Mark Malcomson
Truman: The Challenges of the Post-War World

Mark Malcomson - Truman: The Challenges of the Post-War World

- Brilliant, welcome everybody. My name’s Mark Malcolmson, I’m based here in London, and welcome everybody. Some of you, I think, will have come a couple of weeks ago to my first class on Harry Truman, and this is a separate class, but builds on. So initially, I’m going to kind of reflect a little bit and have a bit of what I would call the equivalent of the previously on “West Wing.” That’ll voiceover to remind those of you who were in the class two weeks ago what we discussed, but also just to give a bit of context for those who are new to this particular class, and give you a chance to kind of talk about context. So Harry Truman, I think, is one of the great, fascinating presidents in American history. There is nothing in my view that gives you a clue of just what a great president he ends up being. Prior to him ascending to the presidency, he had been unlucky, bankrupt. He’d lost elections in 1924, he’d done this, he’d done that. There were lots of backwards and forwards in his career, none of which augured well for him to be a great president. Also, happenstance is hugely important. It’s something I kind of believe that’s true for most presidents. There are, in my view, only kind of two presidents in the last, you know, 100 plus years in the 21st century, who you might say are inevitable. The ones that looked like all the way along, that they would make it to the top job. Most presidents are skilled, ‘cause obviously they’ve been skilled to get to the top job. But they are lucky, they’re lucky because of the opponents that they have, they’re lucky because of timing.

They’re lucky because of the personal politics of their party at the particular time. And also they can be lucky about their opponents, their opponent’s party situation, et cetera. And then there’s, as Harold McMillan famously said to John Kennedy, “What’s the difference between a good leader and a great one?” “It’s events, my dear boy, events.” And I think events play a huge part in the success of a president, or success of somebody to get to the presidency. Just so I can explain, the two people that I think were, inverted commas, inevitable presidents, people that were just waiting for so long for them to run for the president and then they won spectacularly well, it was Herbert Hoover and was Dwight Eisenhower. Both of them had been touted as a future president, and were courted by both parties because of their calibre. Lots of other presidents, often who’ve ended up being great presidents, it is that combination of skill, but chance, luck, happenstance, and events. Interestingly, Eisenhower I think lives up to his expectations. And yet, he kind of, you know, he’s expected to be a really good president. And then he achieves that, and he keeps the peace in the 1950s. Whereas Herbert Hoover, who had been trailed right from the late 1910s into the 1920s as a future president, he’d worked in Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet under a Democrat, and then had been under the Republicans. It was, you know, he was expected for at least a decade to be a great president. And then within a year of him ascending to the presidency by a landslide, things fall apart.

Things fall apart very, very badly for him because he is not equipped to become the president that deals with the Great Depression. And he makes a number of bad decisions that compounds what was already a very difficult situation. So inevitable presidents are one thing, and in my view, they’re quite rare. Whereas, you know, lots of other presidents ascend, and kind of you can see the path. Truman is interesting because actually, you look at it at various points. Right up until 1944 when he’s chosen as a compromise candidate as Franklin Roosevelt’s last vice president, he’s the third of Franklin Roosevelt’s presidents, vice presidents, he’s just in the right place at the right time. He gets chosen by the machine in Missouri to be the senatorial candidate in 1934, when three other people decline to run… It was a safe Democrat seat, three other people declined to run for that seat, and he is literally fourth best. If one of those other three people had been chosen, he would’ve probably remained a local politician in Missouri. He might have made it to the House of Representatives, possibly, but he certainly wouldn’t have been in the Senate and he certainly wouldn’t have been in contention to become that compromise candidate in 1944 with Roosevelt as the president. So I think you look at all of that and you think, wow, he was lucky and in the right place. But also, you just look at his character generally, and there’s very, very little that brings you to think even if he falls by luck into the presidency, he is going to be at best mediocre, and probably not great.

And yet, if you look and there’s a comment in the box about, why would I call him a great president? Well, it’s not just me. If you look at the breadth of his presidency and the challenges of his presidency, it’s one of the things I will look at over the next hour, is he dealt with an enormously difficult inbox. He was dealing with the end of the second World War, and he was dealing then with the aftermath of the second World War and the beginning of the Cold War. And he leaves office incredibly unpopular. He has made a lot of very difficult decisions, some of them right, some of them wrong, but he’s made very concerted effort to make decisions right the way through that he thinks are best for America. And what’s interesting is it’s, you know, every few years you’ll get these surveys of American historians and it’s ranked by ethics, by achievements, by foreign policy, by domestic policy. Do you believe, how good was each of the 45 presidents? And Roosevelt is right there at the top, the top three all the time. It’s always Washington, Lincoln, and FDR who are the top three. And then the remaining kind of numbers, four to 10, move around a bit. Now, what’s interesting is, is Truman has steadily been rising from the teens, right up, pretty much in the top five. He’s now the five, six, occasionally seven, depending on which survey is done. And he’s come in hindsight to be seen as a really, really good president in terms of how he left America.

