Harry S. Truman Trying to make the right call
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This transcript was run through an automated transcription service and then lightly edited for clarity. There may be typos or small discrepancies from the podcast audio.
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: I grew up in a very Republican family, and the night of the '48 election, I was 15. I was in high school, and I was very interested in politics. And I wanted to stay up to hear who won, but the final count didn't come in until something like 2:00 in the morning.
I fell asleep, and the next morning my father was in shaving, and I ran in. I said, 'Dad, Dad -- who won?' And he said, 'Truman,' in a deep, sorrowful voice, like it was the end of the world.
About 25, 30 years later, I was back home in Pittsburgh, where I grew up, and my father and I were having a nice chat after dinner. And he was going on about how the world was going to hell, and the country was going to hell. Then, he paused and he said, 'Too bad old Harry isn’t still in the White House.'
We see things differently as time goes on, and that's the nature of reality. Truman, himself, said, 'You have to wait for the dust to settle.' And he was right. You do. If you were ranking Truman in the last months or year of his presidency, you'd rank him pretty low. But as the dust has settled over the last 50 years and more, we see now that Harry Truman was a very important and effective and admirable president -- a man who never wanted the job, never imagined he'd be in the job.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That's biographer David McCullough. And I'm Lillian Cunningham with The Washington Post. This is the 32nd episode of “Presidential.”
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LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: This episode is about the imperfect art of making decisions that hold up over time. Predictions. Judgment calls. It's an episode, I hope, about what it takes to try to see the future and to make a decision in the moment that will put you ultimately on the right side of history.
So, there are a couple ways we are going to explore this with Harry Truman. One is by looking at some of his biggest and most controversial decisions in the White House. And then another is by
Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 1 looking at the biggest polling miscalculation in American presidential history -- and that was Truman's election in 1948, when just about everyone predicted incorrectly that he was going to lose.
So, I have two featured guests this week: David McCullough, the historian and biographer who wrote the book “Truman,” and Scott Clement, who's the head of polling for The Washington Post. I'm going to kick it off first with David McCullough, who was also on our John Adams episode and our Theodore Roosevelt episode.
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Yes, this is David speaking from our home in Boston.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: And you've written biographies of all three of these presidents, David. So, is there something that binds your interest in these three men? Something that you saw shared at the heart of all three of these presidencies?
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Well, I think that Adams, Harry Truman and Theodore Roosevelt all had a very strong sense of history. They were well read in history. And with that came a sense of cause and effect -- what's the right decision for the country in the long run?
And to me, Adams and Truman, in particular, are presidents who were preceded by and then followed by taller, more glamorous, more celebrated presidents. In the case of Adams, it was Washington and then Jefferson. With Truman, it was Roosevelt and then Eisenhower. And I felt that these were two extremely important and interesting presidents.
But beyond that, they're great stories -- great American stories from birth to death. Both Adams and Truman came from very modest, you might even say obscure, backgrounds. And one would not think that they could rise to be and do what they did.
But they did.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, this seems like a good place to start with a bit about his early story. Harry S. Truman was born in 1884 in the tiny frontier town of Lamar, Missouri. And interestingly the 'S' in his name doesn't actually stand for anything. It is just 'S.
Harry S. Truman had one of those sort of classic, modest upbringings stories. He helped his family run their farm, and they were often in a lot of financial difficulty. He had famously bad eyesight. And so, he was a shy, kind of awkward, introverted boy. And you know, then like many of these stories go, his father died when Truman was about 20-years old.
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: By our standards, Harry Truman grew up with no advantages at all. Truman never went to college, but that should never be a sign that he was not well read or interested in history or interested in learning. He wasn't brilliant, and he didn't have the capacity to express himself in words that some of the others had. But he had a very good mind.
Very few people in his time -- or even since -- ever, ever imagine that Harry Truman read Latin for pleasure, for example, or that he would go to hear the National Symphony whenever he could, but also whenever they were playing one of his favorite composers, like Mozart. And if they were to play somebody like Mozart, he would take the score with him. That's not the Harry Truman that everybody popularly thinks of.
