Affection and Trust: The Personal Correspondence of Harry S. Truman and Dean Acheson, 1953-1971 Read online

  Harry Truman with Dean Acheson in the Oval Office on December 21, 1950, discussing Acheson’s meetings with foreign and defense ministers of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) countries in Brussels, Belgium.

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2010 by The Truman Library Institute

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  All photographs are used courtesy of The Truman Library Institute.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Truman, Harry S., 1884–1972.

  Affection and trust : the personal correspondence of Harry S. Truman and Dean Acheson, 1953–1971 / by Harry S. Truman and Dean Acheson ;

  edited by Ray Geselbracht and David C. Acheson.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59462-4

  1. Truman, Harry S., 1884–1972—Correspondence. 2. Acheson, Dean, 1893–1971—Correspondence. 3. United States—Politics and government—1945–1953—Sources. 4. United States—Foreign relations—1945–1953—Sources. I. Acheson, Dean, 1893–1971. II. Geselbracht, Raymond H. III. Acheson, David C. IV. Title.

  E814.A4 2010

  973.918—dc22

  2010016904

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Editorial Note

  Introduction by David McCullough

  1. February to December 1953

  A New Outlet for “the Truman-Acheson Front”

  2. January 1954 to April 1955

  Eisenhower’s Foreign Policy – Musings on History and Government – Truman’s Memoirs – A Serious Operation – The Truman Library – Visits in Kansas City and Washington – Testimony and Tough Political Talk

  3. June to August 1955

  A Blunt Critique of Truman’s Memoirs

  4. August 1955 to September 1956

  The Potsdam Papers – “Intellectual Prostitutes” – Margaret Is Married – A Trip to Europe

  5. November 1956 to December 1957

  Foreign-Policy and Civil-Rights Crises – A Meeting in Washington – More Politics – The “S”

  6. January 1958 to June 1959

  Meetings in New Haven, Kansas City, and Washington, D.C. – A Political Season – A President Who Doesn’t Know Where He’s Going – Three Foreign-Policy Crises – Truman Is “Steamed Up” – A Grand Birthday Celebration

  7. June 1959 to November 1960

  A Candidate for 1960 – George Marshall’s Death – The U-2 Incident – Sit-Down Strikes – A “Treaty on ‘Don’ts’ ” – John F. Kennedy and the Democratic Convention – The Campaign

  8. February 1961 to October 1971

  JFK and LBJ – An Operation and a Fall – More Memoirs – Deaths in the Family – The Last Letter

  Acknowledgments

  List of Letters

  Editorial Note

  Minor style changes in punctuation and capitalization have been made to these letters without notice. Titles of books and periodicals have been italicized. Dates to the letters and other items have been regularized by being placed in the top right position in a month-day-year format.

  Harry Truman, Dean Acheson, and Chief Justice Fred Vinson in the Oval Office on January 21, 1949, at Acheson’s swearing-in as Secretary of State.

  Introduction

  The younger and taller of the two eminent Americans, the former Secretary of State, stood six foot one and, to judge by his exquisitely tailored suits and neatly trimmed, ever so slightly upturned mustache, he might have stepped from the pages of an English fashion magazine of the day. The other, older man, the former President of the United States, was a good three inches shorter and about as unmistakably midwestern American as anybody could be.

  Where one, the patrician Dean Gooderham Acheson, had attended Groton, Yale, and the Harvard Law School, the other, Harry S. Truman, was the only President of the twentieth century who had no more than a high-school education. Truman was the son of a farmer; Acheson, the son of an Episcopal bishop. Acheson had begun his rise in the profession of the law under the tutelage of the learned Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Truman owed much of his success in the rough-and-tumble of Missouri politics to the notorious boss Tom Pendergast. Acheson was known to suffer fools hardly at all, Truman had long since become a master of the art. Truman, as he said, liked a little H2O flavored with bourbon, Acheson preferred his martinis extremely dry.

  At the time the correspondence in these pages began, early in 1953, both men had come to regard themselves as oldsters, to use Truman’s word. He was sixty-nine, Acheson, sixty, and they seemed still, as they had at the summit of their careers, as incongruous a pair as might be imagined, separated now not only by the thousand miles between Independence, Missouri, and Washington, D.C., but by so much else that was obvious—that is, if one chose to judge only by the obvious.

  For as conspicuously different as they were in background, appearance, and manner, they were two principled men who lived by the same code, and, importantly, each had the capacity to see beyond what met the eye. Truman had understood at once how much more there was than the fashion plate to Acheson. Acheson had seen from the beginning the rare common sense and underlying greatness of the plainspoken supposed nobody who had taken the place of the fallen Franklin Roosevelt.