And I think there are some examples of presidents who leave their country in very good shape, or what appears to be good shape, but it doesn’t hold. So I would give an example is Calvin Coolidge. Calvin Coolidge left voluntarily, he didn’t run for a second full term. He’d inherited the office when his president, Warren Harding, had died in 1923. He completed his term, and then he completed a full term of his own and stood down in 1928 by his own choice. Everybody looked at him, he would’ve won by a landslide for reelection. But he kind of just said, right, I’m going for a quiet life, I’ve done my job, I’m now done. If you’d have stopped the clock at the beginning of March when he handed over to Herbert Hoover in 1929, you would’ve said, incredibly successful president. Done well, you know, peace abroad, prosperity at home. Two of the big deciders of greatness of American presidents. And yet, by the end of that year, basically a lot of the policies that he had followed had ended up with the beginning of the Wall Street crash and the Great Depression. So stopping the clock, depending on where you stop the clock around a president, is always very interesting. And for me, Harry Truman, when you stopped the clock in January, 1953, on the 20th of January, when he handed over to Dwight Eisenhower, you’d have gone, nah, that didn’t end well. Leaves office unpopular, didn’t run for a final term, which he could have done.

And he’s repudiated in a sense because Eisenhower, the Republican, wins by a landslide against Truman’s chosen candidate, Adlai Stevenson. But as you reflect more and more about the decisions, particularly the Cold War decisions, you’re looking at a whole different situation. The other bit that I think is interesting for Truman, and I would like to draw parallels here. I think, you know, it’s a very inexact science, but if you look at the 20th and the 21st century, you often get parallels between presidents and prime ministers. Do not press this to oblivion because actually, you can say so and so didn’t match so and so. Yeah, Theresa May and Donald Trump’s overlap was not really a great likes of minds. But you have joined the second World War, two enormous kind of titans. You have Churchill over here, and you have FDR in America. They are both massive characters and massive wartime leaders. One dies in office, one gets massively repudiated by the electorate in Britain, Churchill gets thrown out in 1945’s election. And they are both replaced by very unassuming, very smaller than life characters in some way. You’ve got Clement Attlee in the UK, you’ve got Harry Truman in the United States, and both of them are quiet men, unassuming. Churchill famously nastily said, about Attlee who was his very loyal deputy prime minister in the wartime coalition, “An empty car pulled up and Clement Attlee got out.” Yet they inherited a world of pain, a world of mess, of trying to reconstruct the world after the devastation of the second World War.

And at the same time, deal with Stalin and the Soviet Union and the creation of the Cold War. And they did it in a very methodical, a very unshowy way. And both of those, Attlee and Truman, history has been kind to because they tended to do things that, on balance, did well to set the world up for that period. So that’s where we are. As I said, Truman becomes president 82 days after becoming vice president. He gets chosen in 1944 to run as Roosevelt’s running mate. Nobody cares 'cause they’re voting for Roosevelt, then he becomes vice president. Those 82 days are dull, boring, he only meets the president twice. He has no preparation for the job he’s about to undertake. And then on April the 12th, 1945, he gets a phone call when he’s in Congress hanging out with his mate, Sam Rayburn, who’s speaker of the house. And gets called back to the White House, and is met by Eleanor Roosevelt who tells him that the president is dead. And he assumes arguably the most difficult job in the world, having woefully been unprepared by his boss. I mentioned last time is one of the things you’ve got to judge his boss by, is whether he prepared for his successors. I mean, in the corporate world and the charitable world, people look at leaders partly from what they do, but also how they prepare for the next person. Truman’s preparation by FDR was woeful in my view, whereas FDR is considered to be one of the great presidents. But on that one particular line, ensuring continuity of government, ensuring that his successor was prepared, he just was either in denial. For whatever reason, he didn’t work on that.

And that left Harry Truman taking on the world in an incredibly difficult time with, as I said, the inbox from hell. So what I’m going to do, just briefly now as we put some slides up, I’m going to kind of talk you through why I think Truman faced so many challenges. He becomes president towards the tail end of the second World War, but he’s far from done and dusted. The war in Europe is going well for the allies, it is coming towards its end. And Truman, it’s fine. That’s actually, in a sense, the war in Europe isn’t a problem. What follows the war in Europe, in Europe, is a big issue. However, Europe is no longer that big problem. And yet, what he does have on his plate is the war in Asia. Now, the war in Asia is going well for the allies, but nowhere near well enough. The progress against the Japanese is very slow. The British and the Americans are fighting the Japanese, the Soviet Union is yet to join the battle in Asia. And they are making progress, but it’s at huge cost. And basically, the calculations that we’ll talk about in a couple of minutes are around, how do you bring that war to a close? And how long could that war go on for? So, one theatre closing down, the other theatre still going.

And whilst going well, the consequences of that theatre of war are going to be hugely problematic. One of the first things that Roosevelt has to do is go to one of the triumvirate kind of conferences that had become the model during the second World War. Now, the players had all been the same for essentially three, four years. You had had Stalin, you had had Roosevelt, and you had had Winston Churchill. And what happens in Potsdam is there’s a huge change of the characters there. Stalin, the generalissimo, comes in and yet he is now the senior partner. What you see is Truman arrives very, very early in his presidency to take the place of FDR. You also see a very chaotic scene. He arrives as the president. What you see with regard to the British is that the beginning of the conference, Churchill as prime minister, and enduring very early on in the conference, it becomes very clear that Churchill has lost the general election by a massive landslide. And he’s replaced by Clement Attlee, who is now leader of the Labour Party and now Prime Minister. So you have a complete change of cast around Stalin, and you’ve got lots of different views about the Potsdam conference. Were the two new boys completely outdone by the sly old fox, Stalin? Did Stalin basically take advantage that neither Truman nor Attlee were as experienced as the previous people, et cetera? And I think there’s an argument to be made there, but I think also you have to look at Potsdam in light of the previous conferences. Potsdam, to be honest, was something of a tidy up.