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LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: One of the things that he would get sometimes ridiculed about was his devotion to his mother. Tell me a little bit about how that relationship, you think, shaped who he is.
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Well, I did a piece years ago on mama's boys, picking people from various walks of life -- Frank Lloyd Wright, General MacArthur, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson. And I came to the conclusion that whether or not being a mama's boy is good or bad for you depends almost entirely on what kind of a person mama was.
Truman's mother was not a mother who spoiled her children. She required that they live up to certain standards and behave a certain way. But she also had backbone. She believed in speaking the truth, speaking directly. She believed in the old hard-rock Midwestern American virtues and values and conveyed that to him.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Truman held a hodge podge of jobs in his youth. He worked for a construction company. He worked as a bank clerk. He joined the National Guard. He ended up serving actually as a soldier in France during World War II. And after his military service, he came back to Missouri and he married his childhood sweetheart, Bess. He also then started a men's clothing store with his friend in Kansas City before it failed.
So, it's around 1922 when he first starts to dip his toe into politics. And he runs for a judgeship in [Missouri] with the support of the Democratic Party boss of Kansas City, who later ends up in prison. But, anyway, time passes. He serves in these various judgeships. And in 1934, Truman won a seat in the U.S. Senate and he moved to Washington D.C.
When he's in the Senate, he's not a particularly standout politician, but some of his notable involvement was with revamping transportation regulations, with helping set up the framework for the airline industry to grow. So, on the whole, he's not making a bunch of waves in the Senate, other than that he's just kind of a good Democrat supporting President Roosevelt's New Deal agenda at the time. And so, this fairly sparse, clean-good-Democrat record is why the Democratic Party decided that they should package Truman as vice president with FDR when FDR was running for his fourth term as president, in 1944.
Truman did not seem to have a whole lot to offer the ticket. Mostly he just kind of seemed like someone who would keep out of the way. But that, of course, was not how things turned out. On April 12, 1945 -- so, this is just a couple months into Truman's vice presidency -- he gets called to the White House.
And up until this point, he's had hardly any contact with President Roosevelt at all. He's not involved in any of the decision-making, doesn't see any of the process. And so, he's called into Eleanor Roosevelt's study. And she says to him, 'Harry, the president is dead.' And Truman says, 'Is there anything I can do for you?’ And Eleanor says back to him, 'Is there anything I can do for you? You're the one in trouble now.’
David, how did Truman approach this really immense task of taking over the presidency? I mean, not only is World War II at its climax, and Truman hasn't been clued in to any of the decision- making up until this point. But also, FDR was this charismatic, larger-than- life figure who'd been president for 12 years. So, how did Truman jump into this leadership void?
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DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Harry Truman never tried to talk like Franklin Roosevelt because he wanted to follow in Franklin Roosevelt's shoes.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Do you think that's one of the common themes for effective leaders -- is just their ability to embrace who they are rather than trying to conform to some image.
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: They're not faking it. They're not trying to act a part that they really are miscast in.
I had the advantage with Truman of being able to talk with countless people who knew him or who worked with him as part of his administration. And when I asked people who did know him at the time that Franklin Roosevelt died, I asked the same question to all of them: How did you feel when you heard that Roosevelt had died and Harry Truman was now president? And without exception, all of them said, 'I felt good about it.' And I said, 'Why?' And they would say, 'Because I knew the man.' They weren't going on the surface impressions or what the press was saying.
One of my favorite scenes of all was right at the point when Truman was about to appoint George Marshall secretary of state. One of his political advisers said, 'Mr. President, you might want to think twice about appointing General Marshall as secretary of state.' And Truman said, 'Well, why's that?' He said, 'Because if General Marshall becomes secretary of state, in three or four months people will be saying he would make a better president than you are.' And Truman said, 'He would make a better president than I am, but I want the best possible people around me.'
