I

In the summer of his seventh year in office, the sixty-seven-year-old President looked the picture of health. His color was good; his clothes, impeccable as always, fit perfectly; his walk was firm and full of purpose. He saw people all day, yet seemed to have time for everyone. Visitors to the Oval Office found a man who stood immediately to greet them, shoulders back and smiling, and who, at his desk, gave them his full attention. Radiating vitality and confidence, he seemed completely at home in his job, as one could only be with experience. Mens sana in corpore sano was the old adage he had learned in high school Latin, “a sound mind in a sound body.” Clark Clifford, who dropped by on occasion, would say he never knew anyone of the President’s age who remained physically and psychologically so sound and solid.

He still walked two miles “most every morning,” Truman had recorded in his diary.

The morning bourbon—an ounce of Old Grandad or Wild Turkey taken after the two-mile walk and a few setting-up exercises and the rubdown that usually followed the morning walk—had also become routine. Whether the bourbon was on doctor’s orders, or a bit of old-fashioned home medicine of the kind many of his generation thought beneficial to the circulation past age sixty (“to get the engine going”), is not known. But it seemed to agree with him.

And how Harry Truman looked, how he carried himself, the timbre of his voice, his air of confidence were all subjects of increasing interest in the summer of 1951, once the MacArthur crisis had passed, as a means of divining whether he intended to carry on in the job beyond the next election. Did he or did he not plan to run again in 1952?

At a press conference, a visiting reporter from Macon, Georgia, said with a drawl, “Mr. President, this is my first conference. My impression of you is that you look a lot younger than I thought you would.” With everyone in the room, Truman laughed.

“Could you tell me if you feel like you are in better physical condition now than you were when you first became President?”

He never felt better, Truman said, looking pleased. “I am still young enough to make a good race—foot race, I mean.” And there was more laughter.

“That wouldn’t be an announcement, would it?”

“No, no.”

To those at the White House who saw him daily, at all hours and often under extremely trying circumstances, he was still the Truman of old, hardworking, cheerful, never short with them, never petty. He seemed to have some kind of added inner balance mechanism that held him steady through nearly anything, enabling him not only to uphold the fearful responsibilities of his office and keep a killing schedule, but to accept with composure the small, silly aggravations that also went with the job. It was a level of equanimity that at times left those around him hugely amused and even more fond of him.

At still another banquet at the Statler one evening, the head table waiters managed to confuse the orders they had about a special meal for Joe Short, who had ulcers. It was Truman who was served a bowl of milk toast, which he ate without complaint, thinking that perhaps Dr. Graham had requested it for him.

One day on the Williamsburg, Graham sat on the fantail dictating into a recording machine, his lap full of letters, mostly inquiries about the President’s health, his weight, diet, manner of exercise. Truman walked over, picked up the letters from Graham’s lap, and threw them overboard. “You constantly tell me to relax. Now you relax,” Truman said laughing.

His resilient cheerfulness was both a wonder and, to some who worked with him, disconcerting at times. It was almost as though he did not fully understand how serious his troubles were, how truly grim and menacing his horizons appeared, even with the MacArthur crisis out of the way. Only in the eyes, behind the thick glasses, could the fatigue sometimes be seen. Only on rare off moments would he say something to suggest how much else he felt.

Once, while paying a visit to the office of the engineer in charge of the White House renovation, General Glen E. Edgerton, whose desk was in a shack on the South Lawn amid a cluster of temporary buildings put up when the work began, Truman had paused to read a framed verse on the wall. Written for Edgerton by a plumbing contractor named Reuben Anderson, it so appealed to Truman that he read it aloud:

“Hurry, scurry, worry, work!” Truman sighed. “That’s the way it is.”

Another day, in September, riding in his limousine on the way to make a speech to a gathering of churchmen, he again sighed and said that sometimes he wondered if it was all worth the effort.

Though peace talks had begun in Korea, at Kaesong on July 8, the war was grinding on with unabated savagery. Joe McCarthy continued to spew charges of treason and espionage, the worst of his venom aimed now at George Marshall. Congress was stalling on a raise in taxes to pay for the war, threatening to cut foreign aid, and there were new charges of further scandal within the administration. Earlier, in the lull after the MacArthur hysteria, Herb Block, in a Washington Post cartoon titled “The tumult and the shouting dies; the captains and the kings depart,” had shown Truman working alone into the night, his desk piled with reports labeled “Korea,” “Europe,” “A-Bomb,” “H-Bomb,” “Troops,” “Planes,” “United Nations,” “Economic Program,” “Peace,” and “War.” In the time since his burdens had only increased.

By midsummer, American troops had been fighting and dying in Korea for as long nearly as Truman and his generation had fought and died in France in World War I, and the struggle in Korea had become increasingly like World War I. The seesaw swings of fortune, the sweeping end runs and pellmell retreats and advances, were past now, the fighting concentrated near or along the 38th parallel. Some of the bloodiest, most desperate battles of the war were fought for limited topographical features—a numbered hilltop or ridgeline—where often, as in France in 1918, the enemy was heavily dug in, fortified with barbed wire, mines, and elaborately camouflaged tunnels. Newspapers and news broadcasts were filled with accounts of the Battle of Hill 1179, Bloody Ridge, Heartbreak Ridge. American casualties ran sometimes as high as three thousand a week, never less than three hundred. By late August the peace talks had broken down. By summer’s end total American casualties had passed 80,000, with 13,822 dead. Losses among the ROK and other U.N. forces were greater still. What the costs had been to the enemy in dead and wounded, or to the people of Korea, were as yet undetermined.

The war Truman had never wanted or expected, but knew to be of utmost importance to the future of the world—the most important decision of his presidency, he believed—had come to overshadow his whole second term. He knew what the reality was in Korea. “I know what a soldier goes through,” he would say with feeling. He knew the anguish of families at home. But when would it end? Who could say? What could he do that he was not already doing? The worries and frustrations were incessant.

One August morning at Blair House, he read in the papers that the body of an American soldier killed in action, Sergeant John Rice, had been brought home for burial in Sioux City, Iowa, but that at the last moment, as the casket was to be lowered into the grave, officials of the Sioux City Memorial Park had stopped the ceremony because Sergeant Rice, a Winnebago Indian, was not “a member of the Caucasian race” and burial was therefore denied. Outraged, Truman picked up the phone. Within minutes, by telephone and telegram, it was arranged that Sergeant Rice would be buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors and that an Air Force plane was on the way to bring his widow and three children to Washington. That, as President, was the least he could do.

The scourge of Joe McCarthy, that Truman had thought would end soon, was poisoning the entire political atmosphere all the while. McCarthy’s attack on Marshall from the floor of the Senate in mid-June was his most vile yet, a wild harangue lasting nearly three hours. The “mysterious, powerful” Marshall and Dean Acheson were part of a Communist conspiracy, a conspiracy of infamy so immense, said McCarthy, that it surpassed any “such venture” in history. It was Marshall who had created the disastrous China policy, Marshall whose military strategy had made the war in Korea a pointless slaughter. Harry Truman, no longer master of his house, was being guided by a “larger conspiracy, the world-wide web of which has been spun in Moscow.” In the final hour of the speech McCarthy was addressing a virtually empty chamber—all but three senators had walked out. The press deplored these “senseless and vicious charges,” but McCarthy carried on, traveling the country. He still had no evidence. He exposed not a single Communist in government. Yet none of that seemed to matter, as he shouted and threatened and waved fistfuls of so-called “documentation.”

One night in the dining room at Blair House, Truman had called a secret meeting attended by Attorney General McGrath, four Democratic senators—Anderson, Monroney, Hennings, and Sparkman—a veteran Kentucky congressman named Brent Spence, Solicitor General Philip B. Perlman, Democratic Party Chairman William Boyle, Clark Clifford, who again sat in, and the author John Hersey as a kind of witness to history. Truman wanted confidential advice. What could be done about McCarthy?

As Hersey would recall, Truman gave a “pithy and bitter” summary of McCarthy’s methods—“his hectoring and innuendo, his horrors and dirty tricks…his bully’s delight in the ruin of innocents.” All this was tearing the country apart, Truman said. But what antidote could he as President use against such poison?

Senator Clinton Anderson mentioned a “devastating” dossier that had been assembled on McCarthy, complete with details on his bedmates over the years, enough to “blow Senator McCarthy’s whole show sky high.” Suggestions were made that the material be leaked to the press. But Truman smacked the table with the flat of his hand, and as Hersey remembered, “His third-person self spoke in outrage; the President wanted no more such talk.”

Now repeatedly at press conferences when asked his views on the senator or the influence of McCarthyism, Truman, though plainly seething, would answer only, “No comment.”

Marshall, too, refused to respond, saying privately that if at this point in his life he had to explain that he was not a traitor, then it was hardly worth the effort.

To what degree the attacks by McCarthy influenced Marshall’s decision to retire is not clear. But on September 12, with great reluctance, Truman announced that the Secretary of Defense was stepping down for the final time, the extraordinary career was over. No man, said Truman, had ever given his country more distinguished and patriotic service.

There was a gathering sense of strong, central figures leaving the stage. Arthur Vandenberg had died of cancer in the spring. Admiral Forrest Sherman, Chief of Naval Operations and one of the keenest and best of Truman’s military advisers, dropped dead of a heart attack in August. Now Marshall, Truman’s “strong tower,” was departing.

Nor were Truman’s days in the West Wing quite the same without Charlie Ross. Press secretary Joe Short was highly professional, but a taut, intense man, very different from the gentle, wise Ross. The only one left on the staff who came close to filling Ross’s place in Truman’s affections was Bill Hassett, the correspondence secretary, who was of the same generation as Truman, and whose kind-hearted outlook, interest in history, and sense of humor greatly appealed to Truman. Hassett would bring him funny items clipped from magazines, joke with him about the endless obligatory letters that had to be cranked out to every conceivable kind of organization, the absurd proclamations that were called for. And from years of experience as a Vermont newspaperman and working for Roosevelt, Hassett had his own kind of wisdom to contribute. But Hassett was seventy-one years old and an alcoholic, as Truman knew.

With charges of scandal—mounting evidence of favoritism, outright corruption—filling the headlines again, the whole atmosphere in the West Wing grew increasingly strained. Joe Short, Roger Tubby, George Elsey, and Bill Hassett were seething with indignation over the damage done by the “chiselers” within. They saw the President being used by so-called loyal associates for their own pernicious ends, and his continuing tolerance of them could only mean shame and trouble ahead, not just for Truman but for the Democratic Party.

“My house is always clean,” Truman had said at a press conference in March. Somehow, he seemed incapable of imagining any of his people doing anything illegal or dishonorable. The accusations and innuendo coming from the Hill, the reports in the papers were all exaggerated, Truman insisted.

“He tended to live a day at a time and do the best he could each day as it came along,” George Elsey remembered. “Maybe it was the farmer in him. You go out and do the day’s work.”

In February 1951 a Senate subcommittee chaired by Arkansas Democrat j, William Fulbright had issued a preliminary report called Study of Reconstruction Finance Corporation: Favoritism and Influence that implied misconduct in the operations of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which dispensed low-interest government loans to business. Among those implicated were Democratic Party Chairman William Boyle, White House aide Donald Dawson, who was Truman’s administrative assistant in charge of personnel, and a former RFC examiner and friend of Dawson’s named E. Merl Young, whose wife, Loretta, also worked at the White House, as an assistant to Rose Conway, Truman’s secretary.

The implication was of an influence ring, the power of which stemmed directly from the White House itself. Newspaper accounts indicated that Boyle and Dawson both had been unduly active in support of loan applicants. Dawson, reportedly, had exercised “considerable influence” over certain RFC directors, even “tried to dominate” the agency. But the one mentioned most frequently and who attracted the most attention was E. Merl Young. Though he was no relation to Truman, Young, for years, had allowed people to think he was, supposedly through Truman’s grandparents, Solomon and Harriet Louisa Young, and the odd part was that Young looked enough like Truman to be taken for his son. As a high-paid, fast-talking Washington “expeditor,” Young traded on his former association with the RFC, his friendship with Dawson; and as now disclosed he had lately given his wife, the White House stenographer, a $9,540 pastel mink coat paid for by the attorney for a firm that received an RFC loan. Overnight the mink coat, like Harry Vaughan’s deep freezers, became a symbol of corruption in the Truman White House. The fact that Boyle, Dawson, and E. Merl Young were also all from Missouri—like Vaughan, like Wallace Graham, who had had his troubles earlier over speculation on grain futures—served not only to renew old charges of “government by crony,” but to recall Truman’s past connections to the Pendergast machine.

After careful study of the “peculiar Washington species known as the influence peddlers,” wrote Time, the Senate investigating subcommittee had discovered some distinctive markings and characteristics:

Truman denounced the report, called it “asinine,” because while its insinuations were in effect serious charges, it also piously stressed that no charges were being made. “Well, now,” he told reporters, recalling his own experience as head of a Senate investigating committee, “when I made a report to the Congress, I made specific charges if I thought they were necessary.” But like his dismissal of the Hiss case as a “red herring,” the word “asinine” struck sparks, infuriating Senator Fulbright, who announced he would begin public hearings. Nor did Truman improve matters by portraying Fulbright as “an overeducated S.O.B.”

Truman had somebody from the White House staff make a fast check of RFC correspondence and was told, as he had anticipated, that the RFC files contained hundreds of “pressure letters” from members of Congress, including a number from Fulbright himself and Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, another Democrat on the investigating committee. (Douglas, quickly checking his own files, found three such letters, which he immediately read into the record, conceding that probably he had “gone too far.”) His temper up, Truman put through a call to the Capitol and had Senator Charles Tobey of New Hampshire, the leading Republican on the committee, summoned away from an executive session. Tobey, a veteran on the Hill, was a man Truman had long liked and admired, but now Truman angrily warned him to watch his step. Paul Douglas would later write that Tobey returned from the call looking pale and solemn. Truman had told him the “real crooks and influence peddlers” were members of the committee, as they might soon find out.

But when Democrats Fulbright and Douglas went to the White House to meet with Truman, to urge him to “clean house” and allow Dawson to testify before the committee, they found him disarmingly subdued.

“You have been loyal to friends who have not been loyal to you,” said Douglas, who would remember the silence that followed as Truman turned in his chair and looked sadly out the window at the slanting rain.

“I guess you are right,” he said softly.

In May, Truman put Stuart Symington in as head of the RFC and Symington moved expeditiously to straighten things out.

There was an increasing sense nationwide that the moral fabric was breaking down all about. For a year now, Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee had been staging televised hearings in one city after another, looking into activities of organized crime, and the testimony of such big-time underworld figures as Joe Adonis and Frank Costello had caused a sensation.