And lots of the big decisions had already been made about what the post-war world was going to look like, and particularly in Yalta. So Yalta had been the last big conference, and that’s where the partition of Europe, where lots of the big decisions had been made. So in a sense, you could argue quite convincingly that FDR, who was very ill by this point, who was in the final year of his life, he’s making decisions that are suboptimal. And essentially, Truman makes the best fist of them possible. And I think that’s kind of one of the big debates around this post-war period, the finishing of Europe, and then also moving on to Asia. One of the things I think is interesting about Potsdam is that a day into arriving there, Truman gets noticed that the Los Alamos tests have worked and the atomic bomb is a real threat. Now, it’s very important to understand that when Truman became president, he knew nothing of the atomic bomb. In fact, the British were more appraised than actually the new incoming president. And in fact, you could also argue, given Stalin’s extensive spy network and informants in America, he probably knew exactly what was going on. Truman confers with Attlee, tells him the British had been very involved with the project. And he then decides that he’s going to sort of tell Stalin.

And in the sense of sort of tell Stalin, he kind of says, well, we’ve got this big new weapon. Now, Stalin’s very nonchalant about it, but it’s kind of been come to known afterwards that Stalin already knew. His sources have said that the Americans have got this atomic weapon that has amazing power. But it’s Truman’s first outing on the major stage. Remember, he is mostly a domestic politician. He’s been a senator for 10 years, he’s been vice president for 82 days. Before that, he was a local county judge, which was like a leader of a local council in Missouri. So he’s had some executive experience, but mostly around roads and dams and drains. Senators famously don’t run anything, apart from their own office and committees. Unlike governors, they don’t have executive power. So Truman comes in, having to deal with a huge amount of stuff about running a country. And the only thing that he’s really run before is Jackson County, Missouri, which to be honest, to the best of my knowledge, has not got its own foreign policy and it tends not to have to negotiate with dictators who control the other half of the world. I think he acquits himself well, I think Attlee acquits himself well, given the hand that they are played and the strong position that Stalin is in. Just one thing, I think I’d smuggled one personal photograph here. Couple of years ago, I chaired a conference in Potsdam. And as part of the beginning of the conference, we all went to Cecilienhof, which is where the Potsdam conference took place. It’s kind of a beautiful, old kind of royal house.

And the chairs are very prominent, and I just thought it’s kind of interesting. They look kind of different, but they’re so important to that image that we have of Potsdam and making the peace of the second World War that I thought I’d just throw that one in there. He comes back to America, he’s dealing with the decommissioning of, or the start of decommissioning of, many, many millions of American soldiers. And I think one of the things we forget is that whilst all the foreign policy stuff that was going on, he was also facing the real concerns, American people going, actually we think of the 1930s with the Great Depression. The great depression was starting to improve, but was still far from fixed when the second World War broke out. And there was a real concern with all of these men coming back to America, that this would cause unemployment. So Truman is having to deal with domestic issues, which I’m not going to spend much time on here, to try and balance what’s going on and try and ensure really good employment, making sure that America does not slip back into recession and depression. That basically there are jobs for people to come back to, because otherwise you’re going to have civil unrest. You’re also going to have a fairly major problem with the fact that a lot of African Americans had fought very successfully during the second World War, had played and enormous part in the war, and they were coming back, particularly to the south of America where they had fought for freedom.

And yet in the Southern states, segregation was as prominent as it had been before. So all of those things are happening kind of on the domestic front. Go back to the major point, which is, Truman had to think about what was happening in Asia. And the estimates vary about if the Americans and the British, but predominantly Americans, and with the help potentially of Russia, Russia had now started to divert forces out to Asia, which was a double-edged sword. It could be helpful to win a land war because of the sheer quantities of men, but at the same time, it would extend Russia’s influence into Asia, which until that point was not as strong as it was going to become. So, you were waiting for the Russians to arrive, you knew that attacking Japan could take five years to occupy all of Japan and deal with the military capability of Japan. Some of the estimates were five years. And they’re saying that the losses would be in the hundreds of thousands, if not into the millions of casualties on the American and obviously on the Japanese side. So that was weighing on Truman. And there’s a question about the morality of Russia, and I’m not, you know, there’s a lot going to be covered, and I’m not going to talk about specific incidents. But Truman, the one thing about him is he is the only man in the history of mankind who has ordered the dropping of an atomic weapon in an act of war. And one hopes that he’s the only person who ever has that accolade. Not only did he do it once, but he does it twice. He decides with cool, calculated conscience to say that the balance of a land and air war and a sea war against Japan and the casualties that would be involved, and the length of time it would be to defeat Japan, it was in his view, the right decision to drop the atomic bomb. And the atomic bomb then gave the Japanese an understanding that they had to finish the war, which they didn’t after the first bomb, but they did after the second bomb.