Now, that's a man who knew who he was, and knew what the job that he had amounted to -- and he knew he needed all the help possible. And most of them were better educated and taller and handsomer and wealthier than he ever was.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, of course, the huge first task before him is overseeing an end to the war.
HARRY S. TRUMAN: This is a solemn, but a glorious hour. I only wish that Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived to witness this day. General Eisenhower informs him that the forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations. The flags of freedom fly all over Europe.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: The victory in Europe came on May 8, 1945, which coincidentally was Truman's 61st birthday. And it was less than a month after Truman had taken over the presidency. Victory over Japan, though, seemed a lot farther away at the time. He always expected that an invasion of Japan would add probably another year to the fighting of World War II, and that it would probably result in the loss of hundreds of thousands more lives.
So, in the summer of 1945, President Truman made the decision to end the war as quickly as possible. He decides to drop an atomic bomb on Japan.
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: That really, in the opinion of a lot of us who studied it, was a decision that was no decision. I think Churchill used that expression because of the terrible loss of life on both sides had the invasion of Japan gone ahead, and the invasion of Japan was definitely going to go ahead. The use of the atomic weapons was horrible in the extreme -- but what would have happened had they not been used, it would appear, from all that we know, would have been even
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LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: On August 6, 1945, the first bomb dropped on Hiroshima. On August 9, a second one dropped on Nagasaki. The estimates are between 100,000 and 200,000 people who died, and just about all of these people were civilians who died instantly.
I want to just pause here for a moment, and say that I definitely could have spent this entire episode talking just about Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb. And this is something that inevitably is going to come up more and more as we move into this final stretch of episodes, which is that there are just so many big, important, complex moments for many of these presidencies. And in a lot of cases, I'm going to just have to touch briefly on it, and put the focus of my episode somewhere else.
So, Truman, of course, ends up with the task of helping to shape the peace after World War II. And this is when more of the divisions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union start to show themselves, and when that early Cold War begins to emerge. Meanwhile, though, by 1948, Congress has authorized the European Recovery Program, which is also more popularly known as the Marshall Plan. It was named after Secretary of State George Marshall, and it was this multibillion-dollar initiative for the United States to help Western Europe rebuild its economies after the war.
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Probably the most important and creative accomplishment of his presidency was the Marshall Plan, which saved Europe, no question about it.
Then, how he handled the Berlin airlift, for example -- a brave dangerous decision. He knew how much was at stake. And it worked.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That's when Truman ordered the airlift of fuel and food into Berlin after the Soviets had blocked access to the city.
And so, it's things like this Berlin Airlift and the dropping of the bomb that start to give Truman this reputation for being decisive, right? So, what did his actual decision-making process look like?
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Truman was once asked by a reporter how he made decisions. He said, 'Well, I asked my advisers to study the situation and give me their opinions. Then, I retired to my office, up in our living quarters. And I spent hours going over all of these papers and reading everything that I've been provided. And then I make the decision.'
And the reporter said, 'Well, what what happens, Mr. President, if you've made the wrong decision?'
He said, 'Then I make another decision.' And that's very good, clear, Middle Western thinking.
With one sweep of the pen, he desegregated the armed services. He didn't go out and make a big fuss about how he's going to do this. He just did it.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Right, so this was in 1948. That's the year that he's up for election. He desegregated the military, and he outlaws discrimination in the civil service.
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DAVID MCCULLOUGH: A president should always make decisions that are selfless, that are in the best interests of the country in the long run; and not worry about getting reelected; and not design everything he or she says, every appearance he or she makes, in order to enhance his/her standing with the people. Yes that's important. But it's not what matters most.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Well, and it looked like Truman was actually going to pay the political price for some of these, including his decision that the United States should be the first country to recognize the newly formed state of Israel, which was a controversial decision as well.
So, really from the very beginning of this 1948 campaign season, Truman is already looking like he is going to be booted out of office.
