For Truman it was a momentous victory. Firmness and patience had prevailed without resorting to force. War had been averted.
On May 12 also, the Allied powers approved establishment of a new German Federated Republic, whereby the West Germans were to rule themselves with their own government at Bonn.
Things overall looked “fifty percent better” than a year ago, Truman confided to Lilienthal. Not even the advance of Communist forces in China seemed to discourage him. At Potsdam, Stalin had told him the people of North China would never be Communists and Truman thought that was “about right.” The dragon was going to “turn over,” he said, “and after that perhaps some advances can be made of it.” With what Lilienthal described as a “big grin and a large dose of his particular brand of charm, which is not inconsiderable,” Truman talked enthusiastically of what a program like TVA could mean for a country like China, “to put it on its feet.”
By then, too, the North Atlantic Treaty had been signed in Washington on April 4, after much hard, skillful negotiation by Secretary of State Acheson. The United States, Canada, and ten Western European countries joined in a defense pact whereby an attack on any one would be taken as an attack on all: For the United States, it marked a radical departure with tradition—the first peacetime military alliance since the signing of the Constitution—but had such an agreement existed in 1914 and 1939, Truman was convinced, the world would have been spared two terrible wars. He ranked NATO with the Marshall Plan, as one of the proudest achievements of his presidency, and was certain that time would prove him right. And though Acheson and British Foreign Secretary Bevin had done most of the work, it was Truman who provided the commitment, unreservedly, just as he had with the Marshall Plan. His first major act after the election in November had been to instruct the State Department to open negotiations for the new alliance, and he rightly considered it his treaty. “We have really passed a milestone in history,” he said in his toast at the state dinner at the Carlton Hotel, following the signing ceremony.
Objections in the Senate, among conservative Republicans, might be fierce, but he had no doubt the treaty would be approved. As it turned out, opposition in the Senate and the press was unexpectedly mild, approval broad. On July 21, the Senate voted ratification by a vote of 82 to 13.
The establishment of NATO, the success of the Berlin Airlift, the prospect of a prosperous, self-governing West Germany as part of the Western Alliance, all made for a greatly improved atmosphere for Truman. “He looks more relaxed…those drawn lines from his eyes across his cheekbones seemed to be considerably modified,” Lilienthal noted.
In March he had taken off again for Key West, for another “working vacation,” his sixth at Key West since becoming President. The place appealed to him as nowhere else. He loved the warm sea bathing and balmy tropical nights, as perhaps only an inland North American can. His quarters were in what had been the commandant’s residence at the Key West naval base, a modest-sized white frame house in the West Indian, style with jalousied porches, simply but comfortably furnished. Hibiscus and bougainvillaea bloomed in the garden. The cares, the pressures, the formality of the presidency, all began to subside almost from the moment he arrived.
He put on bright patterned sports shirts—“Harry Truman shirts,” as they became known—and set off on his early morning walks through the picturesque old town of Key West, stopping sometimes for a cup of coffee at a local lunch counter. The White House pouch arrived daily; members of the Cabinet, congressional leaders, the Joint Chiefs, flew in and out for meetings, and some days he was on the phone far more than he liked; but he enjoyed a daily swim, or rather churning the turquoise water in his self-styled sidestroke, head up to keep his glasses dry, while one or two Navy boats stood guard, to keep other boats at a distance and to watch for barracudas. He loafed in the sun with members of the staff, joked, swapped stories, read, listened to classical music on the phonograph, took an afternoon nap, played poker on the porch nearly every evening, slept soundly, and started off each new day, before his walk with a shot of bourbon.
His privacy on the base was complete. Nor was security ever a problem, which pleased the Secret Service. The staff all enjoyed themselves, as did the thirty-odd reporters who usually made the trip and who had little else to do but enjoy themselves. And with everyone so obviously pleased with his choice of vacation spot, so pleased to be included, pleased to be with him, Truman enjoyed himself that much more. “He was great down in Key West!” remembered Jim Rowley, by then head of the Secret Service detail.