  Some similarities between the two were as marked as the differences. Both had a small-town background. (Acheson came from Middletown, Connecticut.) Both loved books—and history and biography in particular. (The breadth of Harry Truman’s reading—the fact that he read Latin for pleasure, for example—came as a surprise to those who did not know him.) Both liked a morning walk at a good clip and neither had the least ability to speak any language other than his own. If Acheson paid inordinate attention to how he looked, Truman was not far behind with his bow ties, his invariably well-pressed suits, crisp shirts, and insistence that five points of a fresh handkerchief be showing just so from his breast pocket. The failed haberdasher, as his critics liked to label him, loved clothes and from boyhood had cared very much about how he looked.

  In explanation of Acheson’s attention to wardrobe, his son, David, has written that it was not vanity so much as part of “a perfectionist drive that touched everything he did.” To a degree that could be said of Truman as well.

  Both men were devoted to their wives and families. Each had an active sense of humor and was capable of laughing at himself. And they were both profound patriots. An unfailing loyalty to their country was bedrock to their code and one of their strongest bonds.

  They were the same in their dislike of cheap political preening and hypocrisy, not to say the use of public office primarily as a means of self-aggrandizement. But at the same time, both relished politics, and Acheson quite as much as Truman. Many of his happiest hours, Acheson once confided to a reporter, were spent in the back rooms of the Capitol working with the leaders of both parties. “Some of my worst enemies on the Hill were my best friends,” he said.

  They were alike in their exceptional vitality and their belief in straightforward leadership. They deplored the tendency in politicians to avoid hard choices. They had tried always to make decisions in the
best interest of the country in the long run, and to adhere to decisions once made. Though they made mistakes, both showed again and again uncommon courage in the face of adversity, each drawing strength from the other’s resolve.

  As mentioned in the pages that follow, an English writer once observed that a great play could be written about Truman and Acheson. How right he was!

  In an interview with the writer Merle Miller, shortly after returning to stay in Independence, Truman said, “I tried never to forget who I was, where I came from, and where I would go back to.” And on the morning of his first full day at home, in February 1953, when asked by the NBC correspondent Ray Scherer what was the first thing he planned to do, Truman said he was going to “carry the grips up to the attic,” a remark the country took to heart, because it seemed so perfectly in character, so like a man glad to be back where he came from.

  In truth, being off the world stage and taking up the part of a plain citizen again was no easy thing for Truman, or for Acheson either, as they were to confide in their remarkable exchange of letters.

  The correspondence began on February 7, 1953, with Truman telling Acheson, “I hope that we will never lose contact,” and continued for fully eighteen years, until Acheson’s death in 1971. There has been nothing like it in our history, except for the post-presidential exchange, known as the Retirement Series, between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, as Acheson was quick to point out, telling Truman that the Adams-Jefferson letters were among “the most glorious” he had ever read. What Truman and he wrote had more to do with the bonds of friendship, less with political philosophy than what the two Founders had taken up with each other. Acheson wrote at greater length than Truman, but then Acheson loved to write and had an exceptional gift for expressing himself.

  Above all, it seems, each wanted the other to know how much their friendship mattered. To a large degree this remarkable collection of letters is a testament to friendship.

  Most of the letters were handwritten, and on two sides of the paper. The handwriting of both of the correspondents is clear and straightforward. Truman writes a bit larger and the lines are more forward moving in spirit. Acheson’s writing is tighter, perfectly neat and trim. They had both learned well in school to maintain a legible hand, to dot is and cross ts.

  Much is said about the particular activities each had taken up in his new life. Acheson was devoting large amounts of his time to Yale, as a member of the Yale Corporation, the ruling board of the university. Though he continued to live in Washington on P Street in Georgetown, his repeated trips to Connecticut and the time spent there seem to have been his way of going back where he came from. In the spring of 1958, he arranged for Truman to come to New Haven for several days as a visiting lecturer. Truman was an enormous hit with the students. “I hope you can understand how very much I enjoyed my visit to Yale,” he writes Acheson afterward. “I have never had a better time anywhere. It is what I have always wanted to do.…”

  Truman writes of his part in the creation of the Truman Library in Independence. And then there were his memoirs, about which he and Acheson both have much to say. “The cursed manuscript” proved an awful ordeal, the work far greater and more demanding than Truman had ever reckoned. He had come home from the White House without a salary or pension, and would refuse to serve on any corporate boards or to take fees for lobbying or commercial endorsements. But the offer of a publisher’s advance for an autobiography he thought an acceptable source of income.

  He desperately needed Acheson’s editorial help, and the help Acheson provided, as his critical comments on the subject so abundantly document, was no easy matter for either of them. Once, in 1951, at the start of his seventh year serving under President Truman, Acheson had written, “We have always spoken the truth to one another and we always will.” And there could be no waiving of that rule now, however awkward or outright painful that truth might be.

  At one point, responding to the manuscript of the memoir in a letter dated June 27, 1955, Acheson warns Truman about the excessive use of the first person singular and refers to a page where the pronoun I appears eleven times. In a following letter, Acheson says bluntly that two entire chapters of the memoir are “pretty heavy going”: “Somehow I don’t think that a general exposition of budgetary principles adds a great deal to your autobiography.”