So one of the great moral questions of all time is, was it the right decision? Was it the decision that saved many, many hundreds of thousands of other lives? Or was it an immoral decision because it was the wanton destruction of such an enormous amount of lives in one action? And I think that’s a separate class, but it is something that is worth reminding ourselves, that Harry Truman made that decision not even knowing that this bomb existed a few months before. And he makes that decision. I have to say, obviously lots of you will have seen “Oppenheimer,” and looked at the whole story about Los Alamos and the developments of nuclear weapons. But I think one of the things, there’s a very small cameo in it, it’s Gary Oldman, who I love and adore. I think he’s a brilliant actor. But I have to say, I hated his Harry Truman. I thought it was kind of caricature, and I don’t think it really got the nuance. Truman right to his dying day was clear that it was a decision he felt that had to be made to save more lives in the balance. I think the way he’s portrayed in “Oppenheimer,” he’s not true to my imaginings of Truman. If you want to see a really good Gary Oldman, if you get a chance, I think it’s on Apple TV, is “Slow Horses,” which is a British TV series about defunct spies. It’s truly magnificent, but that’s an aside. The bomb is dropped, peace comes to Asia, the Japanese surrender. The Russians, who are mobilising their forces to the east, do not get the opportunity to take more and more land, which is what would’ve happened otherwise.

It doesn’t mean that Asia doesn’t become a major confrontation point between the Soviet Union and the West during the Cold War. But actually, had the war gone on, the strength of the position of the Soviet Union in Asia would’ve been far greater, because they would’ve literally been transporting hundreds and hundreds of thousands and millions of men east from the front in Europe. So that is one of Truman’s first decisions. Rightly or wrongly, it is an enormous decision that he makes. And he’s faced with a series of major foreign policy decisions, one after the other, after the other. In a way, I would say that the first World War and the second World War, instead of a nice tie a bow on it, it’s done, peace is declared, we will move on, in both cases, it is incredibly messy. And Truman is faced with a Europe that is in complete devastation after six years of war. And also, you have a defeated Germany creating a massive vacuum, political vacuum in the centre of Europe.

And you have this hugely resurgent Soviet Union now occupying not only its traditional territory, but having moved right into Eastern Europe and into Germany. And as a result, is now a major continental power, arguably the most important continental power since Napoleon in terms of areas that are covered and states that are ruled either directly or by proxy. The Soviet Union and Stalin now controls a huge swathe of Europe. American foreign policy was not geared for that. You also got to remember that America is designed, and in its mentality up until this point, and you’ve seen it reinforced after the first World War, it is essentially, we don’t want to get involved in these messy conflicts and this messy politics of abroad. We are continental Americas, we have the Monroe doctrine, and we have all of our things. And to prove the point, in the early 1920s, America rejects joining the League of Nations, after being involved in the first World War, turns its back on international commitments. One of the things that I think, and it goes predominantly to Franklin Roosevelt and FDR but also to Truman is, you don’t get that backlash around isolationism and retreating after the second World War. The United Nations is ratified, United Nations is given a home actually very, very clearly in the United States, in New York. And the conference that ratifies it is based in San Francisco. Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR’s wife, is Truman’s main delegate to it. Whilst the Republican party has still got a significant isolationist ring, it is nowhere near as powerful, as strong as it was in the 1920s and where America retreated.

And Truman, I think, is phenomenally adept in ensuring and giving things that we now take for granted, NATO, the Truman doctrine, the commitment to Europe, which has basically been an orthodoxy really up until Donald Trump, is that was not a given in my view. That is something that Harry Truman, through very careful skill, ensured that America stayed committed not only to Europe, but to the world generally, and didn’t retreat back into the Americas. And one of the biggest challenges is us Brits. The British empire is falling apart. Britain is essentially bankrupt, certainly is insolvent, because it’s being bankrolled by the United States. And can no longer support its commitments around the world that were hardly sustainable in the 1920s and 30s, but after the second World War, were almost completely unsustainable. You see the retrenchment in India, Burma, what becomes Pakistan, there’s huge loss of life there, there’s huge problems there. But Europe and Britain’s ability to help keep the peace in Europe, even that is in doubt. And one of the first kind of big tests for Truman is that Turkey and Greece, which have been decided to be, in Yalta and confirmed in Potsdam, to be in the Western sphere of influence. They’re meant to be democracies, they’re meant to be pro-Western. They’re not going to be part of the Soviet block. The Soviets aren’t playing fair. And there is big partisan, communist partisan forces in both places, and it’s being bankrolled by the Soviet Union. Britain cannot support Turkey and Greece, it wants to, but it has not got the money to be able to do it. And as a result, Truman is faced at very short notice with a, how do I save these two countries? And how do I ensure that they stay, inverted commas, on our side?

