DAVID MCCULLOUGH'S BIOGRAPHY OF TRUMAN. Billie Pritchett Western History 31 May 2016

Transcription

1 Pritchett 1 DAVID MCCULLOUGH'S BIOGRAPHY OF TRUMAN Billie Pritchett Western History 31 May 2016 David McCullough. Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, pp. David McCullough's Truman biography tells the story of how a farmer's son from Missouri became a soldier, a judge, a senator, and then Vice President and President of the United States. During the First World War, after becoming an army captain while serving in France, he became friends with the nephew of T.J. Pendergrast, a Kansas City kingmaker who had enormous influence over the Missouri political scene. McCullough's book intimates that Truman's connection with Pendergrast helped Truman start his next life in politics: it helped him gain a position as judge in Jackson County (p. 173), as senator of Missouri (p. 203), and as Vice President of the United States (p. 308). While these and other facts besides are laid bare in McCullough's book, they sit uneasily alongside some of McCullough's own commentary. The book roughly divides in two: the life before the presidency, under the shadow of Pendergrast, and the life during and just after the presidency. The portrait of Truman that emerges in this biography is one of a principled man who sometimes compromised his principles to appease those around him personally and professionally, and who during his time as President had to make some tough decisions no President had ever had to make before, given the new Cold War climate. As for Truman's time before President, McCullough's biography does much to point up Truman's moral rectitude regarding those early steps onto the political scene but is uncomfortable when noting incongruities between principles and political realities. Many of these incongruities arise vis-avis Truman's relationship with political boss T.J. Pendergrast and his Pendergrast gang, including T.J.'s brother Mike and countless others. After Truman served in the First World War and arrived home to start up his own business, the Pendergrast brothers approached Truman, wanting to know if [he] would like to run for eastern judge of Jackson County. Harry accepted their offer at once, with no

2 Pritchett 2 hesitation (p. 159). McCullough's comments about these facts suggest the importance of having been selected by the Pendergrasts while at the same time paradoxically downplaying the significance. McCullough writes: For Harry, the timing could not have been better. He badly needed rescuing. To some latter-day admirers and students of his career, the suggestion that he turned to politics in desperation... would be unacceptable, a fiction devised to cast him in the worst possible light. It would be stressed that his interest in politics was longstanding, that the Pendergrasts had come to him, not he to them, and that in any event their power then was by no means absolute, hardly enough to dictate a political destiny. And all this was true. Yet to Harry himself there was never much question about the actual state of his affairs or to whom he owed the greatest debt of gratitude. (p. 160) Although the power of T.J. Pendergrast and his brother might not have been absolute or guaranteed a political destiny, after the Pendergrasts had thrown their political weight behind Truman, McCullough writes that there was never much doubt about the outcome (p. 173). For Truman, it became clear as to why T.J. Pendergrast, the Big Boss, wanted him in office: it was to create a crony network of influence peddling, with the Big Boss at the helm. At some points, McCullough writes as though Truman was too upright to participate in these crimes. For instance, when a new measure to repave the roads of Jackson County was passed, T.J. Pendergrast wanted Truman to grant those road contracts to Pendergrast's friends. McCullough quotes Truman as saying The Boss wnated me to give a lot of crooked contractors the inside and I couldn't (p. 184). This angered Pendergrast, but then Truman and Pendergrast met to talk about it. From that point forward, McCullough writes, apparently Pendergrast was as good as his word, never asking Harry to do anything dishonest (p. 185). This was technically true because after that Pendergrast just appealed to one of the other three judges, a man named David Barr with whom Truman served, in order to get the deal. About this and