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: If anyone was -- in his whole life -- the kind of person who wouldn't give up, it was Harry Truman. And all the predictions of how he was going to lose in 1948…50 different members of the press who were experts at covering politics and were covering the campaigns were asked how the election was going to come out, and all 50 said that Truman was going to lose. But Truman never let that bother him.
He never even mentioned Tom Dewey's name in the course of the campaign. So, he wasn't attacking his opponent in a personal way, ever. He was out on the road, on the trail, on the railroads, carrying on his so-called whistle stop campaign. And the crowds kept getting bigger and bigger and [commentators] seem to just feel, 'Well, they're coming out to see a president before he leaves office.'
Not at all.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Alright, so we're now going to turn to the 1948 election, which is known either as one of the greatest upsets in presidential election history or, conversely, as just about the greatest failure in polling history. So, with me to walk through this chapter of the American presidency is my colleague Scott Clement, who's the head of polling for The Washington Post. So, thanks. I know you're very busy now in the election season.
SCOTT CLEMENT: Oh, always an important time to review some past failures as we head into a high-stakes season.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, Harry Truman at this point, has served a couple of years in the White House as FDR's replacement. He's never actually been elected himself to the presidency, and he's running in 1948. The spoiler, obviously, is that he wins. But, you know, there's that iconic photograph with Truman holding up a newspaper with a headline that reads, incorrectly, "Dewey defeats Truman."
So, I want to talk with you about how in the world we got to that point. And to do that, maybe we'll just back up. What do the polls even look like early on in the campaign and what was the science of polling at the time?
SCOTT CLEMENT: Right. So, polling was not in its infancy at that moment, but it was a pretty young science. There had long been polls, but there was really no scientific technique applied back to the 19th century. And then there was the famous Literary Digest survey, which was a massive
Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 6 magazine survey that was very popular and accurate in the late '20s and early '30s.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Where readers just fill out who they think --
SCOTT CLEMENT: They sent it out to their readership. And then it famously failed in 1936.
And George Gallup also came to fame at that moment, because he promised a more scientific method of sampling. So, this is really a heyday of the early polling industry. There was a real confidence about them, and there was a real heavy media focus on polling way back then.
Of course, we think about polling being a sort of media fixation today, but it was very much back then as well. And so, there were a lot of reasons to believe that Truman was going to be a weak incumbent. He was facing some serious challenges within his own party, particularly from Strom Thurmond. It was viewed to be a low turnout year, which is something that people thought would benefit Dewey -- because that had seemed to benefit Republicans in recent elections.
The three main pollsters that were conducting national surveys were, of course, famously George Gallup; but there was also Elmo Roper; and there was Archibald Crossley. These were really the leaders in the industry.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, what does this type of polling look like? What does public opinion polling look like at the time?
SCOTT CLEMENT: The most popular form of polling, at least at the national level, was what was called called ‘quota sampling.’ So, interviewers were asked to go and find people who fit different demographic quotas -- something that would match the population, according to the most recent census. So, if you were sent out to a neighborhood, you might be asked to find people in three different age groups. And interviewers were given discretion into who they could select and what households they would go to.
Now, this can help achieve a sample that is demographically balanced and can look like the population. But as some social scientists were pointing out at the time, that method doesn't offer the kind of generalizability that a random sample does. Back then, it was pseudo-random, but the interviewers had wide discretion -- and that can introduce interest bias into who they interview. They might interview people that are easier to obtain an interview with. They also might interview people that are more like themselves. So, there is some evidence that that was an issue. And what the polling started to show was a very clear and consistent advantage for Dewey going into the fall.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Part of what I find fascinating about looking back at that ‘48 election -- and obviously it still happens today -- is the way that seeing these early poll numbers can change the way that campaigns operate. So, for example: In ’48, because this narrative started to emerge that Dewey looked like a clear winner, the strategy that the Republicans ended up taking was, ‘Just don't make any gaffes -- you don't need to go out there and hit the campaign trail in the same sort of proactive way [that you would] if you think you're the underdog.’
