ON NOVEMBER 11, 1948, Dad wrote to his sister Mary from Key West, “I didn’t know I was so tired until I sat down.”

This was the only time, as far as I know, that he admitted how much effort he had put into the 1948 campaign.

November 11 was always a historic day for him. “I am on my way to the beach to take a swim,” he told Mary. “Just thirty years ago I was firing a final barrage at the Heinies at a little town called Hermaville northeast of Verdun. Some change of position I’d say.”

Although Dad strictly forbade us to gloat in public - “Now we’ve got ‘em licked let’s be generous and make ‘em like it,” he cautioned Mary - he could not restrain a few private expressions of delight over his victory.

“The White House sent me a big scrapbook of editorials from all the papers over the country - and my, how they’ve banqueted on crow.”

Winston Churchill, still out of office, underscored the importance of Dad’s reelection in his letter of congratulations:

My dear Harry,

I sent you a cable of my hearty congratulations on your gallant fight and tremendous victory. I felt keenly the way you were treated by some of your party and in particular Wallace who seemed to us over here to be a greater danger than he proved. But all this has now become only the background of your personal triumph. Of course it is my business as a foreigner or half a foreigner to keep out of American politics, but I am sure I can now say what a relief it has been to me and most of us here to feel that the long continued comradeship between us and also with the Democratic Party in peace and war will not be interrupted. This is most necessary and gives the best chance of preserving peace.

I wish you the utmost success in your Administration during this most critical and baffling period in world affairs. If I should be able to come over I shall not hesitate to pay my respects to you.

With kind regards,

Believe me

Your friend,

Winston S. Churchill

Mrs. Churchill predicted your success. Sends her compliments and good wishes to your wife. . . .

Dad’s reply is also rather interesting:

November 23, 1948

Dear Winston:

I can’t tell you how very much I appreciated your cable and your good letter of November eighth.

I had a terrific fight and had to carry it to the people almost lone handed but when they knew the facts they went along with me. It seemed to have been a terrific political upset when you read the papers here in this country. Really it was not - it was merely a continuation of the policies which had been in effect for the last sixteen years and the policies that the people wanted.

I hope everything is going well with you and that sometime or other we will have a chance for another meeting.

Please remember me to Mrs. Churchill and tell her I appreciate the fact that she was a good prophet. . . .

Sincerely yours,

Harry S. Truman

Mother and I joined Dad in Key West for his vacation. We needed a rest almost as much as he did. Mother, in fact, had come down with a terrible cold and sore throat, and for two nights before we left the White House, Dad got up at ungodly hours like three in the morning to make sure she took her medicine.

The highlight of our stay in Key West, at least in my memory, was the impromptu victory parade staged by the White House reporters and aides. Everybody wore the wackiest costumes ever. Charlie Ross had on a pair of bathing trunks and an old-fashioned, Abraham Lincoln style stovepipe hat. The whole thing was a surprise, and someone snapped a picture of Mother and me laughing like a couple of lunatics. It was funny, and wholly in the spirit of that triumphant vacation.

It was on this visit, if my memory is functioning correctly, that the final installment in the saga of Dad’s unlosable eyeglasses was enacted. He was swimming, and I was sitting on the sea wall watching. The ocean was a little rough and waves were breaking on the wall. He swam over to urge me to join him. I declined, reminding him that the last time he had persuaded me to get wet, he told me the water was warm, and I came out feeling like a human icicle. Just then, a wave broke on the sea wall, and Dad went under. One of the Secret Service men standing nearby jumped in sunglasses and all. This was unnecessary heroics. Dad was perfectly all right. But the unexpected ducking had knocked off his glasses, and they vanished into the swirling depths. The loss was no special crisis. He had several reserve pairs of glasses in his quarters. But the Secret Service men thought they could find them, and several agents in bathing suits began to search the bottom. They had no luck. Later, Dad was sitting on the sea wall and happened to glance at the beach. He noticed something glinting in the sunlight on the shore. He pointed to it, and the astonished Secret Service men trotted around to examine it. There, believe it or not, were the glasses, washed up by the tide.

We flew back to Washington and Dad spent most of Thanksgiving Day signing thank you letters in response to the thousands of congratulations he had received: “At Key West I must have signed five thousand [he told his sister Mary], and since I came back here it has been terrific. . . . I went to the office at 9 o’clock and stayed until 2:00 p.m. and cleaned up a batch of so many I couldn’t count them - but I can sign from 500 to 1000 an hour.”

Two weeks later, Dad attended a kind of postscript to the campaign - the Gridiron Dinner. This traditional Washington shindig is run by the capital newsmen. It requires politicians of all stripes and types to laugh and be laughed at. Dad described the evening in rather pungent terms to his sister:

The Gridiron Dinner was quite a trial to me because I couldn’t say what I wanted to say. If I’d been beaten it would have been much easier to speak. They ribbed Dewey unmercifully. Had a lunatic engineer act, that was a scream. They took Jake Arvey, Hague, Flynn of N.Y., and old Crump for a long hard ride. But they were exceedingly nice to me.

Dewey made a speech in which he tried hard to be funny. It was funny in the beginning but he became very sneering and sarcastic in the last half.

Of course when I came to speak - the last thing on the program -I couldn’t be the least bit elated, triumphant or overbearing. I told them I’d not seen most of them for three months, supposed they’d been on a vacation from the White House. Told them they’d ridden in the wrong boat, and then made a very solemn and serious speech on the grave responsibility we are facing and told them that the country is theirs, not mine, but they’d have to help me run it. Complimented Dewey on being a good sport and sat down.

