This menace was no more carried out than was Truman’s own threat that he would not campaign. But the fissure was never healed. It at least had the advantage that it took Truman’s mind off his Stevenson resentments. Strong though these were, he would still have much preferred the Governor to beat the General. He was one of the few major politicians whose commitment to his party was much deeper than any personal dislikes. At least from mid-October onwards there was little doubt that Eisenhower would win. There was no foolish boasting in his talking about what he would do at the inauguration ceremony. The result gave him a majority of about 10% or 6½ million votes over Stevenson. He carried 38 out of 48 states, defeating the Governor in Illinois and leaving him mostly only with a South eroded around the edges.
It was not as overwhelming a victory as those achieved by Roosevelt in 1946, Johnson in 1964, Nixon in 1972, or Reagan in 1984, but it was very substantial. Truman disliked the result but was not surprised by it. He indulged in no public recrimination against the defeated Stevenson. He had a small White House dinner party for him in early December and worked out with him future dispositions in the Democratic Party machine.9 In his Memoirs, published in 1955, he wrote a detached but not bitter criticism of Stevenson’s conduct. ‘His was a great campaign and did credit to the party and the nation … His ability to put into inspiring words the principles of the Democratic Party earned him fame and world-wide recognition. I hold him in the highest regard for his intellectual courage.’9 However, he also calmly rehearsed his objections of the time to the shape of Stevenson’s candidature and came to the conclusion that, had Stevenson gone straight for the nomination from January 1952 and worked more closely with the traditional Democratic base, he might have won at least 3 million more votes, hardly enough to win but enough to make the result close. As the 1956 election approached, Truman withheld his support from Stevenson and gave it unwaveringly to Harriman, up to and over the Convention, once more in Chicago, at which Stevenson was comfortably re-nominated, but certainly not drafted.
Between the 1952 election and Inauguration Day Eisenhower came once to the White House. It was on November 18th, and was a mutually unsatisfactory meeting. Eisenhower was all buttoned up, and Truman superficially at least, tried a little too easily to let bygones be bygones. He offered Eisenhower some commemorative paintings of local heroes given by Latin American governments, which were refused, a globe which Eisenhower had given to Truman in Germany in 1945, the return of which was ‘not very graciously’ accepted, and some fairly gratuitous bits of advice about how to run the presidential office, which Truman thought ‘went into one ear and out of the other’.10
After that they did not see each other again until January 20th. That was a spectacularly prickly occasion. Eisenhower declined the supposedly traditional luncheon invitation from the Trumans.10 He did, however, resile from his earlier intention to make Truman pick him up at the Statler Hotel. He drove to the White House but did not get out of the car. During the drive the only conversation exchanged seems to have been about Eisenhower not having seen a previous inaugural, for he had not been there in 1948 in order, so he is alleged to have self-regardingly said, not to attract attention away from the re-elected President. ‘You were not here in 1948,’ Truman emolliently replied, ‘because I did not send for you … if I had … you would have come.’11 Eisenhower is then said to have complained that the outgoing President had ordered his son, John Eisenhower, home from Korea to attend the ceremony and, no doubt by so doing, embarrass the incoming one. The fact that, three days later, Eisenhower wrote to Truman to thank him for this act of consideration, and indeed for his general courtesy during the handover, does not invalidate the unfortunate picture of two gentlemen in their sixties, both outstanding servants of the greatest democracy in the world, behaving in a way which would have been discreditable to two small boys of eight.
After November 4th the pace of activity began to slow down. Truman was still Chief Executive, but there was no point in trying to execute anything which would not come to fruition in the next few weeks. Already in September he had been told that the incoming mail had fallen below 5,000 pieces a day for the first time during his presidency. This was normal, he was told by the chief clerk (who must have had a long memory for similar circumstances had not occurred since the last days of Hoover) ‘when the White House occupant was not coming back’. The lack of pressure did not reduce the length of his days. But it did give him more time for committing rumination to paper. On November 24th at 5.00 a.m., allowing for a few differences of style from Waugh and background from Lord Marchmain, he was almost parodying the deathbed soliloquy in Brideshead Revisited:11