Since November, Lilienthal had been extremely concerned about the effect so humiliating a defeat in the elections might have on Truman’s self-confidence and thus on his program. Lilienthal’s own appointment, as a prime example, was bound to stir up a hornets’ nest, once the confirmation process began on the Hill, since the aging, vituperative Senator McKellar of Tennessee, who had fought to deny Lilienthal’s reappointment at TVA and despised him no less than ever, had just been reelected to another term.
Not for a month after the elections did Lilienthal actually see the President, and then only by chance. It was at about five o’clock on an afternoon in early December, when Lilienthal and Clifford were working quietly in the Cabinet Room. The day was nearly over, it was growing dark outside. Clifford nudged him to look up at the French doors that opened to the outside passage to the main house. The President was standing on the other side of the glass, looking in at them and smiling. Not knowing what else to do, Lilienthal rose and bowed awkwardly. Truman waved, still smiling, then moved quickly on, a Secret Service man a half step behind.
Nothing had been said, the whole incident occupied only seconds, but to Lilienthal it was a moment of encouragement worth recording in his diary, as he would also record the hearty welcome Truman gave him a few days later in the Oval Office, when, with the four others on his new commission, Lilienthal came to make a brief progress report. The Army would relinquish no more control over atomic energy than it could possibly avoid, Truman warned. “I know how they are, they are trained not to give up. I know because I am one of them.” Again he was smiling.
As the meeting ended and the group wished the President luck, Truman, thanking them, replied that his luck had been improving lately, this in reference to a recent test of wills with John L. Lewis. But what impressed Lilienthal was “the kind of grim gaiety in his tone and manner….”
The change in the President became more obvious by the day. There had been a “showdown” with John L. Lewis, just after the November elections. At Clark Clifford’s urging, Truman had challenged the legality of still another threatened coal strike. Except this time it was to be a “fight to the finish,” as Truman said. “Oh, God, it was the chance of a lifetime,” Clifford would remember. “ ‘Be right, be strong. Nobody’s bigger than the President of the United States.’ All the signs were right. It looked like Lewis had violated the law…. Roosevelt had toadied to him time and again. But now he pushed the President the wrong way. And he just said one day, ‘Okay, we’re going to go!’ ”
The administration took the powerful labor boss to court, on the grounds that he was violating the Smith-Connally Act, which prohibited strikes against government-held facilities, the coal mines being still technically under government seizure. An injunction was served, and when Lewis let the strike begin on November 20, a federal district judge ordered him to stand trial for contempt. Lewis refused. On December 4, the judge hit the United Mine workers with a stunning $3 million fine, and fined Lewis personally $10,000. Truman, meanwhile, had been to Florida and back, for a few days of vacation at the Key West naval base. On December 7, Lewis gave up and ordered his men back to the mines, pending an appeal to the Supreme Court. (In March 1947 the Supreme Court upheld the contempt ruling, though the fine against the union was later reduced.)
It was a resounding victory for the administration and another step up for Clifford. Established now in Sam Rosenman’s old office, the second largest and best office in the West Wing, Clifford was only twenty paces from the President’s desk and saw him six or seven times a day. Often they ate together in the basement lunchroom.
Truman was hugely pleased by the collapse of Lewis. For the first time in months, he was being praised by the press—“Harry S. Truman stood fast, where Franklin Roosevelt met [Lewis] halfway,” said Newsweek—and this, too, of course, he greatly enjoyed. But the real change, in the view of his old friend Charlie Ross and others, had come with the elections. It was the sweeping Republican triumph, ironically, that had given Truman a new lease on life, freeing him at last from the shadow of Franklin Roosevelt as perhaps nothing else could have. He owed no one anything any longer. He was free to take charge, to be himself, and show what he could do if he had to. He was on his own again, much as he had been in the 1940 Senate race, when Tom Pendergast was out of the picture and Roosevelt had abandoned him; or as he had been on the farm when his father died, or in France in 1918, when, with his new captain’s bars, he stood alone, trembling, and speechless before his new command.
The President was “now a free man and can write a fine record,” Ross wrote to his sister. “The real Truman administration,” Ross told White House reporters, “began the day after the elections.”
And clearly Truman agreed. In a letter to Bess from Key West, he had vowed, “I’m doing as I damn please for the next two years and to hell with all of them.”
Far from being downcast or tentative about his new role as a “minority” President, he had returned from Florida tanned, rested, eager to get going. He had accepted the verdict of the people in the spirit, he said, that “all good citizens accept the results of any fair election.” The change in Congress did not alter the country’s domestic or foreign problems, and in foreign affairs especially it must be “a national and not a party program.” Of course, conflicts would arise between a Republican Congress and a Democratic President. That was to be expected. But he, Harry Truman, would be guided by a simple idea: “to do in all cases…without regard to political considerations, what seems to me to be for the welfare of all our people….”
