Full springtime had come; the fruit trees had put on their wedding garments and the other trees their liveliest green. A pleasant six-hour drive, and time for husband and wife to talk out the details of the growing enterprise they had taken upon their shoulders. They had lunch in Baltimore, and when they reached their destination they drove to the National Gallery and spent the rest of the afternoon. Lanny was known to the curators as an art expert. “Delighted to meet you, Mr. Budd”—and they took the couple down into their vaults where they had stored the priceless treasures which the couple had helped to rescue in Germany.
The Monuments people had been greatly troubled over this because some of them had given assurance to German museum curators that nothing would be taken from the country. But the government had quietly decided that the treasures from the Kaiser Friedrich Museum found in the Merkers mine in Thuringia should not be returned to Berlin until it was definitely known that they would be left to the Germans and not taken by the Russians. That was something you could only whisper. Meantime, works which had been damaged by dampness and salt were being repaired, and there were plans to let the American people see some of these treasures under Army guard.
IV
Promptly at five minutes to seven a taxicab turned into the White House drive and stopped at the sentry box inside the gate. The passenger gave his name to the young naval officer, who said “Proceed,” and they drove up to the front of that historic building—which, though Lanny did not know it, was in a dangerous condition from the operation of termites and dry rot. Very soon the occupants would have to move across the street, while the nation spent several million dollars to keep its national home from collapsing. Tonight it was brightly lighted and looked dignified and elegant—something which is the case not merely with buildings but with empires just before they fall.
In front of the door two secret service men looked the visitor over without stopping him; but Lanny stopped because he had met one of them at Yalta, a long way off. In the spacious entrance hall a secretary received him and an elderly Negro took his hat and his bag. In the reception room he waited a minute or two, politely commenting to the secretary on the pleasant weather. Then he was led to the dining-room, and in the doorway stood his host, beaming expansively.
He was a man of medium height, perhaps a trifle less; stockily built, alert and quick in his manner and speech; smooth shaven and wearing spectacles. He was conspicuously neat in his attire; a gray suit, a gray-and-white striped tie to match, and the corner of a white handkerchief sticking out from his breast pocket. His hair matched his suit and was neatly cut. His voice had a slight twang, which was typical of the Middle West; he had been a farm boy and boasted of having plowed a straight furrow. His handshake was firm, and Lanny was careful to exert no pressure—knowing that the poor man must have shaken hands with a hundred people in the course of the day. He saw everybody who wanted to see him.
It was the smaller dining-room, and the table was set for five persons. There entered the matronly First Lady, quiet in manner but with alert eyes which took in everything. Long ago she had waited for her young Harry while he had gone to France to command a battery of artillery in World War I. When he came home she had taken him to Kansas City because she didn’t want to live on a farm. It wasn’t her fault or his that the haberdashery business had failed during the depression that had hit so soon after the war; Lanny thought it was a good thing, for Harry Truman might have to deal with another and worse depression before he got through with his present job, and the plain people might be glad that he had learned at first hand how it felt. He had stubbornly refused to go through bankruptcy and spent many years trying to pay off his debts.
The First Lady’s name was Bess, and the daughter of the house was Margaret. She was a properly brought-up girl who was making a career for herself as a concert singer, giving pleasure to the public if not to sophisticated critics. The mother and daughter were Episcopalians, while the father was a Baptist; they were all devout and went alternately to one church and then the other. As a family they were as American as you could have found by a long search; Harry was a 33rd-degree Mason and a Shriner, a National Guardsman and a Legionnaire. He liked steak; he could, as the saying goes, “take his bourbon or leave it alone”; he liked to play low-stake poker, of the sort called “baseball” or “spit-in-the-ocean.”
How much all that would fit him to deal with the problems confronting the modern world was something about which the elegant son of Budd-Erling had done a lot of worrying. Jackson County road overseer, district judge, freshman senator, and reluctant candidate for the vice-presidency—these things fitted a man to understand America and Americans but were hardly sufficient training to deal with the complications of European diplomacy, the age-old feuds and fears in the midst of which Lanny had been brought up. To say nothing of Japan and Korea, Manchuria, China, and the East Indies, Iran and Iraq, Turkey and Palestine, Arabia, Egypt, and Tripoli! Harry Truman would have to do his best and ask for the prayers of his Christian fellow countrymen.
V
The other guest was a friend of Margaret’s, a student at the University of Virginia. You could see that he was awed by the company he was in, and he spoke only when spoken to; he listened with both his ears. The dinner was of the simplest: tomato soup, roast beef with potatoes and a couple of other vegetables, a green salad, and ice cream; about what they would have had in Independence, Missouri, if the haberdashery business hadn’t failed—in which case Harry Truman would never have come to live in the White House.
It is bad form to talk about yourself at a dinner party—nothing is worse. More than once Lanny tried to stop, but they had read about him and wanted his story. From the President, it was a command; he wanted to know how one became a presidential agent. “I might want to have one or two myself,” he said, that simple, straightforward man! A worldly minded one would have known how to extract the information while pretending to know it all; but not this ex-plowboy, ex-overseer of roads. He had never had a secret agent, and if he had ever heard of one it must have been in a mystery story or a movie.