You never saw such an ovation. Had to get up three times. Some of those old hardboiled Republican newsmen openly cried. . . .

Although Dad wrote this letter on White House stationery, we were no longer living in the Great White Jail. Just in time, Dad discovered the White House was literally falling down. For more than a year, he had been prodding the Commission of Grounds and Buildings to take a good look at the place. He had begun to worry about it one night in 1947 at an official reception, when the guard of honor came in to take the colors away. As the husky young color bearers stamped across the floor in precise military unison, Dad looked up and saw the big chandelier above his head - and the heads of all his guests - swaying. A few weeks later, when the butler brought him breakfast in his study, he felt the whole floor sway as if it was floating in space. Several weeks after he reported these alarming observations to the commission, he learned his fears were well founded.

The time and place in which he learned it makes an almost incredible story. The news arrived in the middle of the last official reception of the 46-47 winter. Dad was listening to Eugene List, the young pianist he had discovered at Potsdam, play for “the customers,” as he called the guests in a letter to his mother: “I was somewhat nervous through the entertainment because Crim the usher and Jim Rowley came and told me that the engineers had found that the chain holding the center chandelier was stretching. Well, the survey had been made three or four weeks ago and it was a nice time to tell me. I let the show go on and ordered the thing down the next day. If it had fallen, I’d been in a real fix. But it didn’t.”

Early in 1948, Dad told his sister what the engineers had finally concluded: “I’ve had the second floor where we live examined - and it is about to fall down! The engineer said that the ceiling in the state dining room only stayed up from force of habit! I’m having it shored up and hoping to have a concrete and steel floor put in before I leave here. The roof fell in on Coolidge and they put a concrete and steel third floor on to take its place and suggested that the second floor be done the same way. But Old Cal wouldn’t do it. He wanted it to fall like the roof did I guess.”

The shoring up was quite an operation. For months, we had to live with a forest of pipes running up through our private rooms. They were particularly thick in Dad’s study, my sitting room, and Mother’s bedroom. We had to walk around them to get out the doors. It was not what I called gracious living. Meanwhile, Dad appointed a committee of experts to examine the entire house from roof to foundations and tell him what needed to be done. Their report made hair-raising reading. The foundation was sinking into the swampy ground beneath it. There was no visible support for the ceiling in the Green Room but a few very rusty nails.

In the summer of 1948, the old house just started to fall apart. One of the two pianos in my sitting room - a spinet - broke through the floor one day. My sitting room, I should add, was just above the family dining room. Dad jotted on his diary-calendar: “How very lucky we are that the thing did not break when Margie and Annette Wright were playing two-piano duets.” A few days later he told his sister: “The White House is still about to fall in. Margaret’s sitting room floor broke in two but didn’t fall through the family dining room ceiling. They propped it up and fixed it. Now my bathroom is about to fall into the red parlor. They won’t let me sleep in my bedroom or use the bath. I’m using Old Abe’s bed and it is very comfortable.”

On November 7, 1948, when we returned from Missouri, the White House engineer and architect refused to let us into the place. Dad told his sister he found the White House in one terrible shape. There are scaffolds in the East Room, props in the study, my bedroom, Bess’s sitting room and the Rose Room. . . . We’ve had to call off all functions and will move out as soon as I come back from Key West.

At that time, he thought it would “take at least ten months to tear the old second floor out and put it back.” By the time we came back from Key West, the experts had taken a harder look at the situation and decided there was nothing that could be saved but the outside walls. The entire house would have to be gutted and rebuilt.

This meant we had to move across the street to Blair House. There were no complaints on my part, except the usual moans during the packing and unpacking days. As I’ve explained earlier, I much preferred Blair House to the White House. But Blair House created serious entertainment problems for Dad and Mother. As he told his sister Mary, “It is a nice place but only half as large - so we have no place to put guests.” This applied not only to overnight guests but the standard official visitors at White House receptions. Instead of being able to entertain 1,200 or 1,500 at a single reception, everything had to be scaled down to half size, and this meant poor Mother was in perpetual motion as a hostess. But Mother “met the situation” Truman-Wallace style. There was, Dad pointed out in a letter he wrote toward the end of 1948, one consolation: “It’s a shame the old White House had to fall down. But it’s a godsend it didn’t when we had 1,500 people in it.”

Between moving out of the White House, getting settled in Blair House, and answering the tens of thousands of letters that poured in congratulating Dad on his victory, we found Inaugural Day on top of us before we realized it. Of course, numerous aides and a committee had been working to make the day a smash, even before the election. They had plenty of money to spend because the Republican Congress, expecting a Dewey victory, had abandoned its public parsimony and voted a whopping sum for the event.

The weather on January 20 was perfect, very cold, but with bright winter sunlight pouring down from a clear blue sky. Dad started the day at 7:00 a.m. by eating breakfast with ninety-eight members of Battery D and their wives. Mother and I came along and watched while he was presented with a gold-headed cane and a leather book in which each man had signed his name. Mother remarked that the cane would obviously last long enough for Dad to give it to his grandson. Dad promised to use it faithfully on his morning walks and then issued his marching orders for the parade. They were to be the guard of honor around his car on the ride from the Capitol down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House reviewing stand. He wanted them to maintain their old World War I cadence - 120 thirty-inch steps per minute. “I’m sure you can still do it for a mile and a quarter,” he told them.

