The Wonderful Wastebasket

The contents of one of the world's most interesting wastebaskets is laid before the U.S. public this week in the form of a book called Mr. President (Farrar, Straus & Young; $5). Explorer of the wastebasket: William Hillman, White House correspondent for the Mutual Broadcasting System. Author of at least 90% of the text: Harry S. Truman, 33rd President of the U.S.

Hillman begins, appropriately, by quoting Truman: "I want the people to know the Presidency as I have experienced it and to know me as I am."

To this end, Truman gave Hillman full access to his personal correspondence, memorandums, diaries and written reveries. To the written material, he has added interviews of Truman by Hillman. All this is tossed together in a jumble from which the patient reader can piece together a better picture of Truman, the man and the President, than historians have been able to construct from the records of more complex and less candid Presidents.

The Delegator. Truman is justifiably proud of the improvement in the day-to-day running of the vast Government machine over which he presides. He does not say so, but it is a fact that the personal government of F.D.R., who was his own Secretary of State, the Treasury, War, Navy and Labor, had brought the Government near to operational chaos. Truman knew that he could not run the Presidency that way. He says:

"No one man really can fill the Presidency. The Presidency has too many and too great responsibilities. All a man can do is to try to meet them. He must be able to judge men, delegate responsibility and back up those he trusts . . .

"I think I have revived the Cabinet system and that I made it work as a real group of administrators and advisers to the President."

An administrator who delegates authority can degenerate into a puppet. Not Truman. From the first, his genuine humility in the face of his job was balanced --and sometimes more than balanced--by a natural cockiness and by his sense of the President's responsibility.

The Boss. For instance, he liked and trusted James F. Byrnes, and he knew he himself had little background in foreign affairs. Yet on Jan. 5, 1946, he wrote Byrnes, then Secretary of State, a blistering letter on Byrnes's failure to report to the White House on a conference in Moscow. Truman says that he did not send the letter, but read it to Byrnes.*

"I received no communication from you directly while you were in Moscocw . . . The protocol was not submitted to me nor was the communique. I was completely in the dark on the whole conference until I requested you to come to the Williamsburg and inform me. The communique was released before I ever saw it."

In the same 1946 letter, the President lays down a foreign policy somewhat stronger than any of his Secretaries of State ever achieved--or attempted:

"There isn't a doubt in my mind that Russia intends an invasion of Turkey and the seizure of the Black Sea Straits to the Mediterranean. Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language, another war is in the making. Only one language do they understand--'How many divisions have you?'

"I do not think that we should play compromise any longer . . . We should rehabilitate China and create a strong central government there. We should do the same for Korea . . .

"I'm tired babying the Soviets."

In his diary, Truman recalls the uproar over his letter to the Washington Post's Music Critic Paul Hume, who panned a Margaret Truman recital. Concludes the President and fond father: "Well, I've had a grand time this day. I've been accused of putting my baby who is the apple of my eye in a bad position. I don't think that is so. She doesn't either--thank the Almighty."

Truman, however, explains to Hillman: "I rarely write angry letters . . . Most of the letters I write are the letters of a good neighbor. I like to gossip with friends. I like to exchange views and opinions with people in all walks of life."

Some Truman views, conventional and unconventional, disclosed in Mr. President:

P: Sherman, or whoever said "War is hell." was right.

P: Cicero and Demosthenes were the greatest orators of all time; Truman, in fact, used to try to write his speeches in the style of Cicero, but gave up--he does not say when.

P: Charles Dickens should not have used the name Uriah for Uriah Heep," a sniveling hypocrite." because the biblical Uriah was "one of the bravest and one of the best soldiers."

P: The Prophet Amos is not properly appreciated. "There are only nine chapters in the Bible on Amos, but Amos says as much in those few chapters as Isaiah did in 66 chapters." Besides, "Amos was interested in the welfare of the average man."

Missouri Days. In Mr. President Truman tells--several times--the story of his childhood, youth and career. It is easy to see where his self-confidence comes from. He did not aim high in politics, but he was, in the main, successful in what he did, and he was respected by the people whom he respected. He makes an apparently straightforward story of his long relationship with Boss T. J. Pendergast of Kansas City. His first contact with Pendergast, who was "interested in county patronage and county purchases," came after Truman was elected Presiding Judge of the Jackson County Court (a nonjudicial administrative office). "Pendergast was interested in having as many friends in key positions as possible, but he always took the position that if a man didn't do the job he was supposed to do, fire him and get someone who would. I always followed such a policy."

Truman tells of an occasion when Pendergast asked him to attend a meeting of local contractors.

"I told him I would. I met them with T. J. present. They gave me the old song and dance about being local citizens and taxpayers and that they should have an inside track to the construction contracts. I told them that the contracts would be let to the lowest bidders wherever they came from* . . . T. J. turned to his friends and said 'I told you that he's the contrariest man in the county. Get out of here.' When they were gone, he said to me: 'You carry out your commitment to the voters.' I did just that . . . Pendergast was always a man of his word with me."

