Washington bets Truman will oust some top men
Friends say new President, given tough job, insists on capable assistants
By Charles T. Lucey, Scripps-Howard staff writer
WASHINGTON – Harry S. Truman is an everyday American who ploughed a straight furrow as a Missouri farm boy and who, as President, is expected to do the same.
Extreme views on both sides can be heard about him today. Truth, as usual, lay somewhere between.
No one knows better than Harry Truman how sharp is the contrast between him and the Franklin Roosevelt he succeeded last night.
He has followed the President, but he is no New Dealer. He has been beholden to bosses, but he has been able to say no to them. He is a man adroit in compromise who can work well with Republicans as with Democrats.
Gets into hot water
And he is a rather frank-spoken man whose bluntness more than once has got him into hot water.
Harry Truman came to the Senate in 1934 with advice from Boss Tom Pendergast to work hard, keep his mouth shut until he knew the ropes, and answer his mail. It wasn’t until 1937 that he did anything that put him in the national spotlight, and that was as vice-chairman of a committee investigating the railroads.
When it came to digging into the Missouri Pacific, names of politicians and others back in Missouri began to bob up. Telegrams and telephone calls poured in on Sen. Truman asking him to ease up on that home-state stuff.
Brushed aside ‘heat’
Boss Pendergast was one of those who turned on the heat. But Mr. Truman told his committee investigators: “I don’t want you to ease up on anything. Treat this investigation just as you do all the others.”
As senator, Mr. Truman never apologized for Boss Pendergast and when the old man died a few months ago he went to Kansas City to his funeral. Pendergast had been his friend and there was still loyalty there, that was all.
Harry Truman has a certain gentleness about him, but back of this is the shrewdness which, despite what some people have rated only average ability, has carried him to political success.
Best man sought
When he became chairman of the Senate war investigating body that came to be called the Truman Committee, he went to his friend, Bob Jackson, then Attorney General, and asked him for the best man he had to run an investigation. The Attorney General gave him Hugh Fulton, and other able investigators were found.
Friends cite this to show that, given a job, Mr. Truman tries to surround himself with able people.
That’s why the betting today is there will be plenty of changes at the top of the government’s executive branch – in the Cabinet and in the White House coterie.
Opposed nomination
Harry Truman didn’t want the Vice Presidency when it came to him last year. He told friends he would be happy to spend the rest of his life in the Senate and, a man of modest means, he was afraid he couldn’t afford the fanfare that would have to go with it.
At the Chicago convention, he thought his biggest role would be to nominate James F. Byrnes for the Vice Presidency. Mr. Byrnes had asked him to do so and he had agreed.
But when Sidney Hillman’s boys thumbs-downed Mr. Byrnes, when the city bosses and National Chairman Robert Hannegan bucked Henry Wallace and when Mr. Roosevelt finally gave the Senator his blessing, Mr. Truman went in fighting.
Genial fellow
“I’m in this now,” he said, “and I’m staying in it until I win.”
On the campaign train he was a genial fellow who played poker and had a drink with the newspapermen but who always knocked off no later than 11:30 p.m., to be up early for the back-platform stops of early morning.
At Uvalde, Texas, he got out on the platform and he and Jack Garner threw their arms around each other. Friends say he likes Cactus Jack and that he is also closer to Jesse Jones and others on the conservative side of the New Deal Party than to the Harry Hopkins’ New Dealers. In the Senate, his closest crony is Carl Hatch (D-New Mexico).
What’s New Deal’s fate?
A big question asked here today was: Is the New Deal dead? Those who looked at Mr. Truman’s many conservative friends said yes; those who looked at his voting record said no. It has been strongly pro-Roosevelt for 10 years.
Harry Truman’s biggest ambition, in recent months, has been to put everything he could into the job of getting acceptance of the post-war international treaties, including Bretton Woods and the one to come out of San Francisco. He was working among Republicans as well as Democrats.
He’s good at that, too. He had Republicans on the Senate War Investigating Committee – and they didn’t file even one minority report.