Little Accident

(See Cover)

The President rested last week out on the end of a long limb of land--at Key West, Fla. Resting there with him was his counsel and legal adviser, Clark Clifford. While Clifford beamed on his smiling boss, Mr. Truman turned a tanned and apparently carefree face toward the photographers; Clifford himself glistened with confidence and sunburn oil. Looking at the two of them, no one would suspect the gravity of the problems which arrived daily in the pouch from, Washington. No one would suspect, in fact, that the country appeared to be getting ready to dump the whole Truman Administration.*

The bad news was spread bluntly in every newspaper. But if this dismayed the men around the President they, like him, gave no sign but went on smiling--hoping, as they had so often hoped before, that something would turn up.

Back in Washington something had indeed turned up. But it was hardly reassuring. At C.I.O. headquarters a wan Phil Murray and P.A.C.'s beady-eyed boss, Jack Kroll, were holding a conference calculated to undo the soothing effects of Mr. Truman's vacation. They were not ready to make any public statement. But Murray and Kroll, so the Washington rumor ran, had met to devise some way by which Mr. Truman could be persuaded to withdraw as a candidate for re-election --and consider whom they could get to run on the Democratic ticket instead.

"He Don't Do Well." Their decision was first to bring pressure on the Democratic bosses and convince them that the party was sure to lose with Truman. They might not need much pressure in that quarter. As for a substitute--out of their conferences came an extraordinary idea. Unembarrassed by labor's traditional suspicion of the military or by Dwight Eisenhower's flatly worded statement to the Republicans, they had seriously discussed the chances of getting Ike to be the Democrats' man. As a possible running mate they had turned hopeful eyes on Supreme Court Justice William Douglas. The story was another indication of the new low point of the Truman stock.

Why had it fallen so low? At a time of great confusion in international affairs, Mr. Truman had often faced his responsibilities with a cheerful, dogged courage. But his performance was almost invariably awkward, uninspired and above all, mediocre. He had declined to assume real leadership. Most of the time, instead of leading, Mr. Truman had been whipped around the curves like the last car of the train. Even on an issue in which he was right with most of the country, Mr. Truman found himself in wrong with most of his fellow Democrats. The Southerners howled with rage because he proposed to assure Negroes their constitutional rights. The fellow travelers had deserted him earlier because he would not appease Soviet Russia. His "muddling through" policy on Palestine pleased no one.

But, worst of all, Mr. Truman was losing out where his appeal had once been strongest. The man on the street was no longer content to admire him as just another "ordinary guy." From all over the country came a chorus of tired complaints: "He means well but he don't do well."

By all these signs, only a political miracle or extraordinary stupidity on the part of the Republicans could save the Democratic party, after 16 years of power, from a debacle in November.

Who's to Blame? On Capitol Hill and elsewhere in Washington, Mr. Truman's old political cronies, distressed and disheartened at the prospect of defeat, made the commonplace excuses. The boss, they explained, was listening to the wrong people. He was getting bad advice from people who did not know the score: And among those wrong people, justly or unjustly, the old cronies emphatically included Presidential Adviser Clark Clifford, who was strictly an amateur politician and a stranger to the President's old friends.

Those old friends had never expected Clark Clifford to emerge as Mr. Truman's chief adviser. Like his boss, he is a political accident. He was simply on the spot when there was a vacancy to be filled. He is no Harry Hopkins, intense and tough as a hatchet, who served F.D.R. as combination chief of staff and whip-cracker. Clifford has a stomach ulcer, but otherwise he is an extremely well setup, physically sound man, who looks younger than his 41 years.

A year ago last November, when the ferocious John L. Lewis defied the President to do his worst, quavering voices were raised in presidential councils arguing that the White House surrender graciously. Clifford, who had then been presidential counsel for only five months, told the wavering Harry Truman that he should stand firm.. In the end the President took Clifford's advice. This was quickly noted in Washington.

Even before the Lewis episode, Clifford had worked on presidential speeches, among them the illadvised, intemperate message to Congress demanding that the railroad strikers be drafted. (On that occasion, Mr. Truman had insisted on going his own way, ignoring the cautious counsel of Clifford and others.) But when the coal mine decision turned out well, Clifford was established, at least in the Washington mind, as a policymaker.

Clifford emerged on the Washington scene at the time when an important change was taking place within the Administration itself. Mr. Truman had figuratively laid aside his mourning band for Roosevelt and had begun to enjoy the job of being President. He even designed some political haberdashery of his own to replace the ill-fitting clothes handed down by the fallen leader. Mr. Truman, so it was widely reported, was not exactly a New Dealer but rather a middle-of-the-roader. He thought of himself as the leader of all the people, not just of organized labor, the underprivileged, the ill-fed, the ill-housed and ill-clothed.

