1943. The Aftermath in Stalingrad

Reporters Visit Stalingrad After the German Surrender

Soviet soldiers on the roof of a factory shop in Stalingrad in 1942 (Photo by Arkady Shaikhet – source)

Bill Downs first arrived in the Soviet Union to cover the Eastern Front on December 25, 1942. He and other foreign correspondents were taken to see Stalingrad shortly after the German surrender there in February 1943.

During their long journey, the group came across Axis commanders in Soviet captivity, including Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, whose 6th Army had just been encircled and defeated. The press group then entered the city, where they passed bodies strewn along the streets and came across the wreckage at Mamayev Kurgan, the site of some of the worst fighting of the Battle of Stalingrad.

Recalling the experience, Downs said: "There are sights and sounds and smells in and around Stalingrad that make you want to weep, and make you want to shout and make you just plain sick to your stomach."

This text has been adapted from a script cabled to CBS in New York. The passages in parentheses were censored by Soviet officials for military security or propaganda reasons.

Bill Downs

CBS Moscow

February 8, 1943

The Foreign Office press department summoned the foreign press corps with a mysterious 6 p.m. phone call. They informed us we were leaving for Stalingrad at 8 a.m. the next morning. The trip was extremely hush-hush, although it had been announced that fighting had ceased in Stalingrad the day before. We were warned to dress warmly and take five days' worth of food.

I rushed back to the hotel and collected hard boiled eggs, a slab of smoked fish, sugar, two loaves of bread, and most important of all, a liter of vodka, which is Russia's most important personal antifreeze.

The next morning I dressed with three pairs of wool socks under fur boots, two pairs of wool underwear, a wool shirt, two sweaters, a ski jacket, a fur hat, and a fur coat—and I was among the lightest dressed in the party. Someone told me it was a mild winter.

The five hour plane trip in a comfortable Douglas transport was spent recalling hundreds of stories of Stalingrad's four and a half months of concentrated hell, which was worse than Coventry's, Rotterdam's, Warsaw's, or London's—anything Hitler had been able to do to cities opposing him.

The Douglas landed at an obscure little airfield 50 miles north of Stalingrad on steppes which looked like the Texas panhandle or Dakota plains buttered with about three feet of snow. The biting northwest wind of the Kalmyk Steppe made me look down at my legs to see whether I was not wearing a bathing suit.

The airfield was a former fighter-bomber base located in the area where the northern arm of the Red Army's tremendous encirclement of west Stalingrad started. We sheltered in a group of a half dozen peasant farmhouses which formed a tractor station for the surrounding wheat country.

We wondered how in the hell the Russians were able to concentrate an offensive army in these treeless, hill-less steppes without German reconnaissance discovering their striking power. That's mystery number one—or mistake number one—which was one of the major factors for the German defeat at Stalingrad.

At nightfall we headed southward to another peasant farm village where we were liberally fed and tried to warm our freezing hands and feet, to the amusement of Red Army men and women who were interested in foreigners.

We traveled by bus some 60 miles to a point 35 miles directly west of Stalingrad, where the next day we were taken to the headquarters of the commander of the Stalingrad front, Colonel General Konstantin Rokossovsky, who now takes a place as one of the great generals of history. Rokossovsky passed us en route to Moscow, where he went to the Kremlin to be awarded the Order of Suvorov for Stalingrad. We herded into a small peasant house where chairs were lined up like in a classroom, with desks in the corner and a map on the wall.

In walked a medium-sized Red Army general, his breast lined with several medals, dressed in a simple uniform on which the Red Army's new epaulets had yet to be sewn. He is Lieutenant General Mikhail Malinin, chief of staff for the Stalingrad front and one of the men responsible for putting into operation plans for the encirclement of the German 6th Army.

Malinin looked 35, square-faced with hair in a short pompadour which stuck up like a schoolboy's. The only sign of age was the sprinkling of gray hairs around the temples. He picked up a stick with which to point to the map. He looked as out of place standing at the front of that schoolroom as a schoolteacher would have looked in a front-line Stalingrad trench.

Malinin started speaking slowly and deliberately and explained that he wanted to outline briefly the details of the Red Army's encirclement movement where it started.

"Hitler sent his best troops—the German 6th Army—against Stalingrad, containing his crack infantry, tank, and motorized divisions," he said. Continuing in the same matter-of-fact tone, he said that as German forces moved toward the Volga, they created for themselves a sort of second front on the northern flank, "and the task of the defenders was not to give up the city."

Red Army soldiers on the Stalingrad front patrol the snow-covered steppes (source)

Malinin has been in three wars—in addition to the Russian Civil War and the Finnish War, he fought on the Moscow and Smolensk fronts in this war. He formerly was on the faculty of a Red Army military school.

