THE PRESIDENCY: When I Make a Mistake

One morning at the end of last month, Harry Truman sat down and tackled the accumulation of personal mail that he always handles himself. No advisers were with him. The only other person in his office was his quiet and devoted personal secretary, Miss Rose Conway. The presidential voice droned through the dictation, the Conway pencil traced its neat shorthand—until Mr. Truman’s eyes fell on a letter from California’s Republican Congressman Gordon L. McDonough.

Congressman McDonough respectfully suggested that the Marines, like the Army, Navy and Air Force, ought to have their own general on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was not the first of such letters on the subject. There had been scores of others, not to mention telegrams and even some telephone calls. This was the limit. Mr. Truman popped a gasket.

The presidential voice clanged out. “For your information,” he dictated, “the Marine Corps is the Navy’s police force and as long as I am President that is what it will remain. They have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s . . . Sincerely yours, Harry S. Truman.”

“Somewhat Startling.” “I must say,” McDonough later observed, “that the tone of Mr. Truman’s reply was somewhat startling.” But Congressman McDonough contented himself with appending a few observations to the letter and quietly inserting the whole correspondence in the Congressional Record. There the matter would have rested, buried in the Appendix, if a free-lance journalist had not spotted it and passed it on to the New York Daily News’s able hatchetman, John O’Donnell. Last week, Columnist O’Donnell ran the full text of the correspondence. A few hours later, Harry Truman’s gratuitous remarks about the U.S. Marine Corps glared bleakly and blackly from the country’s front pages.

Mr. Truman has written many pungent private letters. Mr. Truman has also publicly put his foot in his mouth before, but this time the feat seemed to overshadow all others. His description of the Marines as the Navy’s police was grossly inaccurate. By congressional act the Marines’ primary mission is the seizing and securing of naval bases; by long tradition their mission is to fight anywhere, any time and at a moment’s notice. It was obvious to everyone else in the U.S. that, at the moment, marines were fighting and dying in Korea. Harry Truman’s comparison of Marine propaganda with the Russian product simply left everyone wide-eyed.

“Incompetent Damn Fool.” The Democrats were stunned. Republicans, scarcely able to believe that even Harry Truman could say such things—and in writing—could think of nothing to do at the moment but cluck, “Shocking” . . . “Unfortunate.” Iowa’s Hickenlooper, when he got his breath, declaimed: “I know that the spirits of heroes from the Halls of Montezuma, from Chateau-Thierry and Tarawa . . . will be aroused.”

He was right. The White House switchboard was swamped with calls from angry ex-marines, their families and friends. At the Hotel Statler, the Marine Corps League happened to be holding a convention. The outraged feelings of the Marine veterans reached a steamy climax in a 20-minute speech delivered by Sheriff William Harris, of Chatham County, Ga., who referred to “that creature in the White House,” and blamed as the source of the Marines’ troubles the man who had tried to cut Marine strength to the bone —Defense Secretary Louis Johnson, that “incompetent damn fool.”

While White House aides sat around appalled, even Harry Truman decided that he had better do something. He prepared to do what no other President within memory has done: make a public apology for an egregious blunder.*The White House speech-writers were called in to carve out a statement.

“I Had in Mind . . .” Late that afternoon, the Corps’s commandant, General Clifton B. Cates, arrived at the White House to receive Harry Truman’s apology. The apology, in the form of a letter to Cates, was sent on to be read at the league convention.

Among other things, the letter said: “I sincerely regret the unfortunate choice of language which I used.” Mr. Truman was sure, he added, that the propaganda which had irritated him was the work of individuals, not of the Corps. “When I spoke of the Marines as the ‘Navy’s police force,’ ” he wrote, “I had in mind its immediate readiness.”

Just to make sure that there was no lingering misunderstanding, he appeared next day, hat in hand, at the Statler. Warned in time’s nick that the President was coming, League Commandant Clay Nixon, of Seattle, had ordered: “No wisecracks will be tolerated . . . You will behave like marines.” The convention’s official bugler, 70-year-old Herbert Baldwin, tried to blow Hail to the Chief, but his upper dentures slipped out, so he just blew Attention. (“It was all I could do under the circumstances.”)

“You succeeded in enticing me over here,” Harry Truman grinned. “There are incidents sometimes that appear to be almost the end of the world when they happen, that usually turn out for the good of the cause . . . When I make a mistake I try to correct it. I try to make as few as possible.”

The delegates cheered and Mr. Truman joined them in singing, “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli . . .”

“Just Human.” The President’s apology did not alter the fact that he was deadset against giving the Marines a bigger role in the nation’s defense plans. But before the week was out, a small, uncertain sigh of relief was to run through the Democratic Party; the President, by his forthright if not abject apology, had fixed things—partly, at least. But there was some headshaking.

Said a Kansas City Democratic boss (“Don’t quote me by name”): “It’s not what the Marines themselves think. The people in general are going to think that any guy who is so stupid as to pop off like that isn’t fit to be President.” Most Democrats, however, decided that the incident merely demonstrated again that Harry Truman was “just human,” and courageous enough to admit his mistakes. No politician was ever hurt by being human, was he? Out in Chicago, Cook County Boss Jacob Arvey said confidently: “Walking before that convention showed a lot of guts. It’s that quality that won in ’48.”

Harry Truman left the cheering Marines and marched over to his regular Thursday-morning press conference. “How do you feel?” a newsman asked knowingly. He felt all right, the President said. “Do you feel better now than you did yesterday morning?” He always felt good, said Harry Truman, expanding his chest. He was always fit. And if anyone didn’t believe it, he invited, stepping back like a boxer and slightly raising his hands, let him come up and take a try.

Last week the President also:

¶Dined with 55 A.F.L. and C.I.O. labor leaders and gave his by-now-familiar off-the-cuff, after-dinner speech: “There are probably a million people in this country who could do the presidential job better than I but I’ve got the job and I’m doing the very best I can.”

¶Launched the $34.5 million Point Four program by naming Secretary Acheson as supervisor and creating two collaborating agencies to carry out the work of providing technical advice and supervision in the world’s underdeveloped areas.

¶ Signed the $36 billion omnibus appropriation bill, meanwhile rapping Congress for ordering him to do what Congress could not do, i.e., cut $550 million from the bill, and declaring, as forecast, that he would disregard Congress’ instructions to lend $62.5 million of the appropriation to Franco’s Spain.

*The nearest thing to it: Franklin Roosevelt’s telegram to Alben Barkley, then Senate Majority Leader, after Roosevelt had called a tax bill “relief not for the needy but for the greedy.” Barkley had resigned in a fury, reconsidered only after the President’s apology.