Truman's Brief for His Presidency
JR, ADOLF A. BERLE
WRITERS and WRITING Truman's Brief for His Presidency Years of Trial and Hope: 1946-1952. By Harry S. Truman. Doubleday. 594 pp. $5.00. Revieived by Adolf A. Berle Jr. Professor of law,...
...He improvised the machinery of the "cold war...
...In December 1945, disintegration in China led to his sending General Marshall there...
...In current politics, one notes Truman's comment that "Stevenson now knows as well as anyone that politics is a highly organized effort on the part of a great many people.' Truman suggests (as indeed Stevenson has conceded) that there was too little coordination in the 1952 campaign between the Stevenson organization and the regular Democratic machines...
...Curiously, the most telling argument against MacArthur is not made: the fact that after the Inchon landing he might have established an impregnable line across the narrow waist of Korea and dominated North Korea from that base with relatively little risk...
...he built the great regional alliances...
...The record shows that the Truman Administration was well informed from the outset...
...In Moscow, Ambassador Averell Harriman had no illusions...
...Truman's account of the Korean War and of his dealings with General MacArthur will probably be reckoned the most controversial part of the book-if we except his occasional criticisms of men he disliked...
...at the date of writing, no one knows whether NATO can survive...
...Discussion in both cases was chiefly to assure that his colleagues would come to the same opinion-perhaps flattered into thinking that they had influenced his solution...
...Truman was, for example, committed to Stevenson as Democratic candidate very early in 1952...
...Many things can be said against President Truman, some with truth...
...General Van Fleet was sent to assist...
...President Truman threw down the gauntlet in Korea, and the result was war...
...No one has yet accused Truman of not being a politician...
...American diplomacy made it clear that the accompanying Russian drive to establish Soviet arms on the Dardanelles would be resisted...
...as Truman sees it...
...From here out is the familiar record...
...This was real diplomacy...
...if Truman had any, they died early...
...Rut in this age of air warfare neither strategist nor diplomatists have developed a technique of "limitation" which does not put the army in the field at a disadvantage...
...A peculiar merit of a book like this is precisely its exposition of the relation between statesmanship and politics...
...President Truman decided to resist...
...Not until January 1919 did they open negotiations to halt the blockade-through the dubious device of an interview with an American newspaperman-as a result of the success of the American airlift...
...The British, at Winston Churchill's initiative, had opposed this by force of arms...
...This reviewer would suggest, from a hard-boiled point of view, that it is well to be sure your local organization is in your corner...
...To do this, it was necessary for Soviet diplomacy to prevent any peace conference of the kind that ended World War I, and to take maximum advantage of the shattered economy and social structure in the areas of conflict...
...History winnows out personalities...
...As he rightly observes, a President must be that if he is any good-and so no one will suspect Truman of forgetting that his second volume appears at a strategic moment in an election year...
...policy in the bitter seven years following the close of World War II...
...This may explain why he played so closely with O'Dwyer and Tammany Hall in New York...
...the first essential to victory...
...MacArthur thereafter, in violation of instructions, made his own conflicting views public: Truman then fired him...
...The fact of the matter is that President Truman's record in eight years of the Presidency was a first-rate one...
...Mac-Arthur pushed north, fanning out along the vast Yalu frontier, where concentrated Chinese armies caught his forces dispersed...
...Here is also a political brief for the authors conduct of the Presidency...
...No politician will be surprised to learn that Truman's first consideration is whether his man can win...
...O'Dwyers Tammany of course, was not in Mr...
...Clearly, a new chapter is opening...
...There is more to the history of this than appears in President Truman's volume, and we do not yet have the true picture of the Soviet reaction in its early phases...
...To be President of the United States is to be lonely, very lonely at times of great decisions...
...There is no possibility of knowing, now, what the success of such a move might have been...
...One major member-the Soviet Union-had already decided under Stalin's leadership to betray that alliance, and overtly or covertly to seize territory at the expense of her allies...
...Stalin eventually decided to fight it...
...climb on the wagon of a lost cause...
...President Truman built up NATO (he might have added that he used President Roosevelt's inter-American system as a model...
...on March 12, 1947, he stated his position: "It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures...
...The writer thinks there may have been a chance, but it is only surmise...
...But then, President Eisenhower claimed to make peace in Korea-and no one can truthfully say that peace exists there or that the Asian crisis has been resolved...
...Would any President have handled the matter differently...
...It is far too little realized that no act of high statesmanship in American democracy can be dissociated from the political manipulation required to make it stick...
...To historians, writing decades later, the politician is commonly forgotten...
...This writer knows of no history covering a cold war...
...Truman's political narrative is no less fascinating...
...But though politicians are frequently not statesmen, in a democracy no statesman has avoided being a politician...
...Here is an immense amount of valuable historical record-more than in the first volume...
...probably no one in America really knows...
...This was the famous "Truman Doctrine...
...He has an added right because a powerful amount of political propaganda against him has been circulated by the Republican party apologists, which derives force from the fact of present Republican power...
...It is also a document in current politics...
...What followed is obscure, and this volume sheds no light on it...
...So, before it is too late, Truman proposes to record as much of the story of his occupancy of the White House as he is able to tell...
