# Truman  ## Metadata - Author: [[David McCullough]] - Full Title: Truman - Category: #books ## Highlights - Another speaker, Congressman William S. Cowherd from Lee’s Summit, told a story that Harry would take pleasure in retelling the rest of his life. Speaking of certain provisions in a pending tariff bill that he found unpalatable, the congressman was reminded of a farmer on a visit to New York, having his first experience in a fancy hotel dining room. First he was served celery, which he ate, then a bowl of consommé, which he drank. But when the waiter placed a lobster before him, the farmer looked up indignantly and said, “I ate your bouquet. I drank your dishwater. But I’ll be darned if I’ll eat your bug.” ([Location 994](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=994)) - You know as long as a country is one of that kind, people are more independent and make better citizens. When it is made up of factories and large cities it soon becomes depressed and makes classes among people. Every farmer thinks he’s as good as the President or perhaps a little bit better. ([Location 1344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=1344)) - If it was sure-enough war, wheat would go higher still, farmers had been saying all summer. And then it had come, in the first week of August, when sixty thousand German troops crossed into Belgium at Liège. The papers were filled with war news and as Willa Cather would write, even to “quiet wheat-growing people, the siege guns before Liege were a menace; not to their safety or their goods, but to their comfortable, established way of thinking. They introduced the greater-than-man force which afterward repeatedly brought into this war the effect of unforeseeable natural disaster. . . .” ([Location 1654](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=1654)) - Upon the farmers of the country, said President Woodrow Wilson, rested the fate of the war and thus the fate of the nation and the world. ([Location 1766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=1766)) - Then, on July 15, the Germans unleashed another huge offensive aimed at Paris, the Second Battle of the Marne, sending fifty-two divisions against thirty-four Allied divisions, nine of which were American. In three days, from July 15 to July 18, the tide of battle turned. To Ludendorff, American forces had been the “decisive” factor, and the German chancellor later confessed that “at the beginning of July 1918, I was convinced . . . that before the first of September our adversaries would send us peace proposals. . . . That was on the 15th. On the 18th even the most optimistic among us knew that all was lost. The history of the world was played out in three days.” ([Location 2091](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=2091)) - The Meuse-Argonne offensive was to have been another swift, smashing American victory, like Saint-Mihiel, but it was not. Sedan was ultimately taken, but at appalling cost. The Meuse-Argonne was the battle that produced the so-called “Lost Battalion,” an infantry unit that was trapped for five days and suffered casualties of nearly 70 percent, and also the most appealing American hero of the war, infantryman Alvin York from the hills of Tennessee, who single-handedly captured 132 Germans in one day. In all, in 47 days of fury, there were 117,000 American casualties. In the military cemetery on the Romagne Heights, at the center of the battlefield, 14,246 dead would be buried, making it the largest American military graveyard in Europe. ([Location 2335](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=2335)) - By the time the epidemic ran its course, vanishing mysteriously early in 1919, the number of deaths in the United States reached 500,000, including 25,000 soldiers, or nearly half the number of American battlefield deaths in the war. At Camp Doniphan alone fifty-one had died. ([Location 2426](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=2426)) - After what he had seen of peacetime Army life, he said, he would give anything to be on the House Military Affairs Committee. Like a great many of his fellow reserve officers, he had acquired a decided bias against West Pointers. He thought most of them pompous, lazy, and overrated, and couldn’t imagine himself living under such a system. “I can’t see what on earth any man with initiative and a mind of his own wants to be in the army in peacetimes for,” he wrote. “You’ve always got some fossil above you whose slightest whim is law and who generally hasn’t a grain of horse sense.” ([Location 2442](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=2442)) - I’ve had a few setbacks in my life, but I never gave up. —HARRY TRUMAN ([Location 2466](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=2466)) - As his observant cousin Ethel Noland once remarked, Harry Truman was at heart a nineteenth-century man. ([Location 2468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=2468)) - He was a grown man, thirty-three years old, middle-aged nearly, by the time of the Great War, the event which, more than any turn of the calendar, marked the end of the old century and the beginning of something altogether new. His outlook, tastes, his habits of thought had been shaped by a different world from the one that followed after 1918. As time would show, the Great War was among history’s clearest dividing lines, and much that came later never appealed to Harry Truman, for all his native-born optimism and large faith in progress. ([Location 2470](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=2470)) - All that was expected in return was gratitude expressed at the polls on election day. And to most of his people this seemed little enough to ask and perfectly proper. Many, too, were happy to be “repeaters,” those who voted “early and often” on election day. The woman who worked in the hospital laundry, as an example, started as a repeater at age eighteen, three years shy of the voting age, and enjoyed every moment. She and several others would dress up in different costumes for each new identity, as they were driven from polling place to polling place in a fine, big car. It was like play-acting, she remembered years later. She would vote at least four or five times before the day ended. “Oh, I knew it was illegal, but I certainly never thought it was wrong.” ([Location 2759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=2759)) - “Stealing elections had become a high art,” wrote one man, “refined and streamlined by the constant factional battles. . . .” And the prize at stake always was power—jobs, influence, money, “business,” as Tom Pendergast would say. It was “the game” played by “the boys” with zest, and never over such issues of reform as inspired periodic Republican or independent citizens’ crusades. ([Location 2780](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=2780)) - “If you’re going to be in politics,” Harry later reflected, “you have to learn to explain to people what you stand for, and to learn to stand up in front of a crowd and talk was just something I had to do, so I went ahead and did it.” ([Location 2876](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=2876)) - He was named president of the National Old Trails Association, a nonprofit group dedicated to building highways along the country’s historic trails and to spreading the concept of history as a tourist attraction. ([Location 3047](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=3047)) - “Three things ruin a man,” Harry would tell a reporter long afterward. “Power, money, and women. “I never wanted power,” he said. “I never had any money, and the only woman in my life is up at the house right now.” ([Location 3243](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=3243)) - “It was very hard on my father,” Margaret would concede long afterward, while showing a visitor through the house. “You know, my father was a very quiet, nontemperamental man at home. He got along. I mean, he made it his business to get along . . . because he loved my mother and this was where she wanted to live.” ([Location 3414](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=3414)) - Friends don’t count in fair weather. It is when troubles come that friends count. —HARRY TRUMAN ([Location 3526](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=3526)) - He questioned seriously whether he had made the right choice in life. In a letter of advice to a nephew, he wrote, “It will be much better for you to go to work for a bank or some mercantile institution and get real experience than to get a political job where you learn nothing and lose out when the administration changes.” ([Location 3553](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=3553)) - The Truman candidacy was announced on May 14, 1934. Before dawn that morning, alone in a room at the Pickwick Hotel, he had written: Tomorrow, today, rather, it is 4 A.M., I have to make the most momentous announcement of my life. I have come to the place where all men strive to be at my age and I thought two weeks ago that retirement on a virtual pension in some minor county office was all that was in store for me. ([Location 3747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=3747)) - Another was William Helm, Washington correspondent for the Kansas City Journal-Post, to whom the new senator had gone for help at the start, confessing he was “green as grass” and in need of someone to show him around. At first, Helm took this as a joke. Here, he thought, was the eighth natural wonder of the world, a politician who didn’t take himself too seriously, a friendly, likable, warmhearted fellow with a lot of common sense hidden under an overpowering inferiority complex. ([Location 3917](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=3917)) - “Harry, don’t start out with an inferiority complex,” Lewis said kindly. “For the first six months you’ll wonder how the hell you got here, and after that you’ll wonder how the hell the rest of us got here.” ([Location 3930](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=3930)) - We worship money instead of honor. A billionaire, in our estimation, is much greater in these days in the eyes of the people than the public servant who works for public interest. It makes no difference if the billionaire rode to wealth on the sweat of little children and the blood of underpaid labor. No one ever considered Carnegie libraries steeped in the blood of the Homestead steelworkers, but they are. We do not remember that the Rockefeller Foundation is founded on the dead miners of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company and a dozen other similar performances. We worship Mammon; and until we go back to ancient fundamentals and return to the Giver of the Tables of Law and His teachings, these conditions are going to remain with us. ([Location 4293](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=4293)) - In 1938, in a Senate battle over an anti-lynching bill, he voted to limit debate on the bill in an unsuccessful effort to break a filibuster against it. ([Location 4324](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=4324)) - The documentation amassed by Milligan and a swarm of FBI agents revealed that approximately 60,000 “ghost” votes had been cast in Kansas City in 1936. Many precincts had registration figures exceeding the known population. ([Location 4348](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=4348)) - He went to the Washington premiere of the new Frank Capra movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, hoping it would cheer him up, but came away, as he wrote to Bess, greatly discouraged by