The Unforgivable Snub: Why Eisenhower Refused to Step Foot in Truman’s White House

At 8.45 a.m. on January 20, 1953, President-elect Dwight David Eisenhower sat in the back of a  limousine outside the North Portico of the White House, refusing to step foot inside the building  where Harry S. Truman waited. The temperature was 49 degrees. The sky was overcast. Inside the  White House, the sitting President of the United States stood by the window, watching the car that would not move.

 Eisenhower had made his decision clear. He would not enter the White House as a guest.  He would not have coffee with the Trumans. He would not follow tradition. He would sit in that car and wait for Truman to come to him. This was not a scheduling issue. This was not a  misunderstanding.

 This was a calculated insult delivered on what should have  been one of the most dignified moments in American democracy, the peaceful transfer of power from one  president to another. The man sitting in that limousine was Dwight Eisenhower, 62 years old,  Supreme Allied Commander of World War II, victor of Europe, liberator of millions, the most popular  military figure in America since Ulysses S.

 Grant. He had accepted the surrender of Nazi Germany. He had commanded millions of men across two continents. Kings and prime ministers sought his counsel. The American people had just elected  him president with 55% of the popular vote and a landslide of 442 electoral votes.

 But on this January morning,  he would not walk 20 feet to shake the hand of the man who had given him almost everything.  The man inside the White House was Harry S. Truman, 68 years old, farmer, haberdasher,  county judge, senator, vice president, president. He had made the decision to use atomic weapons. He had confronted Stalin.

 He had initiated the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe. He had integrated the armed forces.  He had fired Douglas MacArthur. He had kept the Western alliance together through the  first desperate years of the Cold War. And he had just seven years earlier offered to  make Dwight Eisenhower President of the United States  on the Democratic ticket with Truman himself stepping down to be Vice President.

 Eisenhower had refused that offer.  He had no interest in politics.  He said he was a soldier, not a politician.  He would serve his country in uniform, not in elected office.  Then in 1952, Eisenhower ran for president as a Republican against  Truman’s party, against Truman’s record, against everything Truman had built.

 And now he sat  in a car outside the White House, making the outgoing president come to him like a servant  summoned to the curb. CBS correspondent Eric Severide watched the scene unfold. He later  wrote three words that captured the moment. It was a shocking moment. J.B. West, the White House head usher, saw it, too.

 He said,  I was glad I wasn’t in that car. The relationship between these two men had not always been broken.  Once they had been allies. Once Truman had called Eisenhower the greatest military mind of the age.  Once Eisenhower had written to Truman with genuine respect and gratitude,  but something had changed between them.

 Something had broken that could not be repaired.  And on this cold January morning, that fracture became visible to the entire nation.  The break did not happen overnight.  It happened slowly over months and years through a series of choices and  betrayals and political calculations that transformed mutual respect into something  close to hatred. The first crack appeared in July 1945 in Germany on the Autobahn outside Potsdam.

 President Truman, newly in office after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, met with General Eisenhower,  the hero of D-Day. They drove together  through the ruins of Berlin. Truman looked at the young general beside him and saw the future  of American leadership. He turned to Eisenhower and said something extraordinary.

 General,  there is nothing you may want that I won’t try to help you get. That included, Truman said, the presidency in 1948. This was not  a casual offer. Truman meant it. He had been vice president for only 82 days when Roosevelt died on  April 12, 1945.

 He inherited a war still being fought on two fronts, secret atomic weapons  research he hadn’t known existed, and relationships with Allied leaders he had never  met. He felt unprepared. He admired military leadership and Eisenhower represented everything  America wanted in a leader at that moment. Competence, victory, moral authority earned  through actual accomplishment. Eisenhower thanked him but said no. He had no political ambitions.

 He was a soldier. He would remain a soldier.  He had spent his entire adult life in the army.  He understood military command.  Politics seemed like a different world.  One where the rules were unclear and the enemies were harder to identify.  Truman accepted that answer.  answer. He respected it.

 In the years that followed, Truman and Eisenhower worked together  often. The relationship was built on mutual need. Truman needed competent military leadershipas he navigated the beginning of the Cold War. Eisenhower needed political support as  he transitioned from wartime command to peacetime military administration. Truman appointed  Eisenhower as Army Chief of Staff in November 1945.

 Over the following years, he awarded Eisenhower the Distinguished Service Medal on three separate  occasions in 1945, 1948, and 1952. When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created in 1949,  Truman called on Eisenhower to serve as its first Supreme Commander in 1951. They exchanged  friendly letters. They met for official business and ceremonies.

