Truman(80)

Truman was quickly offended by Stevenson’s replacement of the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, by other campaign appointments, by the setting up of his campaign headquarters in Springfield, Illinois, and not in Washington, and by his generally detached behaviour. By early August Truman was writing one of his famous unsent letters to Stevenson, but the tone was more hurt and complaining and less aggressive than usual:

‘Dear Governor,

I have come to the conclusion’, he began, ‘that you are embarrassed by having the President of the United States in your corner in this campaign. Therefore I shall remain silent and stay in Washington until Nov 4th.’

He retailed all the efforts he had made to get Stevenson the candidature, and continued:

‘You were nominated and made a grand acceptance speech. Then you proceeded to break up the Democratic Committee, which I had spent years in organizing, you called in the former mayor of Louisville [Wilson Wyatt] as your personal chairman and fired McKinney, the best chairman of the National Committee in my recollection … I have tried to make it plain to you that I want you elected –in fact I want you to win this time more than I wanted to win in 1948. But—I can’t stand snub after snub from you and Mr Wyatt … I shall go to the dedication of the Hungry Horse Dam in Montana (due in late September), make a public power speech, get in a plane and come back to Washington and stay there. You and Wilson can now run your campaign without interference or advice.’5

Within a couple of weeks matters got still worse. Stevenson, maybe carelessly allowing an instinctive assumption of his mind to come to the surface, committed Truman’s old fault of allowing a questioner to put words into his mouth. It was more reprehensible, however, for it was a written exchange. ‘Can Stevenson really clear up the mess in Washington?’ the Oregon Journal asked him. ‘As to whether I can clean up the mess in Washington’ he answered, ‘I would bespeak the careful scrutiny of what I inherited in Illinois and what has been accomplished in three years.’ The reply reverberated around the continent. The Democratic candidate had accepted the validity of one of the main Republican catch phrases of the campaign. Truman was affronted, and returned to the writing table within a few days. On this occasion he started with more raillery and less rancour than before:

‘My Dear Governor,

Your letter to Oregon is a surprising document. It makes the campaign rather ridiculous. It seems to me that the Presidential Nominee and his running mate are trying to beat the Democratic President instead of the Republicans and the General of the Army who heads their ticket. There is no mess in Washington except the sabotage press …’

However, he soon jerked himself up on to a sharper note:

‘You fired and balled up the Democratic National Committee Organization that I’ve been creating over the last four years.

‘I’m telling you to take your crackpots, your high socialites with their noses in the air, run your campaign and win if you can. Cowfever could not have treated me any more shabbily than you have …

‘Best of luck from a bystander who has become disinterested.’6

It was bitter stuff (again not sent of course) and although it represented a part of Truman’s feelings he gave no public vent to them and he in no way carried out his threat (which would have inflicted more deprivation upon himself than upon Stevenson) to remain silent, stationary and sullen. The Hungry Horse expedition, for instance, turned into a full-scale campaign trip, with the presidential train, and a pattern of six or eight speeches a day which was similar to that of 1948, except that the full blast of public attention was not on the President, who was not a candidate.

He and Stevenson never appeared together, which was perhaps as well for there was a fairly wide gulf of style and substance between them. Truman was happy to provide the rough stuff for which he thought that Stevenson was too mealy-mouthed. Some of it he did very well. He had a good joke about the initials GOP really standing not for Grand Old Party but for the Generals’ Own Party. ‘The Republicans,’ he said, ‘have General Motors and General Electric and General Foods and General MacArthur and General Martin and General Wedemeyer. And then they have their own five-star General who is running for President … [but] general welfare is with the corporals and the privates in the Democratic Party.’7

On the whole however he made the mistake of striking too persistent and strident a note of abuse of Eisenhower. From the beginning he resented his candidature. John Snyder, who was the closest link between them, was probably right when he said that Truman thought Eisenhower should have run as a Democrat. It was Democratic presidents who had given him the opportunity to build up his reputation.8 This initial resentment provided the seed-bed from which there sprouted his violent reactions to any politickings which Eisenhower indulged in during the campaign. Some of them were admittedly discreditable, most notably the General’s excision of a pro-Marshall section from his speech when he appeared on a platform with McCarthy in Wisconsin. However, Truman treated almost everything the General did, from this craven act to his only mildly demagogic undertaking to go to Korea himself and see if he could dig out the bogged down negotiations, as being intolerable, and denounced him in immoderate terms. His responses to the Wisconsin episode, while strong -Eisenhower had ‘betrayed his principles’, ‘deserted his friends’, and amazed Truman by ‘stoop[ing] so low’, were perhaps justified. But it was clearly a mistake to send a message to the Jewish Welfare Board accusing Eisenhower, on a somewhat convoluted argument about immigration, of having endorsed the practices of the ‘master race’, and discriminated against Jews and Catholics. Rabbis and cardinals responded by denouncing Truman. He was hit hard by the boomerang which he had thrown. But what was more interesting was that he should have been surprised at Eisenhower’s resentment. He had an engagingly innocent belief that Eisenhower should expiate his sin of seeking the Republican nomination by going round the country paying tribute to Roosevelt, Truman, Marshall and Acheson, under or with whom he had served during Democratic administrations, but that his own denunciations of Republicans were the legitimate ammunition of healthy, hardhitting politics. As a result he drove Eisenhower into muttering that he would break a precedent which had stood since 1801 and refuse to drive down Pennsylvania Avenue with Truman on Inauguration Day. He would meet him at the Capitol steps.