Transcript: Chapter 23

Narrator: After three years in office, Truman was at last enjoying being president of the United States. Dozens of newspapers described the 'new' Harry Truman -- calm, forceful, radiating authority.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: He had decided that he really liked the job, and that he was pretty good at it. And he took the presidency very seriously, but he didn't take Harry Truman all that seriously all the time.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: And sometimes he didn't seem very presidential, and of course his opponents saw those as wonderful opportunities to belittle him.

NARRATOR: Reporters made fun of his shirts and his poker games, criticized his cronies, and his fondness for good bourbon. But Truman always remained himself.

MARSHALL SHULMAN: He never made any effort to create a public relations image. He was what he was and he never pretended other. And it was earthy, it was -- it came out of the heartland of America, with all its virtues and its limitations, too.

REX SCOUTEN: He always said he was a farmer from Missouri trying to do his damnedest. I think he gave everyone the impression no matter what your position was, that you were an important part of what he was trying to achieve.

KEN HECHLER: I remember the very first time that the president invited me as a junior staff member to come to dinner. President Truman sat down at the piano, I began to soar into the clouds. And afterward, he turned from the piano and looked at me and sort of smiled and said, "You know," he said, "If I hadn't gotten into trouble by getting into politics, I would have made a hell of a good piano player at a whorehouse." And this was -- of course brought me down to earth. He tended to look down on himself as a person, yet he revered the presidential office.

MARSHALL SHULMAN: And one time in a mood of reflection, he said, you know the president really is two people and one of them is the president. And then he sort of straightened in his chair and you could feel the sense of obligation that he had, which lifted him and his dignity and his sense of principled commitment. And then he sort of slumped a little bit, and said and then there's also the president as a human being and the wear and tear that goes with the job.

NARRATOR: Truman had said many times he never wanted to be president. Now, he had changed his mind; he wanted the job for four more years. He had failed his party in 1946. He wanted to redeem himself in 1948. But he was about to risk fracturing the Democrats, by reaching out to Americans who by tradition and culture he had dismissed nearly all his life.

In the South, segregation ruled by law and custom as it had for generations. All across America African Americans confronted poverty, prejudice, limited opportunity. And black sailors and soldiers who had fought overseas for America's freedom, didn't like what they found when they returned home.

VERNON JARRETT: Here we are at the end of World War II. We had defeated one of the great racists in human history, Hitler and of course Mussolini, and Japan, but the whole climate said, "We are going to remain the same even though the war aims we had were lofty and idealistic and beautiful and -- and presaged a new world," and so forth, but "You are still a nigger." The United States was advertised as the "Arsenal for Democracy"... but when it comes to the race question things have got to remain the same.

NARRATOR: In 1946, a horrible series of racial murders in the South shocked America. Truman was outraged. African American leaders clamored for anti-lynching laws, but didn't expect much from the president from Missouri.

ALONZO HAMBY: It seems a pretty sure bet that privately he believed that most blacks were inferior to most whites, and I think it's fair to say that neither he nor Bess would have been pleased if Margaret had brought Sidney Poitier home for dinner. But he also came from a background that said everyone deserved an equal chance in life.

NARRATOR: On June 28, 1947 Truman wrote his sister a letter. "I've got to make a speech tomorrow to the Society for the Advancement of Colored people and I wish I didn't have to make it... Mamma won't like what I say.

TRUMAN SOUND ON FILM: "There is no justifiable reason for discrimination because of ancestry or religion or race or color."

NARRATOR: No president had ever before addressed the nearly forty-year-old NAACP. Truman became the first, as he spoke to a rally of thousands at the Lincoln Memorial. A Southerner by birth and inclination, he argued for equal rights for all Americans.

TRUMAN: "We cannot any longer await the growth of a will to action in the slowest state or the most backward community. Our national government must show the way."

DOROTHY HEIGHT, National Council of Negro Women: Well, I think everybody was thrilled. ... And I think the appearance that he had with the NAACP resounded all over. Truman proved to be quite a surprise. He was very different from what we had thought of in terms of a person of his background.

NARRATOR: But Truman hesitated to put civil rights legislation before Congress; he feared that if he acted to help African Americans, he would lose the support of Southern Democrats.

ALONZO HAMBY: There's a great conflict here and politically Truman has to choose -- is he going to go with the South? Or is he going to go with the Northern liberals and the black constituency and the civil rights program they favor?

NARRATOR: On February 2, 1948, Truman became the first president to send a special message to Congress on civil rights. He called for anti-lynching laws, abolition of the poll tax, establishment of a commission on civil rights, desegregation of the armed forces.

VERNON JARRETT: It was a great message. You hadn't had anything like that before! Prior to that, we couldn't even get a president to make an oratorical statement.

GEORGE ELSEY: He recognized that the chances of much legislation, any legislation, getting through that Congress was practically nil. The point was, you had to start sometime and he was going to start.

NARRATOR: Southern newspapers called Truman's civil rights legislation a "dismaying document," based on a "pernicious fallacy." "Here we have the making of a veritable gestapo."

HARRY BYRD: Most of the Southern senators felt it went too far. Senator Byrd Sr. was in the Senate at that time and he, ah, he felt that some of the civil rights legislation went too far and he opposed it.

VERNON JARRETT: Equal this, equal that. The whole thing just wreaked, in terms of how the Southerners looked at it, with "concessions to niggers." Let's put it the way -- this is what they said.

KEN HECHLER: I recall Mrs. Leonard Thomas, one of the Alabama national committeemen, came to Truman and said to him, "Please don't force miscegenation on the South. Please tell the South that you really don't believe and you're going to take back what you said about civil rights." And Truman looked at her, and pulled out a copy of the Bill of Rights, and said, "I'm the president of all the people. I want you to know that I'm not going take back a word of what I said."

NARRATOR: The battle over civil rights was a political disaster. A Gallup Poll showed that the vast majority of Americans opposed the president's stand. Civil Rights was hurting Truman's chances for re-election.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: At the same time as his civil rights message was splitting the Democratic Party, the issue of what was to happen in Palestine comes to the fore.

NARRATOR: Since the end of the 19th century, the Jewish people had aspired to establish a homeland in Palestine. Now, after the devastation of the Holocaust, Jews fiercely lobbied Truman to recognize a new Jewish state there, even enlisting Eddie Jacobson, his old partner in the haberdashery, to win Truman to their cause. But Secretary of State George Marshall feared that Arabs, claiming Palestine as their own, would cut off the world's supply of oil and throw the Middle East into turmoil.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH: Marshall was the American that Harry Truman admired more than any other. Now for Truman to go against George Marshall was for him one of the most difficult moments in his entire presidency.

NARRATOR: Forced to choose between the advice of George Marshall and his sympathies for the Jewish people, Truman, on May 14, 1948, gave de facto recognition to Israel.

He did what he thought was right -- and at the same time won the votes of Jewish citizens. In 1948 Truman would need all the votes he could get. In spite of his triumphs overseas, many Americans still questioned his effectiveness at home.

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