3 Pritchett 3 other crookedness Truman had to come to terms with, McCullough quotes Truman as having written, This sweet associate of mine, my friend, who was supposed to back me, had already made a deal with a former crooked contractor, a friend of the Boss's... I had to compromise in order to get the voted road system carried out... I had to let a former saloonkeeper and murderer, a friend of the Boss's, steal about $10,000 from the general revenues of the county to satisfy my ideal associate and keep the crooks from getting a million or more out of the bond issue. Was I right or did I compound a felony? I don't know... Anyway I've got the $6,500,000 worth of roads on the ground at at a figure that makes the crooks tear their hair. The hospital is up at less cost than any similar institution in spite of my drunken brother-in-law [Fred Wallace], whom I'd had to employ on the job to keep peace in the family. I've had to run the hospital job myself and pay him for it... Am I an administrator or not? Or am I just a crook to compromise in order to get the job done? You judge it, I can't. (p. 186) Truman might have questioned his complicity in some of the shady political practices of those around him, particularly T.J. Pendergrast, and still he relied on Pendergrast to assist his senate nomination and later clench his nomination as Vice President. McCullough tells us Truman was reluctant to run for senate, but when Pendergrast's associates told him that the Boss is for you and told him he had to do it for the good of the [Democratic] party... this apparently settled the issue (p. 203). Truman as senator had all-out faith in the New Deal and railed against the wealthiest few, at a time when [n]inety percent of the wealth of the country was in the hands of 4 percent of the population (p. 206). After serving as senator from 1940 to 1944, Pendergrast and his associates pushed Truman to run for Vice president at the 1944 Democratic convention in Chicago. Rumors swirled that FDR was in bad health and the Pendergrast gang never lost sight of the point that it was really the presidency at stake (p. 309). The Pendergrast gang was able to use the Chicago convention to swing an overwhelming majority of support away from sitting Vice President Henry Wallace toward Truman.

4 Pritchett 4 Pendergrasts' associates were working through the night, talking to delegates and applying 'a good deal of pressure' to help [delegates] see the sense in selecting Harry Truman. McCullough writes, No one knows how many deals were cut, how many ambassadorships or postmaster jobs were promised, but reportedly, by the time morning came... every chairmen of every delegation had been telephoned. McCullough makes little commentary about Truman's own role in securing the nomination, only providing some summary facts. McCullough writes that delegates in groups of twos and threes were were seen going to and from a private air-conditioned room [at the convention]... where, for hours, Senator Truman stood shaking hands. Only later did he emerge to join [his wife and daughter] in a box just behind the podium... [where he] sat in full view munching on a hot dog and enjoying the spectacle (p. 318). If Truman's hands were dirty in clenching the nomination, McCullough does not tell us. Truman was Vice President for only 82 days, when in 1945 President Roosevelt passed away and Truman had to succeed him. Truman came into his first year as President in 1945 and had to reckon with the fact that the United States was now undoubtedly one of two major world superpowers, the other being the Soviet Union. The Second World War was not yet over, and both the United States and Soviet Union would be vying for control over world influence within months. This political and military situation called for some means to end the war once and for all and a realignment of foreign policy priorities. Truman's administration had to make it up as they went along. McCullough tells us that the war in Europe ended with unconditional German surrender to the Allied forces on 7 May 1945 (p. 381) but that Truman still had to make appeals to Japan to get them to stop fighting. Truman called on Japan to surrender, warning that 'the striking power and intensity of our blows will steadily increase,' and that the longer the war lasted the greater would be the suffering of the Japanese people (p. 382). As the war in Japan escalated, more civilian populations were killed as it became increasingly harder to conduct precision bombing (p. 392). Truman's Secretary of War Henry Stimson encouraged use of the newly tested

5 Pritchett 5 atomic bomb in Japan, arguing that [s]uch an effective shock would save many times the number of lives, both American and Japanese (p. 394), but reminded the President that the decision was his alone to make (p. 393). The first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima on 6 August When Truman got news of the successful bombing, he declared, This is the greatest thing in history (p. 454). McCullough's biography hedges on the potential shock readers might have toward such a statement, writing that at the time, to those around him, the President's response seemed in no way inappropriate (p. 455). This pivotal moment in American and world history, the decision to drop the atomic bomb and the consequences of such an action, is perhaps underemphasized by McCullough. McCullough does write of how news of the bomb brought feelings of ambiguity and terror of a kind never behavior experienced by Americans (p. 456). But some of the broader Cold War implications are worth emphasizing as well. For example, although one motivation to drop the atomic bomb was, as McCullough writes, to save the lives of many other countless American soldiers and Japanese people, Truman wrote in his memoirs of another motivation: Our dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan had forced Russia to reconsider her position in the Far East. 1 Dropping the atomic bomb placed a strategic check on Russia's ever-growing involvement in the Asia Pacific. McCullough does not highlight this point. Nor does he highlight the fact that dropping the bomb had consequences outside of the United States as well, specifically and immediately in Korea, where surrender of the Japanese government meant the end of the 35-year Japanese colonization of Korea, 2 a country wherein in five years time the 1 Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, Volume 1: 1945 Year of Decisions (New York: Da Capo Press, 1986), p Even this narrative has to be put in perspective, however, and other American military tradeoffs in terms of lives lost have to be considered. Even though the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings might have saved lives and led to the liberation of Korea, there were many ethnic Koreans who lost their lives, especially in the Hiroshima bombing. Of the 220,000 civilians who were killed as a result of the atomic bomb, conservatively 40,000 of those civilians were ethnic Koreans, many of whom were living in Japan as forced laborers. The survivors who returned to Korea, mainly to Hapcheon, where many of the survivors still reside, they were compelled to keep their experience a secret and hence not contradict the liberation narrative. See Choe Sang-Hun, Korean Survivors of Atomic Bombs Renew Fight for Recognition, and Apology, The New York Times, 25 May 2016, available at