its blanket portrayal of senators as crooks and fools. Doubtless he was distressed too by the fact that the chief figure of corruption in the story was a fat, heavy-handed machine boss who acted much like Tom Pendergast and ruled a city called Jackson. ([Location 4473](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=4473)) - His opposition to a third term, however, was entirely sincere. The idea went against his fundamental political faith. “There is no indispensable man in a democracy,” he wrote privately. “When a republic comes to a point where a man is indispensable, then we have a Caesar. I do not believe that the fate of the nation should depend upon the life or health or welfare of any one man.” ([Location 4524](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=4524)) - War has many faces; or, rather, in war men and nations wear many faces. —ERIC SEVAREID ([Location 4681](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=4681)) - On Sunday, December 29, London was subjected to the most savage bombing yet. More than a thousand fires raged across the city. In Washington that same night, Franklin Roosevelt was wheeled into the oval-shaped Diplomatic Reception Room on the ground floor of the White House to deliver by radio the “fireside chat” to be known as his “Arsenal of Democracy” speech. The ([Location 4694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=4694)) - Events were moving rapidly. An older, simpler way of life in Washington was passing. It was becoming a different city overnight. All through the Depression years, even with the changes imposed by the New Deal since 1933, it had remained a small town in most ways, southern at heart and unhurried. Now there were new people everywhere, swarms of new federal employees, more automobiles, more rush and confusion. ([Location 4718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=4718)) - The talk was different, more urgent and full of new expressions like “stockpile,” “tooling up,” and “mobilize.” The New Deal was passé now, the Depression a bygone era. The hero of the hour, so different from the kind who had flocked to Washington in the early Roosevelt years, was the “dollar-a-year man,” a high-powered, high-priced corporation executive who had taken a government post but kept his old corporate salary, an innovation that some, like Senator Truman, looked on with great skepticism. ([Location 4730](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=4730)) - Hard times were plainly in retreat in the biggest boom in the history of the country. But great haste in the buildup for war was making unconscionably great waste. It was the same everywhere, he found. Millions of dollars were being squandered. Had there been such mismanagement of federal help for the poor and unemployed a few years earlier, he thought, the outcry would have been overwhelming. As it was, no one seemed to care or to be saying anything. If national defense was the issue, the sky was the limit. ([Location 4743](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=4743)) - Much camp construction, he discovered, was being done on a cost-plus basis—the contractor was paid for all costs plus a fixed percentage profit—which could be virtually an open ticket for piling up excessive profits. ([Location 4750](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=4750)) - He was disturbed, too, by the obvious fact that the vast part of defense work was going to a small number of large corporations and these mainly in the East. ([Location 4751](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=4751)) - Truman understood the potential peril in what he was proposing. From his reading of Civil War history he knew what damage could be done to a President by congressional harassment in a time of emergency, and the lives it could cost by prolonging the war. Abraham Lincoln had been subjected to unrelenting scrutiny by the powerful Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, which caused continuing trouble and delays. Its Radical Republican leadership had insisted even on a say in the choice of field commanders and battle strategy, and as often as not it was the Confederates who benefited. Robert E. Lee once remarked that the committee was worth two divisions to him, an observation Truman would often cite. ([Location 4778](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=4778)) - Like others, Truman had little use for investigations after-the-fact such as those conducted by Senator Gerald P. Nye and his committee, who in examining the causes of the First World War had raised a conspiratorial theory of the role played by the munitions makers. The Nye Committee, Truman felt, had been a major cause of isolationist sentiment in the Congress and contributed more than anything else to the nation’s woeful unpreparedness. It did no good, Truman said, to go digging up dead horses once a war was over. “The thing to do is to dig this stuff up now and correct it.” ([Location 4783](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=4783)) - When the problem of seniority in the Army was discussed, Marshall insisted on the need for selective promotion. “You give a good leader very little and he will succeed,” he said, looking at the chairman; “you give a mediocrity a great deal and he will fail.” ([Location 4837](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=4837)) - Flying in and out of Washington’s new National Airport, he looked down on the tremendous gouge in the mud flats along the Virginia side of the Potomac, downstream from Arlington Cemetery. It was the site of a gigantic new five-sided headquarters for the military, the Pentagon, a larger office building than any in the world and a clear sign of the direction the country was taking. ([Location 4899](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=4899)) - Amazingly, all reports of the committee were to be unanimous. Asked how this could happen, Republican Owen Brewster said it was not hard to get men to agree when the facts were known. ([Location 5026](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=5026)) - In a speech at home in Jackson County he said the war was only a tragic continuation of “the one we fought in 1917 and 1918.” The victors in that war, he argued, “had the opportunity to compel a peace that would protect us from war for many generations. But they missed the opportunity.” A “spirit of isolationism” had brought the worse calamity of the present conflict. It must never happen again. ([Location 5036](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=5036)) - Yet for Truman the disclosures appeared to confirm many of his worst suspicions about big business in America. He was truly a Jeffersonian in spirit; William Jennings Bryan remained a political hero. The things Truman had said in the Senate in earlier years about the evils of big banks, big insurance companies, big corporations had been said in earnest. ([Location 5049](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=5049)) - In fact, the American industrial powerhouse, America’s phenomenal productivity was what would turn the tide against Germany and Japan. It would prove the decisive factor in the war, and Truman was to give too little credit to the vast majority of patriotic business people and industrialists who were making this happen. ([Location 5055](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=5055)) - On April 14, 1943, putting aside his committee work, Truman flew to Chicago to champion a cause that had little to do with the war effort and that seemed a bit surprising for a midwestern senator, a Baptist, a Mason, and proud member of the American Legion to involve himself with. He spoke at a huge rally called to urge help for the doomed Jews of Europe. Chicago Stadium was packed, the crowd estimated at twenty-five thousand. The chairman was a prominent Roman Catholic, Federal Judge William J. Campbell. The keynote speaker was Rabbi Stephen Wise of New York, head of the American Jewish Congress. ([Location 5323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=5323)) - Merely talking about the Four Freedoms is not enough. This is the time for action. No one can any longer doubt the horrible intentions of the Nazi beasts. We know that they plan the systematic slaughter throughout all of Europe, not only of the Jews but of vast numbers of other innocent peoples. ([Location 5334](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=5334)) - “Today—not tomorrow—we must do all that is humanly possible to provide a haven and a place of safety for all those who can be grasped from the hands of the Nazi butchers.” Free lands must be opened to them, he said. ([Location 5338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=5338)) - Their present oppressors must know that they will be held directly accountable for their bloody deeds. To do all this, we must draw deeply on our traditions of aid to the oppressed, and on our great national generosity. This is not a Jewish problem, it is an American problem—and we must and we will face it squarely and honorably. ([Location 5340](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=5340)) - Wallace was too intellectual, a mystic who spoke Russian and played with a boomerang and reputedly consulted with the spirit of a dead Sioux Indian chief. ([Location 5527](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=5527)) - But far more serious to Flynn was Byrnes’s southern background and recorded positions on racial issues. This was the crucial flaw. In 1938, Byrnes had been in the forefront of those southern senators fighting against a proposed federal anti-lynching law, and in a speech on the Senate floor he had turned much of his fire on Walter White, head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “The Negro has not only come into the Democratic Party,” Byrnes had said, “but the Negro has come into control of the Democratic Party.” Then, pointing to the gallery where White was sitting, Byrnes exclaimed, “If Walter White . . . should consent to have this bill laid aside, its advocates would desert it as quickly as football players unscramble when the whistle of the referee is heard.” ([Location 5579](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=5579)) - For Truman, events were out of hand. These were three or four of the most critical days of his life and they were beyond his control, his destiny being decided for him by others once again. ([Location 5881](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=5881)) - Southern opposition to Wallace because of his views on racial equality was clear, as was the refusal of northern liberals to accept the southerner Byrnes for his opposing views on the same subject. ([Location 6072](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=6072)) - Roosevelt fancied himself a farmer. To Truman, Roosevelt was the kind of farmer who had never pulled a weed, never known debt, or crop failure, or a father’s call to roll out of bed at 5:30 on a bitter cold morning. ([Location 6102](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=6102)) - Roosevelt had been given things all of his life—houses, furniture, servants, travels abroad. Truman had been given almost nothing. He had never had a house to call his own. He had been taught from childhood, and by rough experience, that what he became would depend almost entirely on what he did. Roosevelt had always known the possibilities open to him—indeed, how much was expected of him—because of who he was. ([Location 6111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=6111)) - A rumor spread that he was part Jewish, again, as in years past, on the basis that he had a