The New York Times

The New York Times is presented through its coverage of Harry S. Truman during moments when personal judgment, public reputation, and presidential authority converged. Its reports framed his perilous Christmas 1945 flight to Missouri as a hazardous “sentimental journey,” while later commentary by Felix Belair and James Reston registered contrasting pressures on his presidency: the demand for firmness during a threatened railroad strike and the confusion surrounding Henry Wallace’s foreign-policy speech.

Reporting a hazardous journey

On Christmas morning in 1945, Truman decided to fly from Washington to Kansas City despite severe weather. His family had already gone to Independence, and the account describes driving wind, sleet, and rain, with National Airport sheathed in ice and commercial flights canceled. After consulting his pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Hank Myers, Truman went ahead. The Sacred Cow eventually appeared over Kansas City more than an hour late.

The New York Times described the trip as one of the most hazardous “sentimental journeys” ever undertaken by a chief of state. That characterization placed the flight between private attachment and public responsibility: the journey was personal in purpose, but its danger made it a matter for national attention. Newspapers and radio commentators criticized the decision as foolhardy. The account adds that the welcome awaiting Truman at the North Delaware Street house made the journey seem still less necessary, and that Bess had not shared his sentimental view. The newspaper’s label thus registers not simply the weather risk but the uneasy gap between the feeling motivating the trip and the reception he encountered.

A test of presidential firmness

During the May 1946 railroad strike crisis, Truman faced union leaders Alexander F. Whitney and Alvanley Johnston, whose organizations were preparing to strike. Negotiations continued through a five-day postponement, but compromise remained elusive. Truman ordered the seizure of the coal mines and proposed an 18½-cent raise for rail workers, exceeding the recommendation of his own emergency fact-finding board. Whitney and Johnston still viewed the offer unfavorably, and their representatives resisted the idea that the President’s position alone should settle the dispute.

In the aftermath of Truman’s forceful response, Felix Belair wrote in The New York Times that Truman remained recognizable as an average man in ordinary settings but had also shown he could rise to an occasion demanding toughness. The distinction mattered in a crisis when his authority was being tested in practice: the union leaders had reportedly dismissed the assumption that a President could simply command their agreement. The House of Representatives passed a bill to draft the strikers by 306 votes to 13 after less than two hours of debate, but the Senate did not follow the same course. Its resistance, led in large part by Robert Taft and shared by some Democratic liberals, showed that decisive public action did not guarantee compliance from every institution. Belair’s assessment linked Truman’s familiar, everyday public image to a demonstrated capacity for resolve, without implying that the crisis had been settled by personality alone.

Interpreting a foreign-policy dispute

The newspaper also carried James Reston’s account of the reaction to Wallace’s speech at Madison Square Garden. Wallace had urged support for the United Nations, increased international trade, and international control of atomic weapons, but had also condemned British imperialism and argued against a policy of getting tough with the Soviet Union. At the Garden, before an audience of twenty thousand that included vocal supporters of the Soviet Union, he departed from his prepared text and argued that the danger of war arose more from imperialism than from Communism.

Reston wrote the following day that Truman appeared to be the only person in Washington who saw no difference between Wallace’s remarks and the administration’s policy. The observation pointed to a political misreading with consequences beyond the speech itself: Secretary of State James F. Byrnes was reportedly outraged, and Arthur Vandenberg insisted that there could be only one Secretary of State at a time. The next morning Truman called his staff together and reproached himself for a serious blunder. At a press conference that afternoon, he read a prepared statement, allowed no questions, and said that his earlier answer had expressed support for Wallace’s right to deliver the speech, not approval of its contents. The clarification did not halt the criticism.

The newspaper’s place in the account

Across these episodes, The New York Times appears less as a single, continuous institutional voice than as a venue for reporting and interpretation at different points in Truman’s public life. Its description of the Christmas flight emphasized the contrast between a President’s private purpose and the hazards of the office. Belair’s account of the strike crisis emphasized the emergence of firmness under pressure. Reston’s report on Wallace’s speech exposed a gap between Truman’s understanding of the administration’s position and the reaction among political figures around him.

Taken together, these appearances show how newspaper coverage helped make presidential character legible through specific tests rather than through a settled portrait. The same President could seem vulnerable to a damaging judgment about a hazardous personal journey, capable of rising to a public emergency, and mistaken about the political meaning of a subordinate’s speech. The New York Times’s contribution in the narrative is therefore episodic but consequential: its reporting and commentary place Truman’s actions before readers as events with reputational as well as political stakes.