(Malinin said that "Russian resistance forced the Germans to continually send up reinforcements. During the month of October and the first part of November was the fiercest fighting. The Germans continued to pour in huge reinforcements. But by the middle of November there was a certain equilibrium of strength. The Soviet High Command took advantage of its own forces at this time and ordered an offensive aimed at destroying both the Stalingrad and Don front troops of the enemy.")

(This certain equilibrium which Malinin referred to represented the greatest fighting retreat in the history of warfare. It was one place where the Red Army for the first time definitely stopped an Axis advance on the southern sector of the Russian front since the Axis invaded Kiev eighteen months earlier.)

Malinin then explained the great pincer movement (which launched simultaneously on November 19 one hundred miles northwest and some distance southeast of Stalingrad. This blow was so well-timed that in the first four days the northern and southern forces each advanced 55 miles on schedule, and the threat of encirclement became evident.)

Malinin said "the German High Command apparently was unconcerned because they evidently planned to bring up a powerful group of reinforcements from Kotelnikovo anyway. However, the genius of this plan directed by Joseph Stalin foresaw this and even predicted that the Germans would attempt to relieve the group. Thus the Red Army prepared for it. The Germans did just what we thought they would do. They were engaged and routed at Kotelnikovo. We captured the original Paulus order to commanders not to receive Red Army emissaries who advanced under white flag to present an ultimatum. This order specified that this peace delegation was to be fired upon—the exact translation read 'to see emissaries off the premises with fire.'"

Malinin said that American and British equipment played very little part in the Battle of Stalingrad. "We had a small number of British tanks—Churchill tanks—but not enough to take into consideration when reckoning the entire offensive. Where they were used, they stood up well under test. No American tanks or planes were used in the battle. There were some American Dodge trucks, but they don't shoot."

The interviews ended and we filed out of headquarters feeling like we had just taken a college examination for a master's degree in history.

However, the Red Army moves fast, and they took us to a nearby village with a dozen or so scattered unpainted houses around which they posted heavy guard. The conducting Red Army colonel motioned us inside one house. There we found four German generals sitting around a table looking at each other, one in a sweater and the other three in full regalia. In the next room were four others standing and looking out the window, and sitting in the corner looking despondent was woebegone General [Romulus] Dimitriu, the onetime glorified Romanian general.

The Germans in the first room got politely to their feet, smiling sheepishly. These men were Hitler's super-generals, leading super-Aryans against an inferior tribe. The only sign of their "super-ness" now were the magnificent decorations of iron crosses displayed on their uniforms like pictures on a gallery wall.

The German generals of the first group included [Otto] Renoldi, Schlömer, Deboi, and Von Daniels. All fought in the last war and are damn proud of it. We were whisked through the room and had little chance to question them, but when they heard we were American correspondents, Schlömer and Renoldi began long conversations about how they like cigarettes of the American type and had used up their ration of Russian cigarettes. Not a single reporter responded to their hint to give them a smoke. I believe if anyone had, he would have been tackled by the entire press corps when we got outside. These generals were getting a Red Army officer's rations according to the Hague Convention, which is too much considering the kind of rats they are.

In the next room Von Drebber, who looks more like a college professor than a military man, dominated the group which included such nasty types as [Hans] Wulz, who is a small, bald-headed, potbellied Prussian who only managed to squeeze out an unenthusiastic "Heil."

Von Drebber, six feet four inches tall, was asked what primary factors led to his defeat. He drew himself up and politely replied: "The Russians struck from the north and south—we were simply sitting in the middle. We were surrounded, cut off with no munitions and no food."

We tried again asking why they didn't try to break out of encirclement. Von Drebber said: "At one time we could have broken the ring—but you will have to ask Marshal Paulus about questions of strategy."

He was asked if he had Hitler's permission to surrender. Von Drebber said: "I was ordered by Paulus to hold until I pushed back to a certain line. When I reached that line I surrendered."

Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, commander of the Wehrmacht 6th Army, and his adjutant Wilhelm Adam (left) are escorted to the Soviet 64th Army headquarters following the German surrender at Stalingrad, January 31, 1943 (source)

Then we asked Wulz, who is an artillery general, how Russian artillery compared to German artillery. He made a whining, inconsequential answer that "every army has good and bad guns, good and bad artillery—that's how it is with the Russian and German armies."

Schlömer, who was stationed in another house, said however: "The Red Army fought well everywhere we met them."

But the most revealing statements came from Von Arnim and [Fritz] Roske. Roske was asked how the Russians broke them down. Von Arnim interrupted: "That question is badly put. You should ask how we managed to hold out under such conditions."

