In the Time of the Americans Read online

  A friend put him on to the idea of trying for a place at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, where an education would be free. It was not easy obtaining an appointment to the academy, but Ike persevered. Eventually he sat for a competitive examination, agreed in advance that West Point would do as well as Annapolis, and won a place at the former when the slot for the latter was taken. So Eisenhower went on to the army’s academy, where he graduated with middling grades.

  Eisenhower’s Kansas ran next to Missouri, where Harry S Truman was born May 8, 1884; but though the states were neighbors, the central line of division in American life and history ran along the border between them. Kansas, after a mini–civil war of its own, had entered the Union in 1861 as a free state; but Missouri had been a slave state from the start. It was for that reason, and because of the stories they had heard of its rich soil, that Harry’s pioneering maternal grandparents, the Youngs, had left Kentucky to settle in the state.

  Independence, Missouri, was perhaps the first of the boomtowns on the trails west. It was the point of departure for trade and travel along the Santa Fe Trail. Grandfather Young prospered by leading wagon trains from Missouri to New Mexico, Utah, Oregon, and California.

  When Harry was ten years old, his family left the Young farm, which was outside town, and moved into Independence so that he could go to school. It was a town like Eisenhower’s Abilene, in that its population was almost entirely native-born American; but there the similarities ended. Abilene was of German stock, Republican, and of the Mennonite sect, while Independence was largely Scots-Irish in ancestry, Baptist, and Democratic. Abilene was North and Independence was South in the great regional division of American politics; the one had backed the Union, the other the Confederacy. Abilene was white, while Independence was split between the whites of the town and the blacks of its slums.

  Harry was a child troubled at first by his poor eyesight, and then by having to wear the spectacles that corrected it. He avoided sports and fights, taking care not to break his glasses. He laughed and smiled a lot, enjoyed school, was fond of his teachers, got good grades, but tended not to mix with the other children. Reading was his passion; he especially enjoyed learning about history’s heroes.

  Unlike most other boys in town, Harry went on from elementary school to high school. But—unless one counts some courses he later began at Spalding’s Commercial College in Kansas City—he never went beyond graduating from Independence High School. His father, a never very successful farmer who traded in livestock and real estate, had tried his hand at speculating in wheat futures—and lost everything about a year after Harry graduated. West Point turned Harry down because of his eyesight, and he could not afford to attend a college that was not free.

  After taking jobs as a newspaper wrapper, a timekeeper for a railroad construction crew, and a bank clerk, Truman became a farmer like his father, and was proud of plowing straight furrows. He dabbled in other businesses, too, but his real taste was for politics. He began by serving as postmaster, road supervisor, and member of a district school board. In 1905 he became a charter member of the Missouri National Guard, and in 1909 he joined the Freemasons.

  James Francis Byrnes, like Truman a born politician, avoided discussing his ancestry or early life. Catholic and Irish—the paternal grandfather he never knew came over from Ireland—and having some relatives in New York City, his family must have come from or at least through the immigrant slums of the big-city industrial Northeast; but Byrnes made himself over into the voice of the rural and Protestant Old South. He was born May 2, 1879—or, more likely, 1881—on King Street, the north–south thoroughfare in historic Charleston, the windswept South Carolina seaport shaded by palm trees, whose commerce was about to revive. Byrnes, along with his sister, cousin, aunt, and invalid grandmother, was supported by his widowed mother, who worked as a seamstress. Learning shorthand at his mother’s suggestion gave him his start: he left school at fourteen to work in a law office. At twenty-one he became a court stenographer, which led him to become a lawyer four years later.

  The young woman Byrnes courted sang in the choir of St. Thaddeus Episcopal Church in Aiken, South Carolina, where he began to practice law. Byrnes joined the chorus and later the church, marrying in 1906 and converting to the Episcopal faith. Becoming Protestant opened up a political career for him in the antipapist South: in 1908 he was elected public prosecutor, and in 1910 won a seat in Congress.