Although most of the boys were ten to fifteen years younger than Dad, there was a groan at the thought. They had been up until 3:00 a.m. the previous morning at the inaugural gala in the National Guard Armory, enjoying the show put on by musicians, actors, dancers, and other show-biz politicians.

After we attended services at St. John’s Episcopal Church, Dad drove to the Capitol to take the oath of office. His inaugural speech was memorable to me for many reasons. Although he served almost two full terms, it was the only Inaugural Address he ever gave. More important, he enunciated what I still think is the best definition of the difference between communism and democracy.

Communism is based on the belief that man is so weak and inadequate that he is unable to govern himself, and therefore requires the rule of strong masters.

Democracy is based on the conviction that man has the moral and intellectual capacity, as well as the inalienable right, to govern himself with reason and justice.

He then spelled out four cardinal points of American foreign policy, which the United States followed for the next twenty-five years. First was unfaltering support of the United Nations; second, the achievement of Europe’s recovery through the Marshall Plan; third, military assistance to strengthen freedom-loving nations against the dangers of aggression. Fourth came the policy that caught everyone by surprise. Dad called for “a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth” of the underdeveloped parts of the world.

Point Four, as the proposal was immediately dubbed by the press, fired the imagination of the globe. Excited farmers in the Middle East sent letters to the local American Embassy, addressed to “The Master of the Fourth Spot.” Arnold Toynbee predicted Dad’s call for the wealthy nations to come to the aid of the world’s poor “will be remembered as the signal achievement of the age.” Before the program was killed by unimaginative Republicans in the middle 1950s, more than 2,000 Americans from Boston, St. Louis, and Seattle and a hundred other towns and cities taught people in Indonesia, Iran, and Brazil better ways to grow their food, purify their water, educate their children. When the Democrats returned to office in 1960, Point Four became John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps.

The Point Four Program was suggested by Benjamin Hardy of the State Department, who first aroused White House aide George Elsey’s enthusiasm for it. But the President’s enthusiasm was the decisive factor. It was a feeling that came naturally to an ex-senator who knew and admired the achievements of the TVA in bringing prosperity to the underdeveloped valleys of Tennessee and an ex-farmer who had seen the miraculous rise in productivity wrought by the scientific and educational programs of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In spite of his enthusiasm for the idea, Dad’s modesty almost persuaded him to omit it from his Inaugural Address. In fact, his desire not to seem to crow over his victory inclined him to make the Inaugural Address as simple and matter-of-fact as possible. In his mind, he at first bracketed it with the State of the Union address which he made to Congress a few days before the inauguration. He was inclined to limit the Inaugural Address to domestic affairs and concentrate on international matters in the State of the Union.

George Elsey, who was assigned the job of drafting both speeches, became more and more unhappy with this approach. He stayed behind in the White House, working, while Dad and other aides were relaxing in Key West. “I finally wrote a long memorandum in which I argued as persuasively, and as forcefully as I could,” George says, “that the President had one and only one inaugural opportunity and that he had other state of the union messages and would have still future state of the union messages.” In the inaugural, George argued, Dad was addressing the world and ought to make a speech that suited the occasion. After thinking it over, Dad agreed. With this background, it is even easier to see why Point Four was greeted with enthusiasm in the White House. Benjamin Hardy had had no success whatsoever selling his idea within the Department of State. At this point, with the memory of the Palestine double cross still fresh, Dad and his aides took special pleasure in finding so much genuine merit in an idea that the striped pants boys had pooh-poohed.

After a quick lunch in Les Biffle’s Senate office, Dad led the inaugural parade from the Capitol down Pennsylvania Avenue to the reviewing stand in front of the White House. The boys of Battery D strutted proudly beside his car in two long lines. Before they got started, Dad had to settle an argument which almost ended in a brawl. No one could remember - or at least agree - on who had carried the guidon in France and “Captain Harry” had to issue a ruling to settle the dispute. The aging artillerymen made it to the reviewing stand without a man falling out, but I heard later they were not very lively at the inaugural ball that night. One man told his wife as he limped to the table, “The Germans never came so near killing off Battery D as their captain did today!”

The inaugural parade was great fun. Drucie Snyder and I salaamed like a couple of happy screwballs when the George Washington University float went by. When Strom Thurmond, the defeated Dixiecrat candidate, rode past as part of the South Carolina delegation, Dad turned aside and became deeply involved in conversation with others on the reviewing stand. Tallulah Bankhead acted out what politicians wanted to do, but didn’t - she gave Thurmond a long, lusty boo. Among the many things Thurmond undoubtedly disliked about this Inaugural Day was its completely integrated character. On direct orders from Dad, for the first time in history, black Americans were admitted to all official and unofficial functions. Walter White, head of the NAACP, praised Dad for “recognizing the new place of all ordinary Americans.”

After three and a half hours of West Point cadets, Annapolis midshipmen, Missouri Mules, and bare-legged girl drum majorettes, we dashed to the National Gallery of Art for a reception, arriving an hour late. Dad and Vice President Barkley each made two speeches and shook hands with about 1,000 VIPs. Then we raced back to Blair House to dress for the inaugural ball.

