Harry Truman (41 page)

Once more, my father was using his keen sense of the past to create a policy for the future. He was determined to avoid the terrible unemployment which shook the nation after World War I, and to a large extent, he was successful. On March 3, he wrote his sister: “Things are looking up, I think. Congress is still balky, but maybe we’ll have a few good and well deserved funerals - political and real which may help that situation. But we can only hope for the best.”

While he was conducting these domestic battles, my father was by no means ignoring the rest of the world. News from Russia was, as usual, in the forefront of his thoughts. All of it was dismaying in the light of his continuing hope that he could work out a settlement with Stalin. On February 9, 1946, the Russian dictator had made a speech in Moscow on the eve of a so-called election. It was a brutal, blunt rejection of any hope of peace with the West. Stalin blamed World War II on capitalism and declared that as long as capitalists controlled any part of the world, there was no hope of peace. The Soviet Union must rearm, and forget all about producing consumer goods. He called for trebling Russian production of iron, steel, and coal and doubling all production to “guarantee our country against any eventuality.”

A few days later, a long dispatch from George F. Kennan, the chargé d’affaires in Moscow, arrived in the State Department. An expert on Russia, who had been studying that country for over thirty years, Kennan analyzed the Russian approach to the world, not from the viewpoint of communism but from the far more profound viewpoint of Russian history. “At the bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is the traditional and instinctive sense of insecurity,” Kennan wrote - an insecurity based on the feeling which Russia’s Communist rulers shared with the czars that “their rule was relatively archaic in form, fragile and artificial in psychological foundations, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries.” Stripped of their Marxist justifications, Kennan said the Soviet leaders would “stand before history, at best, as only the last of that long succession of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced the country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee the external security of their internally weak regimes.”

This report, eventually published as “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” in the July 1947 issue of the magazine
Foreign Affairs,
signed by “X,” has been considered one of the primary documents of the cold war, and the assumption seems to have been made by numerous historians that it profoundly shaped the thinking of the Truman Administration. I can say without qualification such an assertion is nonsense. George Elsey, who had by this time emerged from the obscurity of the map room to become one of Dad’s administrative assistants, confirms my impression the Kennan Report did not strike anyone in the White House as particularly surprising. “Essentially it didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know,” Elsey says. Whatever shock value the report achieved was on those wishful thinkers who bought the gospel preached by Henry Wallace and Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, that the trouble with Russia was all America’s fault. It was terribly tempting to believe peace could be achieved, if only we were more agreeable. At this point in 1946, Wallace and his imitators had a very large following.

My father attempted to defuse Wallace politically by bringing into his Cabinet a man whom he was told would be a moderate liberal voice - Justice William O. Douglas. He sent James Forrestal, his Secretary of the Navy, to ask Douglas to become Secretary of the Interior. Forrestal, who himself had no doubts about Russia’s aggressive intentions, noted in his diary that Douglas called Stalin’s speech “the declaration of World War III.” But he could not persuade the Justice to accept the President’s invitation.

While the professional liberals were creating the illusion of easy compromise, my father was getting reports of continuing Russian pressure, all over the world. Lieutenant General John R. Hodge, commanding the American forces in Korea, warned that the Communists showed absolutely no interest in reuniting the country, except on their own terms. They had launched a brilliant propaganda campaign, selling themselves as saviors of the 30 million Korean people. On May 3, 1946, Dad received a query from General Joseph T. McNarney, commander of the United States forces in Europe, asking for instructions if - it seemed very likely at the time - the Communists should attempt a coup d’état in France. In Iran, they were playing the same game, fomenting civil strife through a Communist front organization. My father authorized Secretary of State Byrnes to begin making speeches telling the American people the truth about Russia. But he himself did not feel ready to commit the immense prestige of the presidency behind an anti-Russian position. He wanted peace in the world too deeply to give up hope, even though hope was ebbing fast.