“You bastards. I hope a goddamn atom bomb falls on every goddamn one of you,” said the girlfriend of gangster Bugsy Siegel, Virginia Hill Hauser, who wore a $5,000 silver-blue mink stole the day of her appearance before the Kefauver Committee.

The New York advertising firm of Young & Rubicam took a full page in the newspapers to register concern:

That summer of 1951 came the shocking news that ninety West Point cadets, including a large part of the Army football team, were expelled for cheating on examinations. Truman was sickened by the West Point scandal. It made him feel discouraged, he said, in a way nothing else had in a long time. When other colleges began making offers to the dismissed football players, he felt even worse.

As time passed and Dawson, Young, and Boyle testified on the Hill, along with scores of others, it often became difficult to distinguish truth from hearsay, or to tell how much that had gone on was illegal or only an impropriety, or old-fashioned, petty political wangling and stockjobbing. Corporations of questionable stability had been propped up or rescued by multi-million-dollar RFC loans, and too often, it appeared, because of political influence. A director of the RFC named Walter L. Dunham testified that Donald Dawson had told him to clear all top personnel matters of the RFC with the White House, and Dunham’s telephone log showed 45 calls from or about Dawson, 151 calls from Bill Boyle or his office, mostly all to urge Dunham to see some “very dear friend” or other on an RFC matter. Yet Dunham also stressed that Dawson had never tried to influence him on an RFC loan.

Dawson, in his turn, insisted he had done no wrong. Acknowledging that he had stayed without charge at a Miami hotel on three different occasions, Dawson said he understood this was a common practice, that even some senators were on the hotel’s free list, a point no one on the committee chose to press. A handsome man with a smooth, ingratiating manner, Dawson gave the appearance of someone who definitely knew his way around, yet claimed he never realized that the Miami hotel had a $1.5 million RFC loan. “I did nothing improper, but I would not do it again,” said Dawson. In conclusion, Senator Fulbright assured Dawson that the object of the hearings was not to embarrass him. “You were sort of a necessary background,” Fulbright said. As Senator Douglas later conceded, Dawson made a “good showing,” only “minor peccadilloes” were proved against him.

While the RFC hearings continued, a House committee began investigations of irregularities in the tax administration, looking into charges of bribes, shakedowns, and gross negligence.

To his staff, Truman said it was all politics and all aimed at him. He could not see that either Dawson or Boyle had done anything seriously out of line and refused even to reprimand them. He liked people, he told Bill Hassett privately, and was loath ever to think of anyone as evil or unredeemable.

“Mr. President,” Joe Short warned, “I don’t think this business is going to blow over.”

Meanwhile, Merl Young, who, because of his wife, had a White House pass, would breeze in cheerfully after work to pick her up. Seeing Young one evening, Roger Tubby had a momentary urge to slam into him. “He was dressed in flashy sport clothes and talked almost gaily to Officer Ken Burke at the door,” Tubby wrote later, still angry.

It was the appearance of wrongdoing, the presence of someone like Merl Young at the White House, that Truman seemed unwilling to respond to with appropriate action, and the appearance of wrongdoing, whether representative or not, only grew worse.

In July the St. Louis Post-Dispatch broke a story charging that Bill Boyle had received $8,000 for arranging a half-million-dollar RFC loan for a St. Louis printing firm, the American Lithofold Corporation, and that part of the fee had been paid after Boyle became chairman of the Democratic Party.

“Ah, me,” wrote Roger Tubby, after returning to the White House from a vacation. “I wonder if this is all as bad as it appears—yes—then, is it as bad or worse than the stuff which goes on in every presidency?” Tubby was forty, a bright, idealistic Yale graduate and former Vermont newspaper reporter who had been a press aide at the State Department before coming to the White House and who in the time since had become devoted to Truman. Like his predecessor as assistant press secretary, Eben Ayers, Tubby was keeping a diary. He was also a great worrier, with premonitions of Truman ending up, as some critics were saying, like Warren G. Harding. “Poker, poker, I wonder why he played so much,” Tubby had commented on Truman in his diary at Key West in April, “a feeling of vacuum otherwise, no struggle, excitement?…companionship, banter, escape from the pressing problems of state?” Now Tubby wrote:

Another day, Tubby would write of the President, “He does not like to dwell upon the weakness and foibles of his party, or even of the GOP—he is a builder, looking far into the future….”

Once when he had served as budget director, prior to becoming Secretary of the Army, Frank Pace had asked the President why he continued to tolerate the influence of machine politicians on his administration, and Truman, with a chuckle, had replied, “Frank, you make a splendid director of the budget, but a lousy politician.”

For Truman, the attack on Boyle was cutting close to the bone. He had known Boyle since Boyle was a child in Kansas City, growing up in a prosperous Irish Catholic family where politics was a life force. Boyle’s mother, Clara, had been a Pendergast precinct worker, an energetic, God-fearing woman still honored and respected in Kansas City, and someone Truman greatly admired, calling her “one of the best Democrats Missouri ever produced.” By age sixteen Boyle had organized a Young Democrats Club in the city’s affluent Fourth Ward, and until now he had never been accused of misconduct or dishonesty. Truman liked him. He had put Boyle in one job after another over the years, and from the time Truman first brought him to Washington, as an assistant counsel for the Truman Committee, Boyle had remained a staunch, resourceful enthusiast, working hard for the Roosevelt-Truman ticket in 1944 and harder still for the Truman campaign in 1948, while between times prospering as a Washington lawyer. Boyle was commonly credited as one of the “masterminds” of Truman’s upset victory in 1948. Once Truman installed him as chairman of the Democratic National Committee he became truly, as the papers said, a political power-house.

No one seeing Bill Boyle in the lobby of the Mayflower or the Statler would have had trouble guessing his occupation. A well-dressed, six-foot, fleshy “good fellow” with a round Irish face, he was the picture of a professional politician. He had a “nice way” about him, an “index card memory” for names, and though not known for efficiency or a particularly sharp mind, he knew politics from experience in a way that others, like most of Truman’s staff, never would. He talked the language, he had “the feel.”

Boyle’s chief trouble was with alcohol, and this had infuriated Truman more than once in times past. On the night of the 1944 presidential election, Boyle had been one of those in the suite at the Muehlebach who got so drunk that Bess and Margaret left in disgust. “Your views on Mr. Boyle and the other middle-aged soaks are exactly correct,” Truman had written to Margaret afterward, apologetically.

But Truman had not scratched him from his own list, he did trust Boyle again, and remained genuinely fond of him. “Bill’s all right! Don’t let anybody tell you differently!” he had told those gathered for a huge black-tie dinner in Boyle’s honor at the Kansas City Municipal Auditorium in September 1949. Truman and Barkley both had flown from Washington for the occasion. “All these are friends to tie to,” Truman had continued, sparkling with warmth for Boyle, McGrath, and Bob Hannegan, his three party chairmen since becoming President. “They are there when you need them, and that’s the kind of friends I like to have around me.” It was the old professional creed—politics as a matter of friends—and his Kansas City audience gave a roar of approval.

But conspicuously present among the more than two thousand at the dinner had been several well-known North Side gamblers, including the ruling Kansas City racketeer of the day, Charles Binnagio, who only months later was shot to death in a gangland killing reminiscent of the city in its worst days. The press had taken careful note of such “friends” present to honor Boyle, just as the press highlighted the fact that Binnagio had been gunned down in a Democratic clubhouse located on Truman Road and that his bullet-riddled body fell beneath a poster-sized portrait of President Harry S. Truman.

To many on the White House staff Boyle now looked like a very large liability.

“So Boyle is not only stupid and inefficient, but also, it seems, a crook,” wrote Roger Tubby, so angry he could hardly contain himself.

Bill Hassett urged Truman to rid himself of Boyle without delay. “Your friends will destroy you,” Hassett pleaded.

“It’s all right, Bill,” Truman said, as if trying to calm a child. “It’s all right.”

Truman quietly ordered a confidential investigation by Charlie Murphy, his precise, scrupulously honest counselor whose importance was far greater than generally understood. Murphy’s report was ready by midsummer, and at a subsequent press conference, Truman said he would stand by Boyle. No one connected with the Democratic National Committee ought ever to take fees for favors or services, Truman said, and it was his impression that Boyle had not. “I have the utmost confidence in Mr. Boyle. And I believe the statements that he made to me.”

In his memorandum, Murphy reported that a thorough search of the RFC records had revealed “no effort of any kind whatever” by Boyle to influence the loan made to the American Lithofold Corporation.

The RFC examiner for the Lithofold loan had never met Boyle, never communicated with him directly or indirectly on that particular subject or any other. Murphy had concluded there was nothing “fishy” about the RFC loan. “I believe that the facts I have developed substantiate the statement Mr. Boyle himself has already issued concerning this matter, and that they indicate pretty clearly that he had nothing to do with the granting of the loans in question and that there is no reason why he should be subjected to criticism, express or implied, on that account.”

Murphy’s report could only have pleased Truman greatly, while also reinforcing his own natural inclination to see attacks on any of his people as fundamentally political and directed at him. It might sound egotistical, Truman remarked, but he thought he was as good a judge of people as anyone who had ever sat in his chair. He had made some mistakes, and he had had to fire some people consequently. But, he added, “You can’t punish a man for not seeming to be right if he isn’t wrong.”

In October, a new revelation relieved considerably the sting of the Boyle accusations. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Guy George Gabrielson, testified that he had been paid $25,000 for “looking after” the loans of a Texas corporation, Carthage Hydrocel, Inc., and had intervened many times with the RFC on behalf of the firm. Gabrielson found it amusing that anyone might think his activities improper. “It is inconceivable to me,” he told the committee, “to believe that a chairman of a party that is not in power could have any possible influence.” But as reported, embarrassed Republicans in Congress did not think it would sound so inconceivable to the voters.

When, in time, the Senate committee issued its final report, Boyle would be cleared of any wrongdoing. In the oddly inverted wording of the report, he was guilty only of conduct that was “not such that it would dispel the appearance of wrong-doing.” But by then, “for reasons of health,” Boyle had also resigned as Democratic national chairman and scandals in the tax bureau loomed larger than any thus far.

For more than a year, Treasury Secretary John Snyder had been trying to get to the bottom of persistent rumors of corruption in various tax collectors’ offices around the country. But Snyder had made little progress. Then in April 1951, the collector in St. Louis, James P. Finnegan, resigned only after being cleared by a grand jury. In July, Truman had to fire two more collectors, Denis W. Delaney in Boston and James G. Smyth in San Francisco. Eight of Smyth’s associates were also suspended, and a few months later, the collector in Brooklyn, Joseph P. Marcelle, was fired.

All four men—Finnegan, Delaney, Smyth, and Marcelle—had been appointed by Bob Hannegan, when Hannegan was head of the Bureau of Internal Revenue under Roosevelt, and all had taken their jobs with the understanding that tax collection need only be a part-time responsibility, that they were free to do other things as well. Like Hannegan, all four men were also the products of big-city Democratic machines, and in fact corrupt practices—or at the least flagrant “irregularities”—had been rampant during their terms of office. Finnegan was indicted for bribe taking and misconduct, Delaney, the Boston collector, for taking bribes to “fix” tax delinquencies. In San Francisco, Smyth, too, was indicted—for fixing tax fraud claims—and in Brooklyn, Marcelle was found to have cheated on his own tax returns and amassed, through his law practice, nearly a quarter of a million dollars beyond his $10,750-a-year salary as tax collector.

Meantime, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, George J. Schoeneman, had suddenly resigned “for reasons of health,” and the resignations of the assistant commissioner, Daniel A. Bolich, and the bureau’s chief counsel, Charles Oliphant, followed almost immediately.

In November, Truman had to fire the head of the tax division at the Justice Department, Assistant Attorney General T. Lamar Caudle. A House investigating committee would conclude that Caudle, though undoubtedly an honorable man, had been naive in his dealings with tax fixers.

By December, George Elsey would report in a White House memorandum that signs of corruption were spreading so fast the staff was unable to document them all.

In Truman’s defense, it was stressed that the tax collectors under fire were holdovers from the Roosevelt administration. Also, Truman had moved swiftly and forcefully to clean house in the tax bureau, a point no one could contest. By December, 113 employees of the Internal Revenue Bureau, including six regional collectors, had been fired from their jobs. When Boyle was replaced by a new Democratic national chairman, Frank E. McKinney, Truman also determined that collectors of the Internal Revenue would no longer be patronage jobs but put under civil service.

Nonetheless, corruption in the tax bureau was truly appalling, the housecleaning long overdue, and if Bob Hannegan had made his key appointments under Roosevelt, Hannegan had also been known as a thorough Truman man, another Missouri crony. Hannegan had himself been a first-rate head of the tax bureau, but Hannegan was no longer available to speak in his own defense—he had died of heart failure in October 1949. And whatever the comparative guilt or stupidity of an unfortunate figure like T. Lamar Caudle, it would be remembered that his wife, too, was the recipient of a mink coat, a Christmas present from an attorney who had dealings with the tax division.

Would he be taking drastic action to clean up the government, Truman was asked at a press conference in December. “Let’s say continue drastic action,” he replied.

“Wrongdoers have no house with me,” he said, an expression that left reporters looking puzzled and that Truman later told his staff he had used since boyhood. (Time would report that it was a colloquialism as old at least as Romeo and Juliet, where Juliet’s father, angry with her for refusing to marry Paris, tells her: “Graze where you will, you shall not house with me.”)

Did he ever feel as though he had been “sold down the river” by his friends?

“Well, who wouldn’t feel that way,” he snapped angrily. But beyond that he would say no more.

“Boss, you’re going to have to run in ’52,” Harry Vaughan told him one day, as Truman sat at his desk. “Who else is there?”

“We’ll get someone,” Truman answered, a twinkle in his eye.

“You know there isn’t anybody else. You’ll have to run.”

“We’ll see,” said Truman, and Vaughan came out of the office convinced the President would run again.

Vaughan, as he told the others, had no misconceptions about what was ahead for him personally, should Truman not run.

“Once I’m outa the White House,” Vaughan said one noon hour in the staff lunchroom downstairs, “I know perfectly well that these jokers who bow and scrape and call me General would pass me by on the street and if they saw me say, ‘Why there goes that fat god-damned son-of-a-bitch!’ ”

It was one of those moments when several of the staff were reminded why, after all, the President had kept Vaughan around for so long.

The only one not pointedly urging Truman to run again was Bill Hassett, who was due to retire soon himself and who told Truman that for his own sake and the sake of his family, he should do the same.

In Korea, though peace talks had resumed, now at Panmunjom, the war went on. The sticking point in the talks was the fate of 132,000 North Korean soldiers held prisoner by the U.N. Command. Originally, it had been agreed that the end of hostilities would bring an immediate exchange of all prisoners. But now the United States opposed that policy, since nearly half of the North Korean prisoners of war, some 62,000, had no wish to be repatriated. Truman insisted that they be given the choice of whether to go home. At the end of World War II Stalin had executed or sent to Siberia thousands of Soviet soldiers whose only crime was to have been captured by the enemy. “We will not buy an armistice by turning over human beings for slaughter or slavery,” Truman declared, and he would not be budged.

