Harry Truman (20 page)

I’m sorry to report I can’t remember why I refused to be bribed. But I do remember all too vividly Dad’s attitude toward John L. Lewis, which was formed in the first days of the Truman Committee. Lewis was playing his usual game of threatening the nation with disaster by calling all his miners out on strike. Dad’s committee had been functioning less than a month, but he already regarded himself as the voice of the Senate in regard to the National Defense Program, and so he boldly inserted himself into the brawl and summoned Lewis to a hearing. Forced to negotiate in the glare of the spotlight my father was holding on him, Lewis was unable to perform any of his backstage antics. Then Dad turned the heat on the mine owners. When it became obvious the Southern branch of the coal mining establishment was blocking a settlement, my father warned them he was going to summon the real owners of the mines - Northern capitalists and bankers - to the witness stand and force them to admit their attempt to insist on lower wages for Southern workers was totally fraudulent. By nightfall, the strike was settled.

My father’s unflattering reference to the column, “The Washington Merry-Go-Round,” was also in character. He detested most columnists - especially those who wrote about Washington politics. Like most of his harsh dislikes, it was based on facts and experience.

Toward the press as a whole, my father’s attitude was more positive. He always recognized the importance of getting information to the people. He did his utmost to tell responsible reporters everything possible about the work of the Truman Committee. His releases came to be known as “Truman Hours” and were always timed to give both press and radio reporters a chance to meet their deadlines.

At the same time, he fretted over the dangers of too much publicity. Early in 1942 he wrote to one close friend: “My committee has had so much publicity in the last sixty days that its work is not nearly as efficient as it was before that time. We are in a situation where the slightest mistake will cause us serious difficulty. . . . One bad tactical error, political or otherwise, can ruin the whole structure much more easily than it could have done when we were first starting.”

By the time he wrote these words, the Truman Committee was no longer investigating the defense program - it was the war effort. On December 7, 1941, my father was in Columbia, Missouri, at a small hotel - the kind of place he retreated to at the end of the 48 election campaign. Already he had found the only way he could get any rest was to hole up in an isolated spot on a Sunday. That historic day was gray and gloomy in Washington. Nursing a cold, I stayed in the house and listened to the New York Philharmonic, simultaneously telling myself I should be doing my homework. Suddenly there was a voice interrupting the lovely music, announcing that Japanese planes had attacked some obscure, distant place known as Pearl Harbor. Since the Japanese had been attacking China for over three years, and Pearl Harbor sounded Chinese to me, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Mother wandered by, and I remarked crossly that the network had a heck of a nerve, interrupting good music to talk about a foreign war.

“What was the name of the place you said they were attacking?”

“Pearl Harbor.”

My mother gasped and rushed for the telephone. The next thing I heard was her voice excitedly talking to my father in Missouri, telling him the Japanese were attacking Hawaii.

Out in the Pennant Hotel in Columbia, Missouri, Dad put on his clothes and raced across the road to a private airport, where he begged the owner to get him to St. Louis as fast as possible. They flew in a small plane, and he arrived just in time to catch a night flight to Washington. It was quite a trip. Every time the plane landed, another congressman or a senator got on. Ordinary citizens were ruthlessly ejected, and pretty soon the plane was a congressional special. They arrived in Washington around dawn. With no sleep, Dad rushed to the Capitol. I soon followed him, thanks to a neat trick I pulled on my mother. I was still running a fever, but I fooled Mother into thinking it was gone by holding my mouth open after she inserted the thermometer. I was not going to let a cold keep me away from seeing history made. Mother gave me her entrance ticket, and I zoomed to the special session of Congress. By the time I got there, the only seat left was in the photographers’ gallery. This gave me the same view the rest of the nation later saw in the movie theaters, as President Roosevelt announced the day of infamy and called for war. I then followed the senators back to the Senate, where I heard my father vote for a declaration of war.

Almost immediately, powerful voices in Washington, who wanted to run the war their own way, tried to dismantle the Truman Committee. Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson wrote to President Roosevelt: “It is in the public interest that the Committee should suspend for the time being. It will impair our activities if we have to take time out to supply the Truman Committee all the information it desires.” But my father was no slouch at Washington infighting. Secretary Patterson wrote this letter on December 13, 1941. On December 10, Dad had written the President, assuring him the committee would be “100 percent behind the Administration” and would scrupulously avoid interfering in military or naval strategy or tactics.

This statement was rooted not only in sound political instinct but in my father’s deep knowledge of American history. Shortly before he formed the committee, he had borrowed from the Library of Congress “Reports of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War,” the hearings of the congressional committee that had played watchdog during the Civil War. This outfit had considered themselves great strategists, and were constantly interfering in strictly military affairs, sniffing treachery in every lost battle, hiring and firing generals and generally harassing President Lincoln to the point of near distraction. After Pearl Harbor, Senators Vandenberg, Brewster, and Taft came to my father and asked him to broaden his committee by appointing more Republicans and widen its jurisdiction to include all aspects of the war. My father did expand the committee to ten senators, but he absolutely refused to make it a Committee on the Conduct of the War. “Thank goodness I knew my history and wouldn’t do it,” he said later.

