Truman (154 page)

It was spring again and the mansion looked warm and cheerful in the dusk, with lights glowing from every window on the ground floor. As a further note of cheer, a large cherry tree in full blossom had been planted just that day in the front lawn.

Beneath the North Portico several of the White House staff, members of the commission, and others stood waiting, with a cluster of reporters, photographers, and newsreel cameramen. Along the sidewalk, by the iron fence, a crowd applauded and called welcome.

Head usher Howell Crim greeted the President at the door. John Mays, the veteran doorkeeper who had been at the White House since the time of William Howard Taft, took the President’s coat.

Truman, “tanned and appearing in excellent health,” “obviously highly pleased,” as reporters jotted in their notebooks, stepped inside. After an absence of three years, four months, the President of the United States was again in residence at the White House.

Every light was burning, everything shimmered with light—crystal chandeliers and red carpets, window glass, marble columns, gilt-framed mirrors. Wood floors shone like polished glass. Walls and ceilings glistened with new paint. The effect was stunning. It all looked much the same as before, yet brighter, more spacious, and finished to perfection.

With Bess, Truman toured the whole of the first floor. To the white and lemon-gold splendor of the East Room had been added new mantelpieces of Tennessee marble, in honor of the chairman of the commission, Senator McKellar. Except for two magnificent grand pianos standing in opposite corners and two newly acquired Adam benches against the far wall—eighteenth-century benches designed by John Adam of Edinburgh—the room was bare of furniture, its parquet floor shining like glass beneath the same two crystal chandeliers that had hung there before but that had been reduced slightly in scale. The Green Room—once Jefferson’s bedroom, later a dining room, later still a diplomatic reception room—looked no different from before, with the same silk on the walls, the same white Carrara marble mantels ordered by James Hoban in 1816. Above the entrance to the Blue Room, however, was a new presidential seal. Previously the seal had been embedded in the floor of the main hallway, but Truman had insisted it be moved—he didn’t like the idea of people walking on it.

The oval-shaped Blue Room itself had been changed from dark to royal blue, with a large motif in gold on its silk damask walls, while the Red Room had new damask walls, new draperies and valances—all very red—setting off another Hoban mantel of lustrous white Carrara marble. Truman was particularly fond of a small French clock on the mantel in the Red Room and of four portraits on the walls: of William McKinley, Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. The painting of Roosevelt, by John Singer Sargent, was, Truman liked to say, “the most expensive picture” in the house.

Where the State Dining Room had been formerly rather subdued, even somber, with dark oak paneling, it was now painted a soft green, a “lovely color,” Truman thought, and a large portrait of Abraham Lincoln by George P. A. Healy hung now over the mantel in a heavy gilt frame.

Because Bess had made a previous commitment to appear at a Salvation Army dinner at the Statler that evening, Truman dined alone, in the family dining room, off the State Dining Room, under a recently donated antique cut-glass chandelier and a spotless replacement of the ceiling where Margaret’s piano had once poked a hole.

“Bess and I looked over the East Room, Green Room, Blue Room, Red Room, and State Dining Room,” he recorded that night. “They are lovely. So is the hall and state stairway…. I spent the evening going over the house. With all the trouble and worry, it is worth it….” The cost had been $5,832,000. It could have been done for less, he thought, and taken less time, if he had been fully in charge. But he was extremely pleased all the same. He had been told by the architect and engineers that it had been built to last another five hundred years. He hoped it would be a thousand years.

On Tuesday, April 22, when the White House was reopened for public tours, 5,444 people went through. On Saturday afternoon, May 3, with the pride of a new householder, Truman led his own television tour of the mansion. The broadcast was carried by all three networks and three network announcers—Walter Cronkite of CBS, Bryson Rash of ABC, and NBC’s Frank Bourgholtzer—took turns accompanying him and asking questions. Thirty million people were watching, the largest audience ever for a house tour. There was no script and Truman was at his best, relaxed, gracious, amusing, and knowledgeable. “His poise, his naturally hearty laugh, and his intuitive dignity made for an unusual and absorbing video experience,” wrote Jack Gould, television critic for
The New York Times.
In the East Room, to demonstrate the tone of the magnificent Steinway—“the most wonderful tones of any piano I have ever heard,” Truman told Frank Bourgholtzer—he sat down and gave an impromptu performance of part of Mozart’s Ninth Sonata, then crossed the room to the Baldwin, an American-made piano, as he said, and from a standing position, played a few more bars on it as well.

He spoke of Alice Roosevelt’s wedding in the East Room and recalled that Franklin Roosevelt had lain in state there.

Time
called his performance “outstanding.” The country loved the new White House and, for the moment, very much liked the man who occupied it.

For quite some time, Truman had been thinking about the question of a successor, someone to head the Democratic ticket in November 1952 and take his place in the White House after inauguration day in January 1953. The Republicans, he expected, would choose Taft, and the prospect of Taft as President was intolerable to Truman. There must be no isolationist takeover that would destroy everything he had worked for.

By late summer 1951, he appears to have concluded that the ideal Democratic candidate, “the most logical and qualified,” was Chief Justice Fred Vinson. But Vinson declined, saying he had been out of politics too long. In November Truman tried again, inviting Vinson to Key West where they could talk freely in the privacy of the Little White House, but not until after Truman had had a meeting with Eisenhower over which there was to be a good deal of controversy.

Whether Eisenhower, still the nation’s number one hero, would run for President, remained the great imponderable, though to judge by reports coming from his NATO headquarters in Paris, he was warming to the idea.

