William Lee Miller, “Two Americans: Truman, Eisenhower, and a Dangerous World”  Knopf, 2012, Kindle Edition  (416 pps. in hard cover)

William Lee Miller, a historian who taught for many years at the University of Virginia, died on May 27, 2012, a month before publication of this, his latest, book.  He was 86. 

Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, consecutive presidents of the United States, were Midwesterners; both were grandsons of farmers and sons of forceful mothers, and of fathers who knew failure.  They were lower middle class and received public school educations, unlike FDR or JFK.  Author William Lee Miller interweaves Truman’s and Eisenhower’s life stories, which then also becomes the story of America as it rose to great power. An important instance of this interweaving of their lives occurred in World War II, when Ike was trying to organize the liberation of Europe and needed landing craft that no one—least of all the big-ship navy—wanted to build, and an obscure senator named Harry Truman emerged as the champion of the Higgins boat in Congress. That craft, more than any other, made the D-Day landings a success.

However, Eisenhower often was the catalyst for real animosity between the two.  During the Republican orchestrated Red Scare, Truman became extremely upset with Ike’s willingness to embrace Senators McCarthy and Jenner and throw old mentors like General Marshall to the dogs.  However, both men were adherents of Keenan’s containment doctrine of the Communists and fought for it against the Taft isolationists and Nixon red-baiters.  Hotheads like Nixon—who railed at “Acheson’s cowardly college of containment”—might have tipped us into World War III. These two thoroughly ordinary men from America’s “middle border” made certain that we didn’t.

My Notes:

Loc 336:  Both Truman and Eisenhower had a straightforward, uncomplicated patriotism.  The chief living moral model for both of them was George Marshall.

Loc 366:  Truman fought in WWI in France and was Captain of Battery D of the 129^th Field Artillery which he would lead in the climactic Meuse-Argonne offensive in the closing stages of the war.  He later became an honest road-building judge of the county court; a senator who investigated the defense industries, and a Vice President.  Eisenhower was an early theorist of tank warfare and the top graduate of the army’s Command and General Staff School in 1926. 

Loc 905:  The St. Mihel offensive which began on September 12, 1918, was the first operation in WWI carried out by a complete American army under the separate and independent control of the American Commander-in-Chief.

Loc 1256:  For three long stretches, Eisenhower was out of the country, remote from its politics: in the Panama Canal Zone from early 1922 to late 1924; in Paris, rewriting the guide to battle monuments in 1928-1929; and in the Philippines, from 1935 to 1939, coping with the theatrics of Douglas MacArthur.  However he did spend more than five years in Washington from 1929 to late 1935. 

Loc 1925:  The Americans determined in WWII that they had to focus first on the defeat of Hitler because: First of all, from the American point of view in 1941-2, that there were two Allied nations already engaged in that fight—England for more than two years and Russia since June 1941—ant that it was of pivotal importance to keep both of them in it.  Second, it was much wiser strategically to defeat the stronger enemy before the weaker.  Third, practically, the supply route to Australia, the Allied base in the Pacific, was three to four times as long as the North Atlantic route to supply England, which provide the base from which to attack German-held Europe. 

Loc 1983:  In the Pacific war there were eighteen American personnel for every service man on the front.  The ratio in the Japanese forces was one to one…In the German army in Europe there were roughly two combatants for every non-combatant; the American army had a ratio opposite.  The American backup for combat troops was formidable.

Loc 2121:  When the time came at last for Operation Overlord, in 1944, the worldwide shortage of landing craft had two large effects: It figured centrally in the postponing of the invasion from May until June, so that there could be another month to produce landing craft, and it was also a main reason that Operation Anvil—the invasion of France from the south—could not be simultaneous but had to be moved back a month.  Eisenhower, virtually alone, had foreseen the key role of amphibious warfare and the need for landing craft to achieve it.  His foresight in this area may well be his greatest contribution to the war effort.

Loc 2220:  By war’s end, A.J. Higgins had turned out some twenty thousand LCVPs, which would carry troops ashore form Normandy to Okinawa.  More American fighting men went ashore in Higgins boats than in all other types of landing craft combined. And if Truman had not investigated the production of landing craft, Eisenhower might never have had those Higgins boats.

Loc 2420:  Operation Husky—the July 10, 1943 invasion of Sicily—was the largest landing of an invading force on a hostile shore until that time, second only to the Normandy landing in history.  The Germans were driven from the island in six weeks, opening the shipping lanes through the Mediterranean, toppling Mussolini, and precipitating Italy’s exit from the war and its alignment with the Allies.  However, the German armies that might have been trapped and defeated were allowed to escape from the island almost intact, and lived to fight on in Italy. 