grandfather named Solomon. He was not Jewish, Truman responded, but if he were he would never be ashamed of it. ([Location 6209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=6209)) - The only Bible to be found was an inexpensive Gideon edition with garish red edging to the pages. It had been in the desk drawer of the fastidious head usher, Howell Crim, a short, stooped, bald-headed man who now made sure it was properly dusted before placing it on the table. ([Location 6479](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=6479)) - In his brief remarks to the Cabinet he said he intended to carry on with Roosevelt’s program and hoped they would all stay on the job. He welcomed their advice. He did not doubt that they would differ with him if they felt it necessary, but final decisions would be his and he expected their support once decisions were made. ([Location 6496](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=6496)) - At home in Independence, editor William Southern wrote in the Examiner that the country was “in the hands of an honorable man, not just a politician.” ([Location 6558](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=6558)) - As the morning papers reported, the war thus far had cost 196,999 American lives, which, as Truman knew, was more than three times American losses in his own earlier war. The new total for American casualties in all categories—killed, wounded, missing, and prisoners—was 899,390, an increase in just one week of 6,481, or an average of more than 900 casualties a day. In the Pacific the cost of victory was rising steadily. ([Location 6620](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=6620)) - But the conclusion, delivered to a hushed chamber, was entirely Truman’s own. His face lifted, his hands raised, in a voice of solemn petition, he said: At this moment I have in my heart a prayer. As I have assumed my duties, I humbly pray Almighty God, in the words of King Solomon: “Give therefore Thy servant an understanding heart to judge Thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this Thy so great a people?” I ask only to be a good and faithful servant of my Lord and my people. ([Location 6728](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=6728)) - After a visit to the White House, the journalist Joseph Alsop wrote to his cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt, in dismay. In Franklin’s time, it had been a great seat of world power. Now the place was like “the lounge of the Lion’s Club of Independence, Missouri, where one is conscious chiefly of the odor of ten-cent cigars and the easy laughter evoked by the new smoking room story.” ([Location 6829](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=6829)) - Truman, for all his reluctance ever to fire anyone, could not tolerate what he called “Potomac Fever,” which he described as a prevalent, ludicrous Washington disease characterized by a swelling of the head to abnormal proportions. ([Location 6845](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=6845)) - Truman considered Hoover and the FBI a direct threat to civil liberties, and he made no effort now, as Roosevelt had, to ingratiate himself with Hoover—as Hoover saw at once and found infuriating. ([Location 6865](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=6865)) - “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police,” Truman would write in his diary after only a month as President. “FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail. . . . This must stop. . . .” ([Location 6871](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=6871)) - On May 11 came two more cables from the prime minister, setting forth his anxieties over the Russians and the future of Europe. “Mr. President, in these next two months the gravest matters in the world will be decided,” he said in the first cable. “I fear terrible things have happened during the Russian advance through Germany to the Elbe,” he said in the second. Russian domination in Poland, eastern Germany, the Baltic provinces, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, a large part of Austria, would constitute “an event in the history of Europe to which there has been no parallel.” ([Location 7169](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=7169)) - “An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front,” Churchill continued, using a new expression for the first time. “We do not know what is going on behind.” ([Location 7182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=7182)) - The President impressed him as someone who knew who he was and liked who he was. ([Location 7234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=7234)) - Stimson was thinking more of the larger historic consequences. At the final meeting of the committee he had said how vitally important it was to regard the bomb not “as a new weapon merely but as a revolutionary change in the relations of man to the universe,” and like O. C. Brewster, he warned that the project might mean “the doom of civilization.” It might be a Frankenstein monster, or it might mean “the perfection of civilization.” ([Location 7344](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=7344)) - Stimson told Truman he was deeply troubled by reports of the devastation brought on Japan by the B-29 fire raids. He had insisted always on precision bombing, Stimson said, but was now informed by the Air Force that that was no longer possible, since in Japan, unlike Germany, industries were not concentrated but scattered among and closely connected with the houses of employees. ([Location 7349](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=7349)) - That winter, in February 1945, during three raids on Dresden, Germany—two British raids, one American—incendiary bombs set off a fire-storm that could be seen for 200 miles. In all an estimated 135,000 people had died. ([Location 7357](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=7357)) - A recent issue of Life carried aerial photographs taken after three hundred B-29 bombers swept such destruction on Tokyo, said Life, as was hitherto visited on the city only by catastrophic earthquakes. The magazine said nothing of how many men, women, and children were killed, but in one such horrendous fire raid on Tokyo the night of March 9–10, more than 100,000 perished. Bomber crews in the last waves of the attack could smell burning flesh. ([Location 7359](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=7359)) - Stimson told Truman he didn’t want to see the United States “outdoing Hitler in atrocities.” But he was also concerned that targets in Japan might become so bombed out by conventional raids that S-1 would have no “fair background” to show its strength, an observation that seems to have struck Truman as so odd, coming on top of Stimson’s previous worry, that he actually laughed, then added that he understood. ([Location 7365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=7365)) - The battle on Okinawa still raged. In the end more than 12,000 Americans would be killed, 36,000 wounded. Japanese losses were ten times worse—110,000 Japanese killed—and, as later studies show, civilian deaths on the island may have been as high as 150,000, or a third of the population. ([Location 7399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=7399)) - By leaving his sickbed to go to Moscow, Hopkins had performed heroic service for his country. Truman was enormously grateful to him and thanked him. Hopkins, who had worked so long and closely with Roosevelt, later told Charlie Ross that it was the first time he had ever been thanked by a President. ([Location 7482](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=7482)) - When he spoke at the huge auditorium of the Reorganized Latter-Day Saints, every seat was filled. “I shall attempt to meet your expectations,” he said humbly. “But do not expect too much of me.” ([Location 7527](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=7527)) - On July 2, he went before the Senate to urge ratification of the United Nations Charter: “It comes from the reality of experience in a world where one generation has failed twice to keep the peace.” ([Location 7532](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=7532)) - Another small frame held a motto of Mark Twain’s, in Twain’s own hand: “Always do right! This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” ([Location 7549](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=7549)) - Morgenthau had a plan to strip Germany of all heavy industry and reduce it to an agricultural land, an idea Truman had never taken seriously and that Stimson ardently opposed, on the grounds that an economically strong and productive Germany was the only hope for the future stability of Europe. “Punish her war criminals in full measure,” Stimson advised Truman. “Deprive her permanently of her weapons. . . . Guard her governmental action until the Nazi-educated generation has passed from the stage. . . . But do not deprive her of the means of building up ultimately a contented Germany interested in non-militaristic methods of civilization.” ([Location 7560](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=7560)) - But Stalin nearly always made a good impression of foreigners. Churchill, who once called Russia “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma,” and who warned both Roosevelt and Truman repeatedly of the Russian menace to Europe, confessed still to liking Stalin the man. ([Location 7842](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=7842)) - That Stalin was also secretive to the point of imbalance, suspicious, deceitful, unspeakably cruel, that he ruled absolutely and by terror and secret police, that he was directly responsible for destroying millions of his own people and the enslavement of many millions more, was not so clearly understood by the outside world at this point as it would be later. Still, the evil of the man was no secret in 1945. ([Location 7851](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=7851)) - In truth, “Uncle Joe” was one of the great mass murderers of all time, as much as Ivan the Terrible (his favorite czar), as much nearly as Adolf Hitler. ([Location 7860](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=7860)) - Stalin responded, “When one man dies it is a tragedy. When thousands die it’s statistics.” ([Location 7867](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=7867)) - (When Stimson went to see the prime minister the next day, to read him Groves’s report, Churchill’s response was more emphatic than Truman’s by far: “Stimson, what was gunpowder?” exclaimed Churchill. “What was electricity? Meaningless. This atomic bomb is the Second Coming in Wrath.”) ([Location 8106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8106)) - Some critics and historians in years to come would argue that Japan was already finished by this time, just as Eisenhower had said and as several intelligence reports indicated. Japan’s defeat, however, was not the issue. It was Japan’s surrender that was so desperately wanted, since every day Japan did not surrender meant the killing continued. In theory, Japan had been defeated well before Truman became President. ([Location 8207](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8207)) - At Potsdam, as Bohlen was to write, “the spirit of mercy was not throbbing in the breast of any Allied official,” either for the Germans or the Japanese. ([Location 8247](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8247)) - Had the bomb been ready in March and deployed by Roosevelt, had it shocked Japan into surrender then, it would