THE PRESIDENCY: Finger Waggings & Fireworks

Harry Truman sounded like a desperate football coach talking to a team that was leading at half time, but apt to lose the game if it got too cocky. He hammered at that one theme: this may look good, but don’t relax; the toughest part is ahead.

Under glaring lights at the Washington Monument, he first had a few words of praise. “Men of the armed forces in Korea, you will go down in history as the first army to fight under a flag of a world organization in the defense of human freedom . . . Victory may be in your hands, but you are winning a greater thing than military victory, for you are vindicating the idea of freedom under international law.” But then he got to his main point, that the U.S. must “stick to a hard, tough policy of self-denial and self-control . . . The greatest threat to world peace, the tremendous armed power of the Soviet Union, will still remain, even if the Korean fighting stops . . . We face a long period of world tension . . .”

Polite Applause. As he read, many of the 50,000 gathered in front of the monument seemed hardly to be listening. Firecrackers popped from the edges of the Fourth of July crowd. Sudden bursts of laughter and applause, inspired by crowd antics that had nothing to do with the President’s words, rose up. Harry Truman ignored the noise and plodded on, making no-attempt at oratory, never gesturing, rarely raising his eyes from his brown leather notebook. He sought to establish a historical precedent for his limited-war policy: “Our aims in Korea are just as clear and just as simple as the things for which we fought in the American Revolution. We did not fight that war to drive the British out of the North American continent … to destroy the military power of England, or to wipe out the British Empire. We fought it for the simple, limited aim of securing the right to be free . . . We are not fighting [in Korea] … to conquer China, or to destroy the

Soviet Empire. We are fighting for … the right of nations to be free and to live in peace.”

When the President finished his 25-minute speech, there was polite applause from the front rows. Then the 50,000 and another 150,000 waiting out of earshot settled down to what most of them had come for anyway: the fireworks display.

“Dire Consequences.” Amid such signs that the head man’s words were not going over, the assistant coaches began to exhort the team, too. Economic Stabilizer Eric Johnston cut short a press conference to catch a plane for New York, where, on a television program and on Mary Margaret McBride’s radio show, he got in a few words for strong controls. Fred Vinson, stepping down from his traditionally aloof position of Chief Justice, warned that any relaxation of preparedness would have “dire consequences.” Secretary of Defense George Marshall, Presidential Assistant W. Averell Harriman and others warned against letdowns. Their warnings were valid enough, though the words had a dreary propaganda sameness, and the flat insistency of a war-bond speech. No one was arguing back, but already there were signs that Congressmen are getting that comfortable feeling. Opined Georgia’s budget-minded Senator Walter George last week: “There should be an end to the hysteria of giving the military everything it wants right now to the exclusion of the needs of the civilian economy.”