On November 12th 1947, Truman told Forrestal that ‘he would be delighted not to run again if it were not for a sense of duty which compelled him to do so.’9 In other words he had crossed his Rubicon. Duty would make him run. But his reluctance was sincere. He talked of the intolerably constrictive effect which the presidency had upon the life of his daughter and of the limited satisfaction which he derived from it.
As that winter turned into the spring of 1948 Truman’s political mood evolved further. By March or April he was determined to fight and if possible to win. It was 1940 writ large. In part this was reaction against Eisenhower, and well before McCarthyism. It was one thing for him to think of handing over the baton to Eisenhower. It was another for others to promote Eisenhower when Truman had already decided that the General had no stomach for a political fight. Yet this is precisely what happened. The whole Roosevelt clan (with the crucial exception of Eleanor who was tempted, but continued to treat Truman as well as ever) and many of their associates too, were seized with a ‘draft Eisenhower’ craze in the early months of 1948. Truman was furious. He was not going to be dumped for an allegedly non-political general who had rejected his own overtures. Subsequently he dragged up Eisenhower’s relationship with his wartime English driver, Mrs Summersby, and his 1945 letter to General Marshall, saying that he wanted to be relieved of his duty, divorce his wife and marry Mrs Summersby, as a reason why he could not support Eisenhower for president.10 This was very much ex post. As Truman knew of the Eisenhower-Marshall correspondence later there seems little reason why he should not have known before 1947. Indeed it would have been more appropriate to disclose it to him as Commander-in-Chief, while both the generals were serving officers, than when they subsequently became political figures of differing affiliation.11 While he was not vain, Truman could occasionally take deep and unforgiving offence if he thought that someone combined excessive self-regard with an attempt to put themselves on a higher moral plane than himself. A curious selection of people fell into this category. Robert Oppenheimer and Adlai Stevenson12, as well as Eisenhower are amongst their number.
Nevertheless it remains the case that throughout 1947 Truman was, for a president, unusually unconcerned with electoral considerations. This did not mean that he was indifferent to politics. Even when he thought that he might voluntarily go out in 1949, he wanted to do so with 3¾ years of effective presidency behind him. He therefore welcomed the big improvement in the polls which took place in the spring (of 1947), when his approval rate rose to a very respectable 60% from a low of 32% in September 1946. He wished to preserve a base in the Democratic Party, even if the South had to some extent to be let go, and he even cultivated with moderate assiduity his relationship with what he was later to denounce as the ‘do-nothing, good-for-nothing, worst (ever) Eightieth Congress’. On July 23rd when he was lunching at the Senate he took the unprecedented step of strolling on to the floor after the meal and sitting in his old seat. Vandenberg, who was in the chair and who of course had been carefully tipped off, ‘recognized’ the ex-Senator from Missouri for five minutes. Truman used the time to make a nostalgic little speech which was well received on both sides.
1947 was notable in the annals of the Truman administration on a number of other counts. It was the year of the National Security Act, which set up the Department of Defense and unified the armed forces, although not in nearly as complete a form as Truman would have liked. The Act also, and almost incidentally, established the CIA. It was the year when Truman, a little afraid but having the courage to go on when frightened, landed himself with a civil rights programme, which was the forerunner of much subsequent legislation in the field, as well as the cause of the Dixiecrat revolt of 1948 and thus the beginning of a substantial geographical re-orientation in American politics. It was also a year, particularly in the latter part, when the Palestine issue obtruded heavily on to both the domestic and the foreign politics of the United States. But that had to some extent been so in 1946, and was to be still more so in 1948, to which year the core and crunch of the story belongs.
Altogether Truman ended the year in much better shape than he had begun it. He had started with the courage of desperation. To most people it looked inconceivable that he could run again, let alone be elected. It looked likely that his own words of 1944 about vice-presidents who succeeded to the presidency (’usually they were ridiculed in office, had their hearts broken, lost any vestige of respect they had had before’) were making themselves even more applicable to himself than to most of the others. By the end of the year he had a certain solidity of achievement, particularly in the foreign policy field. His presidency could not be regarded as negligible, whatever was to happen in the future. He had overcome his own reluctance to run again. Given his temperament he probably already thought that he could win. It was still the case, however, that few others did, although they would no longer have dismissed his ability to be nominated.