In the new 80th Congress, Joe Martin would replace Sam Rayburn as Speaker of the House. In the Senate, instead of Alben Barkley, Taft and Vandenberg would hold the reigns of power, and with the tacit understanding that Taft would attend to domestic issues, Vandenberg to foreign affairs, as Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Truman knew the three Republican leaders from years of experience. Vandenberg, whom he knew best and liked best, had been a friend since Truman’s first days in the Senate, and Truman considered him both able and trustworthy. A former newspaper editor from Grand Rapids, “Van” had been an all-out isolationist until the war, but Pearl Harbor, he liked to say, had ended isolationism for any realist. (Once in London during an attack of German robot bombs, Vandenberg remarked to a friend, “How can there be immunity or isolation when men can devise weapons like that?”) It was a conversion of far-reaching consequence. Not only was Vandenberg one of the Senate’s inner circle, and among Republicans the undisputed authority on foreign affairs, but he was a formidable force as a speaker. Large and hearty, he had the mannerisms of a somewhat pompous stage senator—the cigar, the florid phrase, and more than a little vanity, carefully combing a few long strands of gray hair sideways over the top of his bald head. When making a point on the Senate floor, he favored the broad gesture, grandly flinging out one arm in a sweeping arc. His prestige reached beyond national boundaries, and like Truman during his years in the Senate, he had made no enemies.
Vandenberg was the son of a harnessmaker, Joe Martin the son of a blacksmith, backgrounds Truman could identify with, as he could not with the privileged world of Robert A. Taft, whose father had been President William Howard Taft. Martin, who came from North Attleboro, Massachusetts, a factory town south of Boston, had arrived in Congress first in 1925, when his friend Calvin Coolidge was President. And for forty-two years Martin’s outlook had remained fundamentally that of Coolidge. No legislation of importance had been attached to his name, no memorable declaration of political philosophy, but he was a good cloakroom organizer and known as dependable and fair-minded, “straight as a string,” as was said in the home district. A short, square man, he wore poorly fitting three-piece navy blue suits and boxy black policeman’s shoes. Even when speaking to small groups at home he would stand on a chair in order to be seen. A lock of dark hair that fell over the right side of his forehead had become a trademark.
Like his Democratic counter
part, Sam Rayburn, Martin was a bachelor. He neither drank, nor smoked, nor showed much interest in anything beyond politics and the hometown newspaper he owned, the North Attleboro Chronicle. Whatever was good for the district, Joe Martin held, was “pretty much good” for the nation.
On New Year’s Day, busy placing calls to his Cabinet to wish them a Happy New Year, Truman decided to phone Vandenberg and Martin as well, and was encouraged by the results. Vandenberg was “very pleasant,” Martin even more so, assuring the President that cooperation was uppermost in his mind. “He told me that he would be most happy to talk to me any time on any subject,” Truman recorded. “I am inclined to believe that he meant what he said.”
Taft, whom Truman did not call New Year’s Day, was a remote, self-absorbed man, “a cold fish” in the view of many. (“Bob is not austere,” his wife once explained. “He’s just departmentalized.”) Younger than Truman by five years, Taft had been born into affluent, cultivated surroundings in Cincinnati. He had stood first in his class at Yale and later at the Harvard Law School. Though he had served in the Senate since 1938, he looked more like a banker than a politician. He wore rimless spectacles and, like Harry Truman, his hat at dead center. His Cheshire Cat grin was famous.
Often tactless, habitually brusque with those less intelligent than he, Taft was a poor “mixer,” a poor public speaker. He had trouble remembering names. His reputation for hard work and standing by principle, however, his fund of knowledge and ability to cut to the heart of an issue were considered second to none in the Senate. He was “Mr. Republican,” incorruptible, extremely conservative, and, unlike Vandenberg, a confirmed isolationist. But he could also be highly independent—and exasperate the old guard of his party—by advocating such liberal programs as federal aid to education, health, and housing. Senator Wallace H. White of Maine, a quiet, colorless figure, was to be the Republican majority leader in name only; Taft would be the one running things.
Taft, Vandenberg, and Martin were all determined to restore Congress to the prestige and authority that had been lost during the Roosevelt era. Martin would insist in his first address as Speaker, “Our American concept of government rests upon the idea of a dominant Congress.” All three men, furthermore, were considered presidential prospects for 1948, and Taft in particular. Determined to follow in his father’s footsteps, Taft had already tried for the Republican nomination in 1940. Now, with Harry Truman in office, his opportunity looked greater than ever.
Nor, importantly, was Taft interested in cooperating with the administration. “The purpose of the opposition is to oppose,” he was fond of saying. And unlike Vandenberg and Martin, he had little regard for Truman, who to Taft was truly an ordinary man, deficient in background and education, ill-equipped in nearly every way for so heavy a responsibility, in addition to being overly susceptible to the bad advice of liberals.
Among the new faces in Republican ranks in the 80th Congress were Representative Richard M. Nixon of California, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., of Massachusetts, and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Among the relative handful of new Democrats elected was Representative John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the twenty-nine-year-old son of Joe Kennedy.
For all the labor strife of the year before, the country was prospering as it never had, just as Truman declared in his State of the Union message on January 6, 1947. Food production was at a new high. The national income was higher than ever before in peacetime. “We have virtually full employment,” he said with satisfaction.