have already saved nearly fifty thousand American lives lost in the Pacific in the time since, not to say a vastly larger number of Japanese lives. ([Location 8251](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8251)) - For unlike Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson, or any Commander in Chief since the advent of modern war, Truman had been in combat with ground troops. At the Argonne, seeing a German battery pull into position on the left flank, beyond his assigned sector, he had ordered his battery to open fire, because his action would save lives, even though he could face a court-martial. ([Location 8260](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8260)) - Marshall saw the bomb more as a way to make the invasion less costly. That it might make the invasion unnecessary was too much to expect. “We knew the Japanese were determined and fanatical . . . and we would have to exterminate them man by man,” he would later tell David Lilienthal. ([Location 8271](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8271)) - “It isn’t customary for dictators to train leaders to follow them in power. I’ve seen no one at this Conference in the Russian lineup who can do the job.” ([Location 8383](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8383)) - That same day, July 26, at the island of Tinian in the Pacific, the cruiser Indianapolis delivered the U-235 portion of an atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy.” That evening, Byrnes and Truman decided to release the Potsdam Declaration. Phrased as a joint statement by Truman, Attlee, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, it assured the Japanese people humane treatment. They would not be “enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation.” Once freedom of speech and religion were established, once Japan’s warmaking power had been eliminated and a responsible, “peacefully inclined” government freely elected, occupation forces would be withdrawn. ([Location 8387](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8387)) - However, one secret agreement concerning “military operations in Southeast Asia” was to have far-reaching consequences. He, Churchill, and their combined Chiefs of Staff decided that Vietnam, or Indochina, would, “for operational purposes,” be divided, with China in charge north of the 16th parallel and British forces in the southern half, leaving little chance for the unification or independence of Vietnam and ample opportunity for the return of the French. Truman so informed the American ambassador in China, Patrick J. Hurley, by secret cable the last day of the conference, August 1. At the time, given the other decisions he faced, both military and political, it did not seem overly important. ([Location 8484](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8484)) - Robert Oppenheimer had predicted a death toll of perhaps 20,000. Early reports from Guam on August 8 indicated that 60 percent of Hiroshima had been leveled and that the number of killed and injured might reach as high as 200,000. In time, it would be estimated that 80,000 people were killed instantly and that another 50,000 to 60,000 died in the next several months. Of the total, perhaps 10,000 were Japanese soldiers. ([Location 8576](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8576)) - Later estimates were that seventy thousand died at Nagasaki, where the damage would have been worse had the bombardier not been off target by two miles. ([Location 8595](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8595)) - That night, in his radio address on Potsdam, he made a point of urging all Japanese civilians to leave the industrial cities immediately and save themselves. “I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb,” he told the American people. Its production and its use were not lightly undertaken by this government. But we knew that our enemies were on the search for it. . . . We won the race of discovery against the Germans. Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans. We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us. ([Location 8611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8611)) - In just three months in office Harry Truman had been faced with a greater surge of history, with larger, more difficult, more far-reaching decisions than any President before him. Neither Lincoln after first taking office, nor Franklin Roosevelt in his tumultuous first hundred days, had had to contend with issues of such magnitude and coming all at once. ([Location 8701](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8701)) - But if ever a man had been caught in a whirlwind not of his making, it was he. “We cannot get away from the results of the war,” Stalin had said at Potsdam, and it was just such results that had beset Truman since the night he raised his right hand and took the oath of office beneath the Wilson portrait. The launching of the United Nations, the menacing presence of the Red Army in Eastern Europe, Britain’s bankruptcy, the revealed horrors of the Holocaust, the wasteland of Berlin, the advent of the nuclear age in New Mexico, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki—all were the results of the war, as indeed was his own role now, if one accepted the premise, as most did, that it was the strain of the war that killed Franklin Roosevelt. ([Location 8705](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8705)) - “The only new thing in the world is the history you don’t know,” he would one day tell an interviewer. ([Location 8712](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8712)) - “You can’t have anything worthwhile without difficulties.” Mistakes would be made. No one who accomplished things could expect to avoid mistakes. Only those who did nothing made no mistakes. ([Location 8728](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8728)) - Never had Americans known such prosperity. Yet the certainty that hard times would return was also widespread and deeply ingrained. For a whole generation of Americans, fear of another Depression would never go away. It was coming “as sure as God made little green apples,” fathers warned their families at the dinner table, and next time it would be “bad enough to curl your hair.” ([Location 8767](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8767)) - He asked for national compulsory health insurance to be funded by payroll deductions. Under the system, all citizens would receive medical and hospital service irrespective of their ability to pay. ([Location 8850](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8850)) - Never again could the country count on the luxury of time to arm itself. He wanted mandatory training for one year for all young men between eighteen and twenty, not as members of the armed services, but as citizens who would comprise a trained reserve, ready in case of emergency. ([Location 8853](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8853)) - At a Gridiron Club dinner in December, only half in jest, Truman declared that General William Tecumseh Sherman had been wrong. “I’m telling you I find peace is hell. . . .” ([Location 8890](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8890)) - If his program was steadfastly in the Roosevelt tradition, they could be quite as obdurate as they had been with Roosevelt just before the war, only now without the fear that, like Roosevelt, Truman might take his case to the country with powerful effect. Truman couldn’t “awe them,” and as was said, in American politics “a fearsome respect” usually achieved better results than camaraderie. ([Location 8900](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8900)) - “1946 is our year of decision,” Truman had told the country in a radio broadcast. “This year we lay the foundation for our economic structure which will have to serve for generations.” ([Location 8984](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=8984)) - In the fall, Fred Canfil had given him a small sign for the desk. “The Buck Stops Here,” it said. Canfil had seen one like it in the head office of a federal reformatory in El Reno, Oklahoma, and asked the warden if a copy might be made for his friend the President, and though Truman kept it on his desk only a short time, the message would stay with him permanently. ([Location 9002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9002)) - In the new hit movie The Best Years of Our Lives, which had been written by Roosevelt’s former speechwriter, Robert Sherwood, and was to win nine Academy Awards, actor Fredric March, playing one of the three heroes of the story, three returning veterans of the war, declared bitterly, “Last year it was kill Japs, this year it’s make money,” while at another point his teenage son voiced his fear of the future—of atomic bombs, guided missiles, “and everything.” ([Location 9020](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9020)) - Privately, and somewhat bitterly, Truman mused that perhaps he should add some new Kitchen Cabinet secretaries as well: a Secretary of Inflation to convince everyone that however high or low prices went, it didn’t matter; a Secretary of Reaction, to abolish airplanes and restore ox carts and sailing ships; a Secretary of Columnists, to read all the columns and report to the President on how the country should be run; and a Secretary of Semantics, to supply big words as well as to tell him when to keep quiet. ([Location 9071](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9071)) - Then, in a rare public address in Moscow on February 9, Stalin declared that communism and capitalism were incompatible and that another war was inevitable. He called for increased production in a new five-year plan to “guarantee our country against any eventuality.” Production of materials for national defense were to be tripled; consumer goods, Stalin said, “must wait on rearmament.” Confrontation with the capitalist West, he predicted, would come in the 1950s, when America would be in the depths of another depression. Washington was stunned. Even the liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas called it the “Declaration of World War III.” Since Stalin had decided to make military power his objective, wrote Walter Lippmann, the United States was left with no choice but to do the same. ([Location 9090](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9090)) - The next morning, Tuesday, March 5, as the train raced along the banks of the Missouri River, Churchill made a few final changes in his speech, which was then mimeographed for distribution on board. It was, he said, the most important speech of his career. ([Location 9125](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9125)) - The setting and reception at Fulton were all Truman could have wished for. The day was sunny, the temperature in the high sixties, the little town spruced up and looking exactly as he liked to think of Missouri. This was the America he knew best and that he wanted Churchill to see. ([Location 9130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9130)) - Still, it was his duty, Churchill said, to present “certain facts.” And thus he launched into that part of the speech that was to cause a sensation, giving his own kind of glowering, dramatic emphasis to the indisputable fact that an “iron curtain” had descended in Eastern Europe. ([Location 9146](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9146)) - What was needed in response was a union of the Western Democracies, specifically an English-speaking union of Britain and the United States. For he knew the Russians and there was nothing