The day after Truman’s cabinet meeting, on June 26, the president directed what he called an “improvised ‘airlift’” to be put “on a full-scale organized basis and that every plane available to our European Command be impressed into service.” The Berlin Airlift had begun.
14
“With God’s Help, You Will Win”
ON JULY FOURTH WEEKEND, less than a week before the Democratic convention was to kick off, powerful members of the party panicked. James Roosevelt II—FDR’s oldest son—made a move he hoped would save the Democrats from doom in 1948. Roosevelt had arranged for telegrams to be sent out to all 1,592 delegates who would be voting for the party nomination in Philadelphia, asking them to arrive in the city two days early for a special “Draft Eisenhower” caucus, in which the Democrats would make a high-profile plea to Dwight Eisenhower to run for president on the Democratic ticket. Eisenhower—the beloved army general who had commanded the Allied forces in the D-day landings in Normandy—was a mysterious figure, politically. Being a military man, he had spent his career above politics, and as far as anyone knew, he did not belong to any political party.
Over the next days, Democratic leaders came out in droves with Draft Eisenhower statements of their own: Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, former Interior secretary Harold Ickes, the powerful Democratic machine bosses Jacob Arvey of Chicago and Frank Hague of New Jersey, and more.
“Nothing quite so strange has occurred in a long time as the frantic clamor among discontented Democrats for Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to come and save them from Harry S. Truman,” wrote the columnist Thomas Stokes. If the Democrats failed to get Ike to run, commented the nation’s most popular political columnist, Drew Pearson, “every seasoned political leader in the Democratic Party is convinced Harry Truman will suffer one of the worst election defeats in history.” In pollster Elmo Roper’s latest national study, Thomas Dewey was well ahead of Truman, 41.3 to 33.7 percent, but if Eisenhower ran as a Democrat, the public favored him over Dewey, 42.3 to 33.8 percent.
In the White House, Truman was humiliated by the Draft Eisenhower movement. “Doublecrossers all,” he wrote in his diary. “But they’ll get nowhere—a doubledealer never does.” To Bess, he wrote, “This job gets worse every day. Look what . . . [the] Demorepublicans are trying to do to me now. But I’m going to lick ’em or go down fighting.”
Ike himself responded politely but adamantly: He would not run.
All the while, the pressure in the White House mounted, as it seemed that war in Berlin could come at any moment. The same week that the Democratic convention began, Truman met with his military advisers to discuss the Soviet standoff in Berlin, again. “I’ve made my decision,” he wrote in notes of this meeting. There would be no retreat. “We’ll stay in Berlin—come what may.”
On July 12, the first televised Democratic National Convention opened ceremonies in Philadelphia. From the get-go, the tone was one of irritability and despair. The heat in the city was unbearable. Hotel rooms were nonexistent. Across from the convention hall’s front door, a man waved an EISENHOWER FOR PRESIDENT banner, even though Ike was not attending and would not be running. “The glum resignation of the leading Democrats has to be seen to be believed,” wrote the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop. “There never has been anything like it in the major political history of the United States,” wrote Erwin Canham, editor of the Christian Science Monitor.
In the White House, Truman watched on TV—the familiar calls to order, dull speakers failing to arouse attention. One thing seemed eminently clear: how much the world had changed in the four years since the 1944 convention. Atomic energy. The Iron Curtain. The Cold War. None of this terminology had held any meaning four short years earlier.
By this time Truman had picked a VP candidate—Alben Barkley of Kentucky. The president’s first choice had been the popular Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, but Douglas had declined, claiming lack of political experience. Truman believed the rumors, however, that Douglas did not want to be “a number two man to a number two man,” as the president put it in his diary.
“I stuck my neck all the way out for Douglas,” Truman told his staff, mixing his metaphors, “and he cut the limb out from under me.”
On that first night of the convention, the president sat cross-legged in his bed wearing pajamas, watching Senator Barkley deliver the keynote. Truman was alone, as his wife and daughter were back home in Independence for the summer break. He held his chin in his hands, as if too tired to hold up his head. A friend was shown into the room and the two began to talk over the convention.
Truman reportedly said, “Why do they hate me so? I’ve tried to do the right thing. I’ve done everything I could. But they just don’t seem to appreciate it.”
From the president’s point of view, his current approval rating—a miserable 36 percent—did not reflect the job he was doing. America was booming. Ever since the end of the war, economists had been sounding alarm bells. There was going to be another depression . . . There was going to be hardship and fear . . . But no depression had come. The labor force was strong, the incomes of average Americans in various sectors were strong, and people’s standard of living in many parts of the country was high and rising. Despite high prices and a housing shortage, postwar America was on a tear. But