 The relationship was not intimate  or personal, but it was professional, respectful, productive. Then, in 1947, something remarkable  happened. Truman made Eisenhower the offer again, this time in writing  in his private diary. On July 25, 1947, Truman wrote about a conversation he had with Eisenhower  at 3.30 that afternoon.

 They discussed the possibility of Douglas MacArthur returning  from Japan to seek the Republican nomination. MacArthur was another towering military figure, but one Truman deeply distrusted.  MacArthur had autocratic tendencies. He had governed Japan like a proconsul. Truman worried  about what MacArthur might do with presidential power. Truman’s solution was bold.

 He proposed  that if MacArthur ran as a Republican, Eisenhower should announce for the Democratic nomination.  Truman wrote that he would gladly step aside and run as Eisenhower’s vice president.  He added,  I like the Senate anyway.  Ike and I could be elected and my family and myself would be happy outside this great white  jail known as the White House.

 He ended the diary entry with a note.  Ike won’t quote me and I won’t quote him. This was not a fantasy. This was the sitting  President of the United States offering to demote himself to Vice President to put Eisenhower  in the White House.

 It revealed how little confidence Truman had in his own political  future at that moment. It also revealed how much he valued Eisenhower’s leadership and believed in his character.  Eisenhower said no again.  He still had no interest in politics.  He was serving as president of Columbia University at the time, having left active military command.  He wanted to stay in education or return to military service if needed,  but he did not want to enter the political arena.

 Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royal  approached Eisenhower later that year with the same offer. Truman had asked Royal to try one  more time. Truman wanted Royal to make it clear this wasn’t just a passing thought.  This was a genuine offer. Eisenhower could have the Democratic nomination.

 The party would support  him. Truman would campaign for him. They would win.  Eisenhower declined again. He told Royal the same thing he had told Truman. He was not interested  in becoming president. The office held no appeal for him. He was happy with his life as it was.  In February 1948, Truman awarded Eisenhower his fourth Distinguished Service Medal in  a ceremony at the White House.

 The two men stood together for photographs.  They smiled.  The images show no hint of the animosity that would come later.  Eisenhower wore his dress uniform with all his medals and ribbons.  Truman looked proud to be standing next to him.  The caption in the newspapers described them as close colleagues working together to secure America’s future.

 That same year, Truman faced  the worst political crisis of his presidency up to that point. His approval ratings had collapsed.  The Democratic Party was splintering. Henry Wallace was running as a progressive,  pulling votes from the left. Strom Thurmond was running as a Dixiecrat, pulling votes from the left. Strump Thurmond was running as a Dixiecrat, pulling votes from the south.

 Republicans controlled both houses of Congress.  Everyone predicted Truman would lose in a landslide to Republican nominee Thomas Dewey.  So Truman ran in 1948.  Against all predictions, against terrible poll numbers, against a divided Democratic  Party, Truman won.  It was one of the greatest upsets in American political history. He won without Eisenhower.

 He won on his own terms. But Eisenhower’s refusals had planted something in Truman’s mind.  A question. If Eisenhower had no interest in politics, why did people keep asking him to run?  And if he truly wasn’t interested, why did he keep refusing in ways that left the door slightly open?  The answer came in 1952.

 Eisenhower announced he would seek the Republican nomination for president.  The announcement shocked many people, but it shocked the whole world.  shocked Truman most of all. For five years, Eisenhower had insisted he had no interest in  politics. He had refused multiple offers to run as a Democrat.

 He had turned down the chance to  be president without having to campaign for it. And now he was entering politics anyway. But as  a Republican running against the party that had supported him throughout his career, Truman feltpersonally betrayed. He had  offered Eisenhower the presidency twice.

 He had been willing to step aside to make himself vice  president to hand over power to a man he believed in. And Eisenhower had said no, claiming he didn’t  want it. Now Eisenhower wanted it. He just didn’t want it from Truman or the Democrats. But that was not what broke the relationship.  Political differences could be managed.  Eisenhower believed in different economic policies, different approaches to government.

 Those were honest disagreements.  Truman could accept that.  What Truman could not accept, what broke the relationship beyond repair,  was what happened during the campaign.  The issue was  George Catlett Marshall. Marshall was born in Pennsylvania in 1880. He graduated from the  Virginia Military Institute in 1901.

 He served in the Philippines, in France during World War I,  in China between the wars. He was methodical, disciplined, brilliant at organization and  logistics. He understood how to build armies, brilliant at organization and logistics.  He understood how to build armies, how to coordinate operations across continents, how  to select leaders who could execute complex plans under impossible pressure.

 When World War II began, Marshall was Army Chief of Staff.  He held that position from 1939 to 1945.  During those six years, he transformed the United States Army from a  force of fewer than 200,000 men into a military machine of over 8 million. He selected the  commanders. He approved the battle plans. He allocated resources. He made the system work.