they so admired as strength, nothing for which they had less respect than weakness, and military weakness most of all. ([Location 9154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9154)) - The immediate reaction in the country, however, was strongly in opposition. Editorials accused Churchill of poisoning the already difficult relations between the United States and Russia. ([Location 9157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9157)) - In Moscow, Stalin said it was a “call to war” with the Soviet Union. ([Location 9160](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9160)) - In an 8,000-word message from the Moscow Embassy that was to become known soon as “the long telegram,” George Kennan, the scholarly chargé d’affaires, had tried to dash any hopes the administration might have of reasonable dealings with the Stalin regime. ([Location 9173](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9173)) - The Kremlin, wrote Kennan, had a neurotic view of the world, at the heart, of which was an age-old Russian sense of insecurity. ([Location 9175](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9175)) - Stripped of the “fig leaf” of Marxism, Kennan said, the Soviets would stand before history “as only the last of a long session of cruel and wasteful Russian rulers who have relentlessly forced their country on to ever new heights of military power in order to guarantee external security for their internally weak regimes.” ([Location 9178](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9178)) - Wallace told him. “You yourself, as Harry Truman, really believed in my speech.” He advised Truman to be far to the left when Congress was not in session, then move to the right when Congress returned. That was the Roosevelt technique, Wallace said. Roosevelt had never let his right hand know what his left hand was up to. “Henry told me during our conversation that as President I couldn’t play square,” Truman would report to Bess, “. . . that anything was justified so long as we stayed in power.” ([Location 9679](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9679)) - In another few weeks Truman’s standing in the polls plunged to a low of 32 percent, nearly 50 points below where it had been the year before. ([Location 9761](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9761)) - The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Congressman Carroll Reece of Tennessee, declared nothing remained of the Democratic Party but three distasteful elements: southern racists, big-city bosses, and radicals bent on “Sovietizing” the country. ([Location 9773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9773)) - The Democratic Party, said Senator Taft, was “so divided between Communism and Americanism that its foreign policy can only be futile and contradictory and make the United States the laughing stock of the world.” ([Location 9777](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9777)) - John Taber, a Republican congressman from Auburn, New York, who had a voice like a bullhorn, warned of Communist infiltration of the universities, even the Army, ([Location 9779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9779)) - The capacity to smile when in trouble is a prime requirement for a politician, as Truman, a career politician, had long understood, and now, as so often before in difficult times, he revealed no sign of anger or gloom. He never complained, never acted sorry for himself, or blamed others. He was as cheerful and optimistic, as interested in others, as pleased to see them and to be with them, as ever. ([Location 9798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9798)) - The Republicans swept the election, carrying both houses of Congress for the first time since before the Depression, an era so distant to most people that it seemed another world. The margin in the House was 246 Republicans to 188 Democrats, in the Senate, 51 to 45. The Republicans took a majority of the state governorships as well, including New York, where Thomas E. Dewey was reelected by the largest margin ever recorded. In one city after another—Chicago, Detroit, Jersey City, New York—Democratic machines went down to defeat. In Kansas City, Truman’s own handpicked candidate for Congress, Enos Axtell, lost to his Republican opponent by 6,000 votes, which Margaret Truman remembered as “mortifying” for her father. ([Location 9811](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9811)) - The Chicago Tribune hailed the Republican triumph as the greatest victory for the country since Appomattox. ([Location 9816](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9816)) - “Probably no President since Andrew Johnson had run out of prestige and leadership more thoroughly than had Harry Truman when he returned almost unnoticed to Washington on that bleak, misty November morning in 1946,” wrote Cabell Phillips. ([Location 9827](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9827)) - But he had written also that every farmer “thinks he’s as good as the President or perhaps a little better,” meaning that by the old Jeffersonian faith in which he had been raised, what was ordinary grass-roots American was as good as the best. ([Location 9840](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9840)) - Of course, conflicts would arise between a Republican Congress and a Democratic President. That was to be expected. But he, Harry Truman, would be guided by a simple idea: “to do in all cases . . . without regard to political considerations, what seems to me to be for the welfare of all our people. . . .” ([Location 9914](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9914)) - As one of his staff at the State Department later wrote, Marshall did not possess the intellectual brilliance of someone like Acheson, or the gift of eloquence, but he could distinguish what was important from what was unimportant, and this made him invaluable. ([Location 9996](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=9996)) - But it was Marshall’s rock-bound sense of duty, his selflessness and honesty that Truman especially prized. “He was a man you could count on to be truthful in every way, and when you find somebody like that, you have to hang on to them.” ([Location 10006](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10006)) - Under Marshall all that changed. “He gave a sense of purpose and direction. His personality infected the whole Foreign Service,” Bohlen remembered. “There was greater clarity in the operation . . . than I had ever seen before . . . [and] Marshall never forgot, as Byrnes did, that Truman was President.” ([Location 10023](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10023)) - Asked by American reporters why he had gone to the monument, Truman said simply, “Brave men don’t belong to any one country. I respect bravery wherever I see it.” ([Location 10179](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10179)) - The speech setting forth what became known as the Truman Doctrine was delivered in the House Chamber before a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, March 12, 1947, beginning a few minutes past one o’clock. ([Location 10255](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10255)) - At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms. ([Location 10266](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10266)) - Truman, to head off such attacks from conservatives in both parties, had by this time accepted the view of a special commission—and of Attorney General Clark and the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover—that a program of loyalty reviews was necessary. The whole concept troubled him. In notes he made of a conversation with the President in May 1947, Clark Clifford wrote: “[He is] very strongly anti-FBI. . . . Wants to be sure to hold FBI down, afraid of ‘Gestapo.’ ” ([Location 10325](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10325)) - J. Edgar Hoover wanted authority to remove anyone from public service whose views were politically suspect. Such people, Hoover warned, might well influence foreign policy in a way that could “favor the foreign country of their ideological choice.” ([Location 10332](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10332)) - “The long tenure of the Democratic Party had poisoned the air we Republicans breathed,” remembered Martin much later. “Fear of Communist penetration of the government was an ugly new phenomenon. Suspicion of the State Department was rife. We were disturbed and bewildered by the new power of the Soviet Union.” ([Location 10336](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10336)) - On Friday, March 21, 1947, nine days after his address to Congress, Truman issued Executive Order No. 9835, establishing an elaborate Federal Employees Loyalty and Security Program. And he did so with misgivings. ([Location 10342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10342)) - Roosevelt, in 1942, had empowered the Civil Service to disqualify anyone from government employment where there was a “reasonable doubt of loyalty,” and by executive order Roosevelt later assigned the Justice Department and FBI to check on the loyalty of government workers. ([Location 10343](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10343)) - Anyone found to be disloyal could no longer hold a government job. Dismissal could be based merely on “reasonable grounds for belief that the person is disloyal,” yet the term “disloyal” was never defined. Moreover, those accused would be unable to confront those making charges against them, or even to know who they were or what exactly the charges were. In addition, the Attorney General was authorized to draw up a list of subversive organizations. ([Location 10350](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10350)) - But in an interview with the journalist Carl Bernstein, Clifford was considerably more blunt: It was a political problem. [Clifford told Bernstein] Truman was going to run in ’48, and that was it. . . . My own feeling was there was not a serious problem. I felt the whole thing was being manufactured. We never had a serious discussion about a real loyalty problem. . . . the President didn’t attach fundamental importance to the so-called Communist scare. He thought it was a lot of baloney. But political pressures were such that he had to recognize it. . . . There was no substantive problem. . . . We did not believe there was a real problem. A problem was being manufactured. . . . ([Location 10365](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10365)) - Though it seemed so at the time, and would often be so presented in later accounts, the Truman Doctrine was not an abrupt, dramatic turn in American policy, but a declaration of principle. It was a continuation of a policy that had been evolving since Potsdam, its essence to be found in Kennan’s “Long Telegram” and in the more emphatic Clifford-Elsey Report. It could even be said that it began with Averell Harriman’s first meeting with Truman before Potsdam. But, be that as it may, the Truman Doctrine would guide the foreign policy of the United States for another generation and more, for better or worse, despite any of the assurances by Acheson and Vandenberg that this was not the intent. ([Location 10387](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10387)) - “You don’t sit down and take time to think through and debate ad nauseam all the points,” George Elsey would say, in response to latter-day critics. “You don’t have time. Later somebody can sit around for days and weeks and figure out how things might have been done differently. This