American casualties in Korea were now far less than in the first year of the war. Still every week meant more death and suffering. Korea was consuming lives and resources, poisoning American politics, devastating Truman’s presidency. No one wanted the war ended more than he. According to the polls, half the American people favored using the atomic bomb to get it over with. And though determined to keep to his policy of restraint, even he had his own fantasies about the ultimatum he might hand the Soviets. In another of his solitary ventings of anger and frustration, a lengthy private soliloquy in longhand, he wrote:

But no one heard him ever say such things. He had no such intentions. The seven sheets of desk notepaper that he had filled were put away in a drawer and on he went with the hard work of his responsibilities. “I know of no easy way to be President,” he would say.

At Washington dinner parties, and increasingly to reporters, prominent Republicans talked almost gleefully of the “damndest” campaign ever in 1952 on the issues of communism, corruption, and Korea. Taft was already running. Others, Republicans and Democrats, spoke more and more of Eisenhower as the ideal candidate. By December, Attorney General McGrath was being questioned by the House committee investigating the Internal Revenue scandals and Truman’s standing in the polls had fallen to an all-time low. Only 23 percent of the country approved of how he was handling his job.

But by then the staff had been told. In mid-November, during a brief vacation at Key West, Truman had gathered them about the poker table on the porch at the Little White House to read aloud the statement he had written on April 12, 1950, and that he planned to release in the coming spring, in April 1952, well in advance of the Democratic National Convention. He was not running again; but for the next five months, he cautioned them, there must be utmost secrecy. He was only telling them now, he explained, so they could start making their own plans. Once having told them, he seemed greatly relieved.

“From that day forward,” Roger Tubby was to write several months later, “I have not discerned any difference in any of our feelings for, or relations with the President—we are, and I think it proper to generalize for the staff, devoted to him as before.”

Later still, it would be seen as a measure of that devotion that none of those who knew Truman’s plans for 1952 ever said a word. The secret was kept for five months, as he had asked.

In the first week of the new year, on January 5, 1952, Winston Churchill, who in recent months, at seventy-seven, had returned to office as prime minister, arrived for a brief visit. Churchill had sailed on the Queen Mary. Truman sent the Independence to New York to bring him to Washington and Truman was there at National Airport to welcome him. Churchill, white-haired, wearing the familiar derby and smoking a long cigar, looked greatly aged, more stooped than ever, his walk slower. But to those watching as he and Truman greeted one another, he was “the old warrior,” “the old lion” still, with an air of dramatic dignity about him. To Truman, Churchill was the greatest public figure of the age, as he often said. To Dean Acheson, this was an understatement. One would have to go back four centuries to find his equal, Acheson insisted. “What Churchill did was great; how he did it was equally so…. Everything felt the touch of his art—his appearance and gestures….”

That evening, following dinner on board the Williamsburg, the table cleared, Churchill began talking of the state of the world, the menace and paradoxes of the Soviet empire. He acknowledged the importance of American nuclear power, and warmly praised Truman’s leadership of the free world, including, as Churchill said, Truman’s “great decision” to commit American forces in Korea. For Acheson, Averell Harriman, and others present, it was an occasion to be long remembered.

Looking at Truman, Churchill said slowly, “The last time you and I sat across the conference table was at Potsdam, Mr. President.” Truman nodded.

“I must confess, sir,” Churchill went on, “I held you in very low regard then. I loathed your taking the place of Franklin Roosevelt.” He paused. “I misjudged you badly. Since that time, you more than any other man, have saved Western civilization.”

In a dark period for Harry Truman, a winter of tawdry scandal, of interminable war in Korea and greatly diminished public confidence in his leadership, the gallant old ally had again, and as only he could, served as a voice of affirmation.

II

During his initial years in the White House, Truman had often referred to it derisively as “the great white jail,” “the great white sepulcher of ambitions,” or “the taxpayers’ house.” He had found living there difficult, often very lonely. But he was also the President who, with the war over, reestablished state dinners and receptions in the grand, formal rooms of the mansion, insisting on respect for tradition in most every detail. He and the First Lady had returned “pageantry” to the White House, as J. B. West said, and plainly this had given him great pleasure.

As much perhaps as anyone who had ever lived there, Truman felt the aura of the old structure’s past, the lingering presence of the strong personalities who had been its occupants down the years, even to the point, some nights, of hearing their ghosts stalking the center hall upstairs or knocking at his door. As Ethel Noland and others had observed, history for Truman was never just something in a book, but part of life, and of interest primarily because it had to do with people. Often when he spoke of Andrew Jackson or John Quincy Adams or Abraham Lincoln, it was as if he were talking about someone he knew. One cold Saturday morning near the end of 1950, he had led John Hersey on a tour of the White House renovation, at a time when the inside of the building looked like any big construction project, with steel beams, raw concrete floors, and metal ductwork contained within the shell of the old exterior walls. There were no partitions. Nothing remained of the original interior. It looked, thought Hersey, as if someone had decided to set up a modern office inside a deserted castle. Yet Truman stepped briskly along describing the historic features of one room after another, as though they were all still there, everything in place. The tour became a kind of fantasy, “a game of imagining,” as Hersey wrote. Truman pointed out the Red Room, the Blue Room, the Green Room, then, at the far end, the East Room.

“You know, the White House was started in 1792,” he said, “and the first ones to move in were John Adams and his wife, in 1800, and when they moved in, only six rooms in the whole building were ready to be lived in. This East Room was just a stone shell, so Abigail Adams used to string up her wash to dry in here. Imagine it! Later on, when the room was dolled up, Jackson bought twenty spittoons to go in here. They cost twelve-fifty apiece.”

When Hersey asked if the intention was to restore the interior more or less as it had been before the building was dismantled, Truman answered emphatically, “Oh, yes indeed!”

History aside, Truman also understood the building’s immense power as symbol. Since his first weeks in office, he had made steady use of such lesser symbols as the presidential yacht, the presidential plane, railroad car, and limousines. It was not just that he enjoyed them, but that he knew the degree to which they represented the dignity and importance of the office. Now, in an ironic bit of timing, as his tormentors in the press and opposition party made much over the “mess in Washington” by use of such other symbols as deep freezers and mink coats, Truman found some relief from his daily burdens, welcome diversion from war and scandals and politics, in the work of saving and returning to service the ultimate symbol of his high place in American life. The creator of acclaimed Missouri roads and courthouses—and of what had become the nation’s best-known balcony—could be a builder again, restorer and guardian of one of democracy’s shrines, the oldest building of the federal city. And little else that he was able to accomplish in these last years of his presidency would give him such satisfaction.

From its beginning stages he had cared intensely about the project. “It is the President’s desire,” the official White House architect, Lorenzo Winslow, had written in the spring of 1949, “that this restoration be made so thoroughly complete that the structural condition and all principal and fixed architectural finishes will be permanent for many generations to come.”

The first dismantling had begun December 13, 1949, after six months of planning. Truman had hoped to have full responsibility for the project—it was, after all, the President’s house—but was turned down by Congress. A Congressional Commission on the Renovation of the Executive Mansion was established, its six members appointed by the President, including two from the Senate, two from the House, the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the president of the American Institute of Architects. The senior member of the commission, old Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, the president pro tempore of the Senate, who was by then eighty, became chairman, while Glen E. Edgerton, a retired major general from the office of the Army Chief of Staff, was made executive director of the work. But it was the White House architect, Winslow, who worked most directly with Truman, and it was to be Truman, in the last analysis, who made nearly all the major decisions and a good many others as well.

The last major overhaul of the old mansion had been in Theodore Roosevelt’s day, in 1902. Under the direction of Charles McKim of the renowned New York architectural firm of McKim, Mead, & White, the main floor especially had been transformed from something resembling a dowdy Victorian hotel to a kind of Beaux-Arts elegance, with the added touch of magnificent new electrical light fixtures and chandeliers. But the work was fundamentally cosmetic and accomplished in a huge rush. Structural needs had been bypassed, making the house in all less stable than it had been before. It had been truly a “botch job,” as Truman said, and a principal cause of the conditions Truman faced forty-seven years later.

Although the exterior sandstone walls, the roof, and a fire-resistant third floor that had been added in the 1920s, during the Coolidge era, were in stable condition, the rest of the house was on the verge of collapse and a fearful fire hazard. Great loads had been put on the interior bearing walls. Beams had been notched or cut for plumbing or electrical wiring. The entire second floor, most of which had been rebuilt after British soldiers burned the house in 1814, was unsafe. “The character and extent of structural weakness were found to be truly appalling,” said the Commissioner of Public Buildings in his report. (Winslow had claimed he could prove mathematically that it was impossible for the house to remain standing.) The plumbing was all largely makeshift and long outdated, the heating system and electrical wiring all inadequate and obsolete.

The main question to be decided in 1949 was whether to remove the existing interior of the house below the third floor, keeping the outside walls, and then rebuild everything within; or to take down the whole building, preserving and numbering the exterior stones in the process, so they could be reassembled when the new building went up. In the words of a later report, “The decision between these plans presented a matter of not inconsiderable complexity, especially since there were involved not only the construction factors, but the compelling sentimental aspects of the matter.” To have proceeded by dismantling the outside walls would have made the project less difficult and less costly, saving as much as. $300,000 or $400,000. But only one member of the commission, Democratic Congressman Louis C. Rabaut of Michigan, had argued for that approach. To the rest, tearing down the White House was unacceptable. It would have seemed an act of desecration. Truman never considered the idea.

Had he and the commission decided otherwise, the walls of the White House would have begun coming down in early 1950, as McCarthy was beginning his assault. The country would have had to have seen the complete demolition of the building, down to the ground, at about the time the news from Korea had turned so dreadful the following summer, with American troops fighting desperately to hang on at the Pusan Perimeter.

As it was, the exterior remained intact, while within, everything below the third floor was removed, piece by careful piece to begin with—after which came the full-scale demolition until the entire inside was hollowed out and the house had become a cavernous empty shell, the old outside walls held in place by steel framing. Trucks and bulldozers moved in to begin excavation for two entirely new basement levels. It was an extraordinary sight. “They took the insides all out,” Truman wrote in his diary. “Dug two basements, put in steel and concrete like you’ve never seen in the Empire State Building, Pentagon or anywhere else.” He loved making inspection tours, often using the workers’ catwalks, high above ground.

The work was projected to cost $5,412,000 and be completed by December 1951. John McShain, Inc., of Philadelphia was, as low bidder, made general contractor. The firm had built the Pentagon, the Jefferson Memorial, and had a high reputation in Washington, but when Truman, walking over from Blair House one morning, saw a big McShain sign on the North Lawn of the White House, he told head usher Howell Grim to have “that thing” removed at once.

The project was far bigger and more complicated than commonly appreciated. Most of Washington and the country never realized all that was involved or the extent to which it was to become the house that Harry Truman built.

For 149 years the outside walls of the house had been standing on clay. Now, for proper underpinning, 4-foot-square pits were dug to a depth of about 25 feet, down to a firm stratum of gravel—some 126 pits in all, these filled with reinforced concrete, thereby forming the foundation for the structural steel frame of the house that went up within the original walls. The old brick of the interior bearing walls—the backing for the stone—was also found to be too soft and had to be removed, thus for the first time revealing the inside surfaces of the original stones, many of which, to Truman’s delight, bore the mark of Masonic symbols. (He was also pleased to learn that on the Saturday in October 1792 when the Free Masons of Georgetown had laid the first stone, in the presence of President George Washington and the architect of the house, James Hoban, they had afterward paraded back to Georgetown, to “Mr. Sutter’s Fountain Inn,” where toasts were raised to the fifteen United States, the President, and “masonic brethren throughout the universe.”)

Original ornamental plaster cornices designed by James Hoban were found in the East Room hidden behind plaster put on in 1902. A well dug by Thomas Jefferson was discovered beneath the east wall. In his temporary office out on the South Lawn, General Edgerton kept an assortment of curiosities uncovered: a brick with a dog’s footprint in it, a pike blade found buried under the North Portico, an ancient pair of workman’s shoes.

All the principal rooms of the main floor—those used for state occasions—were to be rebuilt as “faithful reproductions” of the original rooms. The second and ground floors, too, would be restored with only minor changes.

The best of the original furnishings, beyond what was already at Blair House, had been put in storage at the National Gallery. Old mahogany doors and window sashes, mantelpieces, hardware, and floorboards deemed worth saving for reuse in the building, all paneling from the East Room and State Dining Room, were numbered, tagged, and carried away to federal warehouses across town. Twenty surplus mantels were given to museums, while some 95,000 old bricks were trucked off to Mount Vernon for the restoration of garden walls and to reconstruct George Washington’s orangery.

The public, too, was offered the choice of a dozen different White House relic “kits,” these ranging from a single foot-long piece of original, hand-split lath, for 25 cents, to a single brick (“as nearly whole as possible”) for a $1, to enough old pine to make a walking stick or gavel, for $2. The charge was intended only to cover the cost of distribution. A small metal “authentication plate” was also provided with each item. For $100, one could get enough bricks to surface a fireplace.

Truman had warmly endorsed the idea of offering such souvenirs, and receipts wound up exceeding expenses by $10,000. Originally he had said he wanted to send gavels made of White House wood to all forty-eight state governors. When the stones showing the original stonemasons’ marks were uncovered, he ordered a large number of them removed, some to be reset in the walls of the restored ground-floor kitchen, the rest to be sent to the grand lodges of the Masonic orders of every state, as a token of the bond between Freemasonry and the founding of the nation.

But as the pace of demolition stepped up, an immense quantity of material that might have been saved was not. Tons of old pine flooring, scrap lumber, ancient plumbing fixtures, pine doors, brick, and stone were hauled away to Forts Belvoir and Myer in nearby Virginia, some of it to be used in construction, but the large part as landfill. Chair rails, door frames, beautiful plaster moldings (once they had been measured and cast for reproduction) were scrapped, as part of the wreckage. For nearly a month, trucks loaded with White House “debris” went rolling back and forth across the Potomac to Virginia.

By the standards of latter-day preservation work, this was a needless and tragic loss. The justification would be cost and the President’s own desire to see the job finished in reasonable time.

Before the renovation, there had been sixty-two rooms in the mansion, twenty-six halls and corridors, fourteen bathrooms. With the project complete, there were to be more than one hundred rooms, forty corridors and halls, and nineteen bathrooms. There would be 147 windows, 412 doors, 29 fireplaces, 12 chimneys, 3 elevators. There would also be a television broadcast room and a bomb shelter, two definite and costly signs of the times.

