Truman(73)

The bridge between this account and that which he gave to Mr Harris was provided by his description of the difficult general battle he had to fight to prevent Attlee skilfully leading Truman into a cumulative acceptance of his argument, and the specific battle over the excision from the communiqué of an undertaking by each of the two countries not to use the atomic weapon without consultation with the other. This, it was alleged, would be as much against United States law as the President delegating such authority to MacArthur. Talking to Mr Harris, Acheson paid high tribute to Attlee, although rather in the way that Churchill described Baldwin as ‘the most formidable politician he ever knew’, and several times using rather inappropriate words:

‘Churchill never asked or got so much as Attlee did,’ Acheson was recorded as saying. ‘He was a very remarkable man … Attlee was adroit, extremely adroit, his grasp of the situation was masterly. His method was seduction:13 he led the President, step by step, to where he wanted to get him. He would make a statement of what the British wanted as though it were a statement of what the Americans wanted, and pause and say, very quickly, “I take it we are already agreed about that,” and Mr Truman, who was no slouch himself as a negotiator, would answer “Yes, we are.” I was horrified. I began stepping on the President’s foot … I found that Attlee had been very much underrated. He was a damn good lawyer.14 All through the talks he was out to get everything he could out of Truman’s hands, and into his. The idea that he came over just to expostulate about MacArthur and the Bomb is most misleading; if we hadn’t watched him like a hawk, he would have gone back to London leaving American policy hamstrung.’22

There remains the question of personal relations between Attlee and Truman. Truman was not particularly good at getting on with those from a different background whom he did not much know. Attlee was still worse. In the circumstances they seem to have managed very well. Lord Franks, who was British Ambassador at the time, but whose judgment is much less affected by achievements as a host than is that of many diplomats, has told me that the embassy dinner on the Thursday evening (the third day of the talks) was in his view an occasion of break-through. Truman and Attlee sang World War I songs together. This particular choral manifestation is not mentioned elsewhere, although both Truman and Acheson give the impression that the dinner was a considerable success.

This was the more remarkable as it took place at the end of 24 hours which had been exceptionally wearing for Truman. On top of having to cope with the débâcle in the Far East and the Attlee talks, he had just sustained the sudden death of the member of his staff to whom he was closest. Charles Ross, his press officer, with whom he had been at school in Independence, had dropped dead at his desk on the Wednesday evening, within minutes of completing a briefing on the progress of the talks during the day on the presidential yacht. Later that evening, Margaret Truman gave a concert in Washington. The music critic of the Washington Post reviewed it in terms which, while not wholly hostile, were fairly critical. Truman read the review at 5.30 the next morning, walked across to his office in the White House, and there poured out to the thirty-four-year-old critic 150 words of bile which was as childish as it was concentrated.15 This was pre-eminently a composition which should have joined Truman’s large collection of letters he did not send. His staff would quickly have gathered it in had he put it in his out tray. Instead he stuck a three-cent stamp on it and got a White House usher to go and put it in an ordinary mail-box. Hume published it two days later. The informed reaction was one of shocked surprise that the President of the United States should attack such a small target so intemperately. But the incoming mail was largely on his side and he wrote defiantly in his diary about what he had done. It was not the best preparation for an embassy dinner with visitors with whom he had already spent most of the previous 72 hours.

On the other hand I must record that when I went to see Truman in Kansas City nearly three years later and tried to get him to discuss his relationship with Attlee, I could elicit little warmth. It was Churchill, with whom he worked for the last fifteen as for the first three months of his presidency, for whom he reserved his enthusiasm and whom he wished to see again. He liked to stress his own homespun virtues in favourable contrast to the grandeur of F.D.R., but he confused the issue by showing much more appreciation of the grandeur of Churchill than of the more homespun quality of Attlee.

The essential skill of Attlee on this visit, which Truman probably appreciated more than Acheson, for all the latter’s high perception, was that he put under the talks the safety net of fairly frequently telling the Americans that the British would in the last resort support them more or less whatever they did. He did this both in public and in private. He told the National Press Club: ‘As long as the Stars and Stripes flies in Korea the British flag will fly beside it.’ In this way he kept American impatience at some of his views well under control and gave himself a relatively safe position, up on the tight-rope, from which to tell them that he hoped the courses in which he would support them would not be too foolish. As a result he could return to London feeling that he had got satisfactory moral (although not formal) assurances about consultation before any future use of the bomb, and that he had made the Americans more aware, not merely of MacArthur’s bad and rash generalship in the context of Korea (it needed ‘no ghost come from the grave to tell [them] that’), but of the dangers of his strategy distorting the whole balance of their world effort.