Soon they were all sporting Harry Truman shirts. To Truman’s great delight, even Sam Rayburn, during a visit in November, had put on one printed with flocks of cranes and swaying palm trees.
Back in Washington on May 8, at a party celebrating his sixty-fifth birthday in the ballroom of the palatial Larz Anderson House on Embassy Row, as toasts were raised, Truman looked better by far than he had since 1945, “like a man who had few qualms about the future,” according to one account. “The President,” said his physician, Wallace Graham, “is as close to being an iron man as anyone I know at his age.”
The one distinct shadow on these “first sunny months” of 1949 was the tragic fate of Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, who as far back as the previous summer had begun looking weary and troubled and who, since the election, had been acting quite strangely. An intense, introverted, extremely dedicated man by nature, Forrestal had worked himself to a state of near collapse, yet wished only to hold on and work harder.
Truman had begun losing confidence in Forrestal even before the fall campaign. Struggling to bring about the reorganization of the military services—an unprecedented, killing task—Forrestal had become increasingly indecisive and absorbed in details. “He won’t take hold,” Truman complained. At one point, exasperated with Forrestal’s handling of a problem, Truman had sent an uncharacteristically curt note saying, “This is your responsibility.” Then, with the campaign under way, there had been suspicions about Forrestal’s loyalty, whether his meetings with Thomas E. Dewey really concerned defense matters, as Forrestal said, or were arranged in the hope of staying on in the Dewey administration. Drew Pearson called it an open secret that Forrestal wanted to hold on to his job regardless of the outcome in November, and several of those closest to Truman grew convinced that politically the Secretary of Defense was no longer to be trusted.
Forrestal had also been one of the few members of the Cabinet since the departure of Henry Wallace to disagree with the President over policy—over Palestine and civilian control of the atomic bomb most notably—and now he was adamantly opposed to Truman’s position on defense spending. To achieve a balanced budget, Truman insisted on a defense ceiling of $15 billion, a sum equal to more than a third of the entire federal budget, but that Forrestal thought dangerously low given the scale of the Soviet menace.
Criticism of Forrestal by the press had grown steadily since his unpopular stand on the Palestine issue, with Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell leading the attack in their columns and radio broadcasts. And for Forrestal who had long courted the press, this was all extremely painful. He was called a tool of Wall Street and the oil companies, an imperialist, an anti-Semite. Pearson and Winchell tried to create doubt about his personal courage, with a trumped-up account of how years before, Forrestal had fled out the back door of his New York City home as jewel thieves accosted his wife. On an NBC Radio broadcast in January, a guest claimed that the I. G. Farben works in Frankfurt had not been bombed during the war because Forrestal owned I. G. Farben stock—a totally false charge that NBC later retracted.
The more amplified the attacks became, the more Truman, who hated to dismiss anyone under almost any circumstances, was inclined to keep Forrestal where he was. Truman would not have him leave “under fire.” In February, Drew Pearson had attacked Harry Vaughan for accepting a decoration from the Argentine dictator Juan Perón, a decoration that several others, including Generals Eisenhower and Bradley,
had received earlier, but about which nothing had been said. Pearson had called for Vaughan’s immediate dismissal and Truman publicly responded by calling Pearson an “S.O.B.,” which raised a new storm of adverse comment and gave Truman a great deal of satisfaction. “No commentator or columnist names any members of my Cabinet, or my staff,” he said. “I name them myself And when it is time for them to be moved on, I do the moving—nobody else.” It was a sentiment that had been felt by other presidents before him and would be often again by more who followed in his place, but that none stated so openly in so many words.
Forrestal, as he told a friend, felt that Truman had always been very fair with him. Truman was “the best boss I have ever known.” To another friend he wrote that the American people were fortunate to have in the highest office “a man who, while he reflects the liberal forces both in this country and throughout the world, is nevertheless conservative in the real sense of that word—a conserver of the things we hope to keep.”
