AMERICAN DIARY: After John F Kennedy, the best-loved post-war US President is Harry Truman. He is regarded as honest and as a straight-talker. However an overlooked 1947 Truman diary has been opened for the first time, and it shows that the then Democratic president could be as devious as any holder of the office.
It reveals that he secretly told Dwight D Eisenhower, a Republican, that he would step down and run on his ticket as vice president if the general ran as a Democrat in 1948.
Truman always denied this story publicly. He made the offer because no one expected that he had the remotest chance of retaining the White House. Eisenhower declined and Truman went on to beat Republican Thomas Dewey in one of America's biggest election upsets.
Throughout the diary - which can be read on
www.trumanlibrary.org - Truman shows the simplicity and wit for which he was so popular. When the visiting Lady Astor told him she thought he had become too "Yankee" Truman replied that such tendancies "were not half so bad as her ultra-conservative British leanings." Gleefully he adds, "She almost had a stroke."
For someone who supported the creation of Israel against the advice of his state department, it comes as a surprise to find that Truman had unkind thoughts about Jews. In an entry on July 21st, 1947, after a conversation with Henry Morgenthau, the Jewish former treasury secretary, about a ship carrying Jews to Palestine he wrote that Morgenthau had no business calling him.
"The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed . . .
"The Jews, I find are very, very selfish," he went on. "They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D\ P\ as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog."
Truman felt this way about any oppressed people getting power. "Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire," he noted. "I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes."
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Love and scandal, as Henry Fielding said, are the best sweeteners of tea, and in a season made grim by news from Iraq and a wet summer, New Yorkers have found sweet tea in a new spate of Kennedy scandals, stirred up by the two city tabloids, the Daily News and the Post.
The first concerns the break-up of the marriage of Andrew Cuomo, 45, and Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, 43, the power couple who 13 years ago united two Democratic Dynasties in the North East.
Andrew, a former Clinton administration housing secretary, is the son of former York Governor Mario Cuomo, and Kerry, a human rights activist and advocate for the environment, is the daughter of the late Senator Robert Kennedy. The couple issued a bland statement saying they were separating but Andrew ignited a tabloid frenzy when he said, through his lawyer, that he felt "betrayed and saddened by his wife's conduct".
This could only mean one thing. Soon the headlines identified the third party as a married friend Bruce Colley, a part owner - along with Sean Penn, John Malkovich, and Johnny Depp - of an overpriced West 15th Street restaurant called Man Ray. He is also a noted polo player who has played with the likes of Prince Harry, and (the plot thickens) a registered Republican.
The Colleys and Cuomos live in fashionable Westchester County and have holidayed together in the Aspen ski resort. In a city that was only recently tut-tutting the use of anonymous quotations by the New York's Times's Jason Blair, the tabloid stories have been spiced with comments from unnamed "sources" and "friends". The "friends" told the tabloids that a distraught Andrew Cuomo found out about the affair either (a) when he walked in on his wife and her lover, or (b) when he compared notes and telephone records with Colley's wife Ann, according to which tabloid one reads.
Under (b) the two confronted their spouses on the same day three months ago and the break-up became inevitable. The four main actors have refused to say much on the record. Andrew Cuomo denied he was behind the leaks and Bruce Colley told the Daily News: "I'm happily married. I love my wife. I don't know how these things get started."
The paparazzi have staked out the principles in the love triangle and provided the dailies with pictures of Kerry, sans wedding ring, relaxing in a bikini at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, while Andrew went off alone fishing, Bruce went abroad, and Ann Colley went off to stay with relatives in North Carolina. Scintillating stuff.
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The second Kennedy "love and scandal" episode concerns the late John F Kennedy Jr and his wife, Carolyn Bessette, both of whom died when a small plane Kennedy was piloting crashed in the Atlantic in 1999. A new book called The Kennedy Curse: Why Tragedy Has Haunted America's First Family for 150 Years, claims that far from being an ideal marriage, the couple were on the point of separating. Caroline had a cocaine habit and a violent temper, according to the author Edward Klein, and refused to have sex when John said he wanted children.
The cable news channels seized upon the story, recounting the details at length but thrashing it for violating the privacy of a couple not elected to high office. This story also depended heavily on "sources" and "friends".
In TV interviews Klein, a longtime friend of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and a former editor of the New York Times Magazine, says that they were practically the nation's first couple and that this justified inquiring into their private lives. It also fed the public's insatiable appetite for inside stories on the troubled Kennedys.
Vanity Fair started the ball rolling with an extract from Klein's book. In the magazine, but not in the book, Klein indirectly blamed Bessette for the crash. Because she insisted on a perfectly colored pedicure the flight took off late, and the plane crashed in darkness off the coast of Martha's Vineyard.
Laurence Leamer, author of two Kennedy books, said Carolyn did do recreational cocaine but was not an addict and that it was not true the couple were about to break up. "People want to read the worst things about people," he was quoted as saying. "It just shows the deterioration in American popular culture."
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The reputation of the Kennedy family was not enhanced by a remark made by Congressman Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island at a recent gathering of Young Democrats in Washington. "I don't need Bush's tax cut," said the son of Senator Edward Kennedy. "I have never worked a f***ing day in my life."