  Truman was being assisted by a cluster of “helpers,” and the manuscript kept growing ever larger. Acheson read every page, carefully, thoughtfully, questioning facts and doing his part to weed out redundancies and such excess lumber as budgetary principles. The book was too much the work of others, Acheson saw, and far too long-winded. One of Acheson’s letters, written on July 18, 1955, could serve as a model of expert editorial questioning and guidance. “Was the final meeting with Marshall re China on December 14 or 15?” he asks at one point. “My recollection is the latter.” “The CIA is not the Presidential advisor on the effects of policies. This is the State Department,” he reminds Truman, adding, “The illustration does not illustrate; it confuses.” The hours of thought and effort that went into this one letter can be imagined, not to say the discomfort Acheson must have had over hurting Truman’s feelings. Most unfortunate and infuriating, he writes, were those pages that seemed more like what Horatio Alger might have said than Harry Truman. Your ghost writers are doing you in, Acheson is telling him. And then follows a superb, two-paragraph Acheson synopsis of Truman’s first term which is one of the golden moments in the collection.

  At times Acheson’s criticism verges on the caustic. But Truman took it all in stride. “Damn it, Dean,” he later writes, “you are one man who can say to me what you please any time, anywhere on any subject.”

  When reading these letters between old friends it is well to pause now and then and remember that these are the two who established the Truman Doctrine of assistance to Greece and Turkey, who worked together in the creation of the Marshall Plan, who faced the decision of whether to go into Korea. They had worked together continuously, their respect and admiration for each other growing steadily, over the seven years of Truman’s presidency, during which Acheson served first as Undersecretary of State, then for four years as Secretary of State. Acheson saw himself as “the faithful first lieutenant” to Truman, whom he called “the captain with the mighty heart,” echoing a line from Edwin Markham’s poem about Lincoln. In 1946 he was the sole member of the President’s official “family” who came to the railroad station to greet Truman on his return to Washington after the humiliating defeat for the Democrats in the off-year elections. It was something Truman would never forget, and he had stood by Acheson when Acheson was under continuous attack from Senator Joe McCarthy. Truman considered George Marshall the greatest American of the time, but regarded Acheson, as he says in the letters, as his greatest Secretary of State.

  I first encountered the post-presidential letters between Truman and Acheson more than twenty years ago, while reading in the Research Room at the Truman Library. I was in the last stages of work on a biography of Truman and these particular letters provided some of the most pleasurable hours of all. I remember being especially struck by Acheson’s enthusiasm for the Adams-Jefferson correspondence. It was the first I had heard of that classic exchange and it started me on the path that led to my biography of Adams. (In writing history, as in history, one thing does very often lead to another.)

  That the “oldster” letters of Truman and Acheson are now at last in print and in such handsome fashion is a grand step forward. They provide interest and amusement aplenty, as well as further human delineation of two Americans who are so immensely important for us to understand and appreciate.

  One of my favorite samples of vintage Truman is the good-humored observation, in his letter of January 28, 1954, that while “the past had always interested me for use in the present … I’m bored to death [when writing his memoirs] with what I did and didn’t do nine years ago.”

  But Andrew Johnson, James Madison, even old
Rutherford B. Hayes I’m extremely interested in as I am King Henry IV of France, Margaret of Navarre, Charles V, Philip II of Spain, and Charlie’s Aunt Margaret.

  Wish to goodness I’d decided to spend my so called retirement putting Louis XIII, Gustavus Adolphus, Richelieu and five tubs of gold together instead of writing about me and my mistakes. Anyway I made no mistake in my Great Secretary of State.

  I love, too, what Acheson wrote in 1955 to Bess Truman after he and his wife, Alice, visited Independence, staying as guests in the Truman home at 219 North Delaware Street, in that it expresses so much that countless others have felt after spending time in Independence, and I am one of them: “It made us feel all over again the strength and grandeur of the fabric of this America of ours.”

  For two who had such a sense of history and who had played such outsized parts in history, they rarely seem to be writing for the benefit of history, but to each other only. As old friends do, they report on birthdays, anniversaries, and their travels, they exchange photographs. Still the arena of politics is never far from their thoughts. They talk candidly of Adlai Stevenson, Churchill, John Kennedy, Sam Rayburn, and Lyndon Johnson. (Kennedy is “immature,” Nixon, “dangerous,” Truman writes.) Both get “steamed up” over Eisenhower’s foreign policy, and especially during the 1960 presidential election, one feels all the old political adrenaline rising in them once again.

  Another of my favorite observations is one about the preoccupation with “image” in Washington under the new Kennedy administration. “This is a terrible weakness,” Acheson says. “It makes one look at oneself instead of at the problem. How will I look fielding this hot line drive to short stop? This is a good way to miss the ball altogether.”

  Nor does Truman take lightly the increasingly conspicuous role of big money in politics. “I am told that the Dam Democrats at Kennedy’s suggestion are putting on a $1,000 [a plate] dinner! If and when that happens we’ll quit being democrats with a little d! … To hell with these multimillionaires at the head of things.”