And what he does is he makes an address to Congress, which the copy of the speech is here, “The Recommendation for Assistance Greece and Turkey.” And it’s $400 million, which is an enormous amount of money at those day prices to sustain those two countries, which he does and which he does successfully. But what he essentially does, it becomes more than Greece and Turkey, and it becomes known as the policy of containment. And containment is essentially saying, okay, there is a bunch of places now that the Soviet Union is in charge of, in a perfect world, we would like to roll that back. But the reality is they’re on a roll, what we’ve got to do is stop them making further inroads, they are going to be contained. And Turkey and Greece were very clearly the first line of the Truman doctrine. And the Truman doctrine, I think, articulates the first time in America’s history a very clear commitment to ensure that America’s interests outside its own hemisphere are going to stay in good shape. And it’s not just where there are civil wars and fighting between the communists and the pro-Western sides, it’s also in places like Italy and France and West Germany where you have very active communist political parties. And America essentially bankrolls, particularly in Italy, the Christian Democrat, to ensure that the Russians do not take over. One of the things I think in history, certainly from my point of view, is worth thinking about, is what would’ve happened if the Italian elections had been won by the communists in 1948? Or the French communists had won in the 50s?

That would’ve actually made it virtually unsustainable, the whole idea of NATO, 'cause they were much more aligned the left parties with the Soviet Union, you’d argue they’re pockets of proxies. And those are the bits that holding the line was really, really important. So there was the line, which was military aid and financial aid, but there was also covert aid to support, inverted commas, and I’m conscious that if you’re covertly supporting democratic parties, it’s slightly contradictory or very contradictory. And as a result, there’s all of that going on. But the Truman doctrine is a really important milestone in 250 years of American foreign policy. It’s where America makes a commitment, and Harry Truman makes a commitment very clearly. The second thing he does is George Marshall, the great General, has become his Secretary of state. And that there is a realisation that Europe is on the brink of collapse, and that the Germans, the French, the British, the Italians are in no way going to be able to rebuild their countries and their economies on their own. And what will be needed is an enormous infusion of money, a scale that has never been given before. And this is crafted by the Truman administration. And one of the things that’s clever about Truman, Truman realises he’s not particularly popular as president. And he’s not arrogant in the main way, or he’s not shy of using other people’s names and other people’s good reputations to further the agenda. He’s not going to say everything’s Harry Truman, he’s got the Truman doctrine. But that was actually, he didn’t go out and say, “I’ve got a doctrine and my name’s Truman,” it actually became that.

But the Marshall Plan actually is named after George Marshall. And this enormous amount of aid, which was also offered to the eastern block and rejected by Stalin, helps rebuild Europe. The Europe that I live in now, the French, the Germans all live in now, that was created to a large degree. And the prosperity and the regrowth, particularly of Germany in the 1950s and 60s, which was phenomenal, could never have happened without the money that America gave. Now, America prospered because the world economy grew and grew back and America’s export capability was now sucked in to Europe. So, American companies start to dominate the world during this period. So it benefits America, but it actually really benefits Europe and the rebuilding of Europe. So you have the Truman doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and then you have one of the first major direct challenges by the Soviet Union of really pushing at Truman and Attlee and saying, we’re going to really challenge your logic. Just to remind you, postwar Germany had been divided into four parts, British, French, Russian, and American. Also, Berlin had been divided into four quadrants. Berlin though was very, very much in the east, and was in the overall Soviet area. So the three bits of what became known as West Berlin were an island, in essentially a Soviet sea. It had bumbled through for three years after the war. There were corridors to bring trucks and troops in, and those came through East Germany, what would become East Germany, the Soviet controlled part of Germany. 1948, Stalin, under a pretext of fixing the roads, closed off all road access and rail access to Berlin.

It’s very clear very quickly that Berlin will go bankrupt, not only just financially, but actually people will starve to death. And Truman very quickly decides that there will be a massive airlift, and there will be the shuttle backwards and forwards of hundreds upon hundreds of planes, ensuring that Berlin has enough food and coal and energy to be able to get through that winter. In terms of a peace time mobilisation to support a particular thing, there’s probably very few analogies that can be given. This was something that was huge. The British and Americans literally are running sorties, planes were landing every 90 seconds, turning around, et cetera. And Truman stares down Stalin. After a month, Stalin gives up, says, well, yeah, it was fine, it was only, the roads are fixed now, et cetera. But the Berlin airlift was a huge test for Truman. Stalin is in the ascendancy, communism seems to be on a roll around the world, it has taken over so many countries. And in a way you could argue, well, fine, they can have Berlin and we’ve got the West, but it was enormous symbolism. And the symbolism carried on right the way up to 1989 of this island of democracy in the totalitarian state of Eastern Germany. So you have that going on, and I think Truman makes the right decision and succeeds, but also he’s faced with other things. Now, I’m very conscious there’s other lectures going on in this America series, and I’m not going to dwell on a number of those decisions, Korea, and particularly the foundation of Israel. The foundation of Israel is really very interesting because Israel is recognised by the United States on the first day of its existence.

And a lot of that is to the credit of Harry Truman, it’s a decision he makes against a lot of opposition, particularly in the State Department. Big debate, I’m going to leave that for other colleagues around that. But it is one of the most important postwar decisions that is made in the late 1940s, because by recognising Israel, America gives it a starting chance on the diplomatic, as well as the military stage. Now, as I said, there’s other lectures in the series that will be talking about that, but it is something that I think is very interesting and is controversial about America’s role, America’s decisions, how those decisions were made, et cetera. But it is something that Truman felt strongly about, given that America had not covered itself in glory during the 30s and during the second World war in supporting the aspirations of the Jewish community, given what they were going through. So, I think that is a fascinating subset of a much bigger set of issues around foreign policy that he was dealing with. But it just showed literally, I can imagine Truman every day going down to his desk in the Oval Office and going, what next? What’s going to happen? Where is it going to be? Where is the next problem going to be? Is it going to be in Asia? Is it going to be in Europe? Is it going to be in the Middle East? And all of these things keep on falling in his lap, which I think is one of the reasons I think just his sheer resilience around this is enormous.