Roske ignored Von Arnim's remark with a brief statement: "Hunger, cold, and lack of munitions."

However, the Russian colonel was anxious to show us the Red Army's prize exhibit and rushed us to a small farmhouse sitting apart from the others. We gathered outside around the doorway while a grinning Mongolian soldier—definitely non-Aryan—looked down on us.

The door opened and out came Paulus, poker-faced except for a tic which spasmodically twitched from eye to mouth on the right side of his face. He is 53 but looked 65, his face lined and yellowish—almost the same yellowish color of the frozen corpses of men he left lying in gutters in Stalingrad.

Accompanying him was his personal aide, Colonel Adam, a flat-faced Teuton who looked like a slightly overweight ball of concentrated Nazism, and Paulus' chief of staff, General Schmidt, who looked like he'd be happier running a Berlin butcher shop. All men were dressed in fur caps pulled down over their ears against the subzero cold. Paulus answered only two questions, which he appeared to do with effort. He said his first name was Friedrich and that he is 53.

The standing and gazing captured Nazis in those overheated peasant houses, as well as that bare peasant yard where Paulus was held, gave the same feeling one gets when looking in a snake pit at a zoo. But the obvious comparison that strikes when looking at German officers and German soldiers is that the officers are always well-clad while the soldiers are just the opposite. And standing there in that obscure peasant village, these much decorated gold-braided groups of Nazi bigwigs reminded you of a flock of sad-eyed peacocks standing with distaste in a hen run.

The conducting colonel loaded us into drafty buses for a 60 mile trip to Stalingrad. By nightfall the temperature dropped to 40 below, and we started out on a twelve hour, all night trip through snow to Stalingrad.

We would have made the trip sooner when we ran into a Russian supply column moving westward from Stalingrad toward new battlefields. There was a long black line of soldiers, horses, mobile kitchens, guns, and cars. It was an unbelievable sight out there in the steppes to come upon so many people slowly moving along the snow-choked road. But the most unbelievable of all was the sight of camels pulling sledges in three feet of snow.

As we made our way slowly along the road against traffic, a curious Red Army man came up to our bus, looked in, grinned and asked: "Deutschen Soldaten?"

When we explained we were Americans he immediately called all his comrades and soon there was a great crowd around our bus. We passed out cigarettes and someone made a speech with the general theme of friendship between the Soviet Union and the United States. Russians will make a speech at the drop of the hat, but it gave you a warm feeling overcoming even the steppe temperatures to get such a demonstration of friendship at two o'clock in the morning in the swirling snow and wind 30 miles east of Stalingrad on the world's bloodiest battlefield.

We arrived in Stalingrad at about 4 a.m. The driver seemed anxious to get there. We drove around for two hours. The only thing in sight were the dark ruins where we spotted fires which sentries cluttered around to keep warm.

Our driver finally pulled up to one of these fires, and when he got out he was crying. Our interpreter explained that the driver had once lived in Stalingrad and had not been back to the city since the battle. "He can't find any street that he knows," the interpreter explained. "He hasn't yet recognized a house."

This is because there were no houses. The streets were just auto tracks over ruins up and down through bombshell holes. This was the Red October factory district, parts of which changed hands a half dozen times during the fighting.

As the sun came up the scene of devastation was so great it made a lump in your throat. This was the worker's factory district's small homes. These homes were absolutely flat. Not even a gracious blanket of snow could cover the destruction they suffered.

Characteristic of all bombings I have seen in Britain, one of the most indestructible items of furniture in any home is the iron bedstead. It is the same in Stalingrad. The grave of every home is marked by charred headpieces of beds sticking up like tombstones over what was a peaceful home. Occasionally one could mark where a street once existed by looking closely at poles sticking six or seven feet out of the ground. These once were telephone poles which stuck ten to twelve feet up. Now they looked like blasted trees.

Sentries told us that, believe it or not, some civilians holed up in their basements and stuck through the whole bombardment. These included some women who did washing and cooking for the Red Army.

What these people suffered cannot even be imagined. When they were without food, they were forced to forage and risk bombshells. Horse meat was considered a delicacy, and sometimes bread. But they stuck through it, although many are not there to tell their story.

Soldiers of the Soviet 62nd Army walk past dugouts constructed on the banks of the Volga, 1942 (source)

At daybreak we were directed to the headquarters of the 62nd Army, which is credited for saving the city of Stalingrad. The headquarters is built into the side of a western bluff on the Volga near the bottom of a hundred foot high clay cliff. We were led up this cliff to dugouts—zemlyankas—small timber-roofed caves dug into the side of the cliff from where the Red Army held the Germans from establishing themselves on the bank of Russia's greatest river. Just three days earlier the Germans had been only 300 yards away from my zemlyanka. But I slept well—they are now fighting on a line 200 miles away.