At the same time, when it came to watchdogging the war effort, Senator Truman was, if anything, tougher than he had been on the defense program. To one new committee investigator, early in 1942, he wrote: “Go into the investigation . . . with all you’ve got. Don’t let those fellows get any statement out of you that they are doing a good job. Don’t compliment them. . . . If you do and it is later found they haven’t done a good job, then they can say our committee agreed with what they did.”

With this approach, Dad soon took on some of the biggest names in Washington.

One was Jesse Jones, who wore so many hats he sometimes sounded like a one-man government. As head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, he had the power to lend hundreds of millions to various companies to enable them to do defense work. He was also Secretary of Commerce, and in this office he had access to very powerful business connections, aside from being a millionaire himself. An arrogant man, he was not used to having his decisions questioned. But my father discovered from Harold Ickes, among others, that Jones was largely responsible for a truly alarming aluminum shortage. Alcoa (The Aluminum Corporation of America) dominated the production of this metal, so vital for aircraft manufacturing, and they conned Jones into signing a plant expansion contract which gave them monopoly control of the market while the government put up all the money to build the plants.

The mere possibility of being summoned before a committee to answer for his actions aroused Jesse Jones’s wrath, and he turned on every iota of influence he had in Washington to make Senator Truman back down. This only made Dad madder, and Jones soon appeared before the Truman Committee, where he weakly admitted the original contract was a flagrant violation of the government’s interest and agreed to renegotiate it. At the hearing, my father treated him courteously. He made it a point, no matter how mad he might be at a man in private, never to browbeat him when he was a witness before his committee. He detested congressional committees that abused their powers and turned their hearings into witch-hunts or circuses. At one point in the committee’s tussle with John L. Lewis, one of the senators called the coal miners’ leader a “charlatan.” Dad instantly called his colleague to order with a sharp rebuke.

In the aluminum mess, my father found far more fault with Alcoa than he did with Jesse Jones. He was enraged and astounded by the way this supposedly great American company had disregarded the national interest in making interlocking agreements with I.G. Farben, the German corporate giant. In order to keep Farben out of Alcoa’s American markets, Alcoa agreed to stay out of the magnesium production field, and even let Farben buy American magnesium, which Alcoa owned, at prices far below those charged American users of the metal. As a result, in 1941, Germany was producing 400 percent more magnesium - another vitally needed metal for war planes - than the United States. When my father released these findings in January 1942, as part of his first annual report, they created a sensation. The
New Republic
and
The New York Times
joined in calling the revelations a decisive contribution to the prosecution of the war.

When it came to revealing shortages, my father played no favorites. Poet Archibald MacLeish, in charge of the Office of Facts and Figures, released a glowingly optimistic report to the nation, assuring everyone we had more than enough rubber stockpiled to last for the duration. The Truman Committee grimly replied, a few weeks later, that there was, in fact, an alarming rubber shortage and published the figures to prove it.

My father was passionately committed to winning the war, and he absolutely refused to let anyone or anything stand in the way. Part of this passion was rooted, I think, in the frustration he felt because he was too old to get into the fight. It was not for want of trying. In 1940, he had gone over to the War Department and tackled General George Marshall. Dad was still a colonel in the army reserve, and he had kept up his study of field artillery.

“I would like very much to have a chance to work in this war as a field artillery colonel,” he said.

General Marshall pulled down his spectacles, eyed my gray-haired father, and said, “Senator, how old are you?”

“Well,” said Dad lamely, “I’m fifty-six.”

“You’re too damned old. You’d better stay home and work in the Senate.”

Tartly, Dad replied, “You’re three years older than I am.”

“I know. But I’m already a general.”

Some five years later General Marshall came to the White House to see the President of the United States, who happened to be the same reserve colonel he had so abruptly rejected. Matt Connelly, now serving as Dad’s appointments secretary, was a great tease. “General,” he said, “if the man in the other room” - meaning Dad – “were to ask the same question now that he did in 1940, what would you say?”

General Marshall declined to lose his magisterial calm. He thought for a moment and said, “Well, I would tell him the same thing, only I would be a little more diplomatic about it.”

My father was crushed when Harry Vaughan, who was a lieutenant colonel, talked himself onto active duty and went winging off to Australia. Vaughan had replaced Vic Messall as Dad’s chief administrative assistant. Dad arranged to tour some California defense plants to coincide with Vaughan’s departure, and they went out on the train together. From Los Angeles, he wrote me the following letter. The opening was to become a familiar refrain to his lazy, non-letter-writing daughter.

My father’s interest in the Far East remained intense for several reasons. Mother had a cousin, a brigadier general who was with MacArthur and Wainwright on Corregidor, and Dad had another cousin, Lou Truman, who was an aide of the commanding general at Pearl Harbor. With Harry Vaughan and another good Missouri friend, Roy Harper, in Australia, my father was an avid reader and seeker of news from that part of the world. On June 30, 1942, Dad wrote to me from Washington - Mother and I were back in Independence - remarking that a visiting general from Australia was coming to see him: “I guess he can tell me all about Harry Vaughan and Roy Harper. I hope he’ll tell me all about the war in the Far East and Down Under. . . .”