The Highest Calling, page 23
DR: Truman didn’t have the most honest people around him. He himself was honest, but there were some minor scandals caused by some of the people around him?
JF: That’s true. They were little scandals, but they kept going. There was bribery. There were certain phrases like “mink coats” and “deep freezers” (i.e., gifts given to Truman officials) that made headlines.
DR: On the domestic front, people might be surprised that Truman was an ardent believer in civil rights.
JF: Not too ardent. He and his wife came from a family that had supported the Confederacy. Nonetheless, Truman supported the desegregation, in effect, of the federal workforce. But by modern standards, Truman would probably be considered something of a racist. He used the N-word all the time. He grew up in Confederate Missouri. But as I said before—he recognized that there were two people in the office: the president and Harry Truman. The president invariably did the right thing.
DR: He was also a supporter of health care for everybody. What happened there?
JF: This is something Roosevelt couldn’t accomplish. Roosevelt could get legislation creating Social Security, but he couldn’t get health care through Congress. Truman tried again and again. He had a very ambitious plan that eventually would have become Medicare, but it was shot down time and again in Congress.
DR: Truman is not all that popular as he goes forward. People think he’s not as good as Roosevelt; the economy has some inflation after the war; and his administration had scandals. He had never been elected. Did he ever think he shouldn’t run in 1948?
JF: He had no doubt that he’d run again. But according to the polls, he was destined to lose. He had trouble recruiting a vice president. The Supreme Court justice William Douglas said no.
DR: The first couple years of Truman’s presidency, he has no vice president because the Constitution did not spell out steps for a vice presidential succession. Had he died in office, who would have been the president?
JF: The secretary of state. But after Truman lost the midterm elections in 1946, a Democratic senator went so far as to suggest that Truman appoint a Republican as secretary of state and, in the interest of a smooth transition, resign. Then someone like Arthur Vandenberg, seen as a model bipartisan Republican, would be next in the line of succession.
DR: In 1948, the nominee for the Republican Party is Thomas Dewey, the governor of New York, who had been the nominee in 1944 for the Republicans. He was thought widely to be certain to win. What happened?
JF: It was a strong ticket. Earl Warren, the governor of California, was the Republican nominee for vice president. All the polls said Dewey was going to win. The polls were right, but the pollsters stopped polling about two months before the election. They probably were right when they were polling, but in the end they were very, very wrong.
DR: There’s a famous Chicago Tribune headline that said “Dewey Defeats Truman.” Truman liked to hold it up to show how wrong the press was. Did Truman think he was going to lose?
JF: He never said so. He always said he thought he was going to win. But as to the newspaper, it was only the early editions. Some of the pollsters sensed there was some movement, things were happening, but they didn’t poll again.
DR: Who was his vice president?
JF: Alben Barkley, who was a terrible choice. He’d been the Senate majority leader, but he was much older than Truman. It made no sense. That was one thing I never understood: picking an older vice president after being there when Roosevelt died. But Barkley was it.
DR: Truman gets elected, or reelected. During his second term, the Korean War breaks out. The North Korean forces invaded the South Korea area?
JF: Yes. It broke out at the end of June 1950. There had been border skirmishes, but suddenly it became very serious. Truman was in Missouri at the time. His secretary of defense and others were away. When they realized the severity, and that they had to meet, they immediately started discussing what they were going to do about it.
DR: Why didn’t they go to Congress and get a declaration of war?
JF: People like Senator Taft of Ohio made that very same point.
DR: But Truman called it a “police action,” not a war.
JF: Actually he didn’t. A reporter said, “Would you characterize this as a police action?” And that’s how it became known. Truman never used the phrase himself.
DR: Who was in charge of fighting for the Americans?
JF: General Douglas MacArthur was the commander, but, at age 70, he wasn’t at top form. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had worked with MacArthur in the Philippines, once said, “How did such an idiot ever become a general?” MacArthur was both vain and famous.
He had a very successful couple of months, after a terrifying couple of months. The North basically occupied 90 percent of Korea at first, but then MacArthur had this daring, successful idea to do an amphibious landing at Inchon, behind the North Korean lines, and come to the enemy from the rear. Then the war turned around. That’s when it possibly could have ended. But MacArthur decided that he was going to unify the country, as opposed to simply pushing the North Koreans back over the 38th parallel.
DR: And maybe attack the Chinese as well.
JF: It came to that later, but he had his atomic weapon dreams. The analogy to me is the first Gulf War, pushing the Iraqis out of Kuwait. What MacArthur did was turn it into the second Gulf War—regime change and a disaster. Thirty-seven thousand Americans died. Hundreds of thousands of Koreans, possibly two million Chinese. Every single village in the North was burned. Kim Il-sung, the leader of North Korea, never forgave us. His grandson is now the leader of North Korea. That’s one reason why we don’t have easy relations with North Korea.
DR: MacArthur says, “Maybe we should carry the bombing into China,” beyond what the president has authorized. So Truman talks to people about getting rid of MacArthur. What did his advisors tell him?
