National Affairs: Mortal Words

In his best high-cockalorum manner, Harry Truman sashayed through Texas, doing his bit for Jack Kennedy and the Democrats. More than 700 well-heeled Texans paid $50 a plate for a roast-beef dinner and a full serving of the old Harry in San Antonio. And Harry was steaming. “This Republican outfit doesn’t know the definition of parity,” he cried. “All the prices have gone down, down, down. And the damn farmers still vote the Republican ticket. They ought to have their heads examined.”

Harry had a glancing blow for Dwight Eisenhower (“No Eisenhower veto ever built a dam, or helped a farmer”), but his choicest epithets were reserved for Vice President Nixon: “Tricky Dicky Nixon is cut from the same cloth—don’t make any mistake about that. Nixon is against the small farmer, against small business, against labor, against public housing, against public power. Come to think of it, I don’t know what the hell he is for. And that bird still has the nerve to come to Texas and ask you to vote for him. And if you do, you ought to go to hell—that’s all I have to say.”

Truman’s intemperate words touched off a salvo of indignation. In Waco, Texas, a group of 72 Baptist ministers passed a resolution rebuking Truman “as a Christian, a Baptist, and a guest in our midst.” In Washington, G.O.P. Chairman Thruston Morton (himself no slouch at name calling) described the Truman speech as despicable, degrading, a smear, low-road tactics, a back-alley campaign and a slur on the 35.5 million Americans who voted for Nixon in 1956. In a blistering telegram Morton called on Jack Kennedy “to disown Truman’s attack and to apologize to the American people.” Replied Kennedy during his TV debate: “Mr. Truman has his methods of expressing things . . . They are not my style, but I really don’t think there’s anything that I could say to cause him, at 76, to change his particular speaking manner. Perhaps Mrs. Truman can, but I don’t think I can.”