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Mixed Feelings. The U.S. press and people reacted with mixed feelings. Ex-President Harry Truman remarked: "I am sorry to hear of [Stalin's] trouble ... I'm never happy over anybody's physical breakdown." Much more typical was a Chicago restaurateur who put a black wreath in his window, with a sign below reading: "Joe's gone. Vodka on the house." The New York Daily News, as usual, called a spade a meat-ax: "Jailbird son of a drunken cobbler . . . in essence, a backwoods plug-ugly and killer." Less crudely, but no less clear in its condemnation, the New York Times said: "Our children's children will still be paying the price for the evil which he brought into the world."
Rarely had the U.S. been so nearly unanimous about anything as in its hatred of what Stalin stood for. But the U.S. was far from being either unanimous or precise on why or what it hated. To some, Stalin was a personal despot who had betrayed the cause of Socialism and progress. To others, he was another expansionist czar who disturbed the peace of the world with aggression. To others, he was the typical and inevitable product of the Marxist religion.
The last group would have the least difficulty in adjusting themselves to Stalin's death. The philosophy that made Stalin had not died, and it was capable of producing thousands of leaders to carry on the basic policies and methods of Stalinism. The symbol of this force was the Kremlin, with its old defensive walls and churches converted into the nerve center of a vast effort at world revolution.
The change from Stalin to Malenkov & Co. might bring changes of tactics, a more pressing threat or a more cunning effort to lull the anti-Communist world to sleep. But the Kremlin and all that it stood for endured, essentially unchanged in its meaning and its menace.