...He failed (in retrospect, anyone would have failed), and the only visible alternative would have been to intervene with troops on a huge scale...
...His book suggests that he has already settled on one of these two as his candidate for the 1956 nomination, his choice turning on a cold estimate of their respective chances of winning...
...Marshall was sent to help work this into a viable Chinese government...
...the "cold war" was out in the open...
...Little consideration was given to actually terminating the nominal cooperation...
...There, swift use of the United Nations blocked Russian troops in northern Iran...
...The one other responsibility-to give all-out backing to liberal groups in China opposed to both Communism and Chiang Kai-shek absolutism-apparently was not considered...
...your politician when he nominates does not, if he can help it...
...It adds value to the book as a statement of the point of view of the man most responsible for U.S...
...Truman's bul in Thomas E. Dewey's...
...Necessarily, the combination detracts from the value of the book as history...
...In hindsight...
...President Truman inherited, at the close of the war, a worldwide alliance...
...Truman was increasingly convinced that MacArthur was developing a policy of his own rather than following Washington instructions...
...In one respect, probably, the problem surpassed anyone's ability to deal with it...
...As the game played out, the Marshall Plan did become, as Truman accurately states, one of the greatest contributions to the peace of the world, or at least to preventing the cold war from extending revolution and Soviet seizure to Western Europe...
...I think, the strongest point against MacArthur is military...
...Again, the result is a man's own presentation of himself and a document for the historical record...
...But Britain threw in the towel in early 1947, laying the problem on the American doorstep...
...Truman thinks "Russia was caught off guard by the Marshall Plan," and this may prove to be the fact...
...The assignment was an impossible one...
...Truman thought no solution would be achieved by fighting more wars, and the United States had no intention of sending troops to the Asian mainland...
...Truman had (in the view of this reviewer, rightly) decided on a "limited" war...
...So the story goes through the complicated years that followed...
...Politicians who do business with him would do well to read the book...
...only the statesman emerges...
...In that year, too, the Russians were making trouble in Iran...
...But no one can say that he did not turn in a record as brave and as impressive as any contemporary statesman of his time...
...Professor of law, Columbia University...
...Probably not...
...he successfully defended the position in Europe...
...Regularity" needs to be realistically applied...
...Truman has a right to do this as an historical figure and as the active politician he still is...
...As these included all Western Europe and most of Asia, the theater was enormous...
...The outcome was a civil war in which the Communists were successful, with resultant Soviet ascendancy on the Asian mainland...
...To back it up, ten naval vessels were sent to Greece...
...Domestic politics and foreign affairs are always unfinished stories...
...Such a picture is subject to qualifications-as is any self-portrait-by other observers...
...Fair enough...
...eventually, the Soviet Union settled for the Berlin blockade...
...The "Marshall Plan" was proposed...
...much of 1946 was devoted by the President to establishing his own grip on the Government, but he was nevertheless coping meanwhile with Russian aggression throughout the world...
...Assistant Secretary of State, 1941-46 "I have often thought" writes former President Truman, "how much is lost to us because so few of our Presidents have told their own stories...
...The Soviet Union promptly turned to Greece, where a powerful and well-armed Communist revolution was being assisted from Bulgaria and Yugoslavia...
...Truman considered this impossible...
...Being autobiography, this volume presents the author as he sees himself...
...These last, to be sure, were primarily Truman's men rather than Stevenson's...
...A brief for MacArthur has already been filed by the MacArthur side: Truman naturally presents here his own viewpoint...
...The Presidency of the United States carries with it a responsibility so personal as to be without parallel...
...we shall find that out later...
...Truman thinks President Eisenhower's 1952 campaign promise to intervene personally and end the war weakened our hand in bringing negotiations to a successful conclusion-the most telling historical point vet made against the Republican campaign of that year...
...Few disinterested persons will differ with Truman's conclusion...
...though that fact was not generally known until the Democratic Convention assembled...
...he attempted to establish eve-to-eye understanding...
...Actually...
...Plenty of people-many of them unfriendly-have presented President Truman to the United States as they saw him...
...Truman pays high tribute not only to Stevenson but to Harriman, an old member of his team...
...A "formal" agreement between Chiang Kai-shek and the Communists had been worked out, as Truman believed, by Pat Hurley...
...It is said that the war was not successful, though South Korea is still there...
...It carries forward all the successes and all the failures of the past ten years...
...legislation authorizing financial and military help was passed...
...In a manner of speaking, the Old Master here gives away his hand...
...As a rule, he made up his mind first and discussed afterward, in politics as in policy-making...
...There is a technique for military history and for diplomatic history...
...Nor is there any doubt that the loyalty of the regular local political organization is...
...By then, the issue was whether the President or the General made policy...
...One suspects (this being March 1956) that he has already made up his mind about a candidate this year...
...The best that can be done, probably, is what President Truman and his literary advisers have done: to give the narrative episode by episode, as he saw it...
...if he failed in Asia, no one can say that there was real possibility of success...
...That point requires answer if answer is possible, for Truman states a powerful prima facie case...
...There is evidence (not included by President Truman) that the Soviet Army seriously considered invading Western Europe...
Vol. 39 • March 1956 • No. 13