In the midst of this mounting tension, Dad had to take a trip to Missouri with his good friend Winston Churchill. To understand how this happened, I have to backtrack a little. Not long after Dad returned from Potsdam, the president of Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, paid a visit to General Vaughan in the White House. The president’s name was Frank McCluer, and he and General Vaughan had been classmates there. Dr. McCluer, who was known as “Bullet” because he was only five feet tall and shaped, so General Vaughan says, like a projectile, wanted to invite Winston Churchill to speak at the college. General Vaughan brought Dr. McCluer in to see Dad. He read the letter Dr. McCluer was sending to Churchill and scribbled on the bottom of it: “Dear Winnie, This is a fine old school out in my state. If you come and make a speech there, I’ll take you out and introduce you.”

So, on March 3, at 3:00 p.m., Dad, General Vaughan, Churchill, and the usual entourage of Secret Service men and aides boarded the B&O at the Silver Spring, Maryland, station. They had a delightful time on the way out. Dad assigned General Vaughan to keep Churchill liberally supplied with his favorite liquid refreshment. When the General delivered the first drink, Churchill held it up to the light, and said, “When I was a young subaltern in the South African war, the water was not fit to drink. To make it palatable we had to add whiskey. By diligent effort I learned to like it.”

Dad proposed to teach Churchill the intricacies of poker, about which he claimed to know nothing. He soon had the poker-playing Missourians doubled up with comments such as, “I think I’ll risk a few shillings on a pair of knaves.” But their laughter dwindled as he displayed a startling knowledge of the game, plus some sly remarks he had played something like it during the Boer War.

In Fulton, Missouri, Churchill’s desire for liquid refreshment became something of a problem. Fulton was a dry town. Dad ordered General Vaughan to spare no effort or expense to find their speaker a drink. After some frantic scouting, the General produced the wherewithal and arrived in Churchill’s room, liquor and ice water in hand. “Well, General, I am glad to see you,” said the guest of honor. “I didn’t know whether I was in Fulton, Missouri, or Fulton, Sahara.”

Less than an hour later, my father introduced Churchill. From the hindsight of the furor Churchill’s speech caused, Dad’s introductory words are worth repeating: “I had never met Mr. Churchill personally until a conference we had with Mr. Stalin. I became very fond of both of them. They are men and they are leaders in this world today when we need leadership. . . . I understand that Mr. Churchill is going to talk about the sinews of peace. I know he will have something constructive to say to the world. . . .”

Churchill proceeded to denounce Russian aggression in magnificently chosen words. The most memorable of these became part of the vocabulary of our era. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent. From what I have seen of our Russian friends and allies during the war, I am convinced that there is nothing they admire so much as strength and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for military weakness.”

Churchill urged an Anglo-American “fraternal association” to stop Russia’s persistent aggression.

Up and down the United States and around the world the speech created headlines. It was the first bold denunciation of Russia’s tactics by a man of Churchill’s stature. Bert Andrews of the New York
Herald Tribune
echoed most of the press when he wrote that on the evidence of my father’s applause at one point in Churchill’s speech and the fact he had read the speech before delivery, “Mr. Truman went along largely with what Mr. Churchill had to say, if not entirely.”

The truth is the precise opposite, and I have the best possible evidence - my father’s comment on the speech, in his letter of March 11 to his mother and sister. “I’m glad you enjoyed Fulton,” he wrote. “So did I. And I think it did some good,
although I am not yet ready to endorse Mr. Churchill’s speech.”
(The italics are mine.) Dad did not have the slightest idea what Churchill was going to say at Fulton until they met in the White House before boarding the train to Missouri. He approved of
Churchill
saying it, because he was not a head of state. In fact, the ex-prime minister made a point of reminding his listeners he represented no one but himself. My father in no sense considered the speech a break with Russia, nor did he want one. In fact, he later invited Marshal Stalin to come to Missouri and deliver a speech, stating Russia’s point of view on the various disputes imperiling the peace.