Also, in terms of domestic affairs, he doesn’t sit back. It’s very odd, I’m such a kind of history wonk that I have a favourite executive order. This executive order is executive order 9981, and it’s a great executive order. Truman, literally overnight, desegregates the army. He sends an order out to say there will be no more segregation in the army. He does a lot of other things around race relations, which is hugely problematic for him because of the situation with the Democrats in the South, which are fundamentally racist, the Dixiecrats in his own party. But he does that because he feels it’s the right thing to do. And he also does it in 1948, which is an election year. Now, it’s worth noting that in 1946, in the midterms, the Republicans did very well. After 18 years of… I’m sorry, not 18 years, 14 years of Democrat control, the Republicans take control of Congress and they decide to cause Truman quite a lot of problems. But he still makes decisions that he knows could be adverse for him when he wants to run for reelection in 1948. And he comes into 1948 very much as the underdog, and lots of his own party actually don’t want him to run again. They want Dwight Eisenhower to run for president. Eisenhower is the great wartime General, he hasn’t declared party affiliation. And at the moment, he’s President of Columbia University in New York. He says, I’m not a politician, I’m not getting involved. Truman decides he’s going to run, for the first time, for president, having been president for three and a half years. And Tom Dewey, who is the governor of New York, who had made a decent fist of the race in 1944, losing less badly to Roosevelt compared with everybody else, gets a second go. And everybody assumes that Harry Truman will lose, and lose badly.

Harry Truman puts together a really interesting strategy, which I won’t go into now, and one element of it though that’s very important is he decides to run against the Republican Congress. And actually, he calls it the Do Nothing Congress. And he challenges them, he goes to the Democrat congress, convention and says, I’m summoning back to Congress. They’ve said they’re going to do all of these things, well, I’m going to call 'em back in from an adjournment and they can get to, the Republicans can choose whether they’re going to do the things they say they’ll do for Tom Dewey. Will they do them now for the good of the country? The 80th Republican Congress decides not to, and it gives Harry Truman a huge stick to bash Tom Dewey with, which is the Republicans talk a lot, but they don’t actually achieve anything. And I think that’s pretty fair to say. As a result, and I love this, this is, of course, the famous “Chicago Tribune” newspaper, which had basically gone to publication at 6:00 p.m. on the night of election day. Everybody assumes that Dewey’s won. Truman, with great glee, holds the newspaper up the next day, and he has won a marked victory. He’s been helped, rather than hindered, by his own party splintering. Henry Wallace, his predecessor, has vice presidents from the Democrats, has split on the left of his party.

And Strom Thurmond, the governor, the Democrat governor of South Carolina, has decided to run as what we call State’s Rights Party, has run as basically a segregationist racist party. And that assumed that the splitting of the Democrat Party would cause him even greater problems than he already had. But bizarrely, that actually helps him. He’s seen as a moderate, he’s seen as the true heir to Roosevelt, and these other two are more problematic. Dewey runs an awful campaign, and Truman wins 50% of the vote. But this is the electoral college map that he manages to come. Thurmond wins a number of the Southern states. But if you look at it, the blue is Truman. He does tremendously well, with the exception of kind of the Northeast, which we tend to think now as a Democrat kind of bastion. He wins, you know, Dewey wins New York and Pennsylvania and Maryland and Maine, et cetera. But Truman wins the overwhelming majority of states throughout the US, and is vindicated. Along with Trump’s 2016 election is the great upset of all time. As with all second terms, it’s almost universal. So let’s call this a second term, 'cause basically he had the majority of his first term after inheriting it from Roosevelt. Second terms always end badly. And they tend to come in with great promise, great landslides, you know, this wasn’t a landslide, but it was a convincing win. But things start to kind of go wrong quite quickly. You know, as one, in my view, last big hurrah, he brings together all of the European powers, that are essentially all the allied powers, and says, right, okay, we need to have a defensive umbrella over Europe and we need to work together.

And he puts into place NATO. Going back to the point about George Marshall is that with George Marshall, he gives credit to the Marshall Plan and lets Marshall… Actually to ensure that America latches on to this first peacetime alliance that they’ve ever been involved with, he calls out of academic retirement, the person he thinks that can sell this to be its first Secretary General of NATO, a guy called Dwight Eisenhower. So he reaches out to Eisenhower. Of course, everybody’s beholden to Eisenhower, they think he’s brilliant. And as a result, NATO gets solidified, and lasts to this day as an incredibly vibrant alliance, which, of course, has clause five, which says that an attack on one is an attack on all and has to be responded to. So NATO 1949 is a great foreign policy triumph, not only because it’s the triumph, but he gets it through what could have been very difficult politics within the United States. But where things start to go wrong are the Chinese have been having their civil war in the late 1940s, it started in the 1930s, got paused because of the Japanese. But Chiang Kai-Shek, loses to Mao Zedong, the communists takeover China, and Truman is characterised as the man who loses China. And the Republicans start to harp on to, China is a problem. That you didn’t pay enough attention, you were too concerned about Europe, you’re too concerned about the Middle East. You let China fall, and now swathes of people in Asia are now under communist control and it’s Harry Truman’s fault, Harry Truman lost China. Grossly unfair, I don’t think Roosevelt, I don’t think a Republican could have intervened. It was a civil war within China, and the amount of external influence that would’ve been needed to get Chiang Kai-Shek’s very corrupt, very incompetent forces to win would’ve been beyond anybody’s control. But it became a stick to beat Truman and his administration.

