away with his message of appeasement. In mid-September, Dad wrote a gloomy memorandum to himself:
Forrestal, Bradley, Vandenberg [the air force general, not the senator], Symington brief me on bases, bombs, Moscow, Leningrad, etc. I have a terrible feeling afterward that we are very close to war. I hope not.
On October 3, my father made a daring decision. As President George Washington had done in an earlier crisis (with England), Dad decided to send the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court on a personal mission to rescue the peace. The Chief Justice was his old friend, Fred Vinson, for whom my father had enormous respect. “I hoped that this new approach would provide Stalin an opportunity to open up,” he said. He wanted to convince the Russian dictator that the United States was sincere in its desire for a peaceful world, but Dad had no intention of attempting to prove this sincerity by disarming or surrendering at any point on the globe where the Russians were challenging us.
If Vinson could have been launched on his mission immediately, a great initiative toward world peace might have been created. But my father felt that it was important to explain the government’s intentions to the American people. So he asked Charlie Ross to get him a half hour of network time to make this explanation. In the course of negotiating with the networks, Charlie had to explain the purpose of this speech.
Charlie was fond of picturing the White House as a gigantic sieve and this time the metaphor was all too exact. In a matter of hours, the Vinson mission was leaked to the newspapers and flung into the political arena, before my father could even begin to defend it. The opposition denounced it as a political gesture, and Secretary of State Marshall, in Paris, was more than a little unsettled to discover that Dad was making such a major departure in foreign policy without consulting him. Of course, he had no intention of doing any such thing. He had planned to brief General Marshall thoroughly on the mission, before announcing it to the public. But now he had to consider the General’s feelings, and the allegations floating around Washington that the President had lost confidence in him. So he summoned General Marshall home for a personal conference and then, with deep regret, announced to the nation that the Vinson mission was canceled.
The decision was in line with my father’s fundamental philosophy of the presidency. He never undercut a subordinate or let one down. He always backed the man he had chosen to perform an important job (unless of course he failed to perform it). He considered General Marshall one of the greatest men in American history, and so he deliberately chose, at the height of this searing campaign, to accept what seemed at the time the public humiliation of withdrawing the Vinson proposal rather than embarrass his Secretary of State.
Throughout October, the crowds continued to grow in size. A few of the reporters began to comment on this fact. Charles T. Lucey of the Scripps-Howard chain wrote on October 15: “The polls and the pundits say Harry Truman hasn’t a chance to be returned to the White House, but you’d never guess it from the way people come out to see him. . . .” Like most of the reporters, however, Lucey attributed this phenomenon to the President’s high office, and his “entertainment value.”
By now, we had gone back and forth across the country once and were in the midst of our second swing. Dad had spoken to almost 4 million people. He had talked with politicians and plain citizens just about everywhere. On October 13, as the “Truman Special” was thundering from Duluth to St. Paul, he gave George Elsey, one of his aides, a state-by-state breakdown of the results as he now saw them. He predicted he would win with 340 electoral votes, 108 for Dewey, and forty-two for Thurmond. The prediction was amazingly accurate - and it was done without the aid of a single pollster. He even
Forrestal, Bradley, Vandenberg [the air force general, not the senator], Symington brief me on bases, bombs, Moscow, Leningrad, etc. I have a terrible feeling afterward that we are very close to war. I hope not.
On October 3, my father made a daring decision. As President George Washington had done in an earlier crisis (with England), Dad decided to send the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court on a personal mission to rescue the peace. The Chief Justice was his old friend, Fred Vinson, for whom my father had enormous respect. “I hoped that this new approach would provide Stalin an opportunity to open up,” he said. He wanted to convince the Russian dictator that the United States was sincere in its desire for a peaceful world, but Dad had no intention of attempting to prove this sincerity by disarming or surrendering at any point on the globe where the Russians were challenging us.
If Vinson could have been launched on his mission immediately, a great initiative toward world peace might have been created. But my father felt that it was important to explain the government’s intentions to the American people. So he asked Charlie Ross to get him a half hour of network time to make this explanation. In the course of negotiating with the networks, Charlie had to explain the purpose of this speech.
Charlie was fond of picturing the White House as a gigantic sieve and this time the metaphor was all too exact. In a matter of hours, the Vinson mission was leaked to the newspapers and flung into the political arena, before my father could even begin to defend it. The opposition denounced it as a political gesture, and Secretary of State Marshall, in Paris, was more than a little unsettled to discover that Dad was making such a major departure in foreign policy without consulting him. Of course, he had no intention of doing any such thing. He had planned to brief General Marshall thoroughly on the mission, before announcing it to the public. But now he had to consider the General’s feelings, and the allegations floating around Washington that the President had lost confidence in him. So he summoned General Marshall home for a personal conference and then, with deep regret, announced to the nation that the Vinson mission was canceled.
The decision was in line with my father’s fundamental philosophy of the presidency. He never undercut a subordinate or let one down. He always backed the man he had chosen to perform an important job (unless of course he failed to perform it). He considered General Marshall one of the greatest men in American history, and so he deliberately chose, at the height of this searing campaign, to accept what seemed at the time the public humiliation of withdrawing the Vinson proposal rather than embarrass his Secretary of State.
Throughout October, the crowds continued to grow in size. A few of the reporters began to comment on this fact. Charles T. Lucey of the Scripps-Howard chain wrote on October 15: “The polls and the pundits say Harry Truman hasn’t a chance to be returned to the White House, but you’d never guess it from the way people come out to see him. . . .” Like most of the reporters, however, Lucey attributed this phenomenon to the President’s high office, and his “entertainment value.”
By now, we had gone back and forth across the country once and were in the midst of our second swing. Dad had spoken to almost 4 million people. He had talked with politicians and plain citizens just about everywhere. On October 13, as the “Truman Special” was thundering from Duluth to St. Paul, he gave George Elsey, one of his aides, a state-by-state breakdown of the results as he now saw them. He predicted he would win with 340 electoral votes, 108 for Dewey, and forty-two for Thurmond. The prediction was amazingly accurate - and it was done without the aid of a single pollster. He even
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