For the inauguration, I had worn a scarlet suit and hat. Now I donned a tulle and brocade gown, called “Margaret pink” - a phrase which did not catch on like Alice blue, but you’ll never hear me complaining about it. Who needs a color named for her? The inaugural ball was so jammed, real dancing was impossible. People simply got out on the floor and swayed to the music of Xavier Cugat, Benny Goodman, and Guy Lombardo. I had my own box, and Drucie Snyder and two other girlfriends joined me, all of us escorted by White House aides. (The aide who danced with me, Bill Zimmerman, was decorated for heroism in Korea. Years later, he ruefully told me people remembered him more for the picture someone snapped of him dancing with me at the inaugural than for his feats of courage under fire.) That night, Bill and the other White House military aides were ablaze in gold braid, gold lace epaulets, and decorations. But no amount of artificial splendor could outshine the smile on Dad’s face. I am sure if he had to pick the happiest day of his political life, this would have been it.

The celebrating tapered off with a few more parties and receptions in the next few days, and then the Truman cousins trekked back to Missouri, and the Washington Trumans settled into Blair House and went to work. Dad had a Democratic Congress, but there was still the old tendency of Southern and Western conservatives to vote Republican on a dismaying number of issues. The world was still seething volcanically in various places, and there were several major changes to be made in the Cabinet. The most important was the retirement of Secretary of State General George C. Marshall, after a serious kidney operation, and his replacement by Dean Acheson.

I was very sorry to see General Marshall leave our official family. I shared Dad’s enormous admiration for him. Among my fondest memories are the Sunday visits we made to the General and Mrs. Marshall, in their lovely house in Leesburg, Virginia. I usually did the driving. Dad was inclined to drive with his mind on affairs of state. When there were problems to discuss, the President and the General would retire to his study, while I visited with Mrs. Marshall. Sometimes, however, the visit was purely social.

The General’s farm was on the site of the battle of Ball’s Bluff, one of the first serious engagements between the North and South in the Civil War. One day Dad and General Marshall roamed the rather rough terrain discussing the battle, in which Senator Edward Baker of Oregon, a close friend of Abraham Lincoln, was killed leading the Union forces. They found a little cemetery, about 40 by 20, with twenty-one unknown dead buried in it. Rambling farther into the woods, they found a little stone marker which said, “Colonel Edward Dickenson Baker was killed here.” Both Dad and General Marshall were so intrigued, they persuaded Wayne Morse of Oregon to find out where Senator Baker was buried. Was it on the battlefield? No, he turned out to be interred in San Francisco, in a cemetery which he owned, and had promoted into a handsome fortune. The oddities of history are almost endless.

Dean Acheson, the new Secretary of State, was tall and aristocratic, the quintessence of the so-called Eastern Establishment. Yet he shared with George Marshall and Harry Truman an uncompromising honesty and a total dedication to the goals and best interests of the United States of America. When you think of how different these two Secretaries were, it becomes one more tribute to Dad’s ability to work harmoniously with men of almost opposite temperaments and background. I responded to these two men in very different ways. With General Marshall, my affection was tinged with awe. With Acheson, a very definite attraction had just a touch of acid in it, for reasons we shall soon see.

It was Acheson who assumed the greatest and most important legacy of Secretary of State Marshall’s tenure, that logical but crucial - and angrily debated - step beyond the Marshall Plan, known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The historic pact - America’s first peacetime military alliance - was signed on April 4, 1949, by the foreign ministers of twelve nations. But my father had been working on the problem of winning Senate approval for this major innovation in American foreign policy for over a year. On March 17, 1948, Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg had signed a fifty-year political, economic, and military alliance in Brussels. In his address to Congress on the same day, urging the swift passage of the Marshall Plan, Dad had praised this significant step toward European unity, and declared that “the determination of the free countries of Europe to protect themselves will be matched by an equal determination on our part to help them to protect themselves.”

Throughout the spring of 1948, Dad and Under Secretary of State Robert M. Lovett spent long hours working with Senator Arthur Vandenberg on the problem of persuading Congress. It was formidable. There was a deep prejudice, buttressed by the warning in Washington’s Farewell Address against “entangling alliances.” But Dad had labored since he took office to persuade Americans this prejudice no longer made sense, because the world had simply grown too small for any country, even one as protected by ocean barriers as America, to remain isolated. So, slowly and carefully, a resolution took shape, which Dad wanted Senator Vandenberg to propose to the Senate.

Arthur Vandenberg was a great senator and a great American. But he was something of a prima donna, who required very special handling. Dad understood this, of course. He had an amazing ability to read the character of almost every man in the Senate. Bob Lovett, another outstanding American, who made a great contribution wherever he served, from Under Secretary of State to Secretary of Defense, had won the senator’s friendship and confidence. With extraordinary patience, he worked through draft after draft of what eventually became the Vandenberg Resolution. Introduced as Senate Resolution 239 on June 11, 1948, it declared the “sense of the Senate” supported “regional and other collective arrangements for individual and collective self-defense” and the “association of the United States by constitutional process” with these regional defense organizations. It was, in essence, the application of the concept developed by Dad and General Marshall for the Americas -the treaty we went to Brazil to sign - to the rest of the world. Equally important to Dad, the resolution carefully pointed out that the right of individual or collective self-defense was affirmed under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. The Vandenberg Resolution was approved by a resounding sixty-four-to-four vote. Thus, the Senate - a Republican Senate at that - was on record as supporting the general principles on which NATO was based.

But even with the support of the Vandenberg Resolution, NATO did not sail smoothly through the Senate. It was violently attacked by Robert Taft because he was opposed to the idea of giving military assistance to our allies. Other senators, notably Forrest Donnell of Missouri, denounced it because it might involve us in a war we did not want. As if we ever wanted one. Dean Acheson did a magnificent job of defending the treaty against these and other attacks. He was well supported by Senator Vandenberg, who rightly called the treaty “the most important step in American foreign policy since the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine.”