Most of the additional rooms and baths were on the third floor (thirty-one rooms and nine baths) and in the new basement levels, which, when finished, would resemble the off-stage service and utility complex of an up-to-date 1950s hotel. There were storage rooms, a laundry, a dental clinic, medical clinic, staff kitchen, barbershop, pantries, everything very institutional-looking. Few buildings anywhere in the country had such advanced mechanical and electrical equipment as went into the new White House that was emerging. The main electrical control board looked big enough for a theater. Plumbing, heating, air conditioning, kitchen appliances, elevators, incinerator, fire alarm systems, wall safes—all were the most advanced of the day, and cost well over $1,250,000. To accommodate the refrigeration compressors for the air conditioning, a tremendous additional excavation had to be made outside, next to the North Portico.

To make the lowest basement bombproof, an additional $868,000 was spent, and with no questions asked. The Secret Service and Truman’s military advisers had convinced him of the necessity. The decision was made in the grim first months of the Korean War, when it seemed a third world war could come any time. “The President has authorized certain protective measures at basement level in and adjacent to the wings of the White House,” the commission was informed on August 16, 1950. “Plans for this work are now being developed by the Architect of the White House….”

The change meant many tons of additional steel and concrete in corridor walls and the floor above, work that was rushed ahead full speed. The bomb shelter was completed in less than a year, long before the upstairs levels were even close to finished.

The entrance, at the end of a subterranean passage at the northeast end of the house, was a four-inch steel door with a narrow window at eye level, like the entrance to a speakeasy. In the event that the President and those with him reached the shelter after an atomic attack had already occurred, they were to shed their clothes once inside a small entrance hall, then, naked, proceed into another somewhat larger hall, where they would shower—to remove any radioactive material—and put on emergency clothing, which by the summer of 1951, like everything else in the shelter, was all ready and waiting.

Beyond was a large room with some seventy army cots neatly stacked against one wall, gas masks, chemical toilets, and acetylene torches (in case the occupants had to cut their way out of the steel door). In adjacent rooms were an emergency generator, a larder of Army rations, and a communications center, with radios, cryptographic machines, and telephone switchboard with direct lines to the Pentagon, state police headquarters, and a secret military relocation center near Leesburg, known as Mt. Weather. Accommodations for the President and his family consisted of an 8 by 10-foot room, four bunk beds, a toilet, and a supply of books.

Those inside, Truman was informed during a first visit to the shelter, would probably survive an atomic attack. The facility, however, would not sustain a direct hit. As the Secret Service and most of his staff already knew, Truman intended, in the event of an attack, to remain at the White House or in the shelter, both during and afterward, largely for “morale reasons.”

(Once when a radar operator incorrectly reported the approach of twenty-five unscheduled, unidentified planes—which turned out to be one plane—and several of the White House staff went below to the shelter, Truman did not.)

In the early months of the White House project, the work had proceeded ahead of schedule; but with the onset of the Korean War, and increasing shortages of building materials, progress slowed, costs began to rise. About 250 men were on the job. The work went on six days a Week. Truman came and went repeatedly, so often as time passed that the men scarcely bothered to glance up or take notice.

“He considered it his project. He was saving the White House,” remembered Rex Scouten, one of the Secret Service agents who regularly accompanied the President on such rounds and who, years later, would become head usher, then curator of the White House. “He was also showing his desire to get it done with.”

Truman wanted everything handled correctly, on the job and on paper. When he learned of a movement within the commission to dispense with making complete plans of the installations in the new building—as a way of cutting costs—he responded at once with a terse memorandum to the head of the General Services Administration:

His own principal contribution to the design of the building concerned the grand stairway, which he insisted be relocated to the east side of the main entrance hall and made more open, more fitting for the ceremonial processions of the President and his guests of honor. Before, the stairway had been largely out of sight.

Often over the years, Truman had told friends and members of his staff that had he been forced as a young man to choose a profession other than politics, he would have been either a farmer, an historian, or an architect. Now, working with Winslow, he could pore over plans and drawings to his heart’s content, as he had once with Edward Neild, when building the Kansas City Courthouse; and at first, he and Winslow got along extremely well. A tall, personable, highly gifted man, Winslow had been an important figure at the White House since the 1930s. He cared intensely about the building, knew and loved its history. Privately, he even communed with the spirits of a few departed presidents. (“Franklin Roosevelt appeared and presented a rose to me as did Andrew [Jackson],” Winslow had recorded in his diary after an evening over a Ouija board in the summer of 1950.) A married man, he was also romantically involved with several women, and while Truman seems to have been aware of this, he appears only to have grown annoyed by it when the project started to fall behind schedule. Losing his patience, Truman could often become quite abrupt with Winslow.

Most of the time, however, they worked smoothly together, each admiring the other’s strengths and pleased to find how often they agreed. Winslow would write long memoranda reporting on progress, or listing current problems, and Truman would give his answers in the margins or between paragraphs in longhand. When, for example, Winslow reported that the commission intended to dismantle the temporary sheds on the South Lawn and set up various storage rooms and facilities for the workers in the new basement areas, Truman scrawled, “No! HST.”

In August 1951 the plasterers went out on strike for two weeks, slowing progress still more. The laying of the fine parquet floors, a slow process at best, seemed to go on endlessly, since few craftsmen could be found who knew how the work should be done and those available were often advanced in years and worked very slowly.

The contract for furnishing and decorating the house went to B. Altman & Company of New York, which did the entire project at cost. When a number of socially prominent New Yorkers who had served on a White House advisory committee in years past began pressing for the chance to contribute their views, Truman wrote that

This settled, the work went on, directed principally by B. Altman’s young chief of design, Charles T. Haight, who was tireless, forceful, and got along well with both the President and the First Lady, even as Truman made his presence felt more and more.

He kept pressing for greater speed. He wanted everything ready by Christmas 1951. He hoped to have at least a year in the house, before his term of office expired. As the new year began, work on the floors was still behind schedule. Installation of marble and paneling was incomplete. Bath fixtures had yet to arrive, and though some twenty painters were at work, only the third floor, the guest and servant quarters, had been finished.

There was no letup in the racket and confusion. In February 1952, the main floor was a thicket of scaffolding, paint buckets, and stacks of lumber, as Truman led a half-dozen reporters on a preview tour. The builders were speeding things up, he said, obviously pleased. He had “taken a curry comb to them.” He intended to move in by April. The reporters confessed difficulty in imagining how the finished interior would look.

On March 15, The New York Times reported that things were “moving at the double quick” at the White House.

Twelve days later, late in the afternoon on Thursday, March 27, Truman arrived back in Washington after a week’s stay at Key West and, joined by Bess, was driven to the White House, entering by the north gate on Pennsylvania Avenue.

It was spring again and the mansion looked warm and cheerful in the dusk, with lights glowing from every window on the ground floor. As a further note of cheer, a large cherry tree in full blossom had been planted just that day in the front lawn.

Beneath the North Portico several of the White House staff, members of the commission, and others stood waiting, with a cluster of reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen. Along the sidewalk, by the iron fence, a crowd applauded and called welcome.

Head usher Howell Crim greeted the President at the door. John Mays, the veteran doorkeeper who had been at the White House since the time of William Howard Taft, took the President’s coat.

Truman, “tanned and appearing in excellent health,” “obviously highly pleased,” as reporters jotted in their notebooks, stepped inside. After an absence of three years, four months, the President of the United States was again in residence at the White House.

Every light was burning, everything shimmered with light—crystal chandeliers and red carpets, window glass, marble columns, gilt-framed mirrors. Wood floors shone like polished glass. Walls and ceilings glistened with new paint. The effect was stunning. It all looked much the same as before, yet brighter, more spacious, and finished to perfection.

With Bess, Truman toured the whole of the first floor. To the white and lemon-gold splendor of the East Room had been added new mantelpieces of Tennessee marble, in honor of the chairman of the commission, Senator McKellar. Except for two magnificent grand pianos standing in opposite corners and two newly acquired Adam benches against the far wall—eighteenth-century benches designed by John Adam of Edinburgh—the room was bare of furniture, its parquet floor shining like glass beneath the same two crystal chandeliers that had hung there before but that had been reduced slightly in scale. The Green Room—once Jefferson’s bedroom, later a dining room, later still a diplomatic reception room—looked no different from before, with the same silk on the walls, the same white Carrara marble mantels ordered by James Hoban in 1816. Above the entrance to the Blue Room, however, was a new presidential seal. Previously the seal had been embedded in the floor of the main hallway, but Truman had insisted it be moved—he didn’t like the idea of people walking on it.

The oval-shaped Blue Room itself had been changed from dark to royal blue, with a large motif in gold on its silk damask walls, while the Red Room had new damask walls, new draperies and valances—all very red—setting off another Hoban mantel of lustrous white Carrara marble. Truman was particularly fond of a small French clock on the mantel in the Red Room and of four portraits on the walls: of William McKinley, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. The painting of Roosevelt, by John Singer Sargent, was, Truman liked to say, “the most expensive picture” in the house.

Where the State Dining Room had been formerly rather subdued, even somber, with dark oak paneling, it was now painted a soft green, a “lovely color,” Truman thought, and a large portrait of Abraham Lincoln by George P. A. Healy hung now over the mantel in a heavy gilt frame.

Because Bess had made a previous commitment to appear at a Salvation Army dinner at the Statler that evening, Truman dined alone, in the family dining room, off the State Dining Room, under a recently donated antique cut-glass chandelier and a spotless replacement of the ceiling where Margaret’s piano had once poked a hole.

“Bess and I looked over the East Room, Green Room, Blue Room, Red Room, and State Dining Room,” he recorded that night. “They are lovely. So is the hall and state stairway…. I spent the evening going over the house. With all the trouble and worry, it is worth it….” The cost had been $5,832,000. It could have been done for less, he thought, and taken less time, if he had been fully in charge. But he was extremely pleased all the same. He had been told by the architect and engineers that it had been built to last another five hundred years. He hoped it would be a thousand years.

On Tuesday, April 22, when the White House was reopened for public tours, 5,444 people went through. On Saturday afternoon, May 3, with the pride of a new householder, Truman led his own television tour of the mansion. The broadcast was carried by all three networks and three network announcers—Walter Cronkite of CBS, Bryson Rash of ABC, and NBC’s Frank Bourgholtzer—took turns accompanying him and asking questions. Thirty million people were watching, the largest audience ever for a house tour. There was no script and Truman was at his best, relaxed, gracious, amusing, and knowledgeable. “His poise, his naturally hearty laugh, and his intuitive dignity made for an unusual and absorbing video experience,” wrote Jack Gould, television critic for The New York Times. In the East Room, to demonstrate the tone of the magnificent Steinway—“the most wonderful tones of any piano I have ever heard,” Truman told Frank Bourgholtzer—he sat down and gave an impromptu performance of part of Mozart’s Ninth Sonata, then crossed the room to the Baldwin, an American-made piano, as he said, and from a standing position, played a few more bars on it as well.

He spoke of Alice Roosevelt’s wedding in the East Room and recalled that Franklin Roosevelt had lain in state there.

Time called his performance “outstanding.” The country loved the new White House and, for the moment, very much liked the man who occupied it.

III

For quite some time, Truman had been thinking about the question of a successor, someone to head the Democratic ticket in November 1952 and take his place in the White House after inauguration day in January 1953. The Republicans, he expected, would choose Taft, and the prospect of Taft as President was intolerable to Truman. There must be no isolationist takeover that would destroy everything he had worked for.

By late summer 1951, he appears to have concluded that the ideal Democratic candidate, “the most logical and qualified,” was Chief Justice Fred Vinson. But Vinson declined, saying he had been out of politics too long. In November Truman tried again, inviting Vinson to Key West where they could talk freely in the privacy of the Little White House, but not until after Truman had had a meeting with Eisenhower over which there was to be a good deal of controversy.

Whether Eisenhower, still the nation’s number one hero, would run for President, remained the great imponderable, though to judge by reports coming from his NATO headquarters in Paris, he was warming to the idea.

The first week of November, on a brief visit to Washington, the general had lunch with Truman at Blair House and reportedly Truman again offered his full support if Eisenhower would accept the Democratic nomination. The meeting took place on the 5th. On the 7th, Arthur Krock broke the story in The New York Times. Krock’s source, he later disclosed, was Justice William O. Douglas, who told Krock he had heard it from Truman himself and in the presence of Chief Justice Vinson and one or two others from the Court, during a reception at Blair House later the same day as Truman’s lunch with Eisenhower. “You can’t join a party just to run for office,” Eisenhower was described saying to Truman. “What reason have you to think I have ever been a Democrat? You know I have been a Republican all my life and that my family have always been Republicans.”

At Key West a week later, Truman denied the story, as had Eisenhower in Paris, both publicly and privately. “He told me Arthur Krock’s story that Truman had offered him the Democratic candidacy in 1952 wasn’t really true,” Krock’s colleague on the Times, C. L. Sulzberger, recorded after an evening with Eisenhower in Paris.

When Vinson arrived at Key West, Truman told him the nomination was his if he would accept. Vinson was tentative, saying he needed time to discuss the matter with his wife. Later, in Washington, Vinson told Truman he did not think the Supreme Court should be seen as a stepping stone to the White House. When Truman countered with the example of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who as the Republican candidate in 1916 nearly defeated Woodrow Wilson, Vinson declined for reasons of health, and apparently to Truman’s great surprise. But Vinson, who had always looked sallow, was indeed in poor health. He would die two years later, in September 1953, at age sixty-one.

As the year ended, Truman seems to have been in something of a quandary, even about his own intentions, as implied in a longhand letter to Eisenhower dated December 18, 1951:

He, too, would like to live a semi-retired life with his family, Eisenhower wrote in reply to Truman. “But just as you have decided that circumstances may not permit you to do exactly as you please, so I’ve found that fervent desire may sometimes have to give way to conviction of duty.” He would not seek the presidency, Eisenhower said. Further, “you know, far better than I, that the possibility that I will ever be drawn into political activity is so remote as to be negligible.”

Eisenhower’s letter was dated New Year’s Day, 1952. Five days later, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge announced in Washington the formation of an Eisenhower-for-President campaign, and the following day in Paris, January 7, Eisenhower announced he was prepared to accept the Republican nomination.

Asked at his next press conference what he thought of the announcement, Truman had only praise for Eisenhower. He was “a grand man,” Truman said. “I am just as fond of General Eisenhower as I can be. I think he is one of the great men produced by World War II…. I don’t want to stand in his way at all, because I think very highly of him, and if he wants to get out and have all the mud and rotten eggs thrown at him, that’s his business….”

As the Eisenhower boom gathered force, Truman would remark to his staff, an edge of sadness in his voice, “I’m sorry to see these fellows get Ike into this business. They’re showing him gates of gold and silver which will turn out copper and tin.”