Rising above the Volga bluff is Stalingrad's famous Hill 102, Mamayev Kurgan, which the Germans held and placed heavy artillery. The hill commands a view of the entire city as well as the Volga, over which the Red Army's vital supply lines are held. The summit of Mamayev Kurgan is only about a quarter mile from the Volga, and between it and the river are the Red October and Red Barricades factories. Beyond these plants is the high Volga bank wherein zemlyankas are located. This is where some of the bitterest fighting occurred.

We walked single file along a narrow path through the factory. There was little need to remind us the factory was mined, as every minute or so there was a shattering explosion of rock wreckage in a nearby district which Red Army sappers were de-mining.

The Red October factory once made steel for tractors and farm implements. With the war it switched over to tank armaments. After the Battle of Stalingrad the whole plant is now simply a junk heap. The Germans took almost the entire building after it was mercilessly shelled and bombed flat. The only portions of the factory still standing are extremely heavy girders which once held cranes. All other buildings are flat. There literally was not a piece of sheet iron roofing or shovel or piece of metal sticking four inches above ground which didn't have bullet shrapnel or fragment holes through it.

It was in this factory that we saw our first German dead. They were lying at the bottom of a large bomb crater with only their bare feet sticking up. Most of Red October's bodies had been cleaned up earlier.

The de-mined path through the factory led across wreckage and craters. We passed a German dugout in perfectly good condition, clean and well-kept. Beside it stood a sentry, and a sign on the door warned: "Keep Away—This Booby Trap."

The path ended at the most forward-line trenches the Germans held at the factory. These lines are on a small hill facing another factory building which still had two walls standing. The Russians held positions in the factory building which I paced, measuring twelve yards. It was here that some brilliant conversations between warring men occurred. This Russian factory position once manufactured consumer goods. Red Army men did their fighting here among dishpans, skillets, and shovels that littered the floor.

Soviet soldiers fighting in the destroyed Red October factory during the Battle of Stalingrad, January 1943 (source)

The only ordinary looking battlefield we saw was Mamayev Kurgan. This hill is terraced in a series of five foot shelves, and there was a recently planted apple orchard with young saplings about four feet high. There is absolutely no cover, and looking down it from German gun positions are trenches. It appeared that a single squad of machine gunners could hold against advancing infantry forces indefinitely.

Correspondents had trouble even walking over the slick snow uphill in broad daylight. It is hard to imagine what it must have been like for the Soviet soldiers who only a few weeks earlier negotiated slopes under a hail of bullets, artillery shrapnel, and dive bombers. The only statement on the subject I could get from a former Red Army man was a private who grimly admitted: "It was tough."

But once they took positions atop the first ridge a really tough job still awaited. The Germans for weeks held two almost impregnable fortresses atop the hill. They were two circular water tanks about ten feet apart. The tanks were about 50 feet in diameter, dug 30 feet into the ground with about 15 feet of reinforced concrete surfaces sticking above ground. Around the tops these Germans threw earth embankment, forming a shell-proof, bomb-proof position virtually impregnable—until the Red Army decided to take it.

The battlefield before these two fortresses was like any battlefield of the First World War. There were wrecked tanks, smashed Russian and German helmets, empty shell case remnants, and smashed guns. There were bodies which had not yet been cleaned up. There were pieces of mortars, bombs, grenades, and strips of machine gun bullets.

The Russians finally took position by digging trenches up to the fortresses and then launching an infantry assault from there. Tanks were no good, only bayonets, grenades, and Tommy guns were effective in the final clean-out.

The southern part of the eastern slope of the hill Mamayev Kurgan in Stalingrad in 1943 right after the battle. A destroyed Renault UE Chenillette, a French armored carrier used by the Wehrmacht, sits in the foreground (source)

But the greatest shock came when we entered the city of Stalingrad proper. The way Stalingrad is laid out is strip factory districts stretching northward along the Volga, with worker's districts connected by bus and streetcar lines. These settlements were marked by wreckage. Streetcars which ran between community centers now stood burned out, wrecked on what was left of their tracks. Store shops along Communist Street—which is the main highway connecting these settlements—now only had a few walls left. About every quarter mile on Communist Street the Germans built barricades eight feet high, consisting of two fences built five feet apart and filled in with dirt bricks and rubble from nearby houses.

As we approached the city center with its modern buildings, there were more and more signs of increased fighting. Around the ground floor windows, many of which were sandbagged with apertures for machine guns, there were countless chinks made by bullets or holes made by shells.