It became difficult for a labor leader to get a White House appointment. Columnists, depending on their political points of view, wrote either in anger or approbation of the change in the White House. A large measure of credit for the change in Mr. Truman's outlook was given to Clark Clifford.

The conversion was by no means complete. Mr. Truman may have thought that he was in the middle of the road, and privately he often talked convincingly as if that was where he wanted to find himself. But whenever he opened his mouth to deliver one of the messages prepared by Clifford, the President talked like a New Dealer. And Adviser Clifford was kept busy scribbling. He wrote the tax vetoes; the Taft-Hartley veto; the October 1947 call for a special session; the State of the Union message last January; this year's Jackson Day dinner speech and the civil-rights message. There was no real difference between what these messages said and what a generation of New Dealers had said before. But in Mr. Truman's monotonous twang and Clifford's primer sentences, they just sounded dull. And after the speeches were made, nothing ever seemed to happen.

Managing the Team. In another, subtler way Clifford also made his influence felt. The President likes to boast that he has the best Cabinet since Rutherford B. Hayes.* At least two members of his Cabinet--George Marshall and James Forrestal--are men of unusual ability and integrity. Certainly Mr. Truman's Cabinet works together without any audible bickering. The President thinks of them as a "great team." But a team is no good without a good manager. The nine Cabinet members work in as many different fields; there are bound to be serious differences of opinion. When the Truman team was first called together, Presidential Adviser John Steelman was supposed to coordinate things for Manager Truman. But most of Steelman's coordinating ended in confusion.

Clark Clifford, who has a passion for orderliness and quiet, solved that problem. Too many differences of opinion made it difficult for the boss to make up his mind. He got Mr. Truman's ear. The President began referring Cabinet members to Clifford, and between Cabinet meetings Clifford screened out what he thought the President should not hear. Cabinet members were grateful for this avenue of escape from Steelman's "coordinating." Clifford also set himself up as a barrier between the President and the professional politicians. They were not pleased at all.

Something for the Boys. Clark Clifford was not alone responsible for this new order. The White House in 1948 is a very different place from what it was in the turbulent Roosevelt days when nobody knew who was seeing the boss, let alone who was writing him memos. The Truman circle is narrower; and so are the men who directly serve the President. Besides Clifford, the innermost ring includes:

Charles Ross, 62, a lanky hound-dog-sad-looking man who succeeded Steve Early as press secretary. Likable, intelligent, usually tired, he dogtrots through a delicate and strategic job; he is also handicapped by Mr. Truman's understandable but unhelpful desire to keep all details of his personal life private. Ross went to high school with the President, became chief of the Washington Bureau of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, once won a Pulitzer prize for his stories on the Hoover depression.

Matthew Connelly, 40, a tall, thin, black-haired Massachusetts Irishman who was Harry Truman's secretary when the President was chairman of the Senate Investigating Committee. He stepped up with the boss, now handles appointments and smoothes ruffled fur.

John Steelman, 47, plump, red-faced ex-conciliator of the Labor Department, who always had one formula for conciliating John L. Lewis: "Give in." After Clifford, his rival in the antechamber, Steelman comes nearest to having the boss's ear. He handles labor and economic problems.

Major General Harry Vauqhan, 54, military aide and former World War I comrade of the President. The President greatly admires his smoking-car humor, keeps him around for laughs and as a general choreboy.

The presidential household also includes such diverse personalities as weather-beaten, 72-year-old Admiral Leahy, still technically the President's chief of staff, who gives Mr. Truman a daily 15-minute briefing on strategic problems; kindly, dignified William D. Hassett, a Roosevelt pensioner who handles general correspondence; and shrewd, soft-voiced David K. Niles, who advises on problems of minority groups, particularly Palestine.

All together, these men stand around the President like handlers around a prizefighter, sponging his face, kneading his muscles, giving him advice, keeping the noisy crowd off. Sometimes it seems to other members of the Administration that they stand in the way of more important advisers. The President ignored a suggestion that he ought to take some of his key Cabinet members on the Caribbean cruise, took Clifford, Steelman, Connelly, Leahy and Vaughan instead. Truman wanted to relax, and with the boys he can relax. They understand him. He understands them.

Juvenile Lead. There was no more in Clifford's early life to foreshadow this rise to his place behind the throne than there had been in Harry Truman's apprenticeship on the farm. They were both Missouri-bred, but there the resemblance ended. Clifford's father was a traveling auditor for the Missouri Pacific Railroad. His uncle was the late, fire-breathing Clark McAdams, liberal editorial writer on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His adoring mother is Georgia McAdams Clifford, who overrode the objections of her husband and became a Chautauqua circuit storyteller. One of her favorite numbers: the story of Persian Prince Sticky-sticky-stombo-no-so-rombo-hody-body-bosco-ica-non-nun-a -non-combo-tombo-rombo, who drowned in a well, wherefore his brother Yip became king.