JF: Truman wasn’t going to go into China, but MacArthur seemed willing to drop some atomic bombs on China. Truman said, “This is it.” MacArthur basically defied orders. Truman met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the decision was made.
DR: Who told MacArthur he was relieved?
JF: They sent a deputy to the secretary of defense over to meet with MacArthur. But then MacArthur heard it on the radio. These things never are kept secret.
DR: So he comes back to the United States for the first time in at least 13 years. What does he do?
JF: He was invited back by Republicans, some of whom were very devoted to MacArthur. He gave a speech to the full House of Congress, and it was considered one of the great speeches of all time. One congressman said, “It was like the voice of God in the flesh today.” People were weeping. The speech ended with MacArthur saying, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”
People thought MacArthur had a huge future ahead of him, that maybe he’d be president. It went away quickly; but there were motions to impeach Truman over this.
DR: MacArthur was popular. How does it happen that Eisenhower, who was an assistant to MacArthur at one point, becomes the next president of the United States and not MacArthur?
JF: Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe. He was a national hero. Eisenhower had this great smile. He was not the friendliest man, but he was extremely appealing.
DR: At the end of Truman’s term, Truman decides not to run for reelection. Why?
JF: Bess told him, “You won’t survive it, and neither will I.” Truman had gotten ill just before the 1952 convention, but he had decided not to run before that. He made the announcement in March of’52. The polls were terrible and some of his answers were rambling. You could just tell the weariness had gotten to him.
DR: Who does he want to have succeed him in the Democratic Party?
JF: He wanted Fred Vinson, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who was a buddy of his. But Vinson said no. So Truman tried to recruit the new governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson, and Stevenson said, “I don’t want anything to do with it. I just want to be governor again.” But Stevenson finally realized that maybe he might want to be president. He was a reluctant candidate, and, in his acceptance speech, he talked about how “If this cup shall pass my way, I shall sip from it.”
DR: Eisenhower was reluctant as well, but he got the Republican nomination.
JF: Eisenhower became less reluctant with time. And Stevenson, as he was being recruited by Truman, talked to his friend and advisor George Ball, and said, “Why would I want to do this? Eisenhower’s going to win. I would probably vote for Eisenhower.”
DR: Eisenhower picks Richard Nixon as his vice president. Did he know Nixon?
JF: Yes, they’d met at the Bohemian Grove in California. There’s a picture of them. Nixon was enamored of Eisenhower already. Nixon had been a lieutenant in the Navy, and Eisenhower was the Supreme Commander. He went to meet him in Paris when Eisenhower was helping to set up what became NATO. I’m not sure that Eisenhower could remember Nixon, but they did know each other.
DR: Eisenhower was 62 and Nixon 39. They win in a landslide in 1952. What’s the relationship between Truman and Eisenhower? Because Eisenhower said he would go to Korea to help solve the war, which was an insult to Truman.
JF: The campaign had been nasty. They had once liked each other. Truman really admired Eisenhower. Truman had been an artillery man in the first World War. Eisenhower was a five-star general, and Truman was impressed by military men.
Eisenhower sort of admired Truman. But Truman thought the campaign was horrible, especially when Eisenhower did not defend General Marshall, who had been Eisenhower’s patron and supporter. Senator McCarthy of Wisconsin, the notorious red-hunter, had attacked Marshall, saying that Marshall “is at the heart of a conspiracy so black and so infamous” that it was basically a communist conspiracy. And Eisenhower did not defend him. Truman thought, and said, that someone who does not defend his friend has no spine and is not fit to be president. Eisenhower was thin-skinned to begin with, and Truman’s view sort of crossed the line for him.
DR: Eisenhower ultimately says during the campaign that he will go to Korea, and that probably helped him win the election.
JF: Right. Eisenhower gave a speech that included a promise to go to Korea to begin to end the war. One of Stevenson’s advisors said, “The election was lost tonight.”
DR: During the transition period, Eisenhower does go secretly to Korea, and ultimately there is an armistice that’s agreed to when he’s president. When Truman leaves the White House, he’s leaving with very low popularity ratings. What does he do?
JF: Yes. He had a pension of about $112 a month from his time as a soldier. He first had a happy farewell lunch with his cabinet at the Achesons’ house in Georgetown. He then took the train back to Independence, where he stayed for the rest of his life. He was not broke. He quickly sold his memoirs to Life magazine for $600,000. So he was going to do okay.
DR: Eisenhower had earlier sold his war memoirs for $500,000, so Truman wanted to get a little bit more.
JF: That’s exactly right, though Eisenhower got a special tax break on his deal. I don’t know that Truman did.
DR: Truman lives to be 88. He dies in 1972. And before he dies, among other things the Medicare bill is passed, and President Johnson comes out to Independence, Missouri, to sign it there. Why did he do that?
JF: Because of all the efforts Truman had made to get a health care plan. Johnson came out to Independence and sat with Truman and Bess. By this time the Truman Library had been built. Medicare card number one went to Truman, Medicare card number two went to Bess, and Johnson signed the bill there.
