Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [59]
At the front of the room there was a small stage with an orange backdrop. I walked up to the edge of the stage and turned to face the empty room. I was standing in the very spot where Harry had stood exactly fifty-five years earlier, front and center in his white dinner jacket, under the blazing klieg lights, measuring an imaginary fish, and giving Ike hell.
The Philadelphia speech was vintage Truman, blunt and forceful with a dash of hyperbole (“atom bombs on our homes”), and it energized Democrats. To the Philadelphia Bulletin the “smiling man from Missouri” looked like he would be a “big cannon” in the 1954 congressional elections.
Republicans, however, were unmoved. “Mr. Truman is back at the old stand,” said Leonard W. Hall, the head of the Republican National Committee, “soft on economy, soft on money and soft on communism. The American people know that … President Eisenhower put some muscle into American defense and foreign policies.” Hall asserted Truman had been “given a well-deserved rest by the American people, and he should take it.” Republicans were also quick to point out that Truman himself had slashed defense spending between the end of World War II and the beginning of the Korean War.
President Eisenhower had no response. He was spending the weekend at the presidential retreat in the Maryland woods—not far from Frederick, actually. FDR and Truman had called the retreat Shangri-La. Ike had recently renamed it in honor of his grandson: Camp David.
The immediate effect of the speech was negligible. The very next day, the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee voted to slash another $1.3 million from the defense budget. “Mr. Truman’s influence with the 83rd Republican Congress appeared to be about as great as it was with the 80th,” quipped the Washington Star.
But the long-term effect of the speech was more profound. By attacking his successor so fiercely so soon after leaving the White House, Harry Truman set the tone, not only for his own ex-presidency, but also for the ex-presidents after him. He was the first ex-president to engage in partisan politics in the age of modern mass media. Earlier exes had been politically active, of course. But in the thirty-four years between the death of Teddy Roosevelt and the end of the Truman presidency—a period during which the first commercial radio and television stations went on the air—ex-presidents were mostly seen but not heard.
After TR died in 1919, there were four ex-presidents before Truman: Taft, Wilson, Coolidge, and Hoover. Taft was chief justice and Wilson was infirm, so neither was especially active politically. For a year or so, Coolidge wrote a newspaper column called “Calvin Coolidge Says,” in which Silent Cal said almost nothing. The columns were mostly bland essays on conservative business and political principles. He died less than four years after leaving office. (Upon learning of his death, Dorothy Parker quipped, “How can they tell?”) As for Hoover, he wrote critically of the Roosevelt administration; his 1934 book The Challenge to Liberty compared the New Deal to fascism. But poor Herbert was lost in the political wilderness, and nobody paid much attention to him.
But Harry Truman—people paid attention to Harry Truman. His plainspoken, straightforward style was perfectly suited to the new broadcast media. If not the first television president, he was, at least, the first television ex-president. He turned the ex-presidency into a bully pulpit in its own right, and in doing so transformed it into the institution it has become.
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10
New York, New York,
June 27–July 5, 1953
Harry’s private railcar, which was attached to the regular Philadelphia Express, arrived at