As we neared the town square called "Heroes of the Revolution" we could see bodies in doorways or behind barricades or lying on sidewalks. Fragments of letters and photographs from home, all written in German, littered streets—letters from Berlin and Hamburg starting out with "Mein Lieber Karl," or Heinrich or Heinz.

There was not a single manhole in Stalingrad's streets with a cover. Germans and Russians not only used the city's basements, housetops, and alleys for battlegrounds, but the sewers as well. Snipers were known to crawl through sewers and come out behind German positions to create panic.

You could almost arm a full division with equipment lying about Stalingrad's ruined streets. Grenades clutter gutters. Full machine gun belts lie across sidewalks, and mortars are a dime a dozen.

Veterans of the Stalingrad fight said it was not uncommon to find Russian and German soldiers locked in each other's death grip during the height of the fighting. That was the way these two armies locked in the city of Stalingrad fought until the Red Army proved itself more powerful and skilled and brought the Wehrmacht to its knees.

Returning to my zemlyanka after this trip through Stalingrad, I went to the headquarters kitchen to ask for a drink of water. The Red Army girl dipped some out of a bucket with a tin cup. The water was cold and clean and good, and I told her so: "Your vodka and wine are great but nothing is better than this water."

She threw back her head and replied: "It ought to be. It's Volga water. It's got Russian blood in it."

1943. "Ten Years of Hitler"

The New York Times on the Tenth Anniversary of Hitler's Rise to Power

Adolf Hitler and Paul von Hindenburg at the memorial ceremony in Tannenberg, August 27, 1933 (source)

This article is part of a series of posts on how newspapers covered the rise and fall of fascism in Europe. In January 1943 the New York Times editorial board published a piece marking the tenth anniversary of Adolf Hitler's rise to power.

From The New York Times, January 30, 1943:

TEN YEARS OF HITLER

A tortured humanity writhing under the scourge of the most extensive and the most savage war in history will contemplate this day with mingled fury and regret, but also with a sense of triumph and a new dedication to final victory over the powers of darkness. Ten years ago today a demoniacal demagogue named Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany and thereby unleashed forces which are now drenching the world with blood. There will be increased fury over the war itself, but also over the savagery and brutishness with which the unspeakable Nazis and their allies are waging a campaign of extermination against helpless conquered populations. There will be regret over our own past mistakes which permitted these forces to get out of hand. There will be, above all, elation over the fact that these forces have been met and stopped, and a new resolve to crush them and wipe them from the face of the earth so that they will never rise again.

But ten years of fevered history have also demonstrated that if Hitler was the mainspring of events the forces which he was able to mobilize are greater than any individual—that, in other words, Hitlerism is a far greater menace than Hitler himself, and that, therefore, the problems we face go deeper than the mere elimination of Hitler and his regime. These forces are both peculiarly German and worldwide, and this anniversary is a good time to impress them on our minds for future reference.

Within the German orbit Hitlerism is primarily the heir of Prussian militarism serving as the instrument of German industrialism. Both kept Hitler in his days of penury and brought him to power to carry through German rearmament after the pathetic failures of their first choices, the tricky but frivolous Junker Papen and the wily but politically inexperienced General Schleicher, who proposed to rearm Germany with the cooperation of the German labor unions. But their final choice fell on Hitler only because he had already rallied behind himself a large popular following by appeals to all the worst elements and instincts of the Germans and, above all, had gathered around himself a fanatical crew of hoodlums and adventurers with whom he promised to terrorize the rest of the Germans into line. This he did, and out of all these elements he was able to forge a military machine with which he could overrun Europe, and to build up a regime that derives its motive force from racial hatred, lust of conquest and domination, and a cold savagery that sets aside all the cultural and moral progress of the last 2,000 years and proposes to clear a Lebensraum for the German master race by exterminating the "inferior" races already living there as a preliminary to world conquest.

From a world-wide standpoint, Hitlerism represents both the drift toward totalitarian government first exemplified in Soviet Russia and touted in this country as the "wave of the future," and also a middle-class counter-revolution against the "proletarian" revolution of the Bolshevists. In this dual role it won the support of many Germans attracted by its totalitarian features or scared by the Communist menace, though the final support that put it over the top came from Communists jumping on the bandwagon. And it also attracted sympathies in other lands which, facing similar issues, were split in two, like France, or considered nazism a good bulwark against bolshevism, as did some elements in England.

Now nazism has fully unmasked itself and the whole decent world is up in arms against it. Today, on its tenth anniversary, it stands at bay like a hunted criminal on which the avengers are closing in from all sides, and the thousand years of Hitler prophesied for his Third Reich are running out fast. The Nazis have proclaimed this war is an Armageddon in which the vanquished will be forever eliminated from the stage of history. So be it. Today we know that it is not our side which will be eliminated, and the ultimatum at Casablanca is the guarantee that there will be no compromise with Hitler or his works.

