That settled the question of his own candidature. He went off for another vacation at Key West and on his return used a Jefferson/Jackson Day Washington dinner to make a surprise announcement of unequivocal non-availability. ‘I shall not accept a renomination’, he said. ‘I do not feel that it is my duty to spend another four years in the White House.’ It did not, however, settle the question of Stevenson. Truman had switched off him, but public attention had not. Indeed, as soon as Truman made his statement of withdrawal the cameramen rushed to the other end of the same long table where the Governor of Illinois was seated.
Throughout the spring and summer Stevenson played very hard to get. To a large extent his reluctance was genuine. But this did not make it any less irritating to Truman, who had his own troubles during these months. On March 28th his Director of Defense Mobilisation, Charles E. Wilson, the former head of General Electric,8 resigned in dudgeon against a policy of profit squeeze on the steel industry and brought a great deal of business and press approbrium upon the head of the administration. On April 3rd McGrath, the delinquent Attorney-General, had to be dismissed for quite separate reasons. On April 8th, almost as though to keep up the interest, Truman seized the steel mills. He had been encouraged to take such action by the private, certainly rash, and doubtfully proper counsel of Chief Justice Vinson. Congress declined to give him power to operate the mills, and a Federal Court declared their seizure unconstitutional. The Supreme Court then announced that it would hear the case. This all happened within a week. After that there was an interval until June 2nd, when the Court declared Truman’s action unconstitutional by the crushing majority of six to three. Vinson had been overruled in his own Court, and had carried only one, not very notable, Truman appointee (Minton) with him. Much of the indignity lay in the fact that the majority was stuffed with Democrats who were mostly liberals as well. It was quite unlike 1936 when Roosevelt could portray himself as battling against a fossilized Court of ‘horse and buggy’ reactionaries. In 1952 there was not a single one of the nine justices who was not a Roosevelt or a Truman appointee. Amongst the majority six were Hugo L. Black, who delivered the majority judgment, Felix Frankfurter, Robert H. Jackson, William O. Douglas, and, almost the unkindest cut of all, Tom Clark, the Attorney-General who had been elevated beyond his deserts by Truman a couple of years before.
The immediate result was that Truman allowed the separation of powers to produce the disorganization of government. With the Korean War simmering away, he had a seven week steel strike on his hands. How much harm to national interests it did is open to question. Indeed one of the factors in the adverse judgment was quantitative rather than qualitative: steel stocks were too high to justify presidential high-handedness. But its pressures, leading up to a settlement on July 24th, no doubt increased his feeling that he was grappling with real issues while Stevenson, to quote Joseph Chamberlain’s satirical lines on Gladstone, ‘left us repining while he is, no doubt, still engaged in refining’.
When, therefore, on that same day of July, Stevenson telephoned the President, the first direct communication between them for several months, and asked Truman whether it would embarrass him after all if he allowed his name to be put forward, he got a fairly rough although favourable reply. That is exactly what I have been trying to urge upon your over-elegant mind for the past six months was the essence of the President’s response. In fact this was not wholly true. It had been so, but after the double rebuff of March Truman had switched to Barkley, semi-senile or not, and had sent him out to Chicago with full presidential backing. Barkley, however, in Truman’s view mishandled his essential canvassing of labour leaders, and got a turn-down as firm as Byrnes had received in 1944. He then withdrew, in reality in dismay but in form under the happy smokescreen of a splendid valedictory oration, and left Truman once again fancy free when Stevenson telephoned.
The President thereupon threw himself with almost excessive enthusiasm into a campaign of support for the Governor’s nomination. He believed that his support was decisive. But the surge towards Stevenson was such that he would almost certainly have been swept in whatever Truman had done. He was the first ‘drafted’ Democratic candidate since Garfield in 1880, and that had been on the 36th ballot, whereas Stevenson achieved it on the 3rd. Nor did he make much obeisance to Truman. He excused himself from meeting him at the airport or from dining with him on the evening of his arrival in Chicago. He did, however, allow himself to be escorted by the President down the aisle of the convention hall and introduced by him before delivering at 2.00 a.m. his memorable if unusually humourless and somewhat florid acceptance speech. Truman, like most other people, was moved by the speech. He pledged himself‘to take my coat off and do everything I can to help him win’. He wrote him a warm letter at 6.40 the next morning. He invited him to Washington for strategy discussion and policy briefing, and Stevenson, perhaps without much alternative, accepted. It was the brief high point of their relationship.