Neighbors remember Clifford as a shy boy with "a mass of golden ringlets," who sold Saturday Evening Posts and sang in the Episcopal choir. He was never any trouble. Like most good little boys, he suffered under the inevitable epithet of "sissy." At St. Louis' Washington University he played juvenile leads in college shows. His casting in these parts always caused lively competition from girls who wanted to play opposite him. Then, as now, he was 6 ft. 2 in., very symmetrical, with rippling, taffy-colored hair. He played tennis and sang baritone in the glee club. Toward the end of his days in law school he acquired a reputation as a cutup, in a clean, boyish way. He never could hold liquor and has become almost a teetotaler because of his ulcers.

In 1929, he went off to Europe, met a fellow tourist, blonde Margery Pepperell Kimball from Massachusetts. Their romance bloomed. They were no sooner married than Clifford began nourishing as a lawyer. St. Louis Lawyer Jacob Lashly began throwing accident cases his way, soon saw that with juries, handsome, earnest Clifford was "well nigh irresistible." By 1938 the firm became Lashly, Lashly, Miller & Clifford and by 1942 the new partner was making $25,000 a year.

Diligent Man. As his career waxed, the up-&-coming lawyer began to take an interest in the St. Louis Symphony Society, thus met James K. Vardaman, an old friend of Politician Harry Truman. When "Jake" Vardaman went into the Navy, he left the legal end of his business in Clifford's hands. The Vardaman Shoe Co. was being liquidated. Clifford tied up the loose ends.

In 1944 Clifford also joined the Navy as a lieutenant (j.g.)-Sent to make a survey of the Pacific Coast supply situation, he won a citation for "diligence." Vardaman meanwhile had become Harry Truman's naval aide. And when Jake went off to Potsdam with Harry Truman in 1945, he summoned Clifford to man the White House station while he was gone. After Vardaman was made a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Clifford stayed on. He began helping Judge Sam Rosenman to write speeches, and when Rosenman left, the President gave Clifford a full-time job.

The American Public. The reasons for Clifford's success are not hard to find. He spreads calm and good will like a road-oiling wagon. At home he is a model father to his three daughters, Margery, 15, Joyce, 14, Randall, 7. When they were younger he liked to tell them stories; particularly the story about the boy with his finger in the dike. But when business was on his mind he sometimes lost interest in the story and began mumbling about a law case. "Never mind the law case," the children would shout, "tell us about the boy with his finger in the dike." The family plays games like "20 Questions" and father is a terrific competitor. He dresses elegantly in dark blues and greys. He is always courtly and courteous. He is the kind of husband women wish their husbands would try to be.

He reads the drafts of his speeches to his wife in the living room of their 13-room house in Chevy Chase. "I'm the American public," says "Marney" Clifford brightly. "I used to be the average jury." When he is under the stress of big events, she surreptitiously changes his diet "to a sort of baby food."

The Right Wave Length. Clifford presents a serene front to the world and is outwardly patient and smiling at all times. But he is a serious man who gets to the White House early--a habit much admired by early-rising Mr. Truman--and stays late. One of the chief reasons for Clifford's rise has been his methodical practice of meticulously copying down the thoughts of the various men around the President, carefully sorting them out and then presenting them in a manner which suits Harry Truman to a T. As Mrs. Clifford proudly expresses it: "Clark has put himself on the same wave length with Mr. Truman." As a more critical observer put it: "He has succeeded perfectly in articulating the mediocrity of the Truman Administration."

It is this" mediocrity, not the counsels of Mr. Truman's advisers, that is primarily responsible for the plight in which the President now finds himself. Mr. Truman himself sincerely thought that he could walk down the middle of the road, being pleasant to all he met on the way. But how wide is the middle of the road, in an election year? Not wide enough, apparently, for all the factions of the Democratic Party, which seemed to be heading toward the ditch.

Harry Truman returned to Washington this week, to find that Democratic bosses had been burning the wires to a worried J. Howard McGrath, chairman of the Democratic National Committee. McGrath hastened to the President. He came out of the conference to announce flatly: "If nominated by the convention [Mr. Truman] will accept and run."

Ditch or no ditch, Harry Truman intended to keep going down the presidential road.

* New York City's James A. Farley, who got almost as much applause as the President did at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner a fortnight ago (TIME, March I) was asked last week during a radio press interview (Mutuals Meet the Press) if he would accept a Democratic nomination as Vice President. Big Jim promptly boomed the shortest, clearest, most emphatic political statment of 1948:"No."

*Described by Historian Arthur Schlesinger as "an unusually able group."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.