Truman (23 page)

James Forrestal was largely responsible for this. He came late into Roosevelt's Cabinet, but was its only member to survive deep into the Truman administration. A former head of the Wall Street firm of Dillon, Read, he was a tense, able man. From 1944 to 1947 he was Secretary of the Navy. As such he effectively resisted a National Security Bill in a form which would have given real power to the head of the Pentagon. Having made a shell of the office of Secretary of Defense he was then appointed to occupy it. The result, not unnaturally, was that he became more tense and increasingly frustrated. He ostensibly stood back from Truman's 1948 campaign and made it dangerously clear that he believed in a Dewey victory. On March 3rd, 1949, Truman sacked him, partly because General Vaughan, the White House joker who occasionally indulged in more serious pursuits, harped on his disloyalty, and partly because his behaviour was becoming increasingly irrational. Ten weeks later Forrestal committed suicide.

In his place Truman appointed Louis Johnson, who had a claim on his loyalty as the 1948 chairman of the Democratic Finance Committee. He had not raised many dollars before the result, but he had at least tried. He was a lawyer from Clarksburg, West Virginia, who had first made a political impact as national commander of the American Legion in 1932-3. He became Assistant Secretary of War in 1937, but flounced out in 1940 when Roosevelt failed to promote him and brought in the Republican Stimson as Secretary. Johnson was a committed Democrat but a very conservative one. However his greatest commitment was to his own political advancement. He quickly made it clear that his principal intent was to use the Department of Defense as a stepping stone to the Democratic nomination in 1952. As Truman's own intentions for that year were unannounced this was not the best way of underpinning his relations with the President and his staff. He also began a running feud with Dean Acheson, confident that on most aspects of foreign policy he knew more than did the Secretary of State. By dismissing Forrestal and appointing Johnson Truman had replaced a neuropath with a megalomaniac.

Johnson's entry into his demesne of the Pentagon was conducted with more bombast than finesse. He evicted generals from their offices, had a great new room created for himself, commandeered General Pershing's old desk and barked orders across it in a
determination to show that he was in charge in a way that Forrestal had never done. Generals were shouted at, but it was the Navy above all that was to be brought to heel. One of the last results of Forrestal's stewardship had been the laying of the keel of a vast new aircraft carrier, the
United States,
at Norfolk, Virginia. This was not just a very big ship. It was a symbol of the Navy's future as an airstrike service. The naval staff had abandoned plans for the construction of thirteen smaller vessels in order to concentrate funds upon this flagship.

In late April Johnson ordered cancellation. The Secretary of the Navy, John Sullivan, whom he had not even bothered to inform beforehand, resigned. Truman was displeased. He supported Johnson on the issue, but thought that his handling was ham-fisted. The President was also beginning to be offended by Johnson's general boastfulness and incontinent ambition. Although he remained as Secretary of Defense for another sixteen months, he never wholly recovered his position with Truman. Nothing was heard of his candidature in 1952. He did however secure from the Congress a considerable strengthening of the executive powers of the Secretary of Defense, well beyond the puny coordinating role which was all that Forrestal had created for himself. The modern administrative shape of the Pentagon stems substantially from this period of office. His one and a half storm-tossed years, for all the braggadocio, were therefore not without some result.

Still less than with Truman did his relations with the Navy recover. They were not helped by the appointment of Francis P. Matthews, a political ‘pro' from the not notably nautical state of Nebraska, as Sullivan's replacement as Secretary of the Navy. Sullivan was a Catholic, and Matthews was a still more prominent one. Truman apparently thought that act of balance was enough without any regard to whether Matthews could tell one end of a battleship from the other. It was a mistake which Roosevelt, for all his skilful playing from the episcopalian heights of Hyde Park of Catholic politicians of Brooklyn and the Bronx, would never have made, at least with the Navy. As a result the admirals, and many below them, were by the autumn not only discontented with the Navy's role but disenchanted with both tiers of the political leadership in the Pentagon. The consequence of this was the so-called ‘admirals' revolt' of October 1949.

The House Armed Services Committee was holding hearings
on the B-36 bomber programme, which the Navy regarded as pre-empting its role as well as its funds. Sparked off by a disputatiously bold naval captain called Crommelin, who published a statement claiming that the Navy's offensive power was being ‘nibbled to death', the majority of admirals of note rushed either to issue statements of support or to testify before the Committee in a sense deeply hostile to the views of their civilian chiefs. Denfeld, Chief of Naval Operations, did so, Radford, C-in-C Pacific, did so, as did the C-in-C Atlantic and a clutch of other senior serving officers. They were supported, from retirement, by several of the great naval names of World War II, Nimitz, King and Halsey. Radford's testimony was the most hostile to Johnson, speaking of the lack of confidence in his office felt by senior officers throughout the Navy. But Denfeld's caused the greater stir. He was the senior serving naval officer. His disloyalty was jugular. It was damaging to the administration, particularly in the month following the news of the Russian A-bomb. Truman, however, was better at dealing with insubordination than at avoiding it. A week or so later he laconically announced that Denfeld had been transferred ‘to another post'. He got the C-in-C Mediterranean, one of the few senior officers who had not been involved in the dispute, perhaps because he was far away, to accept the vacant command. Matthews tried to resign, but Truman allowed him to stagger on for nearly another two years, in spite of a major gaffe in August 1950, when he echoed Bertrand Russell in suggesting that a pre-emptive nuclear strike might be necessary and desirable. A State Department refutation was required and forthcoming. Acheson gladly supplied it. Until he got Marshall back, a month after this, without one kidney but still full of authority, Truman was not lucky in his Pentagon appointments.

The Navy, however, settled down much more quickly and calmly than might have been expected. They were floated off the shoals of inter-service dispute by the splurge of expenditure which followed the outbreak of the Korean War. The Air Force got its B-36S and they got the
United States,
a lot of other equipment as well, and ultimately the underpinning of their nuclear strike rôle through the development of the Polaris submarine programme. Once the exigencies of Korea had caused budgetary probity to be abandoned, there was room for everyone, admirals, generals and aviators, at the trough of public expenditure.

Before then, however, still in the autumn of 1949, Truman was further damaged by the suggestions that his staff, although certainly not himself, were taking a few teaspoonsful out of that public trough. It was very minor stuff, centred around General Vaughan. He had done a few favours for gentlemen of mild dubiety of character who claimed that they could procure government contracts on a 5% basis, and had given the General one or two unsolicited but durable consumer goods. As a result the terms ‘Five Percenters' and ‘Deep Freezers' acquired the temporary status of catch-phrases which could be depended upon to send Republican audiences into paroxysms of derision and mirth. Truman reacted to this with his usual fierce, incautious loyalty. When Vaughan offered to resign he said ‘Don't ever mention such a thing to me again. We came in here together and we're going out of here together. Those so-and-sos are trying to get me, through you. I understand exactly what's going on.'
⁴

The wound to Truman at this stage was only a fairly light flesh one. But it paved the way to more damaging accusations a couple of years later. ‘Deep Freezers' helped to create an atmosphere in which by 1952 ‘the mess in Washington' was accepted as having an objective