Equally crucial was the support that came from Dad. He sent the Secretary of State a telegram from Key West, lavishly praising his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and authorized him to publish it. When the treaty was signed, Dad insisted Acheson was the one who should do it. Dad and Vice President Barkley stood on either side of him, but my father wanted the man who had done the most work to have his name on the historic document.

The impact of the treaty in Europe was what counted. The Senate’s advice and consent to it by an eighty-two to thirteen vote made it clear to our friends and our enemies we were determined to defend the free nations of Western Europe against the kind of aggression that had swallowed Czechoslovakia.

At the Paris foreign ministers conference in June 1949, the Russians were on the defensive for the first time. Andrei Vishinsky, their chief spokesman, was an almost pathetic figure, afraid to agree even on a statement about the weather without discussing it with an angry, sullen Stalin in Moscow.

Now, a revived and powerful Western Europe is accepted as a matter of course. The history of the world would have changed if Western Europe, with its enormous industrial and scientific potential, had become part of the Communist empire.

But NATO was more than a dam to hold back the threatening Communist flood. In Dad’s view, it was another step toward achieving the necessary economic and military strength to negotiate with the Russians as equals. Experience had taught him that force - equality or superiority of force - was the only thing the Russians understood. Even before he was reelected, he had begun the fight to restore our depleted military strength. On May 7, 1948, for instance, he made the following memorandum:

Had a most important conference with Marshall, Forrestal, Snyder, Jim Webb of Budget and Forrestal’s budget man.

We are faced with a defense problem. I have wanted a universal training program, a balanced regular setup, ground, air, water, and a reserve to back up the regular skeleton training force.

The Congress can’t bring itself to do the right thing - because of votes. The air boys are for glamour and the navy as always is the greatest of propaganda machines.

I want a balanced sensible defense for which the country can pay. If the glamour boys win we’ll have another 1920 or another 1941. God keep us from that! And it is so sensible and easy to keep from it - but -

Marshall is a tower of strength and common sense. So is Snyder and Webb. Forrestal can’t take it. He wants to compromise with the opposition!

My father’s critical comment on Forrestal should not be construed as his final judgment on the man. He was a dedicated American, who literally wore himself out in the service of his country. He had done a tremendous job in the struggle to unify the armed services, and Dad had made him the first Secretary of Defense. Forrestal was equally dedicated to Dad. In a letter to a fellow Cabinet member, he called him “the best boss I have ever known.” After the armed services unification bill was fought through Congress, he wrote him the following letter:

28 July 1947

My dear Mr. President:

The fact that we have a bill, which, as you have expressed it, gives us the beginnings of a national military policy for the first time since 1798, is due first and last to your own patience, tact and knowledge of legislative procedures. With the exception of Clark Clifford, I know probably more than anyone else, how much restraint you had to exercise under trying and sometimes provoking circumstances. I believe the result will justify your forbearance.

As I told you Saturday, I will do my best to live up to the confidence you have reposed in me. If I fail, I know it will not be because of lack of support from you.

Respectfully yours,

James Forrestal

The indecision which Forrestal displayed on rearming and in the Berlin crisis may well have been the first symptoms of the tragic mental breakdown he suffered after he left the Cabinet early in 1949 - a breakdown that culminated in his suicide in May of that year.

Trying to persuade Congress to give the country the balanced defense force he wanted was a terribly frustrating job, as Dad’s memo makes clear. The services themselves were uncooperative, each lobbying fiercely for the biggest possible slice of the pie. Complicating the struggle was the problem of rearming Western Europe - the next logical step beyond the NATO treaty. The Soviet Union had thirty divisions in Eastern Europe, all armed with the latest weapons. We had three and a half, plus two and a half British divisions. The French and other nations could field perhaps a dozen divisions, but they were equipped with antiquated guns, obsolete tanks, and inferior air support. To give you an idea of how weak we were at this time, for a reserve force we had in the United States only a pitiful two and one-third divisions. The logical and obvious step was to rearm our friends in Europe as swiftly as possible. So, on July 25, 1949, Dad sent to Congress a request for $1,400,000,000 for this purpose.

The reaction of the Congress was almost unbelievable. You would think they had never even heard of the North Atlantic Treaty. Senator Vandenberg deserted his bipartisan role to make a wild attack on the bill, and he was joined by Walter George, Henry Cabot Lodge, and William Fulbright. In the House of Representatives, desperate pleas by Speaker Sam Rayburn were ignored, and there was a reckless vote to cut the appropriation in half. My father had to pull out all the stops in a speech to the Golden Jubilee Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, on August 22, 1949, to turn the situation around: “The cost of such a program is considerable, but it represents an investment in security that will be worth many times its cost. It is part of the price of peace. Which is better, to make expenditures to save the peace, or to risk all our resources and assets in another war?”

There was a reason for the collapse of bipartisan support in the Congress for Dad’s foreign policy - a reason that had nothing to do with the Russian threat in Europe or the wisdom of helping free nations resist it. In the spring of 1949, the Nationalist Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek began to fall apart, and the Generalissimo prepared to flee to Formosa with the remnant of his followers and China’s monetary reserves. Communist Chinese armies soon controlled all parts of the vast country. Almost immediately, Republicans in Congress began preaching the doctrine that Harry S. Truman’s foreign policy had “lost” China. Most of these critics were the same people who savagely attacked the Marshall Plan and voted against aid to Greece and Turkey. They were the roadblocks to all the creative foreign policy innovations which my father and his administration struggled to extract from a reluctant Congress. What would they have said if the Democratic President had simultaneously proposed a massive program to rescue Chiang Kai-shek? Not only would the cost have been in the billions - the rescue would have necessarily required a 2-or 3-million-man American army. This from a nation that had only two and one-third divisions in reserve.