Forrestal was still greatly admired by several of those whose judgment Truman particularly valued. Eisenhower, whom Truman had recently asked to serve as an informal “presiding officer” of the Joint Chiefs, considered Forrestal one of the best men in public life and, as Eisenhower recorded privately, more perceptive than Truman concerning “the mess we are in due to neglect of our armed forces.”
Except for my liking, admiration, and respect for his [Forrestal’s] great qualities I’d not go near Washington, even if I had to resign my commission completely [Eisenhower wrote in his diary in January 1949]. To a certain extent these same feelings apply to H.S.T., but he does not see the problems so clearly as does Jim, and does not suffer so much due to the failure to solve the problems. I like them both.
But Forrestal, as Eisenhower also noted, was “looking badly…. He gives his mind no recess, and he works hours that would kill a horse.”
(Eisenhower would himself soon find the bickering between the services all but intolerable. He was smoking four packs of cigarettes a day and worrying about his blood pressure. By mid-March he was suffering from severe stomach cramps, and Truman sent him off to recuperate for three weeks at the Little White House in Key West.)
A reporter seeing Forrestal on inauguration day was shocked by his “baffled” look. Afflicted with insomnia and loss of appetite, Forrestal appeared strangely drawn and aged, his shirt collars too large for him. Some days he would telephone the President several times on the same subject, which left Truman mystified. Privately, Forrestal told a few close friends his phone was being tapped. At meetings he would unconsciously scratch at a particular part of his scalp until it turned raw.
When, in early February, Forrestal told Truman he was resigning and would leave by June 1, Truman saw it would have to be sooner than that.
As Forrestal knew, Truman, for some time, had been considering Louis Johnson as his replacement—Johnson the headstrong financial wonder-worker of the Whistle-stop Campaign, who had once served as Roosevelt’s Assistant Secretary of War—and Forrestal agreed with the choice, or so he said. Johnson, on meeting Forrestal to discuss the transition, concluded after an hour, as he later told Drew Pearson, that Forrestal was insane, or possibly taking drugs.
“Forrestal wanted to resign long before he did,” Truman would write, “and I kept him from it, although I realized later that I should have let him quit when he wanted. He left because of failing health, and that’s all there was to it.”
On Tuesday, March 1, Truman summoned Forrestal to the White House to ask for his resignation. Truman also urged him to take a vacation, though he said nothing about seeking medical attention.
Forrestal maintained the necessary composure for public appearances in the following weeks, but only barely. He was present at the Pentagon on March 28 when Louis Johnson was formally installed as Secretary of Defense, and later in the day he stood mute at another ceremony at the White House, when Truman presented him with the Distinguished Service Medal. But the next day, Forrestal, “a very sick man,” was flown to Florida, to Robert Lovett’s home at Hobe Sound, where he told Lovett, “They’re after me.” In the days following he made at least one attempt at suicide.
Unaware of what was happening in Florida, but having now heard reports that Forrestal thought he was being followed by foreign agents, Truman asked the head of the Secret Service, U. E. Baughman, to look into the matter at once. The report, marked “Secret” and dated March 31, said Forrestal’s suspicions were unfounded, that he had become of late “exceedingly nervous and emotional,” and so distraught by the time of his last day as Secretary of Defense that he had not even known his own servants.
As a result of his apparent lack of ability to make a positive decision and carry it out, he was assisted and escorted to the plane [to Florida] by two friends and former associates. When Mr. F. exhibited a last minute reluctance to make his departure, one of the friends reportedly said to the other: “We have to do something—we can’t keep him around here.”
Forrestal, the report concluded, was suffering from a “slight nervous breakdown,” which apparently was as much as Truman had been told up to that point.
In Florida, a Navy psychiatrist and the renowned Dr. William C, Menninger had been sent for, and on April 2, Forrestal was flown back to Washington to be admitted to the Bethesda Naval Hospital for treatment of “nervous exhaustion.”