And again, this is the thing that I know is being covered in other lectures is you also have the issue of the Korean War. So the Korean War starts with an incursion from North Korea into South Korea. MacArthur, who is still the supreme commander in Asia and controls Japan, 'cause Japan has yet to be returned to full Japanese power, becomes in charge of that war. There’s a massive tussle over MacArthur taking control. And Truman, who is after all his president, commander in chief, it goes very badly between the two of them. MacArthur overreaches, Truman eventually fires him after the war’s done. MacArthur, he comes back to America to a hero’s welcome. Truman knew he was going to get a firestorm when he was gone, when he got rid of MacArthur, but he didn’t realise the real extent. The America public, a ticker tape parade, he gives a joint address to Congress. It’s all really looking badly to Truman’s talk of impeachment, et cetera. But actually, as it unfolds, it comes across that MacArthur has been massively insubordinate and Truman has made the right decision. And actually, MacArthur’s kind of favour, and there were talk about him becoming nominee for president, et cetera, MacArthur slowly just disappears into the sand. And Truman is vindicated on the decision. And certainly, as history’s point of view, he made the right decision. MacArthur is a military man who is under the control of the civilians, and therefore, it is really important that he obeyed orders. He constantly disobeyed orders and disobeyed the chain of command.

But it creates a major problem. And because of the way the Korean War unfolds, it goes backwards and forwards. America and the United Nations get involved, 15 countries get involved, and it becomes somewhat of a stalemate. Huge loss of life. And as a result, it again becomes another thing to beat Truman about when it comes to elections. The Republicans going into 1952 have a mantra, K1, C2, Korea, communism, corruption. Any party that’s been in power for 20 years, things will start to go wrong and corruption will take place. Communism, particularly the loss of China was blamed on Truman. And, of course, the Korean War was lingering right into election year. Just one aside, one of the great things Harry Truman did in terms of the way that American government was resolved, is symbolic in two ways. He completely moved out of the White House, and had it renovated into the executive. It is no longer just the residence of the United States President, but also became the functional White House that we kind of know now, with the situation room. It’s the control of the American government. And he set up, not only symbolically by redoing the White House, but he set up by using Herbert Hoover, the president before Roosevelt, who was the great engineer and understood the structure of things, he brought Hoover back in from the cold and asked him to look at the structure of the American government.

And created essentially not only a national security apparatus that lasts to this day, but also a government structure that is really important with an executive presidency, in a world that America is the most important power. So Harry Truman kind of leaves us that. He has a choice, he can run again. Actually, the Republicans in 1946 pass the 22nd Amendment, which say a president can only have two terms, but there’s a grandfather clause, which allows Harry Truman to run again should he want to. And he considers it, but he ultimately decides that he’s pulled off one of the great upsets of all times. The chances of him doing it again are very remote, and he decides to stand down. He tries to woo Eisenhower to be the Democrat candidate, Eisenhower resists, ultimately comes out as Republican. Ultimately, after a lot of backwards and forwards, Truman’s preferred choice, Adlai Stevenson, the governor of Illinois, is his chosen candidate. And Truman campaigns very actively and very strongly for Stevenson, but they stand no chance. And Eisenhower is, in my view, pretty much a nonpartisan figure. In fact, he’s a pretty, I’ll talk about this in a later talk, he’s a pretty lousy politician. He’s a great General and actually a very good president in lots of ways, but he’s a lousy politician.

He rises above the political forays, the only way that he can kind get to, 'cause when he does do politics, it’s kind of messy. And so, ultimately Eisenhower wins. A landslide, beats Adlai Stevenson in '52, and in '56 in the rematch. Truman, who’d had a good relationship with him up until that point, the campaign in '52, and particularly Eisenhower’s failure to support George Marshall, who had been his boss during the second World War when McCarthy attacked him, left their relationships very strained. Eisenhower becomes president in January, 1953. Harry Truman and Bess Truman get back in their car and drive back to Independence, Missouri, where they spend the majority of the rest of their lives. They still get involved in politics. He’s a politician through and through, and he’s quite a confident politician. But symbolism’s important, he’s obviously kept on the outside during the Republican administration for the next eight years, but he does reappear a fair bit. If you remember the picture from two weeks ago of where he’s got Lauren Bacall sitting on a piano as he plays piano. And Truman’s great quote is, “I either could have been a politician, or a pianist in a whorehouse.” “There’s not much difference, to be honest.” Well, actually, he’s an incredibly accomplished pianist.