SCOTT CLEMENT: You definitely see it happening in today's campaigns. If a person has a really big lead, there's a tendency to be more cautious, to take fewer risks. If you're way behind, you need to roll the dice and try to mix things up.
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You know, Harry Truman gained a reputation on this campaign as having some very fiery rhetoric; really campaigning hard trying to overcome what seemed to be some very fierce headwinds. And Dewey is remembered more for taking some long breaks off the campaign trail up in New York.
You could imagine what it was like for the Dewey campaign to see poll releases -- and the Truman campaign to see poll releases -- in September saying that this is a foregone conclusion. Most of the polls showed Dewey leading by five or more percentage points. The media reacted a lot like the way they are doing right now with Donald Trump. Stuart Rothenberg’s headline “Donald Trump needs a miracle” is literally a headline from 1948.
But what happened was they missed the call, obviously.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: Was the polling just flawed all the way along? Or was part of it that there was really sort of a change of tide toward the end that the polls weren't able to accurately catch up to and reflect?
SCOTT CLEMENT: The polls that were conducted before were biased in a consistent way against Truman. Post-election polls found that one out of seven voters made their decision about how to vote within the last two weeks, or at least they said they did. And three quarters of them said they voted for Truman. So this provided some evidence that there was a swing toward Truman or that the people that were on the fence and undecided made a move toward Truman in the final weeks.
I'm sure that finding added to the sense among pollsters that they shouldn't have considered the race a foregone conclusion and stopped conducting their surveys very late in the contest. If there's any lesson they came out of that election that has been taken to heart by many pollsters, it's that.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: You keep polling right up to the moment.
SCOTT CLEMENT: You keep going. If anything, you know you want to track the trends. But the worst case scenario is that, if there is a late shift and you miss it, you're going to have egg on your face.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So do you want to tell the story of how it actually happened that The Chicago Tribune prints a front page that says Dewey defeats Truman?
SCOTT CLEMENT: This headline is really remarkable. It's a false headline, of course. We often don't see newspapers blaring things that are blatantly false.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: The biggest news --
SCOTT CLEMENT: And the biggest news of all. The entire election.
There was a printer strike that forced the paper to go to press before they normally would that particular night -- that election night. And so, they didn't feel like they had the luxury of waiting until the election returns were coming in, all the way in, so they could see who was actually winning.
When the first-edition deadline approached, the Chicago Tribune editors consulted with their
Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 8 political correspondent in Washington, and they made a call that Dewey was going to win and that they were going to print this headline.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: That was just how confident they were, and what all the numbers were showing?
SCOTT CLEMENT: Yeah, that's right.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: It seemed safe enough to them.
SCOTT CLEMENT: This was not a normal circumstance, I should say. But what allowed them to make that kind of confident call is that for the past two months, polls -- national polls -- had shown a sizable lead for Dewey, and the conventional wisdom that this race was over had set in.
In some ways, I think that that headline summarizes a lot of the thinking that was going on -- and the headlines that have been going on -- for months before. If you look back -- this is striking, really -- but back in early September, some of the headlines that were printed were: "Dewey victory in November by a wide margin predicted." And here's, "Dewey almost certain to win, Roper poll finds."
I think it's hard to ignore that overall environment in terms of how it contributed to that eventual decision to print that famous headline of "Dewey defeats Truman."
But they didn't have to wait long, of course, to find out that they were wrong. Even then, the Tribune notes that they might have gotten away with it -- it might have gotten ignored -- except, of course, Truman gets passed this newspaper while he's traveling around and holds it up for this absolutely famous picture -- which summarized the ultimate comeback, overcoming whatever odds or pollsters or anybody else thought.
So, the polling industry went into a crisis. By December, they had issued a major report trying to dig into what went wrong. And the next year, they published a book on it. It caused major changes. It turned out that there were a lot of cautionary tales out of this. There were both scientific nerdy ones, but there was also just…The moral for the news is that, you know, don't write the news before it's true. It's a pretty basic one, but don't bet on an election.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: So, Truman's next term starts up, and he takes this mandate that he feels like he's been given by his victory, and he rolls out a bold progressive liberal agenda to do things like increase the minimum wage, create national health insurance, push forward more civil rights legislation, expand Social Security.