With Vinson no longer a possibility for the Democratic nomination, Truman decided the best choice would be Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois. Alben Barkley, at seventy-four, was too old. The presidency would kill Barkley in three months, Truman thought. (“It takes him five minutes to sign his name,” Truman noted sadly in his diary.) Averell Harriman, whom Truman judged “the ablest of them all,” had never run for office and would be severely handicapped by his Wall Street background. (“Can we elect a Wall Street banker and railroad tycoon President of the United States on a Democratic ticket?”) Senator Estes Kefauver, a possibility, was a man Truman instinctively disliked and distrusted, a feeling shared by most of the party regulars. Privately, Truman referred to him as “Cowfever.”

Adlai Stevenson, by contrast, was comparatively young at fifty-one. He was able, progressive, the governor of a major industrial state, a champion of honest government, and a new face. Stevenson had carried Illinois in 1948 by an overwhelming 570,000 votes, in his first campaign for any office, a point that greatly impressed Truman. “He proved in that contest,” Truman would write, “that he possessed a knowledge and ‘feel’ for politics, that he understood that politics at its best was the business and art of government, and that he had learned that a knowledge of politics is necessary to carry out the function of our form of free government.”

That Truman should turn to Stevenson was greatly to Truman’s credit, for not only was Stevenson still a political unknown nationally, but a man altogether unlike Truman. A graduate of Princeton, well born, a prosperous lawyer, eloquent, witty, urbane—and divorced—Stevenson could hardly have been more different from Truman, or from most political figures of the day. Further, Truman hardly knew him. But Truman had read Stevenson’s speeches; he liked what he heard, admired Stevenson’s political philosophy, his Midwest background, his political heritage—the fact that Stevenson’s grandfather, the first Adlai E. Stevenson, had been a Democratic congressman and Vice President under Grover Cleveland. (“He comes of a political family,” Truman noted approvingly.) Also, several of the younger aides at the White House were keenly interested in Stevenson, seeing in him qualities of the kind needed to revitalize the Democratic Party.

Dispensing with any pretense of round-about overtures, Truman asked the governor to come see him, and for an hour or more, the evening of Tuesday, January 22, 1952, they met alone in the seclusion of Blair House—once Stevenson had talked his way past the guards outside who had never heard of him.

As Truman later recounted the conversation, he spoke to Stevenson at length about the office of the presidency, then asked him to take it, saying he need only agree and the nomination was his. He could count on Truman’s unqualified endorsement. “I told him I would not run for President again,” Truman recorded in notes made afterward, “and that it was my opinion he was best fitted for the place.”

But that night Stevenson said no. “He apparently was flabbergasted,” concluded Truman, who refused to give up.

Stevenson, according to a close friend, came away filled with admiration for Truman, who had been sitting by the fire reading the Bible when Stevenson arrived.

As Stevenson later confided to James Reston, Truman had said Stevenson was the man to defeat Eisenhower, who would most likely be the Republican candidate. Eisenhower’s intentions were good, Truman had said, but he was inexperienced in politics and bound to become the captive of Taft and so destroy Truman’s foreign and domestic programs. It was therefore essential that a Democratic administration be continued in the White House. The President wanted him to save the world from Dwight Eisenhower, Stevenson told Reston, highly agitated.

According to another Stevenson friend, George Ball, who had driven Stevenson to and from Blair House that night, Truman had also observed at one point, “Adlai, if a knucklehead like me can be President and not do too badly, think what a really educated smart guy like you could do in the job.”

But Stevenson had said no to Truman. Not only did he wish to remain governor of Illinois, he was less than certain that a change in Washington, a Republican administration, would be a bad thing for the country. Privately he wondered if the Democrats had been in power too long. And, in any event, he did not feel that being Truman’s handpicked candidate would be necessarily an advantage, given the woeful state of Truman’s popularity. If Eisenhower were the Republican candidate, Stevenson told George Ball, nobody could beat him.

On March 4, Truman and Stevenson met again at Blair House, this time at Stevenson’s request.

For several weeks Truman toyed with the prospect of running again. Some of the staff felt sure he had changed his mind and was about to announce his candidacy.

On March 11, Estes Kefauver won a stunning victory in the New Hampshire primary, having stumped the state wearing his trademark coonskin cap and accusing the administration of doing too little to get rid of corruption. Truman had allowed his name to be entered, but did not campaign. He thought primaries were a lot of “eye-wash.” Still, Kefauver had challenged a President and won handily.

At a small private dinner at Blair House for a few close advisers, including the new Democratic chairman, Frank McKinney, Truman polled the table. Should he become a candidate to succeed himself? The answer, put as tactfully as possible, was no.

Truman left for Key West and on March 22 called Clark Clifford and asked him to come down. The following day, they sat alone in the garden behind the Little White House. Clifford told the President he hoped he would not run again. Truman expressed concern over the effect his withdrawal might have on the war in Korea. Clifford answered that the course of the war had long been established.

The same day from Key West, March 23, a White House aide named David Lloyd, who had once worked with Stevenson when Stevenson was with the State Department, wrote to the governor without Truman’s knowledge, urging him to reconsider, and in large part because of Truman:

On their way to the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner, the huge, annual $100-a-plate black-tie gathering of Democrats held the evening of March 29 in the National Armory, Alice Acheson asked her husband if he thought the President might disclose his political future in his after-dinner speech. “Not at all,” said the Secretary of State in what, as she subsequently told him, was a notably superior manner. It would be too early for the President to announce an intention not to run again, Acheson explained, and too disappointing to many at the dinner were he to announce the contrary.

Truman appeared at the podium looking tanned and uplifted by the occasion. At the end of a lively, righting speech, having duly assaulted the Republicans and championed his own record, he put aside his prepared text and gave his answer:

“I shall not be a candidate for re-election. I have served my country long, and I think efficiently and honestly. I shall not accept a renomination. I do not feel that it is my duty to spend another four years in the White House.”

It was said without buildup, almost matter-of-factly, and for a few seconds the immense audience sat silent and confused. Then followed a strange mixture of automatic applause and shouted cries of “No,” even from some of those who had hoped he would step down. “I found myself shouting ‘No’ with vigor,” recalled Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who had tried to stop Truman’s nomination in 1948. “Then I wondered why the hell I was shouting ‘No,’ since this is what I had been hoping would happen for months. Still the shouts of ‘No’ seemed the least due to the President for a noble and courageous renunciation.”

Truman left the hall quickly, smiling, waving, yet looking somewhat tense, though the First Lady had a very different expression. “When you made your announcement,” Harry Vaughan later told the President, “Mrs. Truman looked the way you do when you draw four aces.”

At the White House, as the President and First Lady arrived, many of the household staff who stood waiting at the door were crying.

Did he plan to run for the Senate, Truman was asked a few days later, at his next press conference. No, he said. (Mrs. Truman did not want him to, he had told his staff.) Did he favor Governor Stevenson for the nomination? No comment.

From Springfield, Stevenson had written:

Replying immediately, Truman said he appreciated Stevenson’s letter “most highly.” The need was for a man who would “carry on the Foreign Policy of the United States as it was established in 1938 by President Roosevelt and carried through by me, to the best of my ability…. We must also have a President who believes in the domestic policies which have made the Foreign Policy possible,” for the one was not possible without the other. “I sincerely hope you will not take yourself completely out of the picture.”

Characteristically, whatever his frustrations with Stevenson, Truman would keep trying.

IV

How the President got through the first weeks of April, wrote Roger Tubby, was a testimony to his amazing stamina. Tubby himself, as he wrote, felt more dead than alive.

On April 3, Truman fired Attorney General McGrath, who for months had appeared to be obstructing the investigations Truman ordered into corruption in the Bureau of Internal Revenue. Feeling he had been “sold down the river” by people whom he trusted, Truman had turned the “cleanup job” over to McGrath in January 1952, which raised charges of an attempted whitewash, since McGrath was a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. McGrath had then named a respected New York lawyer, a Republican, Newbold Morris, to head the investigation. But Morris had soon quarreled with McGrath and annoyed Congress. When Morris issued a long, intricate questionnaire to be filled out by all federal employees, including the Cabinet, listing all assets and sources of income, McGrath exploded, calling the questionnaire an invasion of privacy and a violation of individual rights. McGrath refused to fill out the questionnaire, and after reading a copy, Truman, too, decided it should not be used.

Truman despaired over McGrath’s “inability to get on top” of his job. He liked McGrath—“I don’t think there was the slightest thing wrong with Howard personally at all,” he would later say—but found his performance frustrating. When, on April 3, McGrath announced he had fired Newbold Morris, and apparently with the idea that this was what Truman wanted, Truman fired McGrath.

With this farcical denouement, as Cabell Phillips would write, the administration’s housecleaning effort seemed to have blown to pieces. “It had been a miserable performance from start to finish, almost a burlesque of executive management, and the net result was to underline ‘the mess in Washington’ as a good deal more than a gloating Republican catchphrase.” Truman felt wretched about it all. In his Memoirs he would say nothing of the episode, but shortly afterward he wrote to McGrath, “I want you to know that my fondness for you has not changed one bit. Political situations sometimes cause one much pain.”

And by then, Truman was caught up in telephone and telegraph strikes, land the threat of another nationwide steel strike. He was showing the strain as those close to him had seldom seen. He looked stern in repose, his face deeply lined. After one morning staff meeting, when William Hopkins put the usual stack of papers in front of him to sign, Truman begged off until later, “when I’m not so shaky.” He was tired, terribly tired, he admitted. At the White House the evening before, he had fallen asleep in his chair, something he almost never did.

He seemed overburdened by his duties and decisions in a way he had never been before. It was as if the decision not to run again, the prospect of not being President, had taken something from him.

In his diary, Roger Tubby wrote:

His appointment schedule for Tuesday, April 8, the crucial day, was typical and did not even include what was to be the most important event of the day.

As it turned out, he did not speak at the Shoreham as scheduled—the Secretary of State took his place—for it was that night, in a nationwide radio and television broadcast from the White House, that he announced he was seizing the steel mills.

It was one of the boldest, most controversial decisions of his presidency, and like so much else, the seriousness of the crisis was compounded by Korea, the war that had come to overshadow his whole second term and that was rarely ever out of his thoughts. “These are not normal times,” he would stress in his broadcast. “I have to think of our soldiers in Korea…the weapons and ammunition they need….” Also, it being an election year, with, as he saw it, his whole domestic and foreign program at issue, he had no wish to alienate labor.

From his reading of history, Truman was convinced his action fell within his powers as President and Commander in Chief. In a state of national emergency, Lincoln had suspended the right to habeas corpus, he would point out. Tom Clark, now on the Supreme Court, had once, as Attorney General, advised him that a President, faced with a calamitous strike, had the “inherent” power to prevent a paralysis of the national economy.

Truman’s legal advisers supported his views. And so, significantly, did Fred Vinson. According to later comments by John Snyder, the Chief Justice had confidentially advised the President that, on legal grounds, he could go ahead and seize the mills. Such counsel clearly violated the division between branches of government and was particularly improper in this instance, since a seizure of the steel industry was bound to be challenged in the courts and thus Vinson himself, very likely, would wind up having to weigh the case. But out of friendship and loyalty, Vinson offered advice that was taken quite to heart.

The path was clear, Truman told the ever cautious Snyder, who opposed seizing the mills. “The President has the power to keep the country from going to hell,” Truman would assure his staff.

A steel crisis had been a long time coming. Driven by the demands of the war, the mills were producing record tonnage. Profits, too, were on the rise. Yet steel workers, unlike workers in the auto and electrical industries, had had no pay raise since 1950. In November 1951, the 650,000 United Steel Workers, who were part of the CIO and headed by Phil Murray, called for a boost in wages of 35 cents an hour. Management refused to negotiate. The union gave notice that it would strike when its contract expired on December 31. On December 22, Truman referred the dispute to his Wage Stabilization Board recommended an hourly raise of 26 cents, and the union quickly agreed, the companies denounced the proposal as unreasonable, unless they could add a hefty increase of $12 a ton to the price of steel.

Negotiations continued, only to end in deadlock. With the April deadline approaching, the country, as said in the press, was caught “squarely on the griddle.” To Truman, the pay increase proposed by the Wage Stabilization Board seemed both “fair and reasonable,” and the most direct way to prevent a strike that would not only be a national emergency but would critically impair the flow of munitions to Korea and to the buildup of NATO forces in Europe, which he saw as crucial.

Truman refused to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act—by which the government could enjoin a strike for eighty days pending an impartial study—because he saw no sense in delaying a settlement still further and felt the facts were already well known. Also, the steel workers had remained on the job voluntarily for nearly three months as it was. For them to continue thus another eighty days with no change in pay seemed to him unfair. Nor did the prospect of resorting to a law he disliked, and that labor despised, have any appeal.

But it was Truman’s fundamental feeling about the giants of the steel industry, the old distrust of big corporations that he had voiced with such passion during his years in the Senate, that moved him now, more than sympathy for the position of the steel workers. He considered the industry’s proposed price increase little better than profiteering, and saw the steel companies, with U.S. Steel in the lead, attempting to force a compromise that would ultimately play havoc with his anti-inflation policies and raise the cost of the war. “The attitude of the companies seemed wrong to me, since under the accelerated defense program the government was by far the biggest customer for steel and steel products. To hike prices at this time meant charging the government more for the tools of defense.”

While conceding that a modest ($4.50) increase in steel prices might be tolerated, Truman stubbornly rejected industry demands out of hand and went over the head of his own director of defense mobilization, Charles E. Wilson, who saw validity in the industry position. As a result Wilson resigned, a turn of events that Truman regretted and that brought down still more criticism on him.

To Truman, seizure of the mills was a temporary last resort. On Tuesday, April 8, only hours before the mills were scheduled to be struck, he made his move, signing Executive Order No. 10340.

“The plain fact of the matter is that the steel companies are recklessly forcing a shutdown,” he told the country when he went on the air at 10:30 that night.

The broadcast over, on his way to his room, Truman looked so exhausted Joe Short thought he might collapse.

In some ways it was as though, in the last act of his presidency, with less than a year to go, he had reverted to the man he had been in the spring of 1946, after less than a year in office, when, faced by the great railroad impasse, he had tried to draft the striking workers into the Army.

At some eighty-eight steel mills across the country, the morning of April 9, 1952, things appeared the same as usual. The morning shifts arrived, production continued, the mills worked by the same men and managed by the same officials. The one clearly visible sign of change were the American flags that flew over the mills. In Washington, the Secretary of Commerce, Charles Sawyer, had assumed legal command of the industry.