He looked like a man befitting the message, healthy and purposeful. At seven that morning he had walked from the White House to Union Station to meet the train from Missouri bringing Bess and Margaret, who sat now listening in the gallery.
He called for far-ranging improvements in labor-management relations, a strengthening of the anti-trust laws, a national health insurance program, including support for mental health, child care, and hospital construction. He wanted a “fair level of return” for farmers, aid to veterans, an “aggressive” program of home construction. He promised new progress in civil rights.
In no way was the speech a retreat from the domestic programs he had set forth in his message of 1945. Yet the tone was different, more reasonable, more optimistic. He advocated a balanced budget, a streamlining of the military establishment, international control of atomic energy. He ended with what would later seem a prescient line, about sharing America’s bounty with the war-stricken peoples over the world.
Also, notably missing this time was any mention of Franklin Roosevelt.
Written in large part by Clark Clifford, with help from George Elsey, who like Clifford was in naval uniform no longer but serving as Clifford’s assistant, the speech went far to raise Truman’s standing with Congress. Even greater was the effect of the surprise announcement he made at the White House the following evening: George C. Marshall was to be the new Secretary of State. Jimmy Byrnes had resigned. Marshall was already en route from China.
The appointment of Marshall was one of the best, most important decisions of Truman’s presidency. One wonders, as Truman must have in later years, how differently history might have unfolded had Marshall declined to serve as Secretary of State at that particular moment in world affairs. The reaction everywhere was immediate, virtually unanimous approval. Henry Stimson might have been speaking for the whole nation when he wrote to Marshall: “Your appointment as Secretary of State has filled me with a great sense of security so far as our country is concerned. Mr. Truman made a wise as well as a very shrewd appointment.”
On Capitol Hill, Arthur Vandenberg pushed the nomination through the Foreign Relations Committee without a hearing or opposition, and by calling for a suspension of the rules, ran it through the Senate for unanimous approval the same day. The one possible shadow on the appointment, in the view of some Republicans, was the chance that it might set Marshall up as a future candidate for President, an idea Marshall himself put to rest the same morning he arrived in Washington. He would never be a candidate for any political office, he said, and being Marshall he was taken at his word.
He was sworn in at the White House by Chief Justice Vinson later that morning, Tuesday, January 21, 1947. When a beaming Truman shook his hand and said how much he appreciated Marshall’s willingness to accept “this burden,” Marshall replied simply that he would do his best.
At sixty-six, George C. Marshall was the first career soldier to become Secretary of State. He had been born on the last day of 1880 in Union-town, Pennsylvania, south of Pittsburgh, where through boyhood, from his businessman father, he heard repeated accounts of his distinguished Virginia ancestry, including the distantly related John Marshall, the great Chief Justice. “I thought that the continuing harping on the name John Marshall was kind of poor business,” he later said. “It was about time for somebody else to swim for the family.” Graduated from the Virginia Military Institute in 1901, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry and advanced steadily thereafter, serving in the Philippines, Oklahoma Territory, and Fort Leavenworth, until World War I when, as Pershing’s aide, he directed the American advance to the Argonne. Between the wars, he had served three years in China. In 1939, Roosevelt made him chief of staff.
He was slightly under six feet tall, with sandy-gray, close-cropped hair and light blue eyes. His long face, with its long upper lip, had a homespun, fatherly quality and often, in repose, he looked quite sad. With age his shoulders had begun to stoop slightly. As Dean Acheson would write, there was little military glamour about him, nothing pretentious. Rather it was an intangible aura that affected people. Like George Washington, with whom he was often compared, Marshall was a figure of such flawless rectitude and self-command he both inspired awe and made description difficult. Churchill called him “the noblest Roman.” Bill Hassett on Truman’s staff spoke of the “reverence” Marshall inspired. Imperturbable under pressure—“the imperturbability of a good conscience,” George Kennan called it—invariably
courteous, he was without a trace of petty vanity or self-serving ambition.
As one of his staff at the State Department later wrote, Marshall did not possess the intellectual brilliance of someone like Acheson, or the gift of eloquence, but he could distinguish what was important from what was unimportant, and this made him invaluable.
Acheson liked to recall in later years that the moment Marshall entered a room, one could feel his presence. “It was a striking and commanding force. His figure conveyed intensity, which his voice, low, staccato, and incisive, reinforced. It compelled respect. It spread a sense of authority and calm.” At the Pentagon some lower-ranking officers had been known to exit from Marshall’s office backwards, and no one of any rank, not even the President, called him “George,” only “General Marshall,” a title, as Acheson said, that suited him as though he had been baptized with it. Once, reportedly, when Roosevelt had called him “George,” he responded, “It’s General Marshall, Mr. President.”
Truman described Marshall as “astute,” “profound,” and more of a listener than a talker. “He never made any speeches at you,” Truman would gratefully recall. “Sometimes he would sit for an hour with little or no expression on his face, but when he had heard enough, he would come up with a statement of his own that would invariably cut to the very bone of the matter under discussion.” But it was Marshall’s rock-bound sense of duty, his selflessness and honesty that Truman especially prized. “He was a man you could count on to be truthful in every way, and when you find somebody like that, you have to hang on to them.”