And some of this happens -- like expanding Social Security and boosting the minimum wage -- but a lot of it doesn't actually get enough support from Congress to make it anywhere. By 1950, Truman has also reengaged the United States in international conflict: the Korean War. He sees this as an extension of the Cold War power struggle between the United States and Russia, between democracy and communism, playing out in this conflict between North and South Korea. And it's in the midst of this war that Truman makes one of his most controversial decisions as president -- he decides to fire General Douglas MacArthur, who has been leading the U.N. command there.
Presidential podcast wapo.st/presidential 9 DAVID MCCULLOUGH: The most unpopular thing he ever did -- Truman -- was to fire General MacArthur. And he knew that General MacArthur had to be fired because he was acting as though he was the commander-in-chief. And Truman believed in sustaining, supporting, the integrity of the office of the presidency and that he was the commander-in-chief, not General MacArthur.
He asked General Marshall to go and study the whole situation for him and come back and give him a report. And Marshall who, of course, had spent his whole career in the military, did just that and he came back and said, 'Mr. President, I would have fired him before this had I been in your job.'
And it made him extremely unpopular. I remember it all very well. I was in high school at the time, and I remember the furor over it and the sense that this was the worst president we've ever had.
LILLIAN CUNNINGHAM: What's so interesting is that here we see the flip side of that earlier decision Truman made to bring on George Marshall as secretary of state -- when his advisers were cautioning him that Marshall would make him look less fit to be president and Truman was telling them, 'I don't care. I just want the best people.'
Well, here we see Truman deciding to cut one of the most decorated military leaders in history, in large part because MacArthur was seen to be undermining Truman's authority as president.
Now, of course, over time, there are many people who had come to see both personnel decisions that Truman made -- the one for Marshall, the one against MacArthur -- to see both of those as the right ones. But it's interesting, I think, to contemplate the difference in how Truman reasoned through these two staffing questions and perhaps what it says about how his views shifted over time, in terms of what he required of others in order to feel that he was being an effective president.
Truman did not run again in 1952. He left the White House. He moved back to Independence, Missouri, where his presidential library was built; and he remained as active as he could in politics.
Fast forward to 1965 when Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law. He did so at the Truman Presidential Library with Truman looking on. Johnson noted at that ceremony that the seeds for Medicare were planted by Truman, who had advocated for national health insurance and who had also expanded Social Security. And when the first Medicare cards were printed, Medicare card number one and card number two went to Truman and to his wife, Bess.
Now, I think I'll let David McCullough close the episode for us with his reflections on the post- presidency and the legacy as he sees it of Harry Truman.
DAVID MCCULLOUGH: When he heard that the Kennedy campaign was going to start having $1,000-a-plate dinners to raise money for Kennedy's presidential campaign, he said, 'There goes democracy.' Of course now, both parties have $50,000-a-plate dinners to raise money.
He refused ever to take a fee for a speech after he left the White House, because he felt that would be a disgrace to the office of the presidency. He wouldn't serve on any board because of that. He wouldn't lobby by making a phone call for somebody for which he would be handsomely paid. It's a sad thing that we've lost that kind of moral outlook and respect for the office, itself. He wanted to live up to what the office called for.
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So much of our attention is taken up with bad news -- greed or cruelty or outrageous behavior of one kind or another -- that we forget we are a good country. We are good people. And with the right kind of purpose in our leaders, there's truly still very little we can't accomplish.
I think that the knowledge of history increases one's optimism. It doesn't make one oblivious to what the problems really are -- in fact, in many cases, it makes those problems even more vivid -- but there is the lesson from these people who preceded us that it can be done. As Churchill said, 'We haven't journeyed this far because we're made of sugar candy.'
So, let's end on that.
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