Drew Pearson reported that Forrestal was “out of his mind” and claimed incorrectly that in Florida Forrestal had rushed out into the street screaming, “The Russians are coming.”
Truman called on Forrestal at Bethesda the first week in May and thought Forrestal seemed “his old self.”
Two weeks later, on Sunday, May 22, at two in the morning, Forrestal sat in his room on the sixteenth floor of the hospital copying lines from Sophocles’ “Chorus from Ajax”:
Worn by the waste of time—
Comfortless, nameless, hopeless save
In the dark prospect of the yawning grave…
About three o'clock he walked across the hall to a small kitchen. After tying one end of the sash from his bathrobe to a radiator and the other end around his neck, he jumped from the unbarred window. His body was found on the roof of the third floor, the sash still around his neck.
The news rocked Washington. Suicide among high-ranking government figures was unknown. Other Cabinet members had resigned over the years, or been fired under a cloud, but none had ever taken his own life. Truman, in his words, was “inexpressibly shocked and grieved.” The First Lady, haunted by memories of her father, was, as Margaret later revealed, “terribly shaken.” At Easter, only the week before, Bess had sent Forrestal a bouquet of roses and in a note of appreciation he had said how much they had “helped brighten a bleak day.”
I am moved that you should trouble to send me a token but it’s typical of your thoughtfulness. A Happy Easter to you and the President and Miss Truman. You all deserve it.
The President and Vice President, former President Hoover, the Cabinet, much of Congress, members of the Supreme Court, the Joint Chiefs, General Marshall, an estimated six thousand people were present for Forrestal’s burial with full military honors at Arlington.
Truman, angry, troubled, doubtless remorseful that he hadn’t acted sooner to relieve Forrestal from duty, accused Drew Pearson of “hounding” him to death. Pearson wrote that it was Truman’s call for Forrestal’s resignation that “undoubtedly worsened the illness.” David Lawrence, in his column in the Washington Star, said it was not work that killed Forrestal, but the President’s loss of confidence in him.
Questions about the tragedy persisted. Why had Forrestal, in his condition, with suicidal tendencies, been placed in a sixteenth-floor room? Had his priest been denied the chance to see him? As time went on, and fear of Communist conspiracy spread in Washington, it would be rumored that pages from Forrestal’s diary had been secretly removed on orders from the White House—that Forrestal, the most ardent anti-Soviet voice in the adminis
tration, had in fact been driven to his death as part of a Communist plot and the evidence destroyed by “secret Communists” on Truman’s staff.
But as ever in Washington, it was who was in power that mattered most and so the focus of attention swiftly shifted to the new Secretary of Defense, who, with his previous experience in the department, his reputation for getting things done, had seemed well equipped for the job. Louis Johnson was tough, hardheaded, and, importantly, committed to the President’s policy of holding the line on spending. On the Hill, Democrats and Republicans liked what they saw. The Senate approved the appointment unanimously. But in little time Johnson’s personal style and mode of operation made him a figure of extreme controversy. He hit the Pentagon like a cyclone.
Johnson’s first move was to evict several high-ranking officers from the largest office in the building and make it his own. He resurrected General Pershing’s old desk and installed Roosevelt’s press secretary, Steve Early, as a deputy. Half of all Pentagon employees, some twenty-five thousand people, were shuffled about in a gigantic game of musical chairs. He did away with outdated service boards, cut back the use of official cars.
Johnson was doing what Truman had asked for. From his experience on the Truman Committee, Truman was convinced that huge sums were being wasted in defense spending. He had a basic distrust of generals and admirals when it came to spending money. In late April, with no advance warning to the President or the Secretary of the Navy, Johnson suddenly canceled construction of a new $186 million supercarrier, United States, a major component in the Navy’s whole program—with the result that the Secretary of the Navy, John Sullivan, resigned in a rage. Truman, who liked Sullivan and did not blame him for resigning, nonetheless approved the cancelation. Still, Johnson’s manner troubled him greatly.