1948. "Historians Rate U.S. Presidents"

"The U.S. Presidents" by Arthur M. Schlesinger

LIFE magazine, November 1, 1948

From LIFE magazine, November 1, 1948, pp. 65-74:

Some time ago 55 outstanding authorities in American history were invited by Harvard's Arthur M. Schlesinger to rate the Presidents of the U.S. in five categories; the results, which Professor Schlesinger analyzes in an article beginning on the next page, are illustrated above. The order within each category runs from left to right. Three men were omitted from consideration: William Henry Harrison, who died within a month of taking office; Garfield, shot four months after his inauguration, and Truman, whose record is not yet complete.

THE U.S. PRESIDENTS

What makes a President great? Or a failure? The verdict of history provides some answers

By ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER

Those who believe that in a democracy people generally get the kind of government they deserve will be heartened by the results of an informal presidential rating poll which I conducted not long ago among my colleagues in American history and government (p. 65). Only two of our past Presidents were labeled "failures"; four were judged "near great"; and six received the accolade "great." 

There was a large measure of agreement among the "experts" within the important categories of great, near great and failures. The six greats—Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Wilson, Jefferson and Jackson, in that order—had no close runners-up, though Lincoln was the only one to get all 55 votes for the top rank. 

Among the four near great—Theodore Roosevelt, Grover Cleveland, John Adams and James K. Polk—the selection of Polk will no doubt surprise most readers. Polk's position in American history has been unjustly neglected. His record in the White House was an exceptional one. A coldly practical and methodical man, Polk set himself certain precise objectives to be achieved while he was President, and achieve them he did during his single term of office from 1845–49. He lowered the tariff, re-established the independent treasury system for public funds and completed the westward expansion of the country. To get Oregon and Washington he risked the threat of war with Great Britain. And he did go to war with Mexico to acquire California and most of the territory of the present states of our Southwest. 

The failure rating went to two postwar Presidents, Grant and Harding. Theirs were the only administrations in American history which can be described as riddled with corruption. As President they were both far beyond their depth. Grant allowed himself to become the dupe of crafty swindlers, speculators and plain grafters who rocked the country with schemes involving watered railroad stock, defrauding the government of taxes due on whisky, selling Indian trading-post concessions and raising congressional salaries (while doubling the President's). Grant indulged freely in nepotism, appointing a number of his relatives to various government posts, but he was otherwise personally untouched by the profiteering which went on around him. The greatest scandal of his administration followed the famous attempt by Gould and Fisk, with the aid of Grant's brother-in-law, to corner the gold supplies of the country, an attempt which almost came off and resulted in the Black Friday panic of 1869. 

What the glitter of gold was to Grant's administration, the smear of oil was to Harding's. There was the Teapot Dome affair, in which lavish bribery influenced the sale of government oil lands, and corrupt practices were also uncovered in the Veterans' Bureau, the office of the Alien Property Custodian and even the Attorney General's office. Three of Harding's Cabinet appointees were forced to resign, one going to prison. Harding was an amiable, easy-going man who had been pushed into office by machine politics and the ambitions of his wife. His death, after two and a half years in office, undoubtedly was hastened by his consciousness of having betrayed the public interest. 

The judgments reached in this poll, of course, are based entirely on the performance of these men as President. The total contribution to statesmanship of some was greater—and of some, less—than their contribution as chief executive. As one of those who voted in the poll remarked, "If the whole sum of the man's work were considered, certain of my ratings would be different. Madison and John Quincy Adams would go in the first group. Polk, by contrast, was better as President than he was in general, and Grant was much worse." Another commented, "This inquiry makes you realize how lucky some of the Presidents were in their times, and how others no less able suffered the 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.'" 

Were the six great Presidents merely "lucky in their times"? Or was greatness inherent in them? Let us see what kind of composite portrait we can draw of the six great Presidents. 

In appearance and temperament they differed as much as six men can. Lincoln we remember as the shambling-gaited, gaunt man of simple humanity whose speeches were like authentic religious statements and whose jokes were like parables. The impeccably dressed Washington personified the cavalier tradition of Virginia at its most heroic and austere. Roosevelt combined urbane sophistication with deep feeling, impishness with evident dedication to the job which he filled despite the handicap of partial paralysis. Wilson, the man who loved humanity but so conspicuously lacked the human touch, retained all his life the manner of a thin-lipped college professor; he was dry, didactic and determinedly rational. Jefferson was a complex, many-sided man, a skilled architect, ingenious inventor, profound political scientist and adept practical politician, musician and philosopher, a Virginian who did not use tobacco or hard liquor and once received the British minister in dressing gown and slippers. Jackson was the hothead of the six, a duelist, celebrated for profanity and stubbornness. 