 And he made Dwight Eisenhower’s career possible. In 1941, Eisenhower was a Lieutenant Colonel unknown  outside military circles. Marshall saw something in him. He promoted Eisenhower rapidly,  jumping him over hundreds of more senior officers. By 1942, Eisenhower was commanding  Allied forces in North Africa.

 By 1943, Marshall recommended Eisenhower to lead Operation  Overlord, the D-Day invasion of France. Marshall had wanted that command for himself.  It was the most important military operation of the war, possibly of the century, but President  Roosevelt asked Marshall to stay in Washington to continue managing the global war effort.  Marshall agreed and gave the command to Eisenhower  instead.

 He could have resented Eisenhower for getting the glory while Marshall stayed behind  doing staff work. But Marshall never showed any resentment. He supported Eisenhower completely.  Winston Churchill called Marshall the organizer of victory. Historians credit Marshall with  creating the military force that won World War II.  Without Marshall’s organizational genius, without his ability to build and manage a global military effort, the war might have ended very differently.

 After the war, Marshall tried to retire.  He was 65 years old.  He had served his country for more than 40 years. He wanted to rest.  But in 1947, President Truman asked  him to serve as Secretary of State. Marshall agreed. From 1947 to 1949, Marshall served  as America’s chief diplomat during the critical early years of the Cold War.

 It was Marshall  who articulated the principles of the European Recovery Program in a speech at Harvard University on June 5, 1947. The program became known as the Marshall Plan. Between 1948 and 1952,  the United States provided over $13 billion in economic assistance to help rebuild Western  European economies. The program worked.

 It rebuilt infrastructure, stabilized currencies, restored trade,  and created the economic foundation for decades of prosperity.  In 1953, Marshall was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for this work,  the only career military officer ever to receive that honor.  After serving as Secretary of State, Marshall retired again.  But in 1950, when the Korean War began, Truman called on  him one more time.

 Marshall became Secretary of Defense, serving from September 1950 to  September 1951. He worked to rebuild American military strength after post-war demobilization  had weakened it. He oversaw the military response to the Korean War. He helped create NATO’s command structure.  So when Senator Joseph McCarthy attacked Marshall,  he wasn’t attacking just another government official.

 He was attacking one of the architects  of Allied victory, one of the creators of the post-war order, one of the most respected figures  American public life, and he was attacking Dwight Eisenhower’s mentor, patron, and friend.  Marshall had promoted Eisenhower over hundreds of more senior officers.  Marshall had recommended Eisenhower to lead the D-Day invasion.

 Marshall had made Eisenhower’s career possible. Eisenhower owed Marshall everything. In 1950 and  1951, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin began attacking Marshall.  McCarthy was riding high on anti-communist hysteria.  He had made a career out of accusing people of being communist sympathizers.  Most of his accusations were baseless.

 Many were cruel.Some destroyed innocent lives, but they were politically effective in an America terrified  of Soviet  expansion. McCarthy accused Marshall of being part of a communist conspiracy. In a speech on  the Senate floor in June 1951, McCarthy spent 60,000 words attacking Marshall.

 He called Marshall’s  career a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.  He accused Marshall of losing China to communism. He accused Marshall of undermining American  interests in Europe and Asia. He suggested Marshall was actively working to advance  communist goals. These accusations were insane.

 Marshall had spent his entire adult life serving  the United States. He had  built the army that defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. He had created the Marshall  Plan that stopped communist expansion in Europe. He had served as Secretary of Defense during  the Korean War, fighting against communist aggression.

 The idea that Marshall was secretly  working for the communists was grotesque,  absurd, and beneath contempt.  Senator William Jenner of Indiana went even further than McCarthy. He called Marshall  a living lie and a frontman for traitors. He said Marshall was joining hands once more  with this criminal crowd of traitors and communist appeasers under the direction of Mr.

 Truman  and Mr. Acheson. These were not policy disagreements.  These were personal attacks on Marshall’s character, his loyalty, his integrity.  Everyone who knew Marshall understood the attacks were false,  but they were politically useful for Republicans  trying to paint the Truman administration as soft on communism.

 Truman was enraged by the attacks on Marshall.  He called Marshall the greatest living  American. The attacks on Marshall felt personal to Truman because they were attacks on his judgment,  his administration, his presidency, and Truman expected Eisenhower to defend Marshall.  Eisenhower owed Marshall his career.

 If anyone should stand up for Marshall against McCarthy’s  smears, it should be Eisenhower.  In October 1952, during the presidential campaign, Eisenhower was scheduled to give a speech  in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, McCarthy’s home state.  McCarthy would be on the stage with him.  McCarthy had already endorsed Eisenhower.  Republican leaders in Wisconsin wanted a show of unity.

