Truman(37)

In the meantime, however, the morale around the stockade was fairly bad. On the following day such an intelligent Democratic senator as William Fulbright made the extraordinary suggestion that the President should appoint Vandenberg Secretary of State, and then resign, which in the absence of a vice-president and with the constitution as it was then was, would make Vandenberg president. A Republican chief executive could speak to a Republican legislature. Mrs Roosevelt, who perhaps had her own reasons for always being remarkably friendly and encouraging towards Truman, if occasionally a little chiding, wrote more perceptively that Truman might do better with a Republican than with a disloyal Democratic Congress.

Truman thought the same. In any event he was determind to behave like a liberated man. I do not believe that at that stage he had any more faith in his chance of re-election than did most of his fellow citizens. But he was resolved to make the best he could of his remaining time. ‘From now on I’m going to do as I please and let ‘em all go to hell,’ he wrote to his mother and sister on November 18th. ‘At least for two years they can do nothing to me and after that it doesn’t matter.’19

He started with a good holiday in the surprising location of the submarine base at Key West, Florida. He handled John L. Lewis’s renewed coal strike with much more sureness of touch than he had shown in the spring, and achieved his capitulation on December 7th. He rose in the polls and got his best press for a long time past. His Christmas holiday in Independence was even briefer than in the previous year, but his spirits were higher, and he approached 1947 with the desperate self-confidence of a man who felt that things had been so bad that they could not easily be worse.





7

TRUMAN RESURGENT


Truman began the hinge year of 1947 on the presidential yacht Williamsburg, steaming up the Potomac. He had been for a short New Year’s Eve cruise with his staff. He got back to the White House at 8.45 a.m., and soon afterwards telephoned his wife and daughter in Independence. He then recorded: ‘Never was so lonesome in my life. So I decided to call the Cabinet1 and ex-Cabinet officers.’ The ‘lonesomeness’, a not infrequent complaint, raises the question of why such an uxorious couple as the Trumans chose to spend so much time apart. The President did not have to spend short–and sometimes less short—holidays on masculine boat trips. Mrs Truman did not have to spend several months a year in Independence.2

The telephoning however appears to have been a great success, so much so that Truman went on from present and former Secretaries to embrace by electric wire General Eisenhower, Senator Vandenberg, Republican majority leader in the Senate, and even Congressman Martin, the new Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives. At that stage he was not confronting or denouncing the Eightieth Congress.

Truman’s most important companion for 1947, and the one whom he would probably most like to have greeted on that New Year’s Day, was not available. General of the Army George C. Marshall had recently moved with the Chinese Nationalist government 1500 miles down the Yangtse from the gorges of Chungking to the plains of Nanking. The change had made him somewhat more accessible, but not sufficiently so for the Bell Telephone Company, brilliant though its performance appeared to Europeans in the 1940s and 50s, to be able to reach him. His mission to this doomed government, almost the only failure of his life, but a failure which was neither his fault nor a significant tarnish of his reputation, came to an end five days later. Fifteen days after that he was sworn in as Secretary of State. He held the senior cabinet office for almost exactly two years. Then ill-health forced him to resign and be replaced by Acheson. Twenty months later, recovered, reluctant but as always loyal in accepting assignments, he came back as Secretary of Defense for one year. He and Acheson between them were crucial to the international success of Truman’s presidency. Yet it would be quite wrong to see them as crutches supporting a lame man. Acheson more articulately, but both in their differing ways, regarded their commitment and achievement as stemming essentially from their regard for Truman’s leadership and character. As the one was as different from the other as each was from Truman it was a remarkable triangle of disparate respect. It did a great deal to make the Western world of the past four decades. And no period was more crucial to this artefact than the two years of Marshall’s tenure of the State Department.

This said, Marshall’s quality is not easy fully to comprehend for those who did not know him. He had a high sense of duty, exceptional natural authority, steadiness of judgment, and power of decision. This formidable combination of attributes was enough to make him a great man. But what is more surprising is that the reserve, self-sufficiency and air of impeccability which went with them allowed him also to be likeable. He was always controlled. He never misbehaved. He always spoke in a low, quiet tone to which everyone listened. He always arrived and left every gathering at precisely the time that he intended to. He accepted the few disappointments of his life, most notably Roosevelt’s decision to keep him as Chief-of-Staff rather than to allow him instead of Eisenhower to command ‘Overlord’, without remonstrance. He also accepted calmly the upset of private plans which were involved in his several (apparently reluctantly accepted) recalls to public duty. He never appears to have lost his temper. ‘I have no feelings,’ he told Dean Acheson, ‘except those I reserve for Mrs Marshall.’