The pattern of the great Presidents

It is in the administrations directed by these men that we can find a common pattern. The greats were indeed "lucky in their times": they are all identified with some crucial turning point in our history. As our first President, Washington got the infant republic on its feet. Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase was our first territorial expansion, pushing back the western boundary from the Mississippi to the Rockies. Jackson put down an attempt at secession on the part of South Carolina and acted to right the imbalance between the eastern moneyed interests and the Western and Southern farmers. Lincoln preserved the Union through four years of bloody civil war. Wilson's "New Freedom" and Roosevelt's "New Deal" introduced far-reaching changes in the social and economic structure of the country, and both men led the U.S. to intervene in world wars and the making of international peace. All six by timely action achieved timeless results. 

All of them, moreover took the side of progressivism and reform as understood in their day. It is true that Washington's administration resembled in manner and tone a European court, and that Washington himself (like Franklin Roosevelt later, but for different reasons) was charged by his opponents with harboring kingly ambitions. But we cannot ignore the fact that Washington led the revolt against monarchical Britain, and his lasting contribution as President was to demonstrate the workability of what he called "the experiment intrusted to the hands of the American people." Jefferson's party, the Democratic-Republicans as they were then called, was the party of the small farmers and the nonpropertied class. Jackson destroyed the overweening power of the United States Bank which gave financial interests special privilege in the use of public funds. Lincoln, confronted with armed revolt, summoned the North to "settle this question now, whether, in a free government, the minority have the right to break up the government," and in settling the question took action which ended by transforming four million slaves into human beings. Wilson and Roosevelt expanded the government's authority over business and industry, fought concentrations of economic power at home and became spokesmen for the cause of democracy throughout the world. 

To their contemporaries the six great Presidents often seemed politically ahead of their times, but they had to be careful not to get too far ahead. They had to work experimentally within the framework of the democratic tradition as it had been handed down to them. Political considerations permitted them to be idealists if they liked, but not doctrinaires. "What is practical must often control what is pure theory," wrote Jefferson the chief executive, no doubt with a view to placating Jefferson the political theorist. As James Russell Lowell put it in his essay on Lincoln, the ultimate test of statesmanship is not a "conscientious persistency in what is impracticable" but rather, "loyalty to great ends, even though forced to combine the small and opposing motives of selfish men to accomplish them." Presidents who considered themselves strategists in the public interest had to practice the tactics of political management, thus bringing down on their heads the wrath of the pure-minded among their supporters. 

They were party men 

The six great Presidents were all party men and, with the exception of Washington, they all had their hearts set on becoming President. After election they functioned as party chiefs as well as chief executive, using the powers of the one to back the other. Washington was not a party man from the beginning, but as President he declared that to appoint a member of the opposition to office "would be a sort of political suicide." These are facts which are generally overlooked by posterity because it is so far removed from the heat of earlier party battles and because it first meets the great figures of the past enshrined as wax figures in schoolbooks. 

As administrators the six great Presidents did not distinguish themselves. Some of them, indeed, were in this regard distinctly inferior to men who were otherwise mediocre. The American tradition, rightly or wrongly, dismisses as unimportant the aspect of the President as manager of our national government. We value the ends of public policy over skill in executing it. Franklin Roosevelt said, a week after his election in 1932, "The Presidency is not merely an administrative office. That is the least part of it." Judged in the light of his later performance, this sounds like what lawyers call a plea in avoidance. Jackson and Lincoln would probably have endorsed Roosevelt's view, as well as his description of the presidency as "pre-eminently a place of moral leadership." It was the exercise of moral leadership that won these men their popular acclaim and the lasting regard of posterity. 

The great Presidents were strong Presidents. Each of them magnified the executive branch at the expense of the other branches of the government. They acted on the premise that "the President," as Woodrow Wilson wrote while he was still an academic student of public affairs, "is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can." They had to be strong to break down inertia and overcome opposition to the programs they wanted to carry out. Recalcitrant Congresses were reluctant to pass legislation asked by the Executive; supreme courts sometimes declared wanted measures unconstitutional when they were passed. 