 They wanted Eisenhower and McCarthy standing together,  presenting a united front against the Democrats.  Eisenhower’s staff prepared a speech that included a paragraph defending Marshall.  The paragraph was short but clear.  I know that charges of disloyalty have been leveled against General Marshall.  I have been privileged for 35 years to know  General Marshall personally.

 I know him as a man and as a soldier to be dedicated with  singular selflessness and the profoundest patriotism to the service of America.  And this episode is a sobering lesson in the way freedom must not defend itself.  The paragraph was in the prepared text. It was released to reporters in advance.  The press knew what was coming. Political observers anticipated a dramatic moment.

 Eisenhower, the war hero, standing in McCarthy’s home state, defending his mentor against McCarthy’s  attacks. It would be a powerful statement about character, about loyalty, about standing up for  what was right, even  when it was politically costly.  But then, Wisconsin Governor Walter Kohler Jr.

 and members of Eisenhower’s campaign  staff urged him to remove the paragraph.  They argued it would offend McCarthy.  It would offend Wisconsin Republicans.  It would create unnecessary controversy.  It would make the fledgling evening about Marshall and McCarthy  instead of about Eisenhower’s vision for America. They said it wasn’t worth the political cost.

 Wisconsin was an important state. McCarthy was popular there. Eisenhower needed Wisconsin’s  electoral votes. Why pick a fight over something that wouldn’t change any votes?  Eisenhower listened to his advisors.  He understood their reasoning. He knew they were trying to help him win, and he wanted  to win. He believed he could do great things as president.

 He believed he could end the Korean War, manage the Cold War better than Truman had, and he  bring competent administration to a government he saw as bloated and inefficient.  To do those things, he needed to win the election.  To win the election, he needed Wisconsin.  So Eisenhower agreed.  He deleted the paragraph.

 He made the calculation that winning was more important than defending Marshall.  He told himself that he could defend Marshall later after the election  when the political pressure wasn’t so intense.  He convinced himself that this one compromise wouldn’t matter in the long run.  On October 3, 1952, Dwight Eisenhower stood on a stage in the Milwaukee Arena in front of 10,000  people with Senator Joseph McCarthy standing beside him. The arena was packed. The crowd wasenthusiastic. They cheered when Eisenhower appeared. They cheered louder

 when McCarthy joined him on stage. Eisenhower gave his speech. He praised McCarthy’s anti-communist  efforts. He talked about the need to root out subversion in government. He endorsed McCarthy’s  crusade. He said nothing about George Marshall. Not one word. He didn’t defend him. He didn’t mention him.

 He acted as if Marshall didn’t exist. After the speech, McCarthy approached Eisenhower.  The photographers were ready. McCarthy reached out his hand. Eisenhower saw it coming. He tried  to step back, tried to avoid the handshake, but there were people behind him blocking his path.  back, tried to avoid the handshake, but there were people behind him blocking his path. McCarthy was too quick.

 He grabbed Eisenhower’s hand and held it high in the air like a referee raising the hand  of a victorious boxer. The cameras flashed. The photograph went out across the country.  Dwight Eisenhower, hero of D-Day, shaking hands with the man who had called his mentor a traitor.  The news coverage was brutal.  The paragraph defending Marshall had been in the advance text.

 So reporters knew Eisenhower had  planned to defend Marshall and then chose not to. This wasn’t an oversight. This wasn’t a scheduling  conflict. This was a deliberate choice. Eisenhower had weighed defending his mentor against winning Wisconsin, and Wisconsin  had won. The New York Times ran a front-page story. The Washington Post published an editorial.

 Columnists across the political spectrum condemned the decision. Even some Republicans were disgusted.  One Republican newspaper editor wrote that Eisenhower had sold his soul for a mess of pottage.  Truman’s reaction was immediate and blunt. He told reporters,  I had never thought the porter, a man who is now the Republican candidate, would stoop so low.

 He elaborated in later speeches. He called it one of the most shocking things in the history of this country. He said, the trouble with Eisenhower, he’s just  a coward, and he ought to be ashamed for what he did. Truman didn’t stop there. He made defending  Marshall a central theme of his campaign appearances.

 He reminded audiences that Marshall  had been Eisenhower’s boss, his mentor, the man who had made Eisenhower’s career possible.  He asked how anyone could trust Eisenhower to stand up to the Soviets if he couldn’t even stand up to Joe McCarthy.  He questioned Eisenhower’s character, his judgment, his fitness for the presidency.  Eisenhower knew what Truman was saying. He read the newspapers.