But Truman had brought on an additional crisis, a constitutional crisis, just as he would have in 1946 had the railroad unions not agreed at the last minute to settle the strike. The outcry now was instantaneous and as scathing nearly as what he had faced after the firing of MacArthur. He was called a Caesar, a Hitler, a bully and lawbreaker. In reporting his action to Congress, in a special message delivered to the Hill immediately that same day, April 9, he stressed that his action had been taken with utmost reluctance: “The idea of government operation of the steel mills is thoroughly distasteful to me and I want to see it ended as soon as possible.” He acknowledged the power of Congress to supersede his policy and act on its own to pass a new law enabling the government to operate the mills as an emergency measure. Such legislation, he said, might be “very desirable.” But Congress did not choose to grant him such power. Instead, there were calls for congressional investigations, calls for his impeachment.

The President’s “evil deed” had no precedent in history, said the head of Inland Steel, Clarence Randall, in a radio and television broadcast. Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, all attacked Truman. The “Truman talent for trouble,” said Newsweek, gave him and the nation no rest. The New York Times accused him of acting on “almost inconceivably bad advice.” The Washington Post predicted his seizure of the mills would probably go down in history as one of the most high-handed acts ever committed by an American President. Truman, said the Post, had grossly usurped the power of Congress, and in a constitutional democracy there was no more serious offense against good government. “Nothing in the Constitution can be reasonably interpreted as giving to the Commander in Chief all the power that may be necessary for building up our defenses or even for carrying on a war.”

If he could seize the steel mills under his inherent powers, could he therefore, Truman was asked at a press conference, also seize the newspapers and radio stations?

“Under similar circumstances, the President of the United States has to act for whatever is best for the country,” he answered abruptly and imprudently, stirring speculation that he was indeed planning to seize the press, an idea that had never occurred to him and that he couldn’t imagine happening.

The steel industry sued to get its property back. Swiftly, a federal district judge, David A. Pine, determined that seizure of the steel industry was illegal and the Supreme Court announced it would hear the case.

“I believe,” wrote Judge Pine in a 4,500-word opinion, “that the contemplated strike, if it came, with all its awful results, would be less injurious to the public than the injury which would flow from a timorous judicial recognition that there is some basis for this claim to unlimited and unrestrained Executive power….”

He had read the Pine opinion, Truman told his staff—“read it, read it and read it”—and still could not understand why he had been judged wrong. To Secretary of Commerce Sawyer, he confided that he would be “terribly shocked, disappointed and disturbed,” should the Supreme Court, too, decide against him.

The President was depressed, recorded Roger Tubby after a morning staff meeting.

He would, of course, abide by the Court’s ruling, Truman told reporters. He had no ambition to be a, dictator. He just wanted to keep the country running.

The case against the President was argued in the Supreme Court by the attorney for the U.S. Steel Corporation, white-haired John W. Davis, who had been the Democratic candidate for President in 1924 when he lost to Calvin Coolidge, and who in a distinguished career had argued more than a hundred cases before the Court. Defending the President was Solicitor General Perlman, whom Truman would later describe as an “outstanding” lawyer who presented the government’s case ably and forcefully.

On Monday, June 2, the Court declared the President’s action unconstitutional by a crushing majority of 6 to 3. Those in the majority were Hugo L. Black, who delivered the official opinion, Felix Frankfurter, Robert H. Jackson, William O. Douglas, and, as infuriated Truman, Tom Clark.

“We cannot with faithfulness to our constitutional system hold that the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces has the ultimate power as such to take possession of private property in order to keep labor disputes from stopping production,” Justice Black read slowly and calmly. “This is a job for the Nation’s lawmakers, not for its military authorities.”

“Today,” wrote Justice Douglas, in a concurring opinion, “a kindly President uses the seizure power to effect a wage increase and to keep the steel furnaces in production. Yet tomorrow another President might use the same power to prevent a wage increase, to curb trade unionists, to regiment labor as oppressively as industry thinks it has been regimented by this seizure.”

The Chief Justice, who strongly upheld the President, arguing that he had acted entirely within his constitutional responsibilities, was joined in the minority by Justices Stanley F. Reed and Sherman Minton. Any man worthy of the office of the presidency, Vinson argued, should be “free to take at least interim action necessary to execute legislative programs essential to survival of the nation.” Nor was there any question that “the possession [of the steel industry] was other than temporary in character and subject to Congressional approval, disapproval,” or regulation of “the manner in which the mills were to be administered and returned to the owners.”

For Truman it was a humiliating defeat, and at the hands of old friends and fellow spirits. It was a liberal Court. Hugo Black had been an ardent New Dealer. All nine justices had been appointed either by Truman or Roosevelt. That Tom Clark had gone against him would anger Truman for years. Putting that “damn fool from Texas” on the Supreme Court, he would one day tell the author Merle Miller, was the biggest mistake he made as President, though this, like others of his observations to Miller, was more harsh than he meant or than he indicated at the time.

As a gesture of friendship and goodwill, Hugo Black invited the President and the justices to a party at his beautiful home across the river in Old Town Alexandria. At the start of the evening, Truman, though polite, seemed “a bit testy,” remembered William O. Douglas. “But after the bourbon and canapes were passed, he turned to Hugo and said, ‘Hugo, I don’t much care for your law, but, by golly, this bourbon is good.’ ”

The steel strike that began after the Court decision of June 2 dragged on for seven weeks, until midsummer 1952, making it the longest, most costly steel strike in the nation’s history. Losses in production, losses in wages were unprecedented—21 million tons of steel and $400 million in wages, as 600,000 steel workers and 1,400,000 others in related industries were idle. The military output scheduled for 1952 was cut by a third. “No enemy nation could have so crippled our production as has this work stoppage,” said Robert Lovett bitterly. “The weird and tragic thing is that we have done this to ourselves.”

The settlement called for a 21 cent an hour raise for the workers and a steel price increase of $5.20 a ton, which was the same as the $4.50 offered by the government months earlier, plus 70 cents for increased freight rates.

In the long weeks of the strike, Truman had grown increasingly distressed over congressional inaction. Congress declined to do anything more than request—rather than direct—him to use the Taft-Hartley Act, thus sending the problem—and responsibility for the decision—right back to him. And whether steel production would resume, were he to invoke Taft-Hartley, was highly debatable.

“The Court and Congress got us into the fix we’re now in,” he told his staff. “Let Congress do something about getting us out.”

Discouraged that so few Democrats on the Hill had come to his support, discouraged that practically no Democrats “up there” were fighting for his foreign aid bill, he grumbled that maybe it might be good for the Democrats to be out of power for a while.

For the first time since taking office, he felt ill. At the Army’s Walter Reed Hospital, years earlier, a special Presidential Suite had been set up on the third floor, in the event that he needed medical attention, but it had never once been used. Truman had never been sick until the morning of July 16, when he awoke feeling “poorly” and Wallace Graham found he was running a low fever. Two days later, with what Graham called a mild virus, he was driven to Walter Reed. He stayed three days, during which he was gone over by some eight different specialists. He ate well, slept well, signed more than two hundred bills, and, as he later told his staff, spent a lot of time thinking about what he would say at the Democratic Convention. He delivered his speech to the bedpost, Truman said. “If the doctor had come in then he would have found my temperature up two degrees and might have thought me off my trolley.” He wanted to talk not only about his record, “but about the future and what we can make of it.”

What could be done about the steel strike, Joe Short asked him his first morning back at the Oval Office, July 21, when Truman still looked pale and subdued. He didn’t know, Truman said.

“It’s a lockout, that’s what it is. U.S. Steel is against the little fellows, want to take them over, and of course they’re against labor and against me.”

Three days later, on July 24, he summoned Phil Murray and the head of U.S. Steel, Benjamin Fairless, to his office, demanded a settlement, and got it. “This should lead to a speedy resumption of steel production,” he said in a brief formal announcement that the strike was over.

The following day, he left for Chicago and the convention that was already under way.

V

Truman’s distress over the choice of a Democratic standardbearer had grown extreme. Firm in his belief that any red-blooded Democrat ought to be ready and willing to run against any Republican, he had become increasingly annoyed with Adlai Stevenson, whose reluctance to commit himself had begun to strike Truman as not only tiresome but perhaps something of an act.

As the press was saying, nearly all the old Democratic bosses were gone now. Jim Farley was long past his prime. Tom Pendergast and Bob Hannegan were dead. Ed Flynn was ill. Frank Hague no longer ruled in New Jersey, and Kefauver, with his primary campaigns, had eclipsed Ed Crump of Tennessee. “There was no one to supply party-wide leadership except the President,” reported Newsweek, and he was “under tremendous pressure to name his preference for the nomination….”

Truman continued to wait, holding out for Stevenson. It was only a week before the convention, his patience gone and resolved to do almost anything to stop Kefauver, that he at last suggested that Barkley would be a good choice—and then wished he hadn’t because Averell Harriman, having declared himself a candidate, was proving a spirited champion of the whole New Deal—Fair Deal program in a way that made Truman glow.

When someone raised the point that Harriman had never run for public office, and so might not be up to a sustained campaign, Truman remarked, “You never know what’s in you until you have to do it.”

The Republicans opened their convention in Chicago on July 7. Taft had the largest number of committed delegates. Attacking what he called the “me-too” Republicanism of the party’s eastern liberals—the Dewey people who were backing Eisenhower this time—Taft said it was time to give the American people a clear choice. The floor fight before the balloting turned bitter. “We followed you before and you took us down the road to defeat,” declared Senator Everett Dirksen from the podium, shaking his finger at the New York delegation, where Dewey sat. “And don’t do this to us again.” But such were the tactical skills of the Eisenhower managers, combined with the glamour of the Eisenhower bandwagon, that the general swept to victory on the first ballot—as no doubt he would have done at the Democratic Convention, too, had he been willing.

Of the Democratic candidates, on the eve of the Democratic Convention, Kefauver was far in the lead, claiming 257 delegates, or nearly half what was needed for the nomination. Richard Russell, running as the candidate of the South, had 161, Harriman 112, Stevenson a mere 41 while Truman, it was believed, could swing at least 400 votes to whomever he chose. As Time reported, Truman’s hold on Democratic leaders continued remarkably strong because they saw him as the smartest practical politician around. “If Harry Truman turns out to have an enormous influence on the convention, it will not be a case of delegates doing his bidding, but of their following his highly respected judgment.”

A Barkley boom began and gathered surprising force, only to be abruptly terminated when the leaders of organized labor met with Barkley and told him the blunt truth. It was not that they objected to him on issues, as they had with Jimmy Byrnes in 1944, he was just too old.

Barkley called Truman to say he was withdrawing, and on the afternoon of July 24, the day of the steel strike settlement at the White House, Stevenson telephoned from Illinois to ask Truman if it would embarrass him were he, Stevenson, to allow his name to be placed in nomination. Truman, as he later said, chose some “rather vigorous” words. “I have been trying since January to get you to say that,” he told the governor. “Why would it embarrass me?” Stevenson could count on his full support. As far as Truman was concerned, Stevenson was as good as nominated.

On the floor of the immense international amphitheater at the Chicago Stock Yards, a headlong Stevenson boom was already under way, as a result of the governor’s own brilliant welcoming address to the convention. James Reston in The New York Times called Stevenson “a leaf on a rising stream.” When, during the first ballot the next afternoon, Friday, the 25th, the Missouri delegation was polled, the President’s own alternate, an old Pendergast stalwart named Tom Gavin, was seen voting for Stevenson just as the President and First Lady were leaving from Washington on the Independence. On television the two events were shown simultaneously on a split screen.

Heading west, Truman watched the convention on television “all the way” in flight, something no President had done before. He saw the results of the first ballot—Kefauver 340, Stevenson 273, Russell 268, Harriman 123—and the start of the second. By the end of the second ballot, at 6:00 P.M. Chicago time, with Stevenson gaining but still no decision, Truman was at the Blackstone working on his speech in Room 709, the same corner suite where he had taken the fateful call from Franklin Roosevelt eight years before. To others in the presidential entourage, he appeared in high gear.

With the convention in recess until nine o’clock, Truman went by motorcade and booming motorcycle escort to the Stockyards Inn and dinner in a private dining room with Jake Arvey, Sam Rayburn, and Democratic Chairman Frank McKinney. From there, he also sent word to the governors of Massachusetts and Arkansas, as well as to Averell Harriman, to release their delegates to Stevenson. Charlie Murphy was the messenger sent to see Harriman, who, as it happens, had already decided on his own to withdraw in favor of Stevenson.

The convention’s dramatic turn to Stevenson came on the third ballot, with the release of the Harriman delegates. But it was past midnight before the vote was made unanimous, and not until 1:45 in the morning, as late nearly as four years before, when the nominee and the President entered the hall arm in arm, down the floodlit runway to the rostrum, Truman exuberant, a spring to his step, Stevenson, a short, rather dumpy figure, looking slightly uncertain.

They had picked a winner, Truman assured the crowd. “I am going to take my coat off and do everything I can to help him win.”

Stevenson spoke briefly and eloquently. “The people are wise,” he said, “wiser than the Republicans think. And the Democratic Party is the people’s party, not the party of labor, not the farmer’s party—it is the party of no one because it is the party of everyone.” The ordeal of the twentieth century was far from over. “Sacrifice, patience, understanding and implacable purpose may be our lot for years to come. Let’s talk sense to the American people….”

Later, Stevenson, Truman, Rayburn, McKinney, and four or five others met backstage. Stevenson asked for advice on a running mate. The Republicans had chosen Senator Richard Nixon as their vice-presidential candidate. Stevenson mentioned Kefauver, but when Truman vigorously objected, Rayburn and McKinney backed him. Barkley and Russell were also mentioned and rejected. Finally, the choice was Senator John Sparkman of Alabama. “Stevenson made his decision with Harry Truman’s help,” one of those present explained afterward to a reporter.

In his room that morning at 6:40, Saturday, July 26, having slept perhaps an hour, if at all, Truman wrote a warm letter to the nominee on a sheet of Blackstone Hotel stationery; a letter such as he himself had never received from Franklin Roosevelt.

But though Stevenson sent a gracious reply and would eventually meet with Truman at the White House, he was no less determined than before not to be seen as Truman’s candidate. “He was affronted by the indifferent morality and untidiness of the Truman Administration and was frantic to distance himself from Truman,” his friend George Ball would remember. In quick succession, Stevenson replaced Truman’s party chairman, McKinney, with a Chicago friend, Stephen A. Mitchell, an attorney with little political experience, and announced that Democratic headquarters henceforth would be in Springfield, Illinois, not Washington—decisions certain to offend Truman. Nor did he make any effort to solicit Truman’s advice on plans for the campaign.

Stevenson’s attitude toward him was a “mystery,” Truman would write in his Memoirs. But in a letter he never sent, Truman told the nominee, “I have come to the conclusion that you are embarrassed by having the President of the United States in your corner…. Therefore I shall remain silent and stay in Washington until Nov. 4.” He did not like being treated as a liability. Frank McKinney, he wrote, had been the best party chairman in his memory. “I can’t stand snub after snub by you….”