Lanny told how he had been born and raised in Europe, and had lived among diplomats and munitions magnates and generals; had played tennis with two kings and many princes, and listened to “inside” conversation from earliest childhood. He had been his father’s emergency assistant at the age of fourteen, a secretary at the Peace Conference at nineteen. When he had seen the horror of Fascism creeping over Europe he had” pretended to outgrow his youthful radicalism, and to all his highly placed friends that had seemed quite in order; he had become a Fascist fellow traveler and watched the progress of that evil creed. He had made perilous trips into Germany for the President, staying sometimes for months; he had done secret work in Spain, Italy, Austria, and conquered France; he had been all over North Africa and had spent a couple of hours in the Kremlin with Stalin.
He told some of these adventures; and when the President did not ask for more, Margaret did. She remarked, “We listened to your program, Mr. Budd. We shall be among your audience from now on.”
He answered, “You can do more than that. Come and sing for us, and our fortune will be made.” She promised to consider it.
VI
The host took his guest into the beautiful oval room, his study. The night was warm, and they sat by an open window. Lanny underwent a cross-questioning that lasted three or four hours. Nothing interrupted them—the President must have so ordered. It was one of the most gratifying experiences of the caller’s life, for he had been worrying and fearing about this new man, so obviously unprepared for his colossal task. Truman had been frank in voicing his dismay, and he had made many mistakes; he had found bad advisers among his old Missouri cronies, and when he had made decisions of his own he had revealed impulsiveness and painful lack of knowledge.
But he meant to learn. He wasn’t going to be anybody’s errand boy forever! He said so in tones that showed he meant it. “Mr. Budd, I have pledged mysel
f to carry out Roosevelt’s policies, and I mean that with all my heart. But events move so fast these days—we seem to be passing into a new era, and what Roosevelt would have done is something that no two of his friends agree about. I am blamed because I cannot work with the men whom he chose—but he knew those men and could control them; I don’t know them, and they all want to control me. If they could get together, that might give me help, but they are split forty ways and squabble among themselves.”
“Yes, Mr. President,” replied the ex-P.A., “I have been watching. The best of them, Harry Hopkins, is gone.”
“He did me a great service by going to Moscow. Stalin considered him an honest man—or at any rate he said he did and apparently trusted him. But it doesn’t look as if he trusts me.”
“Stalin is playing his cards close to his chest,” commented Lanny, “and what he means can be learned better from what he does than from what he says. The Governor was greatly disturbed because their agreements were not being kept.”
Truman wanted to know about that. He questioned his guest as to every word his predecessor had spoken on the subject. How sure could Mr. Budd be as to his recollection? Lanny said he had made notes that same night of everything important—it was all in the nature of instructions. He had brought the notes with him, and to Truman they were something like holy writ; he studied them, and Lanny deciphered this scribbled word and that, a sort of private shorthand in which a word might stand for a sentence.
What did the Communists really want? How far did they mean to go? It was like trying to understand the mentality of strange creatures that had suddenly alighted on the earth from another planet. Were they all blind fanatics and egotists or were there reasonable men among them? Lanny answered that there had been some, but many had been killed off. Litvinov had been a man who understood the West and how to get along with it, but he had been deposed, and you seldom heard his name.
“You must understand that to them capitalism is a form of corruption of the mind and spirit, and they defend themselves against it as you would defend yourself against a plague or against some religious idea that you considered impious. All their officials are watched and spied upon, and if they are too polite with foreigners, if they associate with foreigners unnecessarily, they are recalled. You see this young man Gromyko, who has walked out of the Security Council, and you think of him as grim and implacable; but I was told just the other day that he likes to stroll down Fifth Avenue and stop and gaze at the goods displayed. If he continues that practice you will see him go back home, and his place taken by someone less subject to bourgeois temptations.”
Lanny’s talk with Stalin—Truman wanted to know all about that. Lanny said he had made a formal report and it was in Roosevelt’s files, but it was out of date. It represented what the Soviet leaders had wanted Roosevelt to believe four years ago, when the Germans had been close to Moscow and most of the government had fled to Kuibyshev. What had Lanny intended to say to Stalin a year ago? And would he say the same today? Evidently Truman was turning over the idea of asking the ex-P.A. to take up the role again; but Lanny gave no hint that he had thought of this.
He answered each question as clearly as he could. “You have to understand Communist doctrine, Mr. President, and also you have to have some idea of the factions that are pulling and hauling inside the party. They have a favorite word, ‘monolithic’; they wish you to believe that the party is absolutely solid and rigid. But I suspect that the Politburo has its factions, and they dispute about what Marx taught and what Lenin would have done. Lenin himself had a fixed goal, but he was an opportunist when it came to tactics. I have some quotes that I use when I get into an argument with the comrades. One of them is from Lenin in 1905, the time of the first revolution: ‘Whoever attempts to achieve Socialism by any other route than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at the most absurd and reactionary results both political and economic.’ Most Communists look blank when I read that to them.”
