Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [57]
Thurmond carried four Southern states, capturing thirty-nine electoral votes and ending the Democrats’ stranglehold on the region. Two years later, Thurmond returned to the Democratic Party and ran unsuccessfully for the Senate on a decidedly anti-Truman platform. And just the preceding fall, he’d endorsed Eisenhower, not Stevenson. (Thurmond would get elected to the Senate as a Democratic write-in candidate in 1954. He would hold the seat the rest of his life. In 1964 he switched parties and became a Republican.)
Truman, understandably, didn’t much care for Strom Thurmond, whose disloyalty to the Democratic Party was something that Truman couldn’t stomach. But in the receiving line that night, Harry did the same thing he’d done with Ike on Inauguration Day and Nixon two days earlier. He smiled. He shook Thurmond’s hand. The flashbulbs popped.
Harry delivers his first major speech as a former president at the Reserve Officers Association convention in Philadelphia, June 26, 1953. “Do not be misled by the desire for lower taxes into cutting corners on our national security,” he warned.
After dinner, Truman was introduced as “a colonel, U.S. Army, retired, and the former President of the United States.” He received a two-minute standing ovation.
He stood behind a small lectern that had been placed on the head table. A sign leaning against the front of it read RESERVES ASK ONLY THE RIGHT TO BE READY. The lectern was covered with microphones—the speech would be carried live on radio stations nationwide. Television cameras were there too, and it was dreadfully hot under the klieg lights, though Harry, as usual, never let on. The Bellevue-Stratford’s Grand Ballroom was packed with more than a thousand people, most of the men in uniform, the women in gowns. They sat at round tables covered with white tablecloths, or stood in the balcony overlooking the floor.
“He stepped to the microphone like a man who can graciously take applause,” wrote Raymond C. Brecht in the Philadelphia Bulletin. “Then he took off the gloves.”
He began innocuously enough, speaking slowly in that familiar voice, flat, a little high-pitched, the pronunciations still unmistakably Missourian (“entire” he rendered “EN-tire”). He spoke of how he enjoyed reading the morning papers now, “without having to make plans for handling the problems that appear there.”
“Occasionally,” he said, “the temptation has been very strong to do a little Monday-morning quarterbacking and advise my successor on how he should handle particular situations. But so far I have resisted that temptation, and I think I deserve a little credit for that.”
He acknowledged that the Republicans had supported him when “the United States took the lead in defending the Republic of Korea against brutal aggression.” He also noted that there had been “more continuity than … change” in American foreign policy since the Republicans took over. “This is as it ought to be.”
“Unfortunately, however, the elections of last fall have strengthened the irresponsible element in the Republican Party. The grave burden of national leadership has apparently brought no change in the attitude of the reckless and isolationist wing of the Republican Party….
“Our plans were to build the defense forces we needed as soon as possible, and then to continue these forces at whatever strength was necessary for as long as necessary.”
His voice was rising, now, the words coming faster.
“I am sorry to read, however—and I’m sure you are—that a great deal has