is all very well and very interesting and quite irrelevant.” ([Location 10400](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10400)) - A measure of the Truman manner and outlook was the way he conducted his regular morning meeting with the staff, one of the most important events of their day, for the information and sense of direction provided, but also for its overall atmosphere. ([Location 10435](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10435)) - And all of them, it seems, admired his sense of history, which they saw as one of his greatest strengths. “If a man is acquainted with what other people have experienced at this desk,” Truman would say sitting in the Oval Office, “it will be easier for him to go through a similar experience. It is ignorance that causes most mistakes. The man who sits here ought to know his American history, at least.” ([Location 10471](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10471)) - He disliked the terms “progressive” and “liberal.” What he wanted was a “forward-looking program.” That was it, a “forward-looking program.” ([Location 10484](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10484)) - “Gentlemen, enlisted men may be entitled to morale problems, but officers are not,” Marshall would tell those who served with him. “I expect all officers in this department to take care of their own morale. No one is taking care of my morale.” Morale improved steadily. ([Location 10517](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10517)) - It was Truman’s long-held conviction that men make history. Clearly in the spring of 1947, with the Marshall Plan following on the heels of the Truman Doctrine, things of immense importance happened principally because a relative handful of men made them happen, almost entirely on their own, against great odds, and in amazingly little time. ([Location 10522](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10522)) - With Truman’s approval, Marshall decided to make a speech at Harvard, where he had been invited to receive an honorary degree at commencement exercises on Thursday, June 5, an idea Acheson opposed for the reason that no one ever listened to commencement speeches. ([Location 10558](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10558)) - More than once in his presidency, Truman would be remembered saying it was remarkable how much could be accomplished if you didn’t care who received the credit. ([Location 10585](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10585)) - A Marshall Plan that failed would assuredly have become a Truman Plan. ([Location 10589](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10589)) - One member of the Policy Planning Staff, Louis J. Halle, later said of Truman that he had in Marshall a soldier of the highest prestige, in Acheson a man of both commanding intellect and fierce personal integrity who at critical moments, like Truman, was willing to risk his own career rather than abstain from doing what he conceived to be right, and in Kennan a man of Shakespearean insight and vision. Among Truman’s own strongest qualities was “his ability to appreciate these men and to support them as they supported him.” ([Location 10590](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10590)) - Officially it was called the European Recovery Program, or ERP, and the total sum requested was colossal indeed, $17 billion. ([Location 10613](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10613)) - On July 25, Congress passed Truman’s sweeping National Security Act, legislation he had sent to the Hill in February and that would mean mammoth change for the whole structure of power in Washington. Its primary purpose was to unify the armed services under a single Department of Defense and a single Secretary of Defense, a goal Truman had been striving for since taking office. It also established the Air Force as a separate military service, set up a new National Security Council, and gave formal authorization to the Central Intelligence Agency. ([Location 10629](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10629)) - Always be nice to the people who can’t talk back to you. I can’t stand a man or woman who bawls out underlings to satisfy an ego. ([Location 10680](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10680)) - But he must not dwell on the past. “You see age is creeping up on me. Mamma is ninety-four and a half because she never lived in the past.” ([Location 10717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10717)) - As Margaret would write in memory of her “country grandmother” some years later, “Everything had changed around her, but Mamma Truman had never changed. . . . Her philosophy was simple. You knew right from wrong and you did right, and you always did your best. That’s all there was to it.” ([Location 10730](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10730)) - Marshall and Lovett were in yesterday and went over the European situation from soup to nuts with me. If it works out as planned it will cost us about 16 billion over a four-year period. . . . This amount of 16 billion is just the amount of the national debt when Franklin took over. He ran it up to 40 odd and then the war came along and it is 257 but we can’t understand those figures anyway. ([Location 10876](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10876)) - In the summer of 1947, in the journal Foreign Affairs, George Kennan had published an article in which he introduced the idea of “containment,” an expression already in use at the State Department by then. Kennan recommended “a policy of firm containment [of Russia] . . . with unalterable counterforce at every point where the Russians show signs of encroaching”—until the Soviet Union either “mellows” or collapses. The article was signed simply “X,” but the identity of the author was known soon enough, and in another few months Walter Lippmann issued his own strong rebuttal to the concept in a book called The Cold War, an expression Bernard Baruch had used earlier in a speech, but that now, like the Iron Curtain, became part of the postwar vocabulary. ([Location 10922](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10922)) - The Marshall Plan was voted on by Congress in April 1948, almost a year after Marshall’s speech at Harvard, and passed by overwhelming majorities in both houses. It was a singular triumph for the administration, “the central gem in the cluster of great and fruitful decisions made by President Truman,” as Arthur Krock would write. Indeed, it was to be one of the great American achievements of the century, as nearly everyone eventually saw. ([Location 10949](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=10949)) - In the long line of Republicans who had occupied the White House, he admired but two—Lincoln, for his concern for the common man; Theodore Roosevelt, for his progressive policies. To Truman, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were the giants of the century, and he had no choice, he felt, but to fight for the Democratic heritage that had been passed on to him. ([Location 11042](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11042)) - Further, Truman announced he would be sending Congress a special message on civil rights. “Our first goal,” he said, “is to secure fully the essential human rights of our citizens.” The distress among southern Democrats was considerable. ([Location 11056](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11056)) - special, confidential report had been prepared on “The Politics of 1948,” a document of thirty-two single-spaced typewritten pages prepared by a young Washington attorney and former Roosevelt aide named James A. Rowe, Jr., who had been talking with labor leaders, professional politicians, and newspaper people. It was a political forecast, with suggestions based, as Rowe stressed, solely on appraisal of “the politically advantageous thing to do.” ([Location 11118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11118)) - And with some editing and added refinements by Clifford and George Elsey it was perceived as, if not exactly a blueprint for the Democrats in 1948, then a guide to navigation. ([Location 11122](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11122)) - That Rowe’s authorship was so brushed aside then and later distressed Rowe very little. Such was the nature of the system. “This is, as you know, a typical and acceptable White House staff technique,” he would write to a political scholar years later, “and one which I followed in the days when I was Administrative Assistant to President Roosevelt.” Who got the credit was not the point. They were all there to serve the President. Roosevelt especially had preferred people working for him to be equipped with “a passion for anonymity.” ([Location 11124](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11124)) - “The businessman has influence because he contributes money. The liberal exerts influence because he is articulate.” ([Location 11132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11132)) - But more striking was Rowe’s mistaken confidence that the solid South would remain loyal to the Democratic Party. It was, he said, inconceivable that any policies initiated by the administration, no matter how liberal, could so alienate the South it would revolt in an election year. “As always the South can be considered safely Democratic. And in formulating national policy it can be safely ignored.” ([Location 11164](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11164)) - Fifty-two southern Democrats in Congress pledged themselves to fight any civil rights program in the Democratic platform and, by implication, any Democratic candidate for President who advocated such heinous liberal ideas. ([Location 11177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11177)) - Truman felt pulled in several directions. Like the great majority of Americans, he wanted to do what was right for the hundreds of thousands of European Jews, survivors of the Holocaust, who had suffered such unimaginable horrors. His sympathy for them was heartfelt and deep-seated. As senator, at the mass meeting in Chicago in 1943, he had said everything “humanly possible” must be done to provide a haven for Jewish survivors of the Nazis. ([Location 11221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11221)) - The two ardent champions of the Jewish cause on the White House staff were Clark Clifford and David K. Niles, Truman’s special assistant for minority affairs. ([Location 11232](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11232)) - And his own reading of ancient history and the Bible made him a supporter of the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine [Clifford remembered], even when others who were sympathetic to the plight of the Jews were talking of sending them to places like Brazil. He did not need to be convinced by Zionists. In fact, he had to work hard to avoid the appearance of yielding to Zionist pressure. . . . I remember him talking once about the problems of displaced persons. “Everyone else who’s been dragged from his country has someplace to go back to,” he said. “But the Jews have no place to go.” ([Location 11251](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11251)) - So, in effect, Palestine and the destiny of Europe’s displaced Jews was another of those results of World War II—like the bomb and the presence of the Red Army in Eastern Europe—that had been left for Truman to face. ([Location 11314](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11314)) - Jews everywhere favored partition. The Arab