No American President can make decisions in foreign policy, involving the lives and fortunes of millions of Americans, without the support of Congress and the people. Sometimes, as in the case of Korea, these decisions must be made in an excruciatingly short space of time, and the President must use all the political expertise he possesses to sell his foreign policy to the Congress and the American people. When he fails in this crucial task, the country suffers the kind of instability we experienced after 1965. I think it is evident by now that Harry S. Truman was a master of this aspect of the presidency. It is also evident that Dad was a skillful politician, who kept in contact with the American people. My father knew neither he nor any other man could have sold the American people the idea that their sons, barely returned from the greatest war in history, should abandon their careers and their educations once more, to fight for Chiang Kai-shek.

Thoughtful Republicans knew the truth about China. Senator Arthur Vandenberg wrote in his diary: “If we made ourselves responsible for the army of the Nationalist government, we would be in the China war for keeps and the responsibility would be ours instead of hers. I am sure this would jeopardize our own national security beyond any possibility of justification.” Vandenberg wrote to Senator William F. Knowland of California: “The vital importance of saving China cannot be exaggerated. But there are limits to our resources and boundaries to our miracles. . . .”

The shortest answer to the accusation that we “lost China” is to point out we never owned or possessed it. At the same time, any fair-minded examination of our attempts to save Chiang Kai-shek from losing it will show a President doing everything in his power to prevent this catastrophe. As we have already seen, my father sent the Generalissimo the greatest American soldier of the era, George C. Marshall. When General Marshall saw some of the appalling deficiencies of the Chinese Nationalist army (described in vivid detail in Stilwell and the American Experience in China by Barbara Tuchman), it convinced him the Nationalist government’s only hope was a truce and a coalition government with the Communists, who controlled much of North China. This solution might have given Chiang time to pull his spiritless, undisciplined army together, so that he might have survived a test of strength with the Communists at some later date. If he chose to fight, General Marshall advised him to concentrate his forces - a primary military doctrine - and achieve genuine control of southern China before he ventured into North China and Manchuria.

But Chiang arrogantly declined to take any advice from the man whose military genius had helped win World War II. Instead, Chiang launched an ambitious, aggressive attempt to smash the Communists and simultaneously seize control of all China. As a result, he spread his armies disastrously thin, and they lost control of the countryside. Meanwhile, we continued to supply his government with both military and economic aid, to the tune of $2 billion.

My father remained in close touch with the situation, even after General Marshall came home in January 1947, to become Secretary of State. In July of that year, Dad sent Lieutenant General Albert C. Wedemeyer to the troubled nation for another personal report. General Wedemeyer, who had commanded American forces in China, saw practically no chance of rescuing the situation. He placed his finger on the central problem of Chiang’s government: “To gain and maintain the confidence of the people, the Central Government will have to effect immediately drastic, far-reaching political and economic reforms. Promises will no longer suffice. Performance is absolutely necessary. It should be accepted that military force in itself will not eliminate Communism.”

By the fall of 1948, the situation was almost beyond hope. Chiang was not only losing the support of the people, he was losing control of his soldiers, too. Whole divisions, with all their American equipment, went over to the Communists. On November 9, 1948, Chiang sent my father a frantic appeal for help.

Around the same time, General David Barr, who was the commanding officer of the U.S. Military Advisory Group in China, sent the following report to the White House: “I am convinced that the military situation has deteriorated to the point where only the active participation of United States troops could effect a remedy. No battle has been lost since my arrival for lack of ammunition or equipment. Their military debacles, in my opinion, can all be attributed to the world’s worst leadership and many other morale destroying factors that led to a complete loss of will to fight.”

A letter to Arthur Vandenberg, written the following year, shows Dad’s thinking on China is clearly rooted in disenchantment with the Nationalist government: “The Far Eastern situation has been a peculiar one, as is often the case in a horse race - we picked a bad horse. That was the development of the situation in China. It turned out that the Nationalist Chinese Government was one of the most corrupt and inefficient that ever made an attempt to govern a country and when I found that out, we stopped furnishing them with materiel. Most of the Communists’ materiel was materiel which was surrendered by the Chinese Nationalist Government for a consideration. If Chiang Kai-shek had been willing to listen to General Marshall, General Wedemeyer and General Dean he never would have found himself in the condition he is in now. After the surrender of Peiping where ammunition, trucks, and artillery materiel we had furnished was turned over to the Communists I cut off everything to the Chinese Government. It had to be done gradually, however, because Nationalists were still holding the line of the Yangtze River and I didn’t want to pull the rug from under Chiang Kai-shek at that time.”

In the next paragraph, my father added, “I think you will find . . . that the Russians will turn out to be the ‘foreign devils’ in China and that situation will help establish a Chinese Government that we can recognize and support.”