And this is him back in the White House playing piano in front of John Kennedy. Kennedy knew the power of symbolism, and having the grand old man back was important. And the thing that I kind of love is this picture. When Medicare and Medicaid go through, Lyndon Johnson’s great society, the amazing, you know, advances that Lyndon Johnson makes in terms of domestic American policy, Johnson really knew the power of symbolism. And Medicaid card number one goes to Harry Truman, and Medicaid card number two goes to Bess Truman. And there is Harry Truman sitting with Johnson as he signs the bill into law. And he gets, yeah, the first Medicaid cards, which I think is brilliant. He dies in 1972, on what is British Boxing Day, on December the 26th. He has, unfortunately for him, lived to see Richard Nixon, in November '72, win a massive landslide of 49 states. Truman despised Richard Nixon, and had many run-ins with him over the years. And that can’t have been a happy place. It’s a shame that he then didn’t get to see Nixon’s ultimate disgrace of Watergate a couple of years later. But there you have it, a fascinating, I apologise, if somewhat a whistle stop tour around the challenges Harry Truman faced. Bu hopefully, they gave you an understanding of just the degree, and that this wasn’t many of them. I’ve touched very little on domestic policies and domestic challenges he faced. But I think you gives us an idea of the enormity of the foreign policy challenges that Truman faced during that period.

And ultimately, I think one way to view him is that the structure he created has withstood pretty much 80 years. You know, NATO has seen its importance grow again because of the Ukraine. Containment arguably won, the Soviet Union didn’t get any further, certainly not in Europe, and eventually was rolled back, Soviet Union was defeated. The creation of the CIA, the Berlin airlift, all of these things happened relentlessly during that period. And I think, you know, I don’t agree with a number of his decisions, but I think if you look at his portfolio as a whole, and his seven and three quarter years as president, I think in foreign policy terms, there’s a lot to be said that he was the guy that reordered the postwar world after the chaos of the second World War. So, I’m conscious I’ve now gone over time. I am going to have a quick look at the Q and A, if that’s all right.

Q&A and Comments:

And I just wanted to say, I agree with you how David McCulloch’s biography of Truman is excellent. I mean, it’s a really, it’s the definitive book. In fact, I actually had a slide, which had a picture of the book. So if you are going to read one book on Truman, I think that one’s a very good one.

Arlene comments about the phrase, his famous phrase, the buck stops here. Well, here is an imitation of that thing that he used to have on his desk. I actually bought it in what’s known as the Little White House in Key West, where Truman spent his holidays. He used to go down there and run America from the Florida Keys. And the phrase, the buck stops here, ultimately it is the president’s to decide.

Let me see, some people don’t really agree with me around the choices that he had made around Israel, or the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I’m not saying that I necessarily agree with any of the things, what I’m saying, I think he had very difficult decisions to make and that created a lot of challenges for him.

Q: How far into the FDR presidency did the majority of the electorate become aware of the seriousness of FDR’s health?

A: It’s interesting, Ralph. Given the response and the genuine surprise when FDR died, I think people knew he wasn’t well, but I think that subconsciously, they just thought he’s tired. I think certainly, the campaign that was run in 1944, they really covered it up. He stayed running the war from the White House, Truman did a lot of the campaigning. And I don’t think people really understood the nature of just how ill he was. And a sense is, he had probably given, he’d dealt with the great recession, depression, and the second World War, is 12 years. Had he been in full health and had he not had the health issues he had, I think that would’ve been enough for anybody. So, I don’t think it’s surprising.

Q: Victor asked, what were the reasons to justify picking Truman?

A: To be honest, to pick Truman as the vice president, I said this in the other lecture I did, I think part of it was he was the one with least enemies. Every other one of the leading candidates, and Truman, I don’t think was a leading candidate going into that choice, had people in the party that really didn’t want them to become vice president, and therefore heir apparent. And Truman, I think was very much a compromise, and got the role because he was considered to be solid, dependable, reliable, very clear, he was very pro FDRs agenda. And he wasn’t all the other ones, I think literally everybody else else was crossed out and Truman became the kind of last man standing in a way.

Q: Why did Truman drop atomic bombs on civilian rather military targets?

A: I think to get the message over to the Japanese government and the Japanese public of the sheer enormity of the weapons. That is a very good question, but I think it was one of those things, he wanted to make it very clear that this was a game changing weapon. And had it been on a small island off the coast of Japan where the military were, it wouldn’t have had that same effect. Whether I agree with that or not is completely different, but I think it was a shock and awe thing to bring the Japanese to surrender.

Q: Did Truman keep FDR’s cabinet in place, or did he make his own appointments?

A: He did both, he kept Truman’s cabinet in place, sorry, FDR’s cabinet in place straight away. And then, bit by bit he replaced when vacancies came. He fired some, I have to say, really when he won election in his own right, he appointed his own cabinet of his own men, and it was nowhere near as good. His second cabinet was lacklustre and, to be honest, caused him a lot of the problems, particularly as I said around, you know, not corruption on a massive scale, but just more about the challenges of just not being very good. There were a number of appointments that were distinctly substandard. I think, sorry, I’m kind of blurring a bit now.

And, yeah, I think that’s mostly it. Thank you very much for staying with me.

Medicare, so sorry, Ron’s right, Medicare and Medicaid. I always get mixed up, I apologise. That’s being British. Yeah, I’ve got a number of you telling me Medicare and Medicaid.

But thank you so much. I appreciate your time. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks time, doing a number of sessions on Eisenhower and then Eisenhower and Nixon. So I look forward to potentially seeing you then, thank you.