Loc 2670:  By July 4, 1944, one million Allied soldiers had been landed on the Normandy beaches.  On July 25, the Allied armies in Normandy at last effected a breakout against the German armies—Operation Cobra.  No trench warfare like that of WWI.

Loc 2734:  Battle of the Bulge:  On December 16, 1944, the German armies launched an attack on the thin lines of the American First Army on the western front in the bordering Belgian-German region of forests, rivers, and hills called the Ardennes

Loc 3159:  The invasion of Japan was planned for November 1945.  However, the invasion of Okinawa provided a horrendous example of what invading Japan itself would be like: the fanatical resistance the Allies had met in taking the islands of Iwo Jima and Okinawa.  The stated figures for expected casualties expected in the invasion, large form the start, grew larger as the argument about the use of the bomb intensified, until somehow the stunning round figure of one million casualties came into play, and then it was raised another step to one million fatalities.  Imagine an American president, just new on the job, being told that the military action he was ordering would lead to a million dead American soldiers. 

Loc 3229:  Truman, on July 25, 1945, gave his order to drop as many bombs as were available.  Stimson managed to have the ancient capital and cultural center Kyoto stricken from the list of targets.  The bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki just three days after the one on Hiroshima was dropped with no specific order.  It was covered by the blanket order of July 25^th.  After the Nagasaki bomb, Truman belatedly did order that there be no more nuclear attacks without his explicit approval. 

Loc 3280:  On August 15, six days after the detonation over Nagasaki, Japan announced its surrender.

Loc 3313:  Harry Truman was the president whose decisions shaped the American grand strategy of containment in what came to be called the Cold War.  Dwight Eisenhower was the president whose decisions first tested that grand strategy, and built it into the nation’s continuing policies.

Loc 3455:  The most influential subordinate to Truman in world politics was Dean Acheson, who was said to have been more responsible for the Truman Doctrine than President Truman, and more responsible for the Marshall Plan than General Marshall.

Loc 3501:  Acheson’s summing up of the accomplishments of President Truman:  the 1947 assumption of responsibility in the Eastern Mediterranean (Truman Doctrine & Greece/Turkey), the 1948 Marshall Plan, the response to the blockage of Berlin, the NATO defense of Europe in 1949, and the intervention in Korea in 1950.  His decision to drop the two atomic bombs in 1945 had been almost an automatic outcome of this situation, as the inexperienced leader of a nation at war with the imperative to end it, and with the total expectation of those who had been involved with building the bomb that he would of course use it.

Loc 3676:  As the Marshall Plan was making its way through the difficult passage in the Eightieth Congress, the Soviets inadvertently gave it a big boost.  In February 1948, they swept into Czechoslovakia and took over that nation in a bloodless but brutal coup.  The Marshall Plan passed by bipartisan majorities in both houses and became law in April 1948.  When it ended in 1952, the Marshall Plan had spent thirteen billion dollars on a recovered Europe.

Loc 3768:  In less than three years President Truman established the Department of Defense, the United States Air Force, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Council, the position of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the first foreign aid agencies.  Truman brought this about because he considered an orderly government to be of major value, and he though the multiple competing services made for a wasteful arrangement.  Eisenhower supported this reorganization.

Loc 3816:  NSC-68 was a very secret government document aimed at convincing Truman of the need to build up conventional armed forces and to not rely so much on MAD as our protective doctrine.  The cost, not shown to Truman, was estimated at fifty billion dollars annually.  This, at a time when the entire U.S. budget was thirteen billion dollars.  Truman appointed a committee to examine whether such a buildup was necessary, and before it reported its findings, the outbreak of the Korean War gave NSC-68 a boost. 

Loc 3908:  Eisenhower did not run for president primarily to contest Truman’s foreign policy; on the contrary, he agreed with most of it.  His strongest foreign policy reason for running was his disagreement with Taft and Hoover over a new isolationism.  Of course, regarding domestic policy, he had reservations about many facets of the New Deal as well that it was not healthy for one party to be so long in power. 

Loc 3941:  The 1956 Hungarian revolt was a sad case study in why the U.S. (mainly Republicans) should not trumpet an implied announcement that it would roll back the Communist boundaries and liberate captive nations.  The only rollback in the fall of 1956 was that of Britain, France, and Israel in the Suez crisis. 

Loc 3996:  When it appeared that the democratically elected Prime Mnister Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran might come to rely on the Communist party, the Eisenhower administration, through the CIA, helped to overthrow him and restore the Shah in 1953.  The administritation did it again in Guatemala (1954)  when popularly elected Jacobo Arbenz Guzman introduced social reforms and threatened the United Fruit Company.  But the attempt in Indonesia in 1958 or in Cuba in 1960 was not successful.  It may be that the CIA was also involved in plans to assassinate leaders—Castro, Lumumba, Chou En-lai, Trujillo—but it is not known whether any such efforts might have been explicitly ordered by the president (Read “The Brothers”: Eisenhower did indeed order the hits).  Eisenhower would learn that lying when caught does not work well as exemplified in the U-2 plane over the Soviet Union in May 1960.