The first week of November, on a brief visit to Washington, the general had lunch with Truman at Blair House and reportedly Truman again offered his full support if Eisenhower would accept the Democratic nomination. The meeting took place on the 5th. On the 7th, Arthur Krock broke the story in
The New York Times.
Krock’s source, he later disclosed, was Justice William O. Douglas, who told Krock he had heard it from Truman himself and in the presence of Chief Justice Vinson and one or two others from the Court, during a reception at Blair House later the same day as Truman’s lunch with Eisenhower. “You can’t join a party just to run for office,” Eisenhower was described saying to Truman. “What reason have you to think I have ever been a Democrat? You know I have been a Republican all my life and that my family have always been Republicans.”

At Key West a week later, Truman denied the story, as had Eisenhower in Paris, both publicly and privately. “He told me Arthur Krock’s story that Truman had offered him the Democratic candidacy in 1952 wasn’t really true,” Krock’s colleague on the
Times
, C. L. Sulzberger, recorded after an evening with Eisenhower in Paris.

When Vinson arrived at Key West, Truman told him the nomination was his if he would accept. Vinson was tentative, saying he needed time to discuss the matter with his wife. Later, in Washington, Vinson told Truman he did not think the Supreme Court should be seen as a stepping stone to the White House. When Truman countered with the example of Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who as the Republican candidate in 1916 nearly defeated Woodrow Wilson, Vinson declined for reasons of health, and apparently to Truman’s great surprise. But Vinson, who had always looked sallow, was indeed in poor health. He would die two years later, in September 1953, at age sixty-one.

As the year ended, Truman seems to have been in something of a quandary, even about his own intentions, as implied in a longhand letter to Eisenhower dated December 18, 1951:

He, too, would like to live a semi-retired life with his family, Eisenhower wrote in reply to Truman. “But just as you have decided that circumstances may not permit you to do exactly as you please, so I’ve found that fervent desire may sometimes have to give way to conviction of duty.” He would not seek the presidency, Eisenhower said. Further, “you know, far better than I, that the possibility that I will ever be drawn into political activity is so remote as to be negligible.”

Eisenhower’s letter was dated New Year’s Day, 1952. Five days later, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge announced in Washington the formation of an Eisenhower-for-President campaign, and the following day in Paris, January 7, Eisenhower announced he was prepared to accept the Republican nomination.

Asked at his next press conference what he thought of the announcement, Truman had only praise for Eisenhower. He was “a grand man,” Truman said. “I am just as fond of General Eisenhower as I can be. I think he is one of the great men produced by World War II…. I don’t want to stand in his way at all, because I think very highly of him, and if he wants to get out and have all the mud and rotten eggs thrown at him, that’s his business….”

As the Eisenhower boom gathered force, Truman would remark to his staff, an edge of sadness in his voice, “I’m sorry to see these fellows get Ike into this business. They’re showing him gates of gold and silver which will turn out copper and tin.”

With Vinson no longer a possibility for the Democratic nomination, Truman decided the best choice would be Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois. Alben Barkley, at seventy-four, was too old. The presidency would kill Barkley in three months, Truman thought. (“It takes him five minutes to sign his name,” Truman noted sadly in his diary.) Averell Harriman, whom Truman judged “the ablest of them all,” had never run for office and would be severely handicapped by his Wall Street background. (“Can we elect a Wall Street banker and railroad tycoon President of the United States on a Democratic ticket?”) Senator Estes Kefauver, a possibility, was a man Truman instinctively disliked and distrusted, a feeling shared by most of the party regulars. Privately, Truman referred to him as “Cowfever.”

Adlai Stevenson, by contrast, was comparatively young at fifty-one. He was able, progressive, the governor of a major industrial state, a champion of honest government, and a new face. Stevenson had carried Illinois in 1948 by an overwhelming 570,000 votes, in his first campaign for any office, a point that greatly impressed Truman. “He proved in that contest,” Truman would write, “that he possessed a knowledge and ‘feel’ for politics, that he understood that politics at its best was the business and art of government, and that he had learned that a knowledge of politics is necessary to carry out the function of our form of free government.”

That Truman should turn to Stevenson was greatly to Truman’s credit, for not only was Stevenson still a political unknown nationally, but a man altogether unlike Truman. A graduate of Princeton, well born, a prosperous lawyer, eloquent, witty, urbane—and divorced—Stevenson could hardly have been more different from Truman, or from most political figures of the day. Further, Truman hardly knew him. But Truman had read Stevenson’s speeches; he liked what he heard, admired Stevenson’s political philosophy, his Midwest background, his political heritage—the fact that Stevenson’s grandfather, the first Adlai E. Stevenson, had been a Democratic congressman and Vice President under Grover Cleveland. (“He comes of a political family,” Truman noted approvingly.) Also, several of the younger aides at the White House were keenly interested in Stevenson, seeing in him qualities of the kind needed to revitalize the Democratic Party.

Dispensing with any pretense of round-about overtures, Truman asked the governor to come see him, and for an hour or more, the evening of Tuesday, January 22, 1952, they met alone in the seclusion of Blair House—once Stevenson had talked his way past the guards outside who had never heard of him.

As Truman later recounted the conversation, he spoke to Stevenson at length about the office of the presidency, then asked him to take it, saying he need only agree and the nomination was his. He could count on Truman’s unqualified endorsement. “I told him I would not run for President again,” Truman recorded in notes made afterward, “and that it was my opinion he was best fitted for the place.”