Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [68]
Truman’s knowledge of American history is as thorough as that of any President, with the possible exception of Wilson. My family will never forget a tour he personally conducted through the White House near the end of his administration. His commentary was an amazing recap of much of the history of the building, its furnishings, and its famous inhabitants. It was a tour similar to the now-famous one conducted by Jackie Kennedy, without TV cameras.
One of my biggest scoops came from Harry Truman. I was the first to report his decision not to run for re-election in 1952, although he was eligible to seek another term, under the Twenty-second Amendment. I’ve often been asked how I got that story. The answer is simple. The President told me what he intended to do and when, in answer to a direct question I had put to him in the course of our conversation. A big Democratic fundraising dinner was coming up shortly, but no one knew what Mr. Truman planned to say at the dinner. I merely put the question to him and he replied that he would make it official, at the dinner, that he would not run for re-election and that he would name Adlai Stevenson, then Governor of Illinois, as his candidate for President. Mr. Truman made no request that this information be kept off the record. Naturally, I didn’t ask!
How will history rate Truman? Much higher, I think, than do most of his contemporaries. Harry’s greatest hero is Andrew Jackson, and I believe that it is beside Jackson that this forceful, forthright Man of Independence will ultimately be ranked. History faced him with harder decisions than any President since Lincoln – the use of the A-bomb, the launching of the Marshall Plan, recognizing the State of Israel in defiance of his own State Department, dispatching the Army to run the railroads during a nation-wide strike, ordering intervention when the Reds invaded South Korea, firing General Douglas MacArthur. There were those who despised him because he never “looked like a President” – but he never tried to. He is certain to be ranked among the great Chief Executives in our history.
Before we leave the political beat, let’s have a look at the one subject that no Chicago reporter can afford to omit: the national political convention. Chicago held its first one in 1860, when the fledgling Republican Party assembled in the old Wigwam at Wacker and Lake to nominate Abraham Lincoln for President. Since then, there have been many memorable moments in Chicago conventions, ranging from the resounding “voice from the sewer” arranged by Mayor Ed Kelly and which mysteriously repeated Franklin D. Roosevelt’s name over hidden loudspeakers at the 1940 Democratic convention, to the touching reception given the venerable Herbert Hoover as he entered the Republican national convention in 1960.
As an old sports reporter, I’ll have to admit that not even a world series or a heavyweight championship fight can set the entire city aquiver quite like a national political convention can. There is the constant turmoil in the hotel lobbies and banquet halls, and the tense hush in the smoke-filled rooms. There is the scream of sirens as motorcycle police escort Presidents, former Presidents, and would-be Presidents from place to place. There is the unparalleled influx of the working press – the biggest names in newspaper, magazine, and radio-TV reporting and commentary. Tables in the private clubs and booths in the Pump Room are filled with Governors, Senators, wealthy and influential individual party members, and such pundits of the press as Stewart and Joseph Alsop, Bob Considine, William Randolph Hearst, Jr., Drew Pearson, Leonard Lyons, Earl Wilson, Walter Winchell, Walter Cronkite, Marquis Childs, Roscoe Drummond, John Daly, Doris Fleeson,