“How, in the face of such a statement, can the Russians think they are followers of Lenin?”
“They do what so many of the religious sects have done—they give a different meaning to words. They call their regime ‘democratic’ because it is supposed to serve the interest of the proletariat; but they don’t grant the proletariat the right to decide what its interests are.”
“I suppose people quote the passages that suit them, just as they do with the Scriptures.”
“Exactly. A hundred people read about Lenin for every one who reads him; and it’s the same with Marx. I have argued with Russian Marxists but never met one who knew that Marx had admitted that the Anglo-Saxon countries might achieve the Socialist goal without violent overthrow of their governments.”
“Did Marx really say that?”
“It’s another quote that I carry in my mind. He said: ‘We do not deny that there are countries like England and America, and, I might add, even Holland, where the worker may attain his object by peaceful means.’”
“I wish I had had those texts when I was in Potsdam,” remarked the President wryly.
VII
One thing Lanny Budd got clear from this long interview, that here was a man who wanted to know facts and was not going to be permanently fooled. Never had a guest been put through such a grilling, not even by F.D.R. That man of many moods could be diverted, and would divert himself into the telling of jokes and stories; but this was a single-minded man, determined to improve his knowledge of world issues. He wanted to know everything that Lanny knew, not merely about Russia but about Europe as a whole, its principal countries and their leaders, and the economic conditions and states of mind of their people.
Germany, above all—a problem to tax the powers of any statesman. How could a proud people, beaten to the earth, be tempted or lured into adopting the philosophy of their conquerors and becoming democratic and peace-minded? Lanny had a full chance to set forth his own and Monck’s idea that the giant steel and coal industries of the Ruhr, for a century a bone of contention between Germany and France, would have to be placed under international control and operated for the equal benefit of all the peoples of Europe. Harry Truman didn’t say, “But that would be Socialism!” He said, “How would that work, Mr. Budd?” And he listened while Lanny pointed out that we had a post office and a forestry service and an atomic commission which gave equal service to all Americans, and no one found them menaces to freedom. There were many international commissions, and would have to be many more if the nations were to co-operate at keeping the peace.
The visitor had no idea how much or how little this man of the people had managed to learn about the Socialist movement, its ideas or its history. It was possible that he had never talked to a Socialist and had no notion that measures he himself was advocating were a series of steps toward a collectivist society. Lanny avoided the subject of prosperous America; let it wait until the next slump came! He talked about Europe, which was in the slump to end all slumps. The enlightened workers of Europe had learned who it was that had financed Nazi-Fascism and who would finance a resurgence of that hellish creed if they had a chance. The big industrial powers, the cartels, were the number-one enemy of democracy on that old continent, and the Social Democrats were the only group who had the political education and the moral force to carry out such a change and make it stick.
Lanny knew what his old Boss had said in answer to that statement, and he was not surprised when the new Boss said the same thing. “Suppose that I were to order the Army to carry out such a program, Mr. Budd, do you think the American public would back me or that Congress would vote me the funds? To get down to brass tacks, would the Democratic party be able to carry the election next November?”
“You are in better position to answer that than I,” said the other. “I can only warn you that setting up the old owners in Europe means ordering another war. Also, I have to say that it means turning Europe over to the Commies in the end. It gives them all the arguments. The
y say to the workers, ‘You see, America means capitalism; it means nothing else. The Americans care nothing about your rights or your interests.’ And believe me, the Commies know how to say it; they are the world’s best propagandists because they put their whole minds on it, they have no doubts or scruples, and there are no shades in their ideas—everything is either white or black. They have simplified the class struggle so that every child can understand it, and they see to it that every child does. I assure you, Mr. Truman, you have to choose between a Socialist Europe and a Communist Europe, and I think the same thing applies to Asia. If we try to impose ‘private enterprise,’ we shall have to do it with military forces, and do it over and over again, putting down one attempt at revolution after another. You have to ask yourself whether and for how long our Congress will support that program.”
VIII
Lanny had been told that Harry Truman was an impulsive man; his enemies, who had broken the “honeymoon” with him, said so, and some of his friends admitted it. So the visitor wasn’t surprised when, in the middle of the evening, his host suddenly demanded, “How would you like to go and have a talk with Stalin?”
Lanny wasn’t impulsive but well prepared; he said at once, “If you ask what I would like, Mr. President, I answer that I am tired of traveling, and I have found work to do at home that interests me greatly. But if you should say that you want me to go, then, of course, I couldn’t say no.”
“What do you think would be Stalin’s attitude to such a suggestion?”
“When I talked to him four years ago he invited me to come again, and he sounded as if he meant it. When I saw him at Yalta, a little more than a year ago, he asked me why I hadn’t come; so I have reason to suppose that he would receive me. Would I make the application or would you?”