The Highest Calling, page 21
DR: In those years, the term of governor was two years. Franklin gets elected in 1928 and already he’s thinking, “I should be like Teddy Roosevelt, I should run for president.” The next presidential election’s going to be in 1932. What does he do in the first two years as governor to get himself ready for reelection and then get ready to run for president?
JD: It’s not just him who has the idea that he should run for president in 1932. Because he has this Cinderella-story victory in 1928, from the moment that this becomes public, people start talking about him as not just someone who might run for president in four years but as the front-runner. He’s focused in his first two years as governor on doing as good a job as he can, which is not an easy task because he’s got a Republican legislature. He finds ways to go around them and connect directly with the public, and he wants to win reelection by as large a margin as he can to show that this is not just a one-time thing.
DR: He runs for reelection in 1930, and what happens?
JD: He wins by a huge landslide. He’s running against Charles Tuttle, who had been the U.S. attorney for the Southern District. People thought this was a good anticorruption candidate. But Franklin has an easy job defeating him.
DR: So he gets reelected. Does he start gearing up to run for president?
JD: It starts from the earliest moments. They are essentially running what we would call today an inevitability campaign. They want to create this perception across the country that Franklin Roosevelt is the only person who can unite all the various factions in the Democratic Party. Remember that at this point—this is 1932—the Democratic Party had been out of power for 12 years, in part because it had been at war with itself so much. So it is a compelling story: Franklin Roosevelt, who spent all this time in Georgia but is a New Yorker, is a unique figure who can unite the various wings of the party.
DR: As governor, he spends a lot of time with people who are the underclass in some ways, people who have physical problems, people who are not that economically strong. Is that part of his image, to appeal to people who are not the upper class?
JD: Yes. This gets back to this idea of what did the public know about his illness and disability? People understood, on some level, even though they didn’t have all of the details, that this was someone who had been through a serious experience that had altered his life. He was someone who, despite his privileged background, could relate to people when he talked about them as the forgotten man.
DR: Who were the main competitors for the nomination in 1932?
JD: There were a number of people running. His chief opposition was John Nance Garner, who was the Speaker of the House. He didn’t want to run for president in 1932, but William Randolph Hearst told him to. Hearst was a big figure at the time in media and politics, and he was one of these people who gets this idea that he’s going to do everything he can to stop Franklin Roosevelt from getting the Democratic nomination. Hearst didn’t like anyone who was going to be president because it wasn’t him.
DR: Roosevelt campaigns for the nomination. There are no primaries then?
JD: There were primaries but they didn’t have a decisive effect in selecting delegates. So there’s all this drama that gets concentrated on the convention, where it’s really about the perception in the room of who seems strong as a candidate.
DR: In the end, Joe Kennedy, one of the wealthiest men in the United States and the father of John F. Kennedy, cuts a deal with William Randolph Hearst. What is that deal?
JD: Kennedy is a great operator. Hearst has effectively positioned himself as part of this stop-Roosevelt movement, and it’s effective. If he wants, he can keep Franklin Roosevelt from getting the nomination that year. They go through several ballots at the convention where it looks like Roosevelt’s in real trouble. Kennedy goes to Hearst and says, “If you want to pick a president, the only one you’re really going to be able to give it to is Franklin Roosevelt.” And Hearst, who’s got a high opinion of himself, views himself as a kingmaker. So he switches, somewhat opportunistically, at the last minute. He likes the idea that he’s going to be seen as the person who brings Franklin Roosevelt over the line.
DR: The condition is that John Nance Garner is going to be the vice president?
JD: That’s right. Garner is at his home in Washington, totally oblivious to this. He gets woken up by the Hearst press, who inform him of what’s going on.
DR: The election was against Herbert Hoover. Did Roosevelt go to the Democratic Convention and make a dramatic speech?
JD: He did, breaking with precedent. You historically wouldn’t show up at the convention if you were the candidate because you didn’t want to be seen as influencing things too crassly and directly.
He stayed away during the nominating process. But once he secures the nomination, he flies to Chicago to show that he’s someone who can go there physically, to combat the perception of polio.
DR: How does he go to the convention and show people he can walk or give the illusion of walking?
JD: By that point, he had worked out a routine. He has someone—often his eldest son, Jimmy—holding his arm so it looks like they’re walking arm in arm. Then he uses a cane to support his weight, and he swings his legs so if you’re not watching too closely, he looks like someone who can walk but with a great deal of difficulty. He has on thick leg braces, which he hated.
DR: He gives a speech, he gets the nomination, and then the election against Hoover is not that difficult because Hoover had gotten us into a bit of an economic problem.
JD: In Hoover’s mind, he thinks he’s lucky when the Democrats nominate Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. Of all the people being talked about, he knew Franklin Roosevelt best. They had been friends in Washington a decade earlier. He doesn’t rate Franklin very highly. Most people don’t understand how he’s been changed by these years. So Hoover’s quite happy when it’s Franklin Roosevelt running against him.