states were vehemently opposed. ([Location 11318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11318)) - The more attention given to the issue, the more divisive it became, dividing Jews from Arabs, British from Americans, and more and more in Washington threatening to divide the White House from the State Department, ([Location 11323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11323)) - Behold, I have set the land before you: go in and possess the land which the Lord swear unto your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give unto them and to their seed after them. ([Location 11618](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11618)) - The new Jewish state—the first Jewish state in nearly two thousand years—was declared on schedule at midnight in Jerusalem, 6:00 P.M. in Washington, Eleven minutes later at the White House, Charlie Ross announced de facto recognition by the United States of Israel, as it was to be called. ([Location 11665](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11665)) - He felt great satisfaction in what he had been able to do for the Jewish people, and was deeply moved by their expressions of gratitude, then and for years to come. When the Chief Rabbi of Israel, Isaac Halevi Herzog, called at the White House, he told Truman, “God put you in your mother’s womb so you would be the instrument to bring the rebirth of Israel after two thousand years.” “I thought he was overdoing things,” remembered David Niles, “but when I looked over at the President, tears were running down his cheeks.” ([Location 11698](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11698)) - Courage, the saying goes, is “having done it before,” ([Location 11754](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11754)) - Different economic systems could live side by side and in peace, he said, but only providing one side was not bent on destroying the other by force. ([Location 11853](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11853)) - America has faith in people. It knows that rulers rise and fall, but that the people live on. ([Location 11861](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=11861)) - To be a professional in politics required patience, often great patience, and the strength not to take things too personally, and Truman and Barkley were two veteran professional politicians. ([Location 12106](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=12106)) - As he had from the start of his “crusade,” Wallace refused to repudiate his Communist support. He would not repudiate any support that came to him, he said, “on the basis of interest in peace.” Senator Taylor stressed the distinction between “pink” Communists and “red” Communists, telling reporters that the pink variety wished to change the American system through evolution rather than revolution, and that they would support the Progressive cause. In contrast, the red variety would be backing Dewey on the theory that revolution would inevitably follow another Hoover-style administration. ([Location 12191](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=12191)) - “You stayed at home in 1946 and you got the 80th Congress, and you got just exactly what you deserved,” he said at Chariton. “You didn’t exercise your God-given right to control this country. Now you’re going to have another chance.” ([Location 12459](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=12459)) - “Understand me, when I speak of what the Republicans have been doing. I’m not talking about the average Republican voter,” ([Location 12468](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=12468)) - Nobody knows better than I that man for man, individually, most Republicans are fine people. But there’s a big distinction between the individual Republican voter and the policies of the Republican Party. Something happens to Republican leaders when they get control of the Government . . . Republicans in Washington have a habit of becoming curiously deaf to the voice of the people. They have a hard time hearing what the ordinary people of the country are saying. But they have no trouble at all hearing what Wall Street is saying. They are able to catch the slightest whisper from big business and the special interests. ([Location 12470](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=12470)) - “You don’t get any double talk from me,” he declared from a brightly decorated bandstand first thing in the morning sunshine at Sparks, Nevada. “I’m either for something or against it, and you know it. You know what I stand for.” What he stood for, he said again and again, was a government of and for the people, not the “special interests.” ([Location 12504](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=12504)) - “In 1946, you know, two-thirds of you stayed home and didn’t vote. You wanted a change. Well, you got it. You got the change. You got just exactly what you deserved.” “Now use your judgment. Keep the people in control of the government. . . .” “I not only want you to vote for me but I want you to vote for yourselves, and if you vote for yourselves, you’ll vote for the Democratic ticket. . . .” ([Location 12511](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=12511)) - At one point, he had called Roosevelt truly “the indispensable” man—“indispensable to the ill-assorted, power-hungry conglomeration of city bosses, Communists, and career bureaucrats which now compose the New Deal.” ([Location 12646](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=12646)) - “Smile, governor,” a photographer had called at a campaign stop in 1944. “I thought I was,” said Dewey. A remark attributed to the wife of a New York Republican politician would be widely repeated. “You have to know Mr. Dewey well,” she said, “in order to dislike him.” ([Location 12681](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=12681)) - To help guarantee a Dewey victory, J. Edgar Hoover was secretly supplying him with all the information the FBI could provide. Dewey and Hoover were old friends and got along well. Hoover had put the resources of the bureau at Dewey’s disposal months before, in the expectation that when Dewey became President he would name Hoover as his Attorney General. “The FBI helped Dewey during the campaign itself by giving him everything we had that could hurt Truman, though there wasn’t much,” remembered an assistant to Hoover, William C. Sullivan, who was one of those assigned to cull the files. ([Location 12718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=12718)) - Our government is made up of the people. You are the government, I am only your hired servant. I am the Chief Executive of the greatest nation in the world, the highest honor that can ever come to a man on earth. But I am the servant of the people of the United States. They are not my servants. I can’t order you around, or send you to labor camps or have your heads cut off if you don’t agree with me politically. We don’t believe in that. . . . ([Location 12768](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=12768)) - Truman, for the first time, hit hard at the Republicans for the hypocrisy of their “high-level” campaign—the Dewey speeches: So in making their speeches they put them on a very high level, so high they are above discussing the specific and serious problems which confront the people. . . . Republican candidates are apparently trying to sing the American voters to sleep with a lullaby about unity. . . . They want the kind of unity that benefits the National Association of Manufacturers . . . the real estate trusts . . . [the] selfish interests. . . . They don’t want unity. They want surrender. And I am here to tell you people that I will not surrender. . . . ([Location 12787](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=12787)) - Some things are worth fighting for. . . . We must fight isolationists and reactionaries, the profiteers and the privileged class. . . . Our primary concern is for the little fellow. We think the big boys have always done very well, taking care of themselves. . . . It is the business of government to see that the little fellow gets a square deal. . . . ([Location 12796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=12796)) - Now, whatever you do, go to the polls early on election day, and don’t waste any time. Just take that ticket and vote the Democratic ticket straight down the line, and you will be helping your country, and helping yourselves. You will not only be voting for me . . . but you will be voting for yourselves and your best interests. And I believe that is exactly what you are going to do. ([Location 12872](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=12872)) - this was no time for a President to be away from his duties, and this President had been gone sixteen days. Unwittingly, wrote Lippmann, Truman had proven how little he mattered. ([Location 12892](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=12892)) - The Republican candidate and the Republican Congress do not trust the people. They just work along at their old problem of trying to fool the people into voting for the interests of the few. They try to do it without telling you what they think. I have been out among the people now for nearly a month. I believe you have got a right to know what I think, and I have been telling you what I think. ([Location 13085](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=13085)) - Of the writers polled, not one thought Truman would win. The vote was unanimous, 50 for Dewey, 0 for Truman. “The landslide for Dewey will sweep the country,” the magazine announced. Further, the Republicans would keep control in the Senate and increase their majority in the House. The election was as good as over. ([Location 13126](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=13126)) - “I know every one of these 50 fellows. There isn’t one of them has enough sense to pound sand in a rat hole.” Truman put the magazine aside and made no further mention of it. “It just seemed to bounce right off of him,” Clifford remembered. ([Location 13136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=13136)) - As would be pointed out, Truman’s margin of victory in such key states as Ohio, Illinois, and California had been narrow. He won Ohio by a bare 7,000 votes, Illinois by 33,000, California by 17,000. A switch in any two of these three states would have left him with less than a majority in the Electoral College and thrown the decision to the House of Representatives. Had Dewey won in all three states, then Dewey would have eked out victory in the electoral vote and thus won the presidency, while Truman finished in front in the popular tally. A cumulative shift of just 33,000 votes apportioned to the three states would have done it. ([Location 13454](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=13454)) - The managing editor of Time, T. S. Matthews, took the position that there was nothing new about the press being wrong on elections. The press was often out of touch with the popular will. I think the press has been pretending to much more wisdom (or is it smartness?) than it had any right to claim, and has been getting away with murder for some time [Matthews wrote to Luce]. The plain fact now appears to be that (as far as politics is concerned, at least) the press hasn’t known what time of day it is for years. ([Location 13552](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=13552)) - But to the managing editor of Life, Joseph J. Thorndike, Jr., the problem centered on bias. “Of course, we did not intentionally mislead our readers,” he wrote. But I do think that we ourselves