On the day after Dad took his oath of office for the second term, Chiang Kai-shek resigned and handed what was left of his government over to General Li Tsung-jen. He was powerless to prevent the onrushing Communists from crossing the Yangtze and seizing south China. On May 5, Dad received a letter from him which, I think, says more about what really happened in China than any other document I have seen on the subject:

General George C. Marshall, under the instructions from your good self, took up the difficult task of mediation in our conflict with the Chinese Communists, to which he devoted painstaking effort. All this work was unfortunately rendered fruitless by the lack of sincerity on the part of both the then government and the Chinese Communists.

In spite of this, your country continued to extend its aid to our government. It is regrettable that, owing to the failure of our then government to make judicious use of this aid and to bring about appropriate political, economic and military reforms, your assistance has not produced the desired effect. To this failure is attributable the present predicament in which our country finds itself.

In late 1948, the State Department professionals had urged Dad to issue a statement to the American people explaining the gross inadequacies and corruption of the Nationalist government. They were hoping to defend themselves and Dad from the wild accusations about China that were already being flung around by the “China First” politicians in Congress. From the point of view of domestic politics, it was shrewd advice. By taking the offensive on the subject, Dad might easily have saved himself a lot of abuse. As usual, however, he preferred to risk his domestic political reputation for the best interests of the United States abroad. He turned down the idea because it would have administered the coup de grâce to Chiang’s government.

In the summer of 1949, with the Communists in complete control of China, this was no longer a consideration, and my father felt it was only just to himself and to Secretary of State Acheson to make a thorough explanation of what had happened in China to the American people. On August 5, Secretary of State Acheson issued the China White Paper, a massive document, which, with appendices, ran to over 1,000 pages. It detailed overwhelmingly reasons for the Communist victory which I have summarized here.

The facts made the China-First Republican politicians look silly, and they responded with rage and a new determination to repeat their big lie until it became an article of Republican faith. Not love of China but hatred of Dad and his policies, and above all hatred of his stunning victory in 1948, was their motivation. They also stooped to mythmaking and invented a devil: Communists in the government. Here they received a priceless boost from the trial of Alger Hiss. The former State Department official, friend of Dean Acheson, adviser to President Roosevelt at Yalta, a man with impeccable credentials - Harvard law degree, clerk to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes - was tried for allegedly perjuring himself before the House Un-American Activities Committee by denying he had given state secrets to journalist Whittaker Chambers who was at that time a member of a Communist espionage ring.

When the subject was first brought to my father’s attention, during the summer of 1948, he bluntly condemned the investigation as “a red herring.” He had long detested the methods of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he had no hesitation about blasting their claim that there was a Communist spy ring operating in the capital. He said the evidence for such a ring existed largely in the head of Congressman Karl Mundt, then acting chairman of the committee. All the evidence their investigation had produced was submitted to a grand jury, and no indictments had been forthcoming. In the interim, Whittaker Chambers had produced his astonishing hoard of secret documents on microfilm, hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm. Dad, with his dislike of the Un-American Activities Committee still foremost in his mind, had the following discussion with a reporter, in a post-election news conference.

“Mr. President, do you still feel, as you did during the late summer, that this Congressional investigation has the aspects of a ‘red herring’?”

“I do,” Dad said stubbornly.

Another reporter asked, “Mr. President, are you at all interested in this charge of Mr. Nixon’s [Congressman Richard M. Nixon], that the Department of Justice proposes to indict only Chambers - or first Chambers, and thus destroy his usefulness?”

“The Department of Justice will follow the law,” Dad said.

Which, of course, is precisely what the Department did. Hiss was prosecuted for perjury, and he was found guilty, on January 25, 1950, after two of the longest, most bizarre trials in American history. Among those who had appeared as a character witness for him was Dean Acheson. Hiss’s brother, Donald, had been a partner in Acheson’s law firm. When reporters asked the Secretary of State what he thought of Hiss now, he replied: “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss,” and explained he was acting in accord with the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, beginning with verse thirty-four. (“I was hungry and you gave me food . . . a prisoner and you came to me.”) He immediately drove to the White House and told Dad what he had said. Dad calmly reminded him he was talking to an ex-vice president who had flown to the funeral of a friendless old man who had just been released from the penitentiary. He understood - and approved.

The real villain, the specialist in gutter tactics, Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, did not come onstage until February 1950. Bipartisanship had collapsed - or at least sagged badly - and both the Senate and the House were acting as if they might renege on the solemnly signed and consented-to North Atlantic Treaty. It is difficult, even frightening, to predict what might have happened if grim news had not arrived from Europe. First came an economic shock - Great Britain, for two centuries the world’s keystone of financial stability, was devaluing the pound. Then a military shock. The Russians had exploded an atomic bomb.

On September 3, 1949, an air force WB-29 weather reconnaissance plane on a patrol from Japan to Alaska was routinely exposing filter paper at 18,000 feet over the North Pacific east of the Kamchatka Peninsula. The crew suddenly noticed the paper, which was sensitive to radioactivity, was telling them there was an unusual amount of it in the air around them. A second filter paper, hastily exposed, produced an even higher radioactive count. Within hours, other planes were checking the air in different parts of the Pacific and reporting radioactivity as high as twenty times above normal. Within four days, the filter papers had been studied in our atomic laboratories and fission isotopes - proof of an atomic test - were found in them. My father was immediately informed.

The news caused a kind of panic in the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission. They rushed to the White House and urged my father to issue an immediate statement, announcing the Russians had the bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer was one of the most vehement in this pressure group. Seldom in his two terms as President did Dad’s basic inner calm show to better advantage. He simply refused to be stampeded into making a statement. The UN was meeting in New York, and the Russians were showing signs of being more cooperative than they had been in years. The world was still reeling from the British devaluation of the pound. Even though there was a strong possibility of a leak, he decided to take his time and think over exactly what kind of statement he should make. Not even a visit from David Lilienthal, who was flown down from his vacation house on Martha’s Vineyard, changed Dad’s mind. He thought about it for another two weeks and then issued the following careful statement:

We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.

