took some time to pay dividends, and 1946 continued, as it had begun, as a miserable year for Truman. Roosevelt had always aroused plenty of bitter opposition, but it had been balanced by enthusiastic support, and there had never been any serious suggestion that his personality and style were not up to the job. Truman, at this period, had the opposition without the enthusiastic support, and it was precisely his style and character which were most strongly and woundingly criticized. ‘To err is Truman’ was a favourite Republican joke of the time.5 But it was not only Republicans who laughed. The old New Dealers were disenchanted, and the general sophisticated view (and sophisticated opinion is always more important, as a counter to country club and Chamber of Commerce opinion, for Democrats than for Republicans) was that the White House was occupied by a jejune little man who had very little idea what he was doing. There were few who thought that he had the slightest chance of being there after 1948.

Before there was any alleviation he had to suffer at least two further humiliations. In September there was the severance from Wallace. Truman sacked him. This was one of the few popular things he had done for some time. For Wallace, who had so nearly been President of the United States, it was the end of effective power. In 1948 he ran as the Progressive Party candidate for the presidency and started impressively, but in the outcome Truman was able to brush him aside like a fly. Thereafter he had seventeen years of decline, during which he even became disenchanted with most of his own left-wing views. For Wallace it was therefore downhill all the way after 1946. For Truman there were to be a lot of roses. Yet the rupture which set two of Roosevelt’s vice-presidents upon these divergent paths was at the time incomparably worse for Truman than for Wallace.

Truman simply made an ass of himself. Wallace, probably wrong on the issue of how to deal with the Soviet union  , left with dignity and looking as though he had carried a considerable part of Truman’s constituency with him. He was engaged to make a foreign policy speech in Madison Square Garden, New York, the arena in which he had upstaged Truman in 1944, on September 12th. A day or two before he came in and read most of it to the President. Truman either did not listen, or thought that he agreed with it. In any event he approved it. When the text was released during the day of the speech it created a furore. It was manifestly at odds with the foreign policy that Byrnes was pursuing and Truman was supporting. The President was cross-questioned about it at a routine press conference that he was holding that afternoon. He endorsed the speech, and expounded the manifestly absurd proposition that it was in line with Byrnes’s policy.