In August, to make matters worse, Stevenson carelessly signed a letter prepared by an assistant in answer to a question from the Oregon Journal. “Can Stevenson really clean up the mess in Washington?” the editor of the Portland paper had asked. “As to whether I can clean up the mess in Washington,” read the Stevenson reply, “I would bespeak the careful scrutiny of what I inherited in Illinois and what has been accomplished in three years.” The Republicans quickly made the most of the letter, as confirmation by Stevenson himself that there was truly a mess in Washington, and Truman, in another letter he never mailed, said Stevenson had now made the whole campaign “ridiculous.”

At a later point, Stevenson sent Chairman Mitchell to tell Truman that it would greatly help the campaign if Dean Acheson were to announce his plan to retire as Secretary of State once the election was over—an idea Truman bluntly rejected.

But as his daughter Margaret would recall, Truman was more sad than angry. “Oh, Stevenson will get straightened out,” he told his staff. “The campaign hasn’t really started.” And in time to come, he would write that Stevenson conducted himself magnificently in the campaign:

On August 12, Stevenson came to the White House at Truman’s invitation to have lunch with the Cabinet and be briefed at length on the state of the Union. In the course of three hours of discussion, Truman said more than once that he wanted to do everything possible to be of help. He did not wish to direct or dominate the campaign in any way. Stevenson was the boss, Truman stressed. “I think the President wants to win this campaign more than I do,” Stevenson remarked. “As much as you do,” interrupted Truman, who appeared to be greatly enjoying himself, until the meeting ended and he and Stevenson stepped outside to talk to the press.

Truman came out the door first, as customary, only now the photographers shouted to him, “Wait for the Governor, Mr. President.” A new order had clearly begun. “That’s your point of contact right there, Governor,” Truman said, gesturing to the microphones.

Stevenson joked about the size of the lunch he had just enjoyed, saying if he had another he would be too fat to campaign. Truman, usually the first to laugh at such banter, barely smiled, as if his thoughts were elsewhere. “There was just a hint of tension in the atmosphere,” wrote Andrew Tully of The New York Times, “and of sadness—as Harry Truman watched this man taking over….” When Stevenson finished, Truman did not linger, but turned and walked back to his office, “slowly, head erect.”

Several of the White House staff watched in pain. Secret Service Agent Floyd Boring turned to Roger Tubby and remarked, pointing to the President, “There’s a man of granite. And him [pointing to Stevenson], he looks like a sponge.”

With the campaign under way in September, Truman quickly forgot any injured pride he felt and joined the fray with all his old zest. Though not the candidate, he saw the election as a referendum on his presidency. Nor, constituted as he was, could he possibly have stayed out once the fight was on. “We didn’t have to ask Mr. Truman to get into the campaign,” remembered the new party chairman, Stephen Mitchell. “He was raring to go…and he put on a great show.”

He took to the rails, crisscrossing the country again in the Ferdinand Magellan. Stevenson traveled by plane and they kept entirely different schedules, never appearing on the same platform. Stevenson was eloquent as no presidential candidate had been in more than a generation. Truman was the fighter, the believer. “When you vote the Democratic ticket…you are voting for your interests because the Democrats look after the interests of the everyday man and the common people,” he said, sounding very like the candidate of 1948. He praised Stevenson. He evoked the memory of Franklin Roosevelt, heaped scorn on the Republican Party, stoutly championed his own Fair Deal programs. Toward the Republican candidate He was unexpectedly gentle at first. It was Taft he attacked.

He liked Ike, too, Truman would say, seeing Eisenhower buttons or signs in a crowd. But he liked him as a general in the Army. As it was, Ike didn’t seem to know what he was doing. “I think Bob Taft and all the Republican reactionaries are whispering in his ear, and pulling his leg,” he told the people of Whitefish, Montana. “If you like Ike as much as I do, you will vote with me to send him back to the Army, where he belongs.”

The truth was he did still like Ike. Even when Eisenhower refused Truman’s invitation to the same kind of briefing as he had given Stevenson, Truman had written to Eisenhower privately to express his friendship as much as his distaste for those now advising the general:

In conversation on board his train, Truman could swing from premonitions of Eisenhower as a dangerous President, “a modern Cromwell,” to open expressions of sympathy. “You know, I still feel sorry for Ike. He never should have gotten into this.” When it was revealed in mid-September that Eisenhower’s running mate, Nixon, had been subsidized by a secret fund subscribed by California millionaires, and others traveling with Truman were cheered by the news, he commented only, “This will help us, but I’m sorry to see it happen, for it lowers public opinion of politics.”

As so often before, the grueling business of a campaign seemed to restore and enliven him. He would be remembered rolling along at night in the dining room of the Ferdinand Magellan, eating fried chicken with his fingers, enjoying stories and “matching wits” with his staff, while every now and then in the darkness outside a lonely light flashed by. He would be remembered washing his socks in the bathroom sink in California and after a day of eight speeches from Ohio to upstate New York, sitting in a hotel in Buffalo playing the piano at 1:30 in the morning.

The pace and heat of the contest picked up rapidly.

The Republicans, campaigning under the slogan “Time for a Change,” had no intention of repeating Dewey’s bland glide to defeat. Much of what was said by both sides became very unpleasant. “I nearly choked to hear him,” Truman remarked privately after Eisenhower, stepping up the attack, assaulted the foreign policy that, as Truman saw it, Eisenhower himself, as Chief of Staff and head of NATO, had helped shape and implement. Eisenhower, Truman now charged, had become “a stooge of Wall Street.” He was “owned body and soul by the money boys.” Eisenhower, because of his career in the Army, knew little of the realities of life, didn’t “know the score and shouldn’t be educated at public expense.”

Eisenhower, for his part, deplored the “top-to-bottom mess” in Washington, “the crooks and cronies,” while Nixon hammered at what became known as “K₁C₂”—“Korea, Communism and corruption.” When Nixon accused Truman, Stevenson, and Dean Acheson of being “traitors to the high principles in which many of the nation’s Democrats believe,” Truman understood this to mean Nixon had called him a traitor, and he would not forget it.

There was no Charlie Ross to help this time, no Clark Clifford. Press Secretary Joe Short had recently been hospitalized for what was thought to have been a mild heart condition. When Truman received word that Joe Short was dead, he took it very badly, feeling acutely, personally responsible. “I feel as if I killed them,” he said, remembering Ross as well.

Stevenson “has the most wonderful command of the language and he is delighting audiences wherever he goes,” recorded Roger Tubby, who took over in Short’s place.

Most newspapers backed Eisenhower. The Republicans were also out-spending the Democrats by more than two to one. But Truman’s crowds at times were as large and friendly as in 1948. In West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, across New England, his crowds were often bigger than those that turned out for Eisenhower.

The searing moment of the campaign for Truman came in early October, when Eisenhower went into Wisconsin, Joe McCarthy’s home state, where McCarthy in a drive for his own reelection continued to vilify George Marshall. Many of Eisenhower’s backers, many of his own aides, were confident he would eventually repudiate McCarthy and speak up for Marshall, and as he crossed Illinois, heading for Wisconsin, Eisenhower decided now would be the time, “right in McCarthy’s backyard.” A personal tribute to Marshall was prepared for a speech at Milwaukee. But then Eisenhower’s political advisers adamantly objected. McCarthy himself flew to Peoria, Illinois, and crossed into Wisconsin on board the general’s train. Reportedly, when McCarthy argued against any mention of Marshall, Eisenhower reacted with “red-hot anger.” Still, in a speech at Green Bay, Eisenhower expressed his gratitude to the senator for meeting him in Illinois and told his audience it was only in methods, not objectives, that he and McCarthy differed. Then in the speech at Milwaukee, with McCarthy seated behind him on stage, Eisenhower declared that a national tolerance of communism had “poisoned two whole decades of our national life,” thus creating “a government by men whose very brains were confused by the opiate of this deceit.” The fall of China, he charged, the “surrender of whole nations” in Eastern Europe could be attributed to the Reds in Washington. There was no mention of Marshall; the tribute had been cut. But because Eisenhower’s aides had been telling reporters all day about the Marshall tribute they would hear, its removal made more news than the rest of the speech. Even staunch Eisenhower supporters were appalled.

“Do I need to tell you that I am sick at heart?” Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, wired Eisenhower’s personal campaign manager, Sherman Adams.

To Truman, with his devotion to George Marshall, Eisenhower had committed an act of unpardonable betrayal. Truman tried to contain his fury. The spectacle of the Republican candidate campaigning against his own record, his own better nature and principles, was “very sad and pathetic,” Truman said in Oakland, California.

Heading east, Truman remarked to his staff that probably he should “lay off Ike for a while…got to be very careful we don’t overdo the attacks.” But the outrage within seemed to gather force by the day, the more he thought about Marshall, the more he thought about Eisenhower and McCarthy, the more Eisenhower attacked his foreign policy and handling of the Korean War.

“The general whose words I read, whose speeches I hear, is not the general I once knew. Something, my friends, has happened to him,” he told the crowd at Colorado Springs. “I thought he might make a good President,” he said at Muncie, Indiana, “but that was a mistake. In this campaign he has betrayed almost everything I thought he stood for.”

Finally, in a rear platform speech at Utica, New York, Truman lashed out full force. Eisenhower, he said, had betrayed his principles, deserted his friends.

And he never did, never really got over Eisenhower’s ingratitude to the man who had made him. For years to come Truman would harbor intense anger. “Why, General Marshall was responsible for his whole career,” he would say. “When Roosevelt jumped him from lieutenant colonel to general, it was Marshall’s recommendation. Three different times Marshall got him pushed upstairs, and in return…Eisenhower sold him out. It was just a shameful thing.”

Eisenhower, stunned by Truman’s attack, was enraged. “Just how low can you get?” He would never ride down Pennsylvania Avenue with Truman on inauguration day, he vowed.

The polls showed Eisenhower well in the lead. The polls also showed that the stalemate in Korea was what worried most voters. The election had become a referendum on Korea, and Eisenhower stepped up the attack on the administration’s handling of the war. On October 24 at Detroit, in a blistering speech broadcast on national television he called Korea “the burial ground for twenty-thousand American dead,” and promised to end the war. If elected, Eisenhower declared dramatically, “I shall go to Korea.”

Truman issued a statement stressing that the general had been in agreement with administration policy concerning Korea from the start. To a crowd at Winona, Minnesota, Truman warned, “No professional general has ever made a good President. The art of war is too different from the art of civilian government’’

If Eisenhower had a way of ending the war in Korea, he should tell him now, Truman said. “Let’s save a lot of lives and not wait…. If he can do it after he is elected, we can do it now.” Such “demagoguery used in connection with this tragic situation is almost beneath contempt,” he would write to Stevenson. No man, Truman thought, had less right than Eisenhower to use Korea for political advantage.

At the Pentagon, Eisenhower’s old friends among the Joint Chiefs were hardly less furious than the President. “Ike was well informed on all aspects of the Korean War and the delicacy of the armistice negotiations,” recalled Omar Bradley. “He knew very well that he could achieve nothing by going to Korea.”

In the final days of the campaign, Truman was still going strong. A local reporter in Iowa noted that the President “never looked more fit or pleased with the rigorous job of ‘giving ‘em hell.’ ”

But with his dramatic promise to go to Korea, Eisenhower had decided the election, as Truman seemed to know. “Roger, we may be up against more than we can control,” he told his press secretary.

The Eisenhower victory was overwhelming—he carried all but nine of forty-eight states, including Stevenson’s Illinois and Truman’s Missouri, his percentage of the popular vote was bigger than any Democratic victory since Roosevelt in 1936—and the issue that cut deepest was Korea. But with his radiant smile, the unequaled place he held in the affections of the people, Eisenhower had also proven an exceptional candidate. His popularity had made him all but impregnable. And prevalent as the feeling may have been that a change was due in Washington after so long a Democratic reign, it was clearly an Eisenhower, not a Republican, triumph. In Congress the Republicans barely gained control. Their margin in the Senate was one seat.

As Truman would comment privately, probably no one could have beaten Eisenhower in 1952. That some observers, including the Kansas City Star, were saying that he, Truman, had done Stevenson more harm than good left him feeling deeply hurt.

He sent Eisenhower his congratulations and offered him use of the Independence to fly to Korea, but not without adding, “if you still desire to go to Korea,” a final partisan jab that not surprisingly infuriated Eisenhower, who declined the offer.

Eisenhower flew to Korea by military plane and under greatest security at the end of November. For three days he toured the front lines, then flew home having concluded only that the situation was intolerable.

“I sincerely wish he didn’t have to make the trip,” Truman had written in his diary on November 15. “It is an awful risk. If he should fail to come back I wonder what would happen. May God protect him.”

With no hesitation or the least sign of bitterness, Truman immediately invited Eisenhower to the White House to discuss the turnover of power. He was determined, as he wrote to the general, to guarantee “an orderly transfer of the business of the executive branch.” The gesture was unprecedented, and to those around Truman a vivid example of his ability to separate his personal feelings from the larger responsibilities of his office. He would do all he could to help the new President. He only wished someone had done as much for him.

Eisenhower arrived at the White House just before two o’clock, the afternoon of Tuesday, November 18, for a meeting first with Truman in his office, then an extended briefing in the Cabinet Room by Truman, his Cabinet and staff. All went very formally and without incident, though Eisenhower remained unsmiling and wary—“taciturn to the point of surliness,” thought Acheson. To Truman, Eisenhower was a man with a chip on his shoulder. He would remember Eisenhower’s “frozen grimness throughout.”

When Truman offered to give Eisenhower the big globe that Eisenhower had given him years before, and that for Truman had come to symbolize so much of the weight of his responsibilities, Eisenhower accepted it, though “not very graciously,” in Truman’s view. Nor from Eisenhower’s reactions during the briefing in the Cabinet Room did Truman feel the general truly comprehended the extent or complexity of the task that faced him. “I think all this went into one ear and out the other,” Truman recorded. Later, at his desk, talking with some of the staff, he would remark, “He’ll sit right here and he’ll say do this, do that! And nothing will happen. Poor Ike—it won’t be a bit like the Army. He’ll find it very frustrating.”

VI

Upstairs at the White House a death watch had begun. In the bedroom across from Truman’s study, ninety-year-old Madge Gates Wallace lay in a coma.

“The White House is quiet as a church,” Truman wrote in his diary at five in the morning, November 24. “I can hear the planes at the airport warming up. As always there is a traffic roar—sounds like wind and rain through the magnolias.

“Bess’s mother is dying across the hallway….”