Ever since atomic energy was first released by man, the eventual development of this new force by other nations was to be expected. This probability has always been taken into account by us.

Nearly four years ago I pointed out that “scientific opinion appears to be practically unanimous that the essential theoretical knowledge upon which the discovery is based is already widely known. There is also substantial agreement that foreign research can come abreast of our present theoretical knowledge in time.”

This recent development emphasizes once again, if indeed such emphasis were needed, the necessity for that truly effective, enforceable international control of atomic energy which this government and the large majority of the members of the United Nations support.

The leadership my father displayed in this announcement - plus the grim import of the news - had a dramatic impact on Congress. The billion-dollar military assistance to our NATO allies was swiftly passed. But Dad, with the responsibility for the future security of the nation on his shoulders, was forced to look beyond this victory to one of his most difficult decisions. The speed with which Russia had become an atomic power meant they were in possession of much more information and nuclear expertise than our scientists had thought possible. The year 1952 was the date most of them had set for Russia’s first atomic explosion. Some had predicted 1955.

This raised the grim possibility the Russians were perfectly capable of developing a new, more terrible weapon, which at this time was only being discussed in the laboratories - the H-bomb. The power of the hydrogen atom would be a hundred to a thousand times more destructive than the uranium atom. The debate over whether to create such a weapon split the Atomic Energy Commission and its leading scientists. The chairman, David Lilienthal, a man whom Dad liked, was opposed. So was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the A-bomb.

My father appointed Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and Lilienthal to a special committee to study “Campbell,” the code name for the superweapon. Dad thought about this hard choice throughout the fall and early winter of 1949. At one point, David Lilienthal warned him that the Joint Atomic Energy Committee of Congress, led by Senator Brien McMahon, were working themselves into a frenzy over the problem and preparing to descend on the White House to blitz Dad into saying yes.

“I don’t blitz easily,” Dad said with a hard smile.

The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy was a constant problem to my father. He did his utmost to work with them as he would and did work with any other congressional committee. But they were dealing with the most sensitive, highly confidential subject in the government, and it was extremely difficult to decide how much they should be told because of the constant danger of security leaks. There is nothing a senator or a congressman loves more than a headline, and some of them tend to put headlines ahead of the best interests of their country. Early in November 1949, while my father was still thinking about the H-bomb and waiting for his special committee to report to him, Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado blabbed the information about the H-bomb debate on a television show. Dad was furious and called in Chairman McMahon to give him an angry lecture. Senator Johnson replied by accusing David Lilienthal of trying to give away the secret of the H-bomb to Canada and Great Britain. Politics is really a lovely sport.

Senator Johnson’s blunder added the glare of publicity to the other agonizing aspects of the decision on the H-bomb. Then came confidential news from England that made everyone in the White House wince. The British had discovered that Dr. Klaus Fuchs was part of a Communist spy ring that had been operating at Los Alamos during the creation of the atom bomb. The German-born Fuchs, who was a naturalized British citizen, had given the Communists crucial information which undoubtedly enabled Russia to achieve an atomic explosion three years ahead of schedule. It was the most dismaying possible development. Klaus Fuchs had stolen most of his information during the war years. But he had returned to the United States as recently as 1947 as part of a British team that attended a conference that discussed declassifying hitherto secret scientific documents on atomic research. My father and his aides could only shudder at the impact this news would have on the Communists-in-government crowd in Congress.

On January 31, Secretary of State Acheson, Secretary of Defense Johnson, and Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lilienthal met with my father in his office at 12:35. They informed him that, after long and careful deliberation, they had agreed we should launch a program to investigate the possibility of building an H-bomb. At the same time, they recommended a searching re-examination of our foreign policy and our strategic plans. Lilienthal, who had signed the agreement with reservations, made his doubts about the decision clear in a brief statement. He pointed out we could no longer rely on atomic weapons for the defense of the country. As a weapon, the H-bomb really made no sense, because it could achieve nothing but the annihilation of an enemy - not a reasonable or tolerable goal for any nation, but especially intolerable for a democracy.

My father agreed with what Lilienthal was saying. “I’ve always believed that we should never use these weapons,” he said. “I don’t believe we ever will have to use them, but we have to go on making them because of the way the Russians are behaving. We have no other course.” Then, in a grimmer tone, he added that if Senator Johnson had kept his mouth shut, it might have been possible to examine the whole issue quietly, but now, so many people were in a furor about the possibility of Russia achieving such a weapon, he had no alternative but to go ahead.

My father sat down and signed the already prepared statement for the press, announcing in the simplest possible terms the decision to pursue the superweapon. “It is part of my responsibility as commander in chief of the Armed Forces to see to it that our country is able to defend itself against any possible aggressor,” he said. As he signed the statement, he remarked: “I remember when I made the decision on Greece. Everybody on the National Security Council predicted the world would come to an end if we went ahead. But we did go ahead and the world didn’t come to an end. I think the same thing will happen here.”

Two days later, the British Embassy reported Klaus Fuchs would be arraigned on February 3. My father looked grimly at the man who brought him the news, Admiral Sidney Souers, his chief of intelligence, and said: “Tie on your hat.”