DR: But the election doesn’t go very well for Hoover because of the Depression. It’s a landslide election. Does FDR look to Hoover during the transition to learn from him?
JD: He doesn’t want to too closely associate himself with Hoover. When Hoover tries to meet with him a few times, he evades him in this classically Rooseveltian fashion. There’s one point where Hoover’s getting concerned about what is going to be the emergent banking crisis, and he writes an urgent letter to Roosevelt: “I feel so strongly about this. I’m giving this to the Secret Service to give to you, personally.” Roosevelt reads the letter and takes 10 days to respond. He says, “Oh, I think someone misplaced that letter.” It’s not at all believable. He doesn’t want to get enmeshed in Herbert Hoover’s problem.
DR: On Inauguration Day, until most recently, the new president goes to the White House for coffee or tea with the outgoing president, and then they drive up to the inauguration together. Did Roosevelt do that?
JD: They do meet. Hoover makes a generous gesture. He understood that the typical ceremony, where the incoming president goes into the White House for coffee, would put Roosevelt in an uncomfortable position where he’s going to be seen having to get inside. So Hoover instead says, “I’ll come out and meet you in the car.” And they have just the car ride together. If you look at the pictures from that ride, Franklin Roosevelt is Franklin Roosevelt, smiling, and Hoover looks like he’s having the worst day of his life.
DR: Roosevelt gives his first inaugural address, the most famous line of which is, “We have nothing to—”
JD: “—fear but fear itself.”
DR: Who wrote that line?
JD: That’s a good question. Authorship is always an interesting question with Franklin Roosevelt. He has other people draft his speeches, but he leads the revision process, and he’s saying, “Move this here, and move that here, move that there.” He’s not ever really writing a speech so much as conducting it like a symphony.
But with the inaugural address, he does something in the drafting process. He writes a note saying, “This is the draft that was written by Franklin Roosevelt,” and he gives the time and date. I think that’s because he knows that this is an address that’s going to live in history.
DR: Quite a story. After spending all this time studying Franklin Delano Roosevelt, do you come away admiring him more than you did before or less?
JD: I come away admiring him a great deal more than I did before. When you write about the years that I write about, the years that he spends in recovery and rehabilitation from polio, you get to see him at his best on an interpersonal level.
A lot of politicians have moments doing altruistic things. But is it really for an altruistic purpose or are they just trying to look like someone who cares? There’s no way you can say that about Franklin Roosevelt’s work at Warm Springs. There’s no definition of political calculation that says that you should spend a huge chunk of your personal fortune and time getting involved in other people’s recovery. He does that just because he wants to help people.
DR: During the time he’s president, he doesn’t have a relationship with Lucy Mercer any longer, but he has a relationship with his assistant?
JD: Missy LeHand is his assistant. People at the time thought of her as his second wife almost. They have a relationship. She’s definitely in love with Franklin Roosevelt, and I think he loves her back.
But there’s a big difference from the Lucy Mercer relationship, which is that the Missy LeHand one has Eleanor Roosevelt’s sanction. In these years she wants to be pursuing her own independent life, and she knows that her husband has a lot of needs. He has a lot of physical needs, as someone who’s disabled, and he also has a lot of needs as someone who likes to have adulation and admiration. She doesn’t want to play that role and she understands that Missy LeHand can do it, so she gives it her blessing.
DR: Eleanor Roosevelt develops her own relationships, and she becomes a powerful speaker for causes. She’s his eyes and ears on the road, and the relationship between the two of them, in some ways, strengthened?
JD: It strengthened, I think, because she understands how these years have changed her husband. She sees that he has deepened as a person and has this unique ability to be an effective agent of change on the causes she cares about. Her rage toward him never completely goes away.
DR: On the day he dies, in April of 1945, Lucy Mercer is with him. What was Eleanor’s reaction to finding this out and not being there herself?
JD: It’s an amazing and heartbreaking story. Again, in the years when they decide to stay together as a couple, one of Eleanor’s conditions is that Franklin end things with Lucy and have no more connection to her, and Eleanor thinks all those years that he’s abiding by that. He had, in fact, remained in touch with her.
Lucy was married to someone else in those years, Winthrop Rutherfurd. He dies in the last years of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. By then, Franklin and Lucy are spending more time together, and it’s orchestrated by Franklin and Eleanor’s eldest daughter, Anna. Eleanor finds out about all of this in basically the same breath—not literally, but in the same moments—that she’s learned that her husband has died. It’s rewriting history right in front of her eyes.
10 JEFFREY FRANK
on Harry S. Truman
(1884–1972; president from 1945 to 1953)
Harry Truman left the presidency with a then-record low approval rating of 32 percent, and from the day he was sworn in, after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, on April 12, 1945, he was in Roosevelt’s shadow. He was not an accomplished public speaker (his flat Missouri twang and diction contrasted poorly with FDR’s friendly and resonant voice); he lacked the stature of such foreign leaders as Winston Churchill; he wasn’t well educated (he did not attend college); and, all in all, he was not someone whom the American people felt was an appropriate leader for such an august position.