  For red-haired, hot-tempered Joseph Patrick Kennedy, born September 6, 1888, a child of teeming big-city America, it was an advantage to be Catholic. With a genius for politics, the Irish immigrants who overflowed into the urban metropolises of the United States had organized themselves and almost everywhere had taken hold of City Hall. Their political machines provided the basic services to their communities that governments set out to provide only later.

  A prosperous saloon keeper who was the political boss of his ward and later became a state senator, Joe Kennedy’s father was almost as big a man in his world as were Douglas MacArthur’s, Robert Taft’s, or Averell Harriman’s fathers in theirs—and was every bit as much his son’s idol. One of Joseph Kennedy’s earliest memories was the night of the presidential elections of 1892; he was four years old and remembered his father’s campaign workers coming in to report: “Pat, we voted 128 times today.”

  Young Joe was a hustler. He sold newspapers, repaired clocks, ran errands, raised pigeons, sold candy, and invariably greeted the gang of children he led with: “How can we make some money?”

  He was a fierce competitor who played only to win—and made sure that he did. Though a mediocre scholar, he graduated from the best schools; though not the choice of his father-in-law, he married the daughter of the mayor of Boston; though an outsider in the Brahmin world of State Street finance, he went on to make a fortune in business before going into politics.

  James Vincent Forrestal’s mother—a person of powerful character—was determined that he should become a priest. His father, an Irish immigrant who had become a successful building contractor, hoped that he would enter the family business. The senior Forrestal was also a figure in Democratic party politics who supported his young friend Franklin D. Roosevelt in his race for the State Senate in 1910. “Vince,” born February 15, 1892, in the Hudson River town of Matteawan, south of Poughkeepsie, was a troubled person who fought free of his parents. At Dartmouth, which he attended for a year, and at Princeton, which he left at the end of his senior year without graduating, he was financially pressed because he could not bring himself to take money from the parents against whom he rebelled. He refused to become a priest; he declined to enter the family business; he broke with his Catholic faith; and to the extent that he concerned himself with politics, he became a Republican, not a Democrat. After leaving Princeton he quit three jobs in a row before finally finding the career for which he was suited: he became a bond salesman at the Wall Street house of Dillon, Read.

  ON HIS FATHER’S SIDE William Christian Bullitt was related to Pocahontas as well as to George Washington’s father, Patrick Henry’s sister, and more to the point, Fletcher Christian, who led the mutiny on the Bounty. Bill Bullitt was a born mutineer.

  The day he was to leave for Groton, he suddenly refused to go. “Every Groton fellow I know is a snob,” he said. Yet he himself was proud of his family’s position in Philadelphia society and of the fact that his father’s forefathers were among the original settlers of the United States. An ancestor, a French Huguenot named Joseph Boulet, had arrived on American shores in 1634.

  The malicious always would whisper that Bullitt was Jewish. Though the family of his mother, Louisa Gross Horwitz, had long since converted to Christianity, they descended from Haym Salomon, the Jewish immigrant from Poland who founded Philadelphia’s first synagogue and who played so great a role in helping finance the American Revolution and the early Republic.

  Born January 25, 1891, Bullitt claimed early on that “I’m going to be a lawyer and Governor and
Secretary of State and President,” and proved to be wrong on all counts. Yet he had all the talents. He was a superb athlete and was voted most brilliant man in his class at Yale. He was outstanding in college theatricals, and with his friend Cole Porter founded a club for satire.

  The Cole Porter set, of which he was an intimate, was the social center of the college. Archibald MacLeish, future poet and adviser to Franklin Roosevelt, and Dean Acheson were among the younger men drawn to it. Acheson, much changed from his Groton self, had become dashing, and a wit. But at crew he was still the protégé of the commanding Averell Harriman, as he had been at Groton.

