Truman(58)

The inauguration was a more spirited affair than the one at which Truman had previously been sworn in. Roosevelt endured a tired acceptance of his fourth mandate on a sodden White House lawn in 1945. Truman was not tired. Indeed he began the day with a seven o’clock breakfast with 98 surviving members of Battery D and their wives. Nor was he blasé about the proceedings. 1945 was Roosevelt’s fourth inauguration. 1949 was Truman’s first, and he already had a pretty clear idea in his own mind that it would be his last as well. Furthermore there was quite a lot of money to spend. The 80th and Republican House of Representatives had felt little doubt that Dewey would be elected. They had generously voted an exceptionally large sum for his inauguration. Liberation from 16 years of Democratic rule would have been worth celebrating. They had also put up the President’s salary from $50,000 to $100,000 and added $50,000 of tax-free expenses.

Truman was the beneficiary of these premature Republican eleemosynary acts. The $150,000 of income (equivalent to about $¾ million today) enabled him to live more easily than ever before. The $80,000 voted for the inauguration enabled him to mount a procession alleged to be seven miles long. ‘The weather … was perfect,’ Margaret Truman recorded, ‘very cold, but with bright winter sunlight pouring down from a clear blue sky.’1 The White House was closed and the post oath-taking reception had therefore to be held in Mellon’s National Gallery. To compensate for this there was no hated rival with whom Truman had to do an uncomfortable 1½ mile drive along Pennsylvania Avenue. There was only old Alben Barkley. But they both put on their theatrical costumiers top hats and cutaway coats as though they were Harvard Overseers on Commencement Day rather than Missouri and Kentucky politicians.

At the Capitol Truman delivered an address of little oratorical distinction but considerable substance. He laid down the four cardinal points of American foreign policy. The first was support for the United Nations; the second was the use of Marshall Aid to achieve the recovery of Western Europe; the third was the provision of military assistance to sustain ‘freedom-loving nations’ against the threat of Soviet aggression; and the fourth, the surprise one, announced a new programme for assistance to the underdeveloped world. This was christened Point Four (by the press, not by Truman) and was the beginning of Third World Aid. The inaugural speech was almost entirely devoted to international issues. National ones had been dealt with in the State of the union   message on January 5th.

Then he had provided his own label, having himself written a commitment to a ‘Fair Deal’ into the draft speech. The domestic programme he outlined put more emphasis on social measures, as opposed to those for economic recovery, than Roosevelt’s New Deal had done. The post-war economy was in good shape and could largely be left to look after itself. By dint of heavy military cutbacks behind the shield of the solitary possession of the atomic bomb, Truman’s first term had been broadly one of balanced budgets. This financial probity, which was sensible enough when the economy called for no deficit stimulus, he hoped to continue and even intensify in the second term, in spite of proposals for Federal health insurance, increased Federal aid to education and a major public housing programme. There were also proposals with no spending implications. The Taft-Hartley Act was to be replaced and civil rights legislated upon.

Remarkably little of this programme was to be achieved. The budget balance was to be undermined, first by the end of the United States nuclear monopoly, and then, more powerfully in the short-term, by the Korean War. And the 81st Congress was too dependent for its Democratic majority upon conservative Southerners, many of whom held committee chairmanships, for it to show much appetite for liberal legislation. By November 1949, Truman was complaining to his diary: ‘Trying to make the 81st Congress perform is and has been worse than cussing the 80th.’2

Domestic blockage mattered less to the world, and probably to Truman himself, than foreign policy blockage would have done at the time. Internationally, in spite of the China fissure, McCarthy’s antics and MacArthur’s insubordination, the President was able to command policy for most of the second term. The first six months were particularly productive. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed in April and the Berlin blockade came to an end in May.

The latter event was a major victory for Western patience and non-provocative firmness. It was the first turning of a tide which, in spite of the presumed power of nuclear supremacy, had flowed relentlessly in favour of the Soviet union   throughout 1947 and 1948. It created a special bond between the United States and the emerging Federal Republic of Germany, popular as well as official, which was to be an unvarying factor in world politics for the next 25 years (but no longer). It also presaged a new, unacknowledged, but real stability in East-West relations on the central front which was to persist until the renewal of Soviet probings, first in Berlin again, and then in Cuba, in the early 1960s. The brinkmanship of the Dulles era was around the periphery, not in the more dangerous centre.