These views began to change even before he left office, and particularly after David McCullough published his Pulitzer Prize–winning Truman in 1992. The reappraisal of Truman has continued to this day. He is now widely seen as a no-nonsense man from Independence, Missouri, who was not afraid of making tough decisions. He twice ordered the use of an atomic bomb and never second-guessed that decision. He oversaw the successful completion of the European and Pacific Theaters of World War II. Overcoming his own upbringing in rural Missouri, he fought for civil rights—including integrating the military. He created the CIA; and got the United Nations, the World Bank, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the International Monetary Fund off the ground, and these global organizations, while far from perfect, proved to be a bedrock of international cooperation for nearly 75 years. He fought against the red-baiting of Senator Joe McCarthy. And he was honest and incorruptible, despite his roots as part of a Missouri political machine not known for its integrity.
I interviewed the late David McCullough, whom I came to know reasonably well, about many of his books, but sadly never did so about his work on Truman. But I was able to twice interview a worthy successor to him, Jeffrey Frank, who spent about seven years researching and writing The Trials of Harry S. Truman: The Extraordinary Presidency of an Ordinary Man, 1945–1953. This interview occurred at the New-York Historical Society on March 15, 2023.
Like most of Truman’s recent biographers, Frank came away admiring Truman for many of the actions and qualities described above. I came away with the realization that a president’s reputation can certainly change, and that it is probably a mistake to pass judgment only during their time in office. Some historians think that decades are needed before one can really assess a presidency. A look at Truman and what he accomplished is an eye-opening example of how history and presidential reputations can shift.
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DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): What prompted you to write a book about Harry Truman?
JEFFREY FRANK (JF): When I was a kid, Truman was the president. My father worked at the Pentagon, and I was immersed in that period, drawn to it again and again. The entire modern world began to take shape during his presidency.
DR: After David McCullough wrote a book on Harry Truman, which won the Pulitzer Prize, an extraordinary book, what did you think you could add to his legacy?
JF: David McCullough’s book is terrific, but it’s a real cradle-to-grave biography. It was also written 30 years ago. Mine is more a biography of a presidency, so I could focus more on why I really care about Harry Truman. It also includes a lot of new stuff. The National Archives has added a lot of material, the Truman Library has a lot of new material, and there are a lot of oral histories that didn’t exist before.
DR: Harry Truman left office with one of the lowest popularity ratings of recent times. Now he seems to be idolized, and people think he was a great president. What changed?
JF: Time happened. When Truman was president, he was unimpressive. He was a bad speaker. Everything was going badly. There were minor scandals. The Korean War looked like a war with no end. So he was really unpopular, with one of the historically lowest ratings ever.
But as time goes by, people begin to have a different perspective, to be able to say, “Oh, he did do things.” Henry Steele Commager wrote a piece for Look magazine, just before Truman left office, commenting that people will soon forget his “venial sins” and remember his major accomplishments, such as the Marshall Plan.
DR: One of the most famous decisions that he made was to drop two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Did he ever have any second thoughts about doing that?
JF: No, he never had second thoughts. There were times when I think he had pangs of conscience. In a conversation with Reinhold Niebuhr and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., he talked about how he felt awful about all the people who had been killed, but he also said he’d never regretted it. He would do it again, he said.
DR: Did he ever have second thoughts about anything he did?
JF: Yes. The Korean War was a difficult decision. He said it was his most difficult decision, and I believe him. I don’t know that he regretted having so many cronies on the White House staff, but I suspect he probably did.
DR: The State Department, and virtually everybody in his administration, advised him not to recognize the State of Israel when it was about to be created as an independent country. Truman disagreed. Why did he recognize Israel and overrule his most trusted advisors?
JF: He once said that “there are two people at this desk, the president of the United States and Harry Truman.” It was a Harry Truman decision, not a presidential decision. It was an emotional decision. He was obviously influenced by what had happened during World War II. There was a ship of refugees, the former SS President Warfield, fleeing Europe, trying to land in Palestine. That affected Truman. His friend and former business partner, Eddie Jacobson, who was Jewish, influenced him too.
DR: Truman didn’t go to college. He was very plainspoken. Did people at the time feel that the presidency was lowered by having such an uneducated person in the presidency?
JF: He followed Franklin Roosevelt, who was probably the most eloquent and magnetic speaker of the last century. Truman had none of those qualities. He had a high-pitched voice. He had a Missouri accent. He would say “b’lieve.” He was not charismatic. But people got used to it, and got used to his honesty and his straightforwardness. They felt a certain affection for him.
DR: An example is that when his daughter was making her debut as a singer, Paul Hume, a Washington Post music critic, wrote a review saying she didn’t know how to sing. Harry Truman wrote a letter to Paul Hume.
