Perhaps MacArthur made a symptomatic mistake by ending in ambiguity. ‘“Old soldiers,” he said, “never die; they just fade away.” And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away– an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.’
Immediately he faded away to the Waldorf Tower in New York, but from there he made several powerful early forays. However his balloon fairly quickly began to subside. Truman, not the most impartial of witnesses perhaps, thought the beginning of the exhalation was when he was half laughed at at a baseball game in Queen’s. Certainly he was never seriously considered as a presidential candidate for 1952. He was of course immensely old, even by more recent sandards, to start a political career. He died, almost forgotten, in 1964, at the age of 84.
Truman, when led in that direction by an interlocutor,26 said that the sacking was the greatest test of his presidency. In a negative sense it was. But it required more nerve than judgment. It was a question of enduring the noise of bombardment, which was fearsome, but which, once he had got the rest of the military establishment on his side, was unlikely to prove fatal. And Truman was very good at that. Other crises of the war called for a rarer combination of qualities, and ones which came less easily to him. These, too, he surmounted well. The Korean War destroyed any hope of a joyous second term, but in all but the small change of short-run partisan advantage, it enhanced his reputation.
11
THE LAST PHASE
There were nineteen months between June 1951, when the Korean War subsided into a bickering stalemate, and the end of Truman’s presidency. After the searing years through which he had passed, and as an introit to the subsequent soaring of his reputation, it would be agreeable to record that they were a period of calm fulfilment and grateful recognition.
Unfortunately it would be completely untrue. The best that could be said for this final year and a half was that, by the standards of his presidency, relatively little happened during it. But most of what did occur was disobliging to Truman, and some of it was humiliating. His administration was plagued by the eruption of one petty scandal after another, cumulatively very damaging, although only those permeating the Bureau of Internal Revenue reached objectively serious proportions. Partly as a result his poll rating at the end of 1951 was down to 23%, substantially worse even than in 1946. He had to sack his Attorney-General and replace him with the third second-rater he had appointed to that post since getting rid of Roosevelt’s Biddle. He finally lost Marshall, who withdrew from the Department of Defense in September 1951, and he witnessed the sad spectacle of Acheson’s authority at home being increasingly undermined because the President lacked the power to protect his Secretary of State from McCarthy’s vituperation. Confronted with a steel strike Truman once again shot impulsively and probably illegally from the hip (although this time it was the companies, not the union s, who were his target), and was overturned by the Supreme Court.
As the 1952 elections approached he made almost every possible misjudgment about who the Republican candidate was likely to be, who the Democratic candidate ought to be, and which party was likely to win. He played with the idea of changing his mind and running again himself, but was dissuaded by the near unanimous advice of his family, his friends and his staff: a candidate with an age of 68 and a poll rating of 23% might reasonably be regarded by even his most fervent supporters as having got things nearly the wrong way round. He then had an unhappy campaign relationship both with Stevenson, whom he tried unsuccessfully to make his protégé, and with Eisenhower, with whom he entered into a bitter feud for a mixture of about one to two of good and bad reasons. After threatening darkly (to himself at least) that he would do nothing throughout the election but ‘sit on his front porch’–or, as it was the White House,1 the south or back porch—he then conducted a frenetic, ill-judged and unwelcome campaign on behalf of Stevenson.
His last two months of office, apart from a few prickly brushes with Eisenhower, were fairly satisfactory. With a strong sense of the august nature of the presidency (but not of the President) he naturally felt to the full the change in his life which was about to occur. He had a lively awareness of doing things for the last time. But he did not regret this. He felt he had served his time and done his duty. He was ready to go. And when he went he had a grand send-off.
Some of the newer members of his staff sensed a certain lack of grip. Joseph Short, who had replaced Charles Ross as press secretary, thought that Truman was much too inclined to believe that the minor financial scandals could be left to blow themselves out. Roger Tubby, Short’s assistant, wrote an extensive and often worried journal. During a holiday visit to Key West a little before the beginning of the final nineteen months, he wrote: ‘Poker, poker, I wonder why he played so much … a feeling of vacuum otherwise, no struggle, excitement? … companionship, banter, escape from the pressing problems of state?’ Then, the train of his thought being obvious, he added: ‘I read the New Republic editorial expressing fear lest Truman end up in as bad repute as Harding—though that hardly seems possible … the stuff so far [has] been such chicken feed compared to Teapot Dome.’21