were misled by our bias. Because of that bias we did not exert ourselves enough to report the side we didn’t believe in. We were too ready to accept the evidence of pictures like the empty auditorium at Omaha and to ignore the later crowds. We were too eager to report the Truman “bobbles” and to pass over the things that were wrong about the Republican campaign: empty Dewey speeches, the bad Republican candidates, the dangers of Republican commitments to big business. I myself had many misgivings about these things but thought that what the hell, the election was already decided, we could get after the Republicans later. . . . ([Location 13558](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=13558)) - Often in informal conversation, Truman would say there were probably a million men in the country who could make a better President than he, but that this was not the point. He, Harry Truman, was the President. “I have the job and I have to do it and the rest of you have to help me.” ([Location 13666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=13666)) - The emphasis would be on the distribution of knowledge rather than money. ([Location 13760](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=13760)) - Johnson was doing what Truman had asked for. From his experience on the Truman Committee, Truman was convinced that huge sums were being wasted in defense spending. He had a basic distrust of generals and admirals when it came to spending money. ([Location 13961](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=13961)) - The country, Truman assured reporters, was not going to hell. They ought to read some history. America had been through such times before. “Hysteria finally died down, and things straightened out, and the country didn’t go to hell, and it isn’t now.” ([Location 13983](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=13983)) - To Truman the State Department was “a peculiar organization, made up principally of extremely bright people who made tremendous college marks but who have had very little association with actual people down to the ground.” They were “clannish and snooty,” he thought, and he often felt like firing “the whole bunch.” Yet no such feelings applied to the Secretary. Acheson was doing a “whale of a job.” Truman hoped he would never leave the government. ([Location 14200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=14200)) - That Acheson had an exceptional capacity for hard work, that he also subscribed to the philosophy that civilization depended largely on a relatively small number of people who were willing to shoulder the hard work necessary, contributed greatly to Truman’s regard for him. Acheson believed in clear, orderly thinking. He knew there were no easy answers, no quick remedies. With the world as it was, he said, Americans would have to get over the idea that the problems facing the country could be solved with a little ingenuity or without inconvenience. ([Location 14237](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=14237)) - At a press conference on January 7, 1950, he presented his annual budget—a big green book the size and weight of a New York telephone directory—and answered questions about it. The total figure was $42.4 billion, which included an increase of $1 billion for domestic programs. But most, some $30 billion, was to pay for wars past and for the present national defense, listed to cost $13.5 billion. It was a budget that did not balance. The estimated deficit was $5 billion, which would mean a national debt by 1952 of $268.3 billion. ([Location 14300](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=14300)) - Fear gripped Washington and the country. “The air was so charged with fear,” remembered Herb Block, “that it took only a small spark to ignite it.” And the spark was McCarthy. ([Location 14419](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=14419)) - When Block, in one of his cartoons in the Post, labeled an overflowing barrel of tar “McCarthyism,” another new word entered the language along with the H-bomb. ([Location 14420](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=14420)) - It would be said of Harry Truman that without consulting Congress or the American people, he had rushed to judgment; that “as Hermann Goering, when he heard the word culture, reached for his gun, Harry Truman when he heard the word problem, reached for a decision.” But the last thing Truman wanted was a war in Korea, or anywhere, and angry as he may have been over the attack, as determined as he obviously was to do what he felt had to be done, he had nonetheless, so far, made no irrevocable move. ([Location 14697](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=14697)) - “Appeasement leads only to further aggression and ultimately to war,” he would tell the nation in an historic radio and television broadcast the evening of July 19, still unwilling to call what was happening in Korea a war, but an “act of aggression” by the Communist leaders. ([Location 14784](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=14784)) - The demarcation line of the 38th parallel had no basis in Korean history, geography, or anything else. It had been settled on hastily in the last week of World War II, as a temporary measure to facilitate the surrender of Japanese troops—those north of the line had surrendered to the Soviets, those south, to American forces. The decision had been made late one night at the Pentagon by then Colonel Dean Rusk and another young Army officer named Charles Bonesteel, who picked the line of latitude 38 degrees north because it had the advantage of already being on most maps of Korea. ([Location 14805](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=14805)) - “But Truman was . . . just a symbol of the system,” Oscar Collazo would insist in explanation. “You don’t attack the man, you attack the system.” ([Location 15317](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=15317)) - When a general complained about the morale of his troops, observed George Marshall, the time had come for the general to look to his own morale. ([Location 15712](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=15712)) - “The only politics I have,” MacArthur told a cheering throng, “is contained in a simple phrase known to all of you—God Bless America.” ([Location 16037](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=16037)) - “When I joined the Army, even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams,” MacArthur said, his voice dropping as he began the famous last lines, the stirring, sentimental, ambiguous peroration that the speech would be remembered for. The hopes and dreams have long since vanished. But I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barracks ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that, “Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.” And like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away—an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye. ([Location 16094](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=16094)) - Bradley, his first day in the witness chair, testified with unexpected vigor and delivered a telling blow with what would be the most quoted line of the hearings. MacArthur’s program to step up and widen the war with China, Bradley said, would “involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” ([Location 16141](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=16141)) - When in June, MacArthur set off on a speaking tour through Texas, insisting he had no presidential ambitions, he began to sound more and more shrill and vindictive, less and less like a hero. He attacked Truman, appeasement, high taxes, and “insidious forces working from within.” His crowds grew steadily smaller. Nationwide, the polls showed a sharp decline in his popular appeal. The old soldier was truly beginning to fade away. ([Location 16153](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=16153)) - MacArthur did truly believe that he was above the President. MacArthur himself later told the historian Samuel Eliot Morison that a theater commander should be allowed to act independently, with no orders from the President, the United Nations, or anyone; then, to be sure that there could be no mistaking his meaning, MacArthur repeated the statement. ([Location 16176](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=16176)) - If “victory” in Korea meant risking a world war—a war of atomic bombs—Truman would settle for no victory in Korea. That was the line he had drawn. There was a substitute for victory: it was peace. And he would stand by his policy of limited war for that specific objective. ([Location 16187](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=16187)) - To those at the White House who saw him daily, at all hours and often under extremely trying circumstances, he was still the Truman of old, hardworking, cheerful, never short with them, never petty. He seemed to have some kind of added inner balance mechanism that held him steady through nearly anything, enabling him not only to uphold the fearful responsibilities of his office and keep a killing schedule, but to accept with composure the small, silly aggravations that also went with the job. It was a level of equanimity that at times left those around him hugely amused and even more fond of him. ([Location 16222](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=16222)) - Once, while paying a visit to the office of the engineer in charge of the White House renovation, General Glen E. Edgerton, whose desk was in a shack on the South Lawn amid a cluster of temporary buildings put up when the work began, Truman had paused to read a framed verse on the wall. Written for Edgerton by a plumbing contractor named Reuben Anderson, it so appealed to Truman that he read it aloud: Every man’s a would be sportsman, in the dreams of his intent, A potential out-of-doors man when his thoughts are pleasure bent. But he mostly puts the idea off, for the things that must be done, And doesn’t get his outing till his outing days are gone. So in hurry, scurry, worry, work, his living days are spent, And he does his final camping in a low green tent. “Hurry, scurry, worry, work!” Truman sighed. “That’s the way it is.” ([Location 16234](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=16234)) - To Truman, Churchill was the greatest public figure of the age, as he often said. To Dean Acheson, this was an understatement. One would have to go back four centuries to find his equal, Acheson insisted. “What Churchill did was great; how he did it was equally so. . . . Everything felt the touch of his art—his appearance and gestures. . . .” ([Location 16540](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=16540)) - As Ethel Noland and others had observed, history for Truman was never just something in a book, but part of life, and of interest primarily because it had to do with people. ([Location 16557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=16557)) - When the stones showing the original stonemasons’ marks were uncovered, he ordered a large number of them removed, some to be reset in the walls of the restored ground-floor kitchen, the rest to be sent to the grand lodges of the Masonic orders of every state, as a token of the bond between Freemasonry and the founding of the nation. ([Location 16639](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=16639)) - He held to the old guidelines: work hard, do your best, speak the truth, assume no airs, trust in God, have no fear. ([Location 18746](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC0VVQ&location=18746))