DR: When Nixon’s elected president in 1972, although he has a complicated relationship with Truman, he presents him with a piano for the Truman Library that Truman played at the White House. And Nixon plays what song?
JF: The “Missouri Waltz.” Truman hated the “Missouri Waltz.”
DR: Truman ultimately becomes frail and doesn’t go out in public much toward the end of his life?
JF: Yes, he had a bad fall when he was 80 years old. He slowed down. His doctor said he maybe had a type of Parkinson’s. He wanted to go to the funeral for Herbert Hoover in 1984, but couldn’t. He died in the hospital in Kansas City, which cost about $59 a night and was paid for by Medicare.
DR: After doing all this work on Truman, are you more impressed with him than you were before you began, or less impressed?
JF: Truman grows on you. I thought more of him. He was a decent man who tried to do the right thing, and even when he had thoughts that he knew weren’t as nice as they should be, he tried to say and do the right thing.
11 SUSAN EISENHOWER
on Dwight D. Eisenhower
(1890–1969; president from 1953 to 1961)
My first memories of a president were of Dwight Eisenhower. I was three when he was elected and eleven when he left office. As I have come to learn more about Eisenhower in recent years, I have come away as a real admirer. He was old to an eleven-year-old. But in fact, he was elected at 62 and left office at 70, relatively young by today’s standards.
When I was growing up, Eisenhower was seen—by me at least—as, well, dull. He gave no great speeches or press conferences. His syntax felt garbled. And there was no excitement about his programs. Eisenhower may have led the D-Day invasion, but he seemed, in office, to be less of a leader than a follower. And as I recall, he played golf a great deal (though perhaps not by the standards of Woodrow Wilson who, pre-stroke, tried to play almost every day).
My views were in line with the accepted wisdom at the time, even in Republican circles, where Eisenhower was popular but not seen as a forceful or dynamic president. Despite the bland personality, he maintained his popularity, and he left office with quite high approval ratings, certainly compared to his predecessor.
With the benefit of several decades of perspective since he left office, I now see Eisenhower much differently, as do a great many scholars. Eisenhower may have been dull, without rousing speeches, but he kept the peace for eight years; started NASA (which led to America’s eventual success in space); began the Interstate Highway System (without the use of federal income tax dollars); appointed Earl Warren as chief justice; sent federal troops to Little Rock to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education decision (though he may not have really liked it); oversaw an enormous, almost unprecedented economic expansion in the U.S.; began the first series of federal investments in science and technology; and oversaw the admission of Alaska and Hawaii to the Union.
I thought it might be interesting to see how someone close to Eisenhower might provide a modern, highly personal look at him, and I therefore interviewed one of his granddaughters, Susan, who has become a scholar of American and Russian history, at a Congressional Dialogues session at the Library of Congress on March 15, 2022. She had recently written a highly enjoyable book on her grandfather. Her memories of him are still vivid, and she provides a human dimension to him that I found quite appealing.
* * *
DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Dwight Eisenhower and Mamie Eisenhower had two children. One died at the age of three of scarlet fever. The remaining child was your father?
SUSAN EISENHOWER (SE): Yes, John Eisenhower. He and his wife, Barbara, my mother, had four children: David; my older sister, Anne; I’m the middle child; and I have a younger sister named Mary.
DR: You led an effort, maybe on behalf of others in your family as well, to protest the original design by Frank Gehry of the Eisenhower Memorial. What was wrong with the original design?
SE: It seemed not monumental enough for the core of Washington. But ultimately we got a monumental backdrop to a design that had already been approved by the Fine Arts Commission, The Beaches of Normandy in Peacetime. What a great symbol of not just his contribution in the war but what emerged after that war. It’s absolutely wonderful to drive down the street and see little kids up on the plinth kind of tugging on his coat or looking up at these paratroopers. It really means a lot.
DR: Let’s talk about your relationship with your grandfather. How old were you when he was in the White House?
SE: I was about nine years old when he left the presidency.
DR: You were one, more or less, when he was elected?
SE: Yes. I was born when he was commander of NATO forces in Europe.
DR: Do you remember the White House? Did he say, “I’m going to stop everything and spend time with my grandchildren,” or that didn’t happen?
SE: My grandmother had a pretty good rule: Don’t come home from the office unless you come home. Stay there until you get your work done, because when you’re at home, you’re with the family. I think it helped him a lot to gain perspective, because a job like that is so extraordinarily stressful. I was one of the great beneficiaries of my grandmother’s strong rule.
DR: After he left the White House, he lived another nine years or so. You were about 18 when he passed away?
SE: Yes.
DR: What was he like when he moved to Gettysburg? Did you spend time with him? What kind of person was he?
SE: I had almost an everyday relationship with him, because we lived on an adjacent farm. That’s where the grandchildren strategy comes in. We had a very normal family life, and then suddenly, somebody like Winston Churchill or Charles de Gaulle would be coming, and he’d say, “Get the kids cleaned up and over at the house shortly.”