There is also the report of General Walter Bedell Smith, our new ambassador to Russia, of his interview with Stalin on April 5, 1946. General Smith began the interview with a question which my father had instructed him to ask. “What does the Soviet Union want and how far is Russia going to go?” He went on to assure Stalin that America deeply sympathized with the suffering the Soviet people had endured during the war and understood Russia’s desire for security and a share of the world’s raw materials. But they could not tolerate Russia’s methods in seeking these objectives. At the same time, General Smith insisted we had no aggressive plans. He pointed out how swiftly we were demobilizing our armed forces and insisted we asked nothing of Russia but the support of the principles of the United Nations Charter.

Stalin replied with grim evidence of his paranoia. He accused the United States of allying itself with Great Britain to “thwart Russia.” He declared that Churchill’s speech at Fulton was an unfriendly act. “Such a speech if directed against the United States would never have been permitted in Russia.” Never was there more tragic evidence of the Russian dictator’s complete inability to understand a free society.

General Smith could only reiterate that we had no intention of allying ourselves with Great Britain. He said the Iron Curtain speech reflected no more than “an apprehension which seems to be common to both the United States and Britain.” Finally, he asked Stalin once more, “How far is Russia going to go?”

Coolly, Stalin replied, “We’re not going much further.” That, it seems to me, is an admission that he had already gone pretty far and knew it.

Stalin ended the interview by reaffirming his desire for peace and refusing my father’s invitation to visit the United States. “Age has taken its toll. My doctors tell me I must not travel, and I am kept on a strict diet,” he said. “I will write to the President, thank him and explain the reasons why I cannot now accept.”

On the same day that General Smith was having this confrontation with Stalin, Senator Claude Pepper of Florida was denouncing Winston Churchill’s Fulton speech and warning the United States against becoming “a guarantor of British imperialism.” He urged a foreign policy based on a climactic Big Three conference that would settle everything. But before the conference began, we should “destroy every atomic bomb which we have” and dismantle our atomic factories.

People like Senator Pepper made it immensely difficult for my father to conduct a sane, coherent foreign policy. In the Cabinet meeting of April 19, Secretary of State Byrnes complained mightily of the damage they were doing. For months, we had been negotiating with Iceland to continue the use of the immense air base we had built there during World War II. There was an active Communist party in Iceland, and the island’s premier was anxious to negotiate an agreement quietly. But Senator Pepper and Secretary Wallace suddenly rose up and denounced the idea of a base in Iceland as hostile to Russia. Immediately, Iceland’s Communists raised a terrific uproar, making an agreement with us politically impossible for the premier.

My father knew he could not tolerate this kind of sabotage - the word he used to describe the activities of Wallace and his followers - indefinitely. But to smack him down at the wrong moment might endanger our relations with Russia. Also, there was the political value of keeping his supporters in the Democratic Party. So, as with the Russians, Dad tried to be patient and hope for the best.

But Henry Wallace, like Jimmy Byrnes, thought he should have been President. This lent an inevitable arrogance to his actions. I don’t deny, at the same time, that he meant well. The situation was complicated by the fact Dad liked him personally and admired his soaring idealism. But Wallace lacked what the French call
mesure
and what Missourians call common sense.

In March, before Walter Bedell Smith left for Moscow, Wallace usurped the role of both the President and the Secretary of State by advising the new ambassador on how to launch a “new approach” to Moscow. He followed this up with a letter to Dad, outlining his ideas. Dad ignored him - the politest way he could think of telling Wallace he was not the Secretary of State.

On July 23, Wallace wrote another letter - twelve pages of single-spaced typing - which accused the United States of threatening Russia and paying only lip service to peace at the conference table. He accused us of trying “to build up a preponderance of force to intimidate the rest of mankind,” and heaped scorn on my father’s attempt to create a step-by-step program to internationalize atomic energy. He also accused the administration of encouraging military men who favored a “preventive war” with Russia.