6 Pritchett 6 United States military would see the Cold War almost escalate to a hot war. Another major decision for Truman was the creation of America's first Cold War policy, the Truman Doctrine. The Truman Doctrine was drafted in view of the civil war in Greece. McCullough glosses the issue in the following way. He writes that Greece was in desperate need, the situation was urgent. The existing Greek government was not perfect, and the government of the United States, no less than ever, condemned extremist measures on the left and right... One of the primary objectives of American policy, Truman said, was 'the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free of coercion' (p. 547). That the Truman Doctrine arose in view of the fear of Greek Communism, McCullough does little to address. Nor does he address the fact that the monarchical government of Greece, which a majority of the $400 million in aid from the U.S. was designed to prop up (p. 548), was not popularly recognized by the majority of the Greek people. 3 Supporting the Greek monarchy, therefore, constituted a curious case of creating conditions for Greece to work out a way of life free of coercion. An immediate critic of the Truman Doctrine, Russian diplomat George Kennan, whose observations and writings inadvertently inspired the Truman Doctrine, also took exception to [the Truman Doctrine] because of the sweeping nature of the commitments which it implied. 4 Whether the particulars of the doctrine arose from the mind of Truman is also to be doubted. McCullough is silent on the issue, but according to Kennan's memoirs, It had been produced, at the initiative of the [State] department's public relations office... which evidently felt inside under the necessity of clothing the announced rationale in grandiose and sweeping terms. 5 Nevertheless, Truman delivered the speech (p. 547) and thereafter forever became credited publicly with the Truman Doctrine's construction. Surprising in McCullough's biography of Truman was the importance that Truman placed on 3 See L.S. Stavrianos, The Greek National Liberation Front (EAM): A Study in Resistance Organization and Administration, The Journal of Modern History, 24, 1 (March 1952). 4 George F. Kennan, Memoirs: (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), pp Kennan, p. 315.

7 Pritchett 7 Korea's role in the Cold War and American foreign policy generally during the outbreak of the Korean War in Truman referred to Korea as the Greece of the Far East (p. 785), and according to McCullough, Later he would say that committing American troops to combat in Korea was the most difficult decision in his presidency, more so than the decision to use the atomic bomb (pp ). The big fear was that there would be a third world war that would break out, this time between the Soviet Union and the United States. There was also the fear that the commitment of Communist Chinese troops into Korea might cause China to enter a third world war. What is illuminating about the Korean War, too, is the way in which the armistice between North and South Korea may have demonstrated the limitations of both the United States and the Soviet Union to wield absolute power over the world through military means. The United States government would see this again during the Vietnam War, at a time when Truman was long retired. Truman nonetheless saw this first military effort during the Cold War as necessary. McCullough writes that Truman's decision to go into Korea... was the most important of his time in office, and that Korea was the turning point of the Cold War. Whereas free nations had failed to meet the test before failed to stop Japanese aggression in Manchuria, the Nazi takeover in Austria and Czechoslovakia 'this time we met the test' (p. 919). Though we now live in a post-truman world, McCullough's biography reminds us that this new period of global history which Truman inaugurated still has profound effects over American foreign policy and relations in the world today. Likely, the turbulent political and economic status of Greece in the 21 st century would not exist were it not for American interference during the Greek civil war. Nor would Korea have remained divided to this day into two separate countries were it not for the military ambitions of the Soviet Union and the United States. In many respects, the conditions in Korea are the last great vestige of the Cold War. Given that the relations between North and South Korea ended with an armistice in 1953 rather than a peace treaty really means, too, that in Korea the Cold War never ended.