At one rally in San Antonio, Texas, Truman told a crowd gathered in the Gunter Hotel:
Our government is made up of the people. You are the government. I am only your hired servant. I am the Chief Executive of the greatest nation in the world, the highest honor that can ever come to a man on earth. But I am the servant of the people of the United States. They are not my servants . . .
I believe that if we ourselves try to live as we should, and if we continue to work for peace in this world, and as the old Puritan said, ‘Keep your bullets bright and your powder dry,’ eventually we will get peace in this world, because that is the only way we can survive with the modern inventions under which we live.
We have got to harness these inventions for the welfare of man, instead of his destruction. That is what I am interested in. That is what I am working for. That is much more important than whether I am President of the United States.
The day Truman arrived back at the White House in early October, he found out that he and his family were going to move out whether he won the election or not. Two days earlier, the White House architect Lorenzo Winslow had announced that the entire second floor of the building—the space in which the president lived with his family—would have to be rebuilt. The “structural nerves” were in alarming decay, Winslow said. How long the Trumans needed to vacate, Winslow could not say. The work would cost somewhere between $750,000 and $1,250,000.
The president was home for just four days. Democratic leaders came to greet him in the White House, and the first question they asked the sixty-four-year-old was about his health and his stamina.
“Vitamin C stands for campaigning as far as I’m concerned,” Truman said. “When I left town on this trip I had a cold and a sore throat. Now I’m rid of both and I gained 10 pounds while making 120 speeches.”
“What do you think of those Texans tossing eggs at Henry Wallace?” asked Al Wheeler, the head of the Democratic Committee in the District of Columbia.
“I was sorry to hear about that—I really was,” Truman said. “I guess the incident was building up for a long time. Some of those Texans have never liked Wallace . . . Add to that Wallace’s Commie connections and you get some idea why those eggs were thrown. Those Texans couldn’t hold out any longer. But I don’t like that kind of a demonstration in a democratic country, regardless of the circumstances behind it.”
Truman hosted the Democratic National Committee’s research division at the White House, which officially ended its work on October 1. There was no more money to pay the team. Truman wanted to thank these dozen or so individuals personally. At roughly nine o’clock on a warm autumn night in the White House Rose Garden, Truman went from one campaign worker to the next to shake each hand personally.
“On election day,” he said over and over, “we’ll all celebrate together.”
Dr. Johannes Hoeber, who had served as number two under Bill Batt in the division, remembered the moment the president shook his hand, and the confidence Truman displayed in his expression. Truman, Hoeber realized, truly believed he was going to win. “I remember catching the expression on Mrs. Truman’s face at that moment, which was quite clear, that she herself didn’t think this would happen,” Hoeber recalled. “And on Margaret’s face there was the same thing.” But Truman seemed utterly sure. “There was no doubt in the President’s mind,” Hoeber recalled. “This is a memory which will stay with me always.”
On Sunday, October 3, Truman met with campaign officials to discuss strategy. “What was most urgently needed, I felt, was a totally new approach,” Truman later wrote in his memoirs. “We were pretty desperate,” added Jonathan Daniels, Truman’s first press secretary, who was at the White House that day. “We wanted something that would be a dramatic gesture of the President’s effort for peace and security in the world.”
Truman had the idea of sending an emissary to meet with Joseph Stalin in person, in a grand gesture of peace. Something had to be done to iron out the differences between the United States and the USSR, before it was too late, and a diplomatic effort would generate positive publicity, Truman believed. Back in 1945, he had tried a similar approach with Harry Hopkins, who had been one of Roosevelt’s most trusted advisers before FDR had died. Hopkins had spent a week with Stalin in the Kremlin; Truman had asked Hopkins “to use diplomatic language or a baseball bat.” The results had been good, and the American people were pleased. Truman thought now was the time to try again.
Hopkins, however, had since died of cancer. In a meeting with Truman’s advisers, the president suggested sending the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Fred Vinson, to Moscow. Clark Clifford and his assistant George Elsey argued against the idea but Truman could not be swayed. He telephoned Vinson and asked him to come to the White House immediately. When Vinson arrived at the Oval Office, he had no idea why he had been summoned.
“I outlined to him what I had in mind,” Truman later wrote. The president wanted the chief justice to go to Moscow on a special mission in an attempt to negotiate an end to the Cold War. “I asked Vinson to point out to Stalin that the folly and tragedy of another war would amount to an act of national suicide and that no sane leader of any major power could ever again even contemplate war except in defense. Surely the next war—an atomic war—could have no victors, and the total annihilation of vast areas was unthinkable.” The president wanted “to go to any