Loc 4304:  Every pollster and expert said Truman would lose the 1948 election.  His victory is unique in American history. There had never been a totally unexpected victory like his, and there never will be another.  Newsweek conducted a poll of the fifty most eminent political commentators; the score Dewey 50, Truman 0.  The best known, of course, is the headline on the front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune: DEWEY DEFESTS TRUMAN.  The reason for Dewey’s defeat was his over confidence as well as Truman’s grit.  In percentage terms, Truman won 49.6 percent to Dewey’s 45.1. 

Loc 4596:  The Korean War.  We now know that this was not a Soviet or China action or part of any world Communist scheme.  The agent for the incursion was not Stalin, but the North Korean dictator Kim II Sung.  Dim did seek Stalin’s approval but Stalin had turned him down repeatedly before he finally agreed that Kim might take this action.  Of course, had Truman known the truth, it is not clear that his response would have been different.  The Soviets inadvertently paved the way for the U.N. to support resisting the invasion when they walked out of the 1950 Security Council and boycotted the UN because Nationalist China still occupied the China seat.

Loc 4665:  In the first hours after the invasion of South Korea, Truman made a decision that would cast a long shadow.  He decided not to ask for a congressional declaration of war or a resolution of support.  He said he did not want to set a precedent that would inhibit future chief executives.  This action was a worrisome precedent for the repeated actions by presidents who would follow him.

Loc 4709:  After MacArthur’s sensational successfully Inchon landing, the fully inflated MacArthur took two disastrous actions.  First, he attempted another amphibious landing, farther north, this time on the east side of the peninsula; this time, the harbor was mined and the attempt, poorly planned, was a complete flop.  Second, he divided his force into two armies.

Loc 4865:  Although the presidential decision to remove MacArthur on April 11, 1951, provoked a tremendous public outburst—the most extreme overt public reaction against a presidential decision in modern American history—it nevertheless was not as difficult for Truman to make as other decisions.  MacArthur did him the service of making his insubordination so blatant and so continual, and his insistent policy positions so wrongheaded and dangerous, as to make his removal virtually mandatory. 

Loc 4952:  In the Korean war 55,000 Americans died and the borders remained as they had before the armistice (there still is no peace treaty). 

Loc 5292:  Truman’s most serious criticism of Eisenhower revolved around the 1952 campaign.  This was Eisenhower’s support of Senator Joseph McCarthy and McCarthy’s  companion in demagoguery, William Jenner of Indiana, and specifically, Eisenhower’s deletion from his campaign speech in Milwaukee, with McCarthy sitting on the platform, of a paragraph praising George Marshall. Before this episode, Eisenhower had already appeared on an Indiana platform, grinning and holding the senatorial hand of Jenner (who, among his other distinctions, had called Marshall a “living lie”).

Loc 6248:  McCarthy said General Marshall is “a man steeped in falsehood”, he said Marshall had been party to “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man”. 

Loc 6746:  In Batesburg, South Carolina, in February 1946, a black veteran still wearing his uniform, had been taken off a bus, beaten and blinded in one eye by policemen who jammed their night sticks into his eyes.  In July 1946, two black veterans and their wives had been taken from a car near Monroe, Louisiana, by a mob of white men, lined up, and pumped full of as many as sixty bullets.  Truman, after hearing of these incidents, established a Committee on Civil Rights (1946).  Their recommendations would be incorporated in the next twenty years.  In July 1948 he ordered the racial integration of the federal workforce and of the armed services. 

Loc 7269:  Eisenhower in 1957 had to send the 101^st Airborne to Little Rock Arkansas Central High School to escort nine black students. 

Loc 7489:  The Americans exploded the world’s first hydrogen bomb at Eniwetok, an atoll in the South Pacific, on November 1, 1952.  The blast yielded 10.4 megatons of explosive energy, 750 times greater than the explosion that leveled Hiroshima. 

Loc 7718;  Why did Eisenhower take his position of opposing preparation for smaller wars and putting all the emphasis on the big bombs?  It is believed that he knew he could not announce that he would not use nuclear weapons as such an announcement would undercut deterrence and have had drastic consequences for the world’s psychological power balance.  He therefore set it up so that that choice of total war would be so extreme as to be impossible.  He bequeathed an operational plan to JFK that in the event of an imminent Soviet attack, we would launch an enormous number of nuclear weapons—3,267—simultaneously!  They would point against not just the Soviet Union but also all Marxist-Leninist states—China, Eastern Europe, North Korea, North Vietnam…a truly ridiculous overkill.