Truman is very proud of his record as a devoted Mason (now 33rd degree), and proud that his Masonic connection helped him in politics. It helped him once in a rather spectacular way. Running for re-election to the U.S. Senate, Truman was under bitter personal attack by the Republican candidate, Manvel Davis of Kansas City. Says Truman:

"I had a Catholic friend in St. Louis by the name of James E. Wade. He attended a meeting [where] Davis made his usual charges. Forrest Donnell, who afterwards became [Republican] Governor and Senator, was speaking from the same platform. Donnell was just behind me in the Grand Lodge line and would be Grand Master in a year or two.

"So Jim Wade went up to him . . . and asked him if I could be the low sort of fellow that Davis charged and still be Grand Master of Masons of Missouri. Mr. Donnell said: 'No, Jim, he could not.' That ruined Mr. Davis--I won by 276,000 votes."

Lightning Strikes Twice. Truman did not want to be Vice President. He was about to leave Independence to drive to Chicago for the 1944 convention when Byrnes telephoned and asked Truman to nominate him for Vice President. Truman said sure, if that was what F.D.R. wanted. He was about to leave again when Alben Barkley called and asked Truman to nominate him. Truman explained that he was committed to Byrnes.

At the convention Truman worked for Byrnes, who kept telling him that Roosevelt was about to make a public endorsement of the Byrnes candidacy. Instead, the late Robert Hannegan, then chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told Truman that F.D.R. had decided that Truman should be the candidate. Truman refused. Missourian Hannegan, in his presence, telephoned F.D.R. that Truman was a "mulish and contrary man." Truman then heard Roosevelt say: "Well, if he wants to let the Democratic Party and the country down in the midst of a war, that is his responsibility."

Says Truman: "I was. to put it mildly, stunned. I stood around for at least five minutes, and then I said 'I'll do what the President wants.'"

A few days after he became President, Truman wrote out an account of his accession to that office. He was summoned to the White House and "Mrs. Roosevelt put her arm around my shoulder and said, 'The President is dead.' That was the first inkling I had of the seriousness of the situation.

"I then asked what I could do, and she said, 'What can we do for you?'

Truman called a Cabinet meeeting, sent for Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone, for Mrs. Truman and Margaret, and for congressional leaders. He took the oath "beginning at 7:08 and finished at 7:09." Truman then says:

"I was very much shocked. I am not easily shocked, but I was certainly shocked when I was told [that] the weight of the Government had fallen on my shoulders . . . I knew the President had a great many meetings with Churchill and Stalin. I was not familiar with any of these things, and it was really something to think about, but I decided the best thing to do was to go home and get as much rest as possible and face the music . . . Went to bed, went to sleep, and did not worry any more that day."

"What a Life!" Truman has never escaped a sort of schoolboy wonder at being President, and he expresses his wonder in schoolboy terms. Here is a diary entry of Nov. 1, 1949:

"Had dinner by myself tonight . . . A butler came in very formally and said, 'Mr. President, dinner is served.' I walk into the dining room in the Blair House. Barnett in tails and white tie pulls out my chair, pushes me up to the table. John in tails and white tie brings me a fruit cup, Barnett takes away the empty cup. John brings me a plate, Barnett brings me a tenderloin, John brings me asparagus, Barnett brings me carrots and beets. I have to eat alone and in silence in candlelit room. I ring. Barnett takes the plate and butter plate. John comes in with a napkin and silver crumb tray--there are no crumbs but John has to brush them off the table anyway. Barnett brings me a plate with a finger bowl and doily on it. I remove the finger bowl and doily and John puts a glass saucer and a little bowl on the plate. Barnett brings me some chocolate custard. John brings me a demi-tasse (at home a little cup of coffee--about two good gulps) and my dinner is over. I take a hand bath in the finger bowl and go back to work. What a life!"

There he sits, and there he may sit for four years more--a determinedly average man; humble before his responsibilities and anything but humble in the employment of his power; a storehouse of historical fact with little feeling for the sweep, drama and philosophy of history; a man quick to abuse who feels himself to be abused; a man whose good moral instincts cannot cope either with the sins of his old friends tempted by boodle or the softness of his new friends who have failed to build him a strong foreign policy.

Mr. President, disorganized as it is, gets the man over. It will delight Truman's admirers, and it will cause those who deplore him to gnash their teeth. Nobody, however, can deny that it is a strange and wonderful fact that the man pictured in Mr. President can be President of the U.S., anno Domini 1952.

* Byrnes this week hotly denied that Truman had ever read him the letter. "Had he done so, he would have had to write another letter accepting my resignation," said Byrnes.

* Pendergast could afford to be relaxed about contracts. His own Ready Mixed Concrete Co. enjoyed a virtual monopoly of this service in Kansas City and Jackson County.

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