She had never been an easy person to get along with. Even as a resident of the White House she had let it be known in small ways to some of the servants and staff that she still thought Harry Truman not quite good enough for her Bess. But Truman, who had never been known to say anything critical about her, even by inference, was greatly saddened. “Since last September Mother Wallace has been dying…but we’ve kept doctors and nurses with her day and night and have kept her alive. We had hoped—and still hope—she’ll survive until Christmas. Our last as President.” When she died, on December 5, he wrote, “She was a grand lady. When I hear these mother-in-law jokes I don’t laugh.”

For a while the mood overall seemed one of a death watch over his own presidency. New poll results showed that only 32 percent of the people approved of the way he was handling his job; and 43 percent thought it had been a mistake for the United States to go to war in Korea. But polls meant no more to him now than ever before. “I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he’d taken a poll in Egypt?” he wrote Privately, in an undated memo to himself. “What would Jesus Christ have preached if he’d taken a poll in Israel?…It isn’t polls or public opinion of the moment that counts. It’s right and wrong.”

To Ethel Noland, he wrote that no one knew what responsibilities the job entailed, except from experience—“It bears down on a country boy.” The people had never been better off, yet they wanted a change. He felt “repudiated.” The people were fine about supporting the President in time of crisis, he told his staff, recalling the first weeks of the Korean War, “but when there is a long row of corn to shuck, they want an easy way out.”

A new census report confirmed that gains in income, standards of living, education, and housing since Truman took office were unparalleled in American history. As Truman would report in his final State of the Union message to Congress, on January 7, 1953, 62 million Americans had jobs, which was a gain of 11 million jobs in seven years. Unemployment had all but disappeared. Farm income, corporate income, and dividends were at an all—time high. There had not been a failure of an insured bank in nearly nine years. His most important accomplishments, he knew, were in world affairs. Yet he could rightly point with pride to the fact that the postwar economic collapse that everyone expected never happened, that through government support (the GI Bill) 8 million veterans had been to college, that Social Security benefits had been doubled, the minimum wage increased. There had been progress in slum clearance, millions of homes built through government financing. Prices were higher, but incomes, for the most part, had risen even more. Real living standards were considerably higher than seven years earlier.

Truman had failed to do as much as he wanted for public housing, education, failed to establish the medical insurance program he knew the nation needed, but he had battled hard for these programs, set goals for the future. He had achieved less in civil rights than he had hoped, but he had created the epoch-making Commission on Civil Rights, ordered the desegregation of the armed services and the federal Civil Service, done more than any President since Lincoln to awaken American conscience to the issues of civil rights. Until the onset of the Korean War, he had also kept the budget in line, actually reduced the national debt.

With the establishment of a unified Defense Department, the National Security Council, and the CIA, he had changed the structure of power in Washington in ways surpassing even the sweeping measures of FDR. With the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission, he had kept the control of nuclear power in civilian hands.

Reminiscing with his staff, and occasionally with reporters, he talked of the accomplishments he was most proud of-aid to Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan, NATO, Point Four (which, if not a massive program, had also set a goal for the future), the Berlin Airlift. And Korea, “the supreme test,” as he called it. The nation’s military power had been restored, the nation’s prestige was high.

In an extraordinary article in Look magazine the summer before, the historian Henry Steele Commager had written that by all normal measures the Truman administration had been one of almost uninterrupted, unparalleled success—a view that not only conflicted with popular opinion at the moment but with which the editors of the magazine specifically expressed their own disagreement.

“We cannot know what verdict history will pronounce upon it [the Truman record], but we can make a pretty good guess,” wrote Commager.

Reviewing the record—for his message to Congress, for his farewell broadcast—improved Truman’s spirits. He was in “high good humor,” “vigorous, hearty,” obviously happy as he worked to wind things up properly. He insisted on writing his farewell speech himself, and at the big table in the Cabinet Room one evening, the staff gathered, he read it aloud, stopping at the end of each page for their comments. Recounting the decision on Korea, he described how he had flown from Independence to Washington, the fateful Sunday in June 1950. “Flying back over the flatlands of the Middle West,” he read, “I had a lot of time to think.” Roger Tubby suggested he make it “rich flatlands”—““rich flatlands” would sound better, Tubby said. “The parts of southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio that I flew over are not rich, Roger,” Truman replied. Plain “flatlands” it remained.

Pictures came down from his office walls. His desk was cleared of knickknacks, clocks, everything personal. Packing boxes lined the halls of the West Wing, as painters moved from room to room. Already he was making plans for his presidential library. Some four hundred steel file cabinets filled with his private and presidential papers had been shipped to Missouri. When his old friend Senator Kilgore came by for a last visit, Truman told him that if he had known there would be so much work in leaving, he would have run again.

Questioned whether he wanted to live in Washington, Truman said no. Asked about his future plans, he said he had none as yet.

He was “full of bounce” at his last press conference—his 324th—and applauded lustily at the end by some three hundred reporters. There were farewell letters to write. “You have been my good right hand,” he wrote to Dean Acheson.

There was a last meeting with the Cabinet, a final session with his staff, a round of farewell dinners. The closer inauguration day drew, the happier Truman became. “Why, you’d have thought the President won the election the way he acts,” the White House valet, Arthur Prettyman, told a reporter for the Washington Post.

Bennett Clark, Louis Johnson, Clark Clifford, and Senator—elect John F. Kennedy, among others, came to say goodbye. A select few reporters and writers were given the chance for a final, private interview. He felt much as he had when he was heading home from France after World War I, not knowing what the future held in store for him, Truman told Tony Leviero of The New York Times.

The critic and author John Mason Brown, who came and went several times, was surprised to find Truman looking “anything but old” and in “the most benevolent of valedictory moods,” gentle, self-possessed.

The President’s physical and mental “resilience,” wrote Brown, was incredible. In fact, Truman, at sixty-eight, was leaving office in better health than when he came in in 1945 and better than any departing President, since Theodore Roosevelt left the White House at age fifty in 1909.

Churchill arrived for a farewell call at the West Wing and to host a dinner for “Harry” at the British Embassy. Considerably more spry than on his last visit, Churchill was in “rollicking form” and Truman hugely enjoyed his company.

From Pennsylvania Avenue now, the White House was all but obscured behind the wooden grandstands set up for Eisenhower’s inauguration.

Truman’s farewell address was delivered from his desk in the Oval Office by radio and television the night of Thursday, January 15, 1953, at 10:30 Washington time. It was a speech without rhetorical flourishes or memorable epigrams and it was superb, Truman at his best. In what it forecast concerning the Cold War, it was more extraordinary than could possibly have been understood at the time. He was clear, simple, often personal, but conveying overall a profound sense of the momentous history of the times, the panoramic changes reshaping the world, and the part that he, inevitably, had had to play since that desolate day when he was summoned to the White House and told of Roosevelt’s death. It was not a nostalgic farewell. He hated to think he was writing a valedictory, he had said privately beforehand. “I’m not through. I’m just starting.”

“Next Tuesday,” he began, “General Eisenhower will be inaugurated as President of the United States. A short time after the new President takes office, I will be on the train going back home to Independence, Missouri. I will once again be a plain, private citizen of this great Republic. That is as it should be….”

Four years earlier, in his inaugural address, his emphasis had been on the world—democracy looking outward to the world. Now, reviewing his full time as President, he again struck the same theme. His very first decision as President, he reminded his audience, had been to go forward with the United Nations. He recalled the German surrender, his meeting with Churchill and Stalin at Potsdam, the first atomic explosion in the New Mexico desert, his decision to use the atomic bomb to end the war with Japan—all this, as he said, within a little more than four months. He did not say, as he could have, that no President in history had had to face so many important problems in so brief a time, or found it necessary to make so many momentous decisions so quickly or with such little preparation. What he said was that the greatest part of a President’s responsibilities was making decisions. A President had to decide. “That’s his job.”

Yet it was not for the decisions of his first months in office that he would be remembered, Truman speculated.

The decision to go into Korea, he said, was the most important of his time in office. Korea was the turning point of the Cold War. Whereas free nations had failed to meet the test before—failed to stop Japanese aggression in Manchuria, the Nazi takeover in Austria and Czechoslovakia—“this time we met the test.” Yet the horrific potential of modern war had not been allowed to get out of hand. That was what was so important to understand. The issue was world peace in the nuclear age.

In his State of the Union message of the week before, which he had sent to Congress rather than delivering personally before a joint session, Truman had reported that in recent thermonuclear tests at Eniwetok Island in the Pacific, “we have entered another stage in the world-shaking development of atomic energy,” which was correctly understood to mean that the age of the H-bomb had arrived. The President who had ushered in the atomic bomb in 1945 was departing in 1953 at the start of a new era of destructive power “dwarfing,” as he reported to Congress, “the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

His intent in Korea, he now said, was to prevent World War III. “Starting an atomic war is totally unthinkable….”

How then would the Cold War end, he asked. How and when?

He offered a simple forecast, a long-range prediction that, at heart, was a statement of faith. His whole life Truman had been moved primarily by faith. Now in this last chance to talk to the country, in his attempt to read the history of the future, he trusted again to an unwavering faith. To millions who listened then, it seemed a striking expression of the best instincts of America. Read many years later, in the light of what happened at the end of the Cold War, it would seem utterly extraordinary in its prescience. He appeared to know even then the essence of what in fact would transpire, and, more importantly, why.

He was “glad the whole world will have a chance to see how simply and how peacefully our American system transfers the vast power of the Presidency….” Looking back at his time in office, he said, he had no regrets, and he thanked the people for their support.

The speech, indeed Truman’s whole handling of his departure, was praised on all sides. The speech was the finest of his presidency, it was said; he had finished strong. Walter Lippmann, who had been so consistently critical for years, wrote that

Inauguration day was as sunny as it had been four years earlier, only warmer, with blue skies and again tremendous crowds. The ceremonies for Dwight David Eisenhower, the thirty-fourth President of the United States and the first Republican to hold the office in twenty years, went smoothly.

Up early, Truman spent an hour or so winding up odds and ends in his office and saying goodbye to the secretarial staff and Secret Service agents. Relaxed, exuding good cheer, he popped in and out of the other offices. “Looks mighty bare in here,” he said. He was wearing the formal gray-striped trousers and Oxford gray coat that had been decided on as the inaugural attire. Many of the staff had brought their children to see him and say goodbye. At 10:30 there was a small reception for the Cabinet and their wives in the Red Room, as Truman waited for the President-elect to arrive.

The papers had been making much of a presidential hat crisis. Without consulting Truman, Eisenhower had announced he would be wearing a homburg, instead of the traditional top hat. So what would Truman wear, it was wondered? He had no wish to have his last quarrel over a hat, Truman told his staff. He would wear a homburg.

Further speculation had followed over whether the Eisenhowers would call on the President and First Lady before Inauguration Day, as was customary. Truman’s hopes, it was said, “remained touchingly, almost boyishly high” that the tradition would be honored, and when the Eisenhowers declined an invitation to lunch, he felt insulted. Reportedly the general did not wish to enter the house until he was President. When, at 11:30, the Eisenhowers arrived at the North Portico, to start the drive to the Capitol, they refused to come in for a cup of coffee, but sat in the car waiting. Only when the Trumans appeared did they step out of the car to greet them.

“It was a shocking moment,” recalled CBS correspondent Eric Sevareid, who was on the porch close by. “Truman was gracious and he had just been snubbed. He showed his superiority by what he did.”

From the way the two men looked as they drove off in the big Open Lincoln, J. B. West remembered, “I was glad I wasn’t in that car.”

“I ride with Ike in car No. 1 along with Joe Martin and Styles Bridges. Bess and Margie ride with Mrs. Ike,” Truman recorded in his diary. “Conversation is general—on the crowd, the pleasant day, the orderly turnover, etc.”

Later accounts of what was said would differ, but both Truman and Eisenhower would recall an exchange over the presence of Eisenhower’s only son, Major John Eisenhower, at the inaugural ceremonies. Eisenhower asked Truman who had ordered John back from Korea, and according to Eisenhower, Truman said simply, “I did.” But according to Truman what he said was, “The President thought it was right and proper for your son to witness the swearing-in of his father to the Presidency.” In any event, three days later, Eisenhower would send Truman a gracious letter thanking him for “the very many courtesies you extended to me and mine during the final stages of your Administration…I especially want to thank you for your thoughtfulness in ordering my son home from Korea…and even more especially for not allowing either him or me to know that you had done so.”

Truman had been President for seven years, nine months, for 2,841 days, and at noon it was over. He tried to pay attention to Eisenhower’s inaugural address, he later wrote, but his mind was on other things.

Less than half an hour later, he was being driven in a closed limousine back from the Capitol toward Georgetown when at 7th and D streets the driver stopped for a red light. It was the first time that a car in which Truman was riding had had to stop for a traffic light since 1945.

A farewell luncheon for the Trumans, before their train, had been arranged at the Achesons’ home. It was to be a small, private party for the Cabinet, White House aides, and a few close friends, but as the car swung into P Street a crowd of several hundred people, massed in front of the red-brick house, set up a cheer. Truman was astonished. “The street in front of Dean’s house,” he wrote, “was full of people who cheered as if I were coming in instead of going out.”

Swallowing hard, he told them, “I appreciate this more than any enthusiastic meeting I attended as President, Vice President and Senator. I’m just plain Mr. Truman now, a private citizen.”

Elsewhere in the city, as the Eisenhower inaugural parade filled Pennsylvania Avenue, others were telephoning friends to say that perhaps, even with the city tied up in traffic, they ought to try to get down to Union Station so that at least someone would be there to see the Trumans off.

Margaret would describe the lunch at the Achesons’ as “an absolutely wonderful affair full of jokes and laughter and a few tears.” By the time the party broke up, the crowd in P Street reached the length of the block. Traffic was backed up far beyond. When the Trumans went for their train, thousands were at the station to see him, wave to him, cheer and call, “So long, Harry!” “Good luck, Harry!” People pressed forward reaching for his hand.

The Ferdinand Magellan, provided as a courtesy by the new President, had been attached to a regular B&O train bound for Missouri. The police formed a flying wedge to get the Trumans through the crowd.

Old friends, Democratic senators, Supreme Court justices, members of the Cabinet, generals and ambassadors, piled aboard to shake Truman’s hand one more time. “There’s the best friend in the world,” Acheson said above the noise, when a reporter tapped him on the arm. “There’s nothing like that man.”

He kept smiling, waving. Bess looked radiant.

“I can’t adequately express my appreciation for what you are doing. I’ll never forget it if I live to be a hundred,” Truman said from the rear platform. Then, chopping his hands in the air with the familiar gesture, he said with a grin, “And that’s just what I intend to do!”

At 6:30, with the crowd singing “Auld Lang Syne,” the train began pulling slowly out of the station, until it was beyond the lighted platform. It had been a long road from Independence to the White House, and now Truman was going home.

“Crowd at Harper’s Ferry…and it was reported to me at every stop all night long,” he recorded. “Same way across Indiana and Illinois.”