The methods used by these Presidents to get action out of Congress varied with their temperaments and the times. Washington simply overawed the legislative branch with his enormous personal prestige as the military hero of the Revolution and his godlike position as "father of his country." Jefferson preferred to work behind the scenes, pulling party strings in caucuses and overseeing the judicious distribution of patronage. Later executives leaned more on public opinion. They appealed directly to the voters when Congress balked. Jackson was the first to use his veto power extensively. He also exploited the possibilities of a disciplined party press. Wilson revived the practice, which Jefferson had abandoned, of making personal appearances before Congress. Roosevelt's voice worked political magic over the air waves. In our day a vivid personality and gifts of showmanship have become indispensable prerequisites of presidential leadership. This points up one of the weaknesses of our political system, for men who might make good Presidents often make poor candidates, and so get no chance at the office. 

With the supreme court all but one of the six great Presidents sooner or later found themselves in conflict. The exception was Washington—and he appointed all the judges of the court with which he had to deal. 

Strong leaders arouse strong opposition. Business interests resist anything new in the way of controls; politicians usually prefer to let well enough alone; Congress resents executive "encroachments"; the opposition party views everything with alarm. Moreover big Presidents often have big faults which, seen at close range, are apt to appear magnified still more. As a result the great Presidents fell foul of the bitterest antagonisms inside their own parties as well as elsewhere. Even the comparatively sacrosanct Washington was not immune. As he remarked, he was assailed "in such exaggerated and indecent terms as could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter or even to a common pickpocket." When he retired an opposition paper rejoiced that "the man who is the source of all the misfortunes of our country ... is no longer possessed of power to multiply evils upon the U.S." 

The press has regularly thrown the weight of its influence against the great and near-great Presidents in their election campaigns, with the exception of Washington. The majority of newspaper editors tried to defeat Jefferson and Lincoln when they first ran for the presidency, fought Jackson and Wilson both times when they were candidates and lambasted Roosevelt in all four of his campaigns. 

The task of being a great President would seem to be more rewarding to the nation than to the man in office. A few, to be sure, were exhilarated by the ordeals of office, but all looked for abiding satisfaction in the verdict they expected history to render on their service.
That verdict is favorable not only to them, but to the political system which put them in office. More than a third of our Presidents—10 out of 29—achieved the rank of great or near great, a creditable showing for any system of government. 

The common run of our Presidents, as it happens, held office during periods that demanded little of the man in the White House. It is not humanly to be expected that even a young and vigorous nation will always be at its best. Indeed there are periods when the general welfare may call for rest and relaxation. What endows a country with greatness is the ability to produce greatness when it is needed. That test America, up to now, has well met.

1945. Bill Downs Reporting on Allied Occupation Forces Arriving in Japan

American GIs in Occupied Japan

Bill Downs

CBS

August 19, 1945

ROBERT TROUT: Out at Admiral Nimitz's headquarters today, the men who plan amphibious operations are getting set for a peacetime landing on Japan. A Columbia correspondent has recorded the scene on Guam, and for his report here is Bill Downs.

BILL DOWNS: We're sweating out another "D-Day" here in the Pacific—the most peculiar D-Day of the whole war. This occupation move on Japan has taken on all of the aspects of a full-scale combat landing. The men are teed up, the convoys are on the move, and more are assembling. The Air Force is waiting to play its role in the show. Tempers are getting short, and the usual D-Day restlessness is in evidence everywhere.

There are many things that make this peacetime D-Day like many others that have happened before the peace was on. In the first place, there's the uncertainty. No one knows exactly what is going to happen, and it's the same old story of being crowded onto a ship, only this time there are not quite the same number of anxiety complexes in evidence. And the men know that, when they get to their destinations in Japan, that the living will probably be the same tough field conditions that they've had all through the Pacific campaign.

I've talked with a number of men slated for the occupation of Japan, and next to the primary question of whether they're going to be shot at or not, there's the question of what they're going to do when they get there. And if you know the soldier's mind you'll know what I mean. Yeah, that's right: fraternization.

I saw the non-fraternization policy fail in Germany. From completely unofficial sources I understand that a similar non-fraternization policy is contemplated for Japan. But there is a difference. No GI is going to fraternize with a little lotus blossom when Lotus Blossom might have a knife in her hand. And the GIs know the fanaticism of the Jap from a ways back. But a soldier is still a soldier, and an American soldier, believe me, is even more so. Sooner or later there very definitely will be a fraternization problem in Japan.

The people of Japan are getting desperately hungry. The American army will have more food per man than the Jap's ration ever contained in the best of times. The GI is naturally a friendly animal, and he's going to come to like the children of Japan. And nothing can stop that.

In other words, the American soldier is a human being. He's going to suffer when he sees suffering, and he's going to sympathize with any people in distress. He's also going to remember the Jap atrocities and the POW that was killed on one of these island campaigns, and he's going to be a frustrated person for a while. But in the end, the GI is going to be a human being, and when he lives with the suffering that Japan has brought upon herself, he's going to feel sorry. There's nothing that can be done about that here.