  Harriman, who graduated with Bullitt in the class of ’13—but without Bullitt’s athletic and academic sparkle—was in a unique position and held in special awe. He had entered college just after his father’s death. His mother, who inherited everything, and Judge Lovett, who had been his father’s general counsel, took charge of the Harriman empire and clearly were grooming Averell to assume large responsibilities. His grades at school were not outstanding, but he was held in esteem by his classmates. Harriman was the first man in his class at Yale tapped for the grandest of the college clubs, Skull and Bones; and in the yearbook he was listed as the “Most Admired,” “Most Thorough Gentleman,” “Handsomest,” and “Most Likely to Succeed.”

  In the event, the Yale man most likely to succeed did so only because, on a day nearly three decades later, he was thrown a career lifeline by one of his most unlikely-to-succeed contemporaries. Harry Hopkins, born August 17, 1890, in Sioux City, Iowa, was a poor boy from the Middle West. His father was a charming drifter who had been a prospector for gold and a traveling salesman, and who supported himself and his family by betting on himself in bowling matches. Eventually a personal injury lawsuit (he was run down by a horse-driven truck) gave him $5,000 with which he settled as a storekeeper in Grinnell, Iowa. Harry’s mother had a very different character; deeply religious, she was active in the Methodist Missionary Society.

  Harry was a skinny, gangling boy with an open face who was not very good either at sports or at schoolwork. He was an enthusiastic sports fan, a practical joker, and somewhat of a success in student politics. He graduated from Grinnell College with the class of ’12 without any sense of what he would like to do in life.

  He jumped at a chance to visit New York City. A summer job was on offer, as counselor at a camp for slum children outside the city. He took it, went to New York—and stayed, having found his vocation as a social worker. It was as though he had stopped being like his father, a lightweight charmer and aimless, and had started to become, like his mother, a missionary.

  While Hopkins, having graduated, was walking in his mother’s footsteps, and Harriman, entering the family business, was trying to walk in his father’s footsteps, Harriman’s companions at Yale were making their own dispositions.

  In their respective classes Bullitt and Cole Porter, Acheson and MacLeish followed the traditional path: they entered the Harvard Law School. Acheson was to prove a serious student of the law, in large part because he was to fall under the influence of young Professor Felix Frankfurter. Archibald MacLeish, his lifelong friend, was to graduate from law school but would abandon the practice of the law for poetry. Cole Porter quit law school for music, but continued to be Acheson’s roommate in Boston. Bullitt, who had entered law school only to please his father, dropped out in 1914 when his father died.

  With his mother, Bullitt embarked for Europe. His career plan was less odd than it sounds now. He observed that the United States had no foreign intelligence service—and decided that he would gather firsthand knowledge of conditions in Europe and later trade it out for a job in the government of the newly elected President, Woodrow Wilson.

  But his real hero in politics was TR. As a child, he had tacked pictures of TR to his wall. Like Franklin Roosevelt, he was a TR admirer drawn to Europe rather than to Asia.

  A Harvard man for whom nobody would have predicted a career in public service was towering Christian Herter, nearly six and a half feet tall, who loved to play tennis, took no interest in politics, and could never make up his mind what he wanted to do in life. He became engaged to May Carrie Pratt, a great heiress, who at Yale socials had danced with Archibald MacLeish and Dean Acheson—but he was unable to tell her or her family what his plans were, for he had none. It was to be a classmate named Lithgow Osborne who later pulled him into the foreign service, and later still, a Harvard friend, Leverett Saltonstall, future Massachusetts governor and senator, who acted as a mentor in politics.

  Herter’s generation of public figures may indeed have been the first in American history for whom college ties became immensely important in later careers. Dean Acheson, Archibald MacLeish, and their young teacher Felix Frankfurter, for example, were intimates who helped and advised one another throughout life. It may have been no coincidence that after a run of Presidents from Lincoln to McKinley, none of whom had attended one of the elite eastern universities, from the opening of the twentieth century by TR through the end of the First World War, Herter’s generation grew to manhood under the administrations, successively, of a Harvard man, a Yale man, and a Princeton man. The career importance of having attended such universities was growing at the same time.

  Christian Herter was typical, too, of his generation in the eastern part of the country in the closeness of his ties to Europe. His grandfather, a German immigrant, made a fortune as the leading society interior decorator of the post–Civil War United States, and then returned to Europe to live in Paris. Christian’s father and mother, artists both, also chose to live in Paris, where Christian was born and received his elementary education.

  For Herter, as for others of wealth in his generation such as Roosevelt, Harriman, and Bullitt, a major educational experience was the encounter with Europe.

  THOUGH FAR LESS COMMON, an encounter with Asia made its mark on the passage to manhood of a number of those who grew up in the age of TR: MacArthur, of course, and to some extent Taft and Marshall, but especially Willard Dickerman Straight, who was born only a few days after MacArthur.

  Straight’s ancestors were among the early English settlers of the New World. His parents were schoolteachers, were poor, and died when he was a child.

  Feeling that America’s horizons had been extended in his time to the far side of the Pacific, Straight, after graduating in architecture from Cornell, obtained a position with the British-led Imperial Maritime Customs Service in China. In its schools Straight learned Chinese, rose to the top of his class, and became personal aide to the chief and founder of the Service. Idealistic to the core, he was outraged by the behavior of white men in China. He told his diary (September 30, 1902) that “my heart shrivelled within me as I heard tale after tale of the roguery of American officials in the East, of the bribery, of a consul and a group of missionaries, such things of Americans, of the great, the proud home of the Eagle, such rotten corruption by the representatives of one’s own native land, was enough to make me wish for an absolute despotism that the stable might be cleaned.”

  Like the Christian missionaries sent out from the United States—Episcopalians had been in the field in China since 1835, and others had followed—Straight felt that China’s independence and territorial integrity should be assured, and that the great powers should be prevented from carving out spheres of influence or control for themselves within the country. But Straight felt that America’s views carried no weight because her words were not backed up by deeds.

  After a stint as a reporter in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, which he covered from Japan, Manchuria, and Korea, he left journalism to become vice consul and secretary to the American minister to Korea. The victorious Japanese had promised to respect the independence of Korea, and the United States had pledged to uphold that independence with moral support; but Straight saw the Japanese crush Korea, its emperor, and his court, and drew his own conclusions about the value both of Japan’s promises and of America’s moral
support.

  Tall, slender, with reddish-brown hair and open features, Straight had a winning manner that charmed visitors to the U.S. consulate in Seoul. So when Japan’s snuffing out of Korean independence led to the closing of the consulate, Straight was offered other positions by some of the important people he had met: TR’s family and that of E. H. Harriman.

  For a time he served as TR’s U.S. consul general in Mukden, Manchuria, charged with the task of opening up northern China to American business enterprise. As the U.S. government’s man north of the Great Wall, in the cockpit of Asia where the territorial interests of Japan, Russia, and China collided, he was located, he said, where “the biggest game in the East, save Peking itself, is being played.”

  In the Manchurian temple that he converted into his consulate, Straight sat in on that game, hoping to protect the independence of China against Japanese imperialism. He soon discovered that he was playing a lone hand. His own country would not support China in any tangible way; Britain, France, and Germany, caught up in dangerous rivalries in Europe to which they necessarily gave priority, were unwilling to risk alienating Japan; while Russia, after some initial wavering, deemed it more prudent to cut a deal with the Japanese than to take a chance on being defeated by them once again. It was true that Russia and Japan had solemnly pledged to uphold the Open Door in China; but the Russian minister with whom Straight dealt described this treaty language as nothing but “drool” inserted to please the Americans. In 1909 Straight decided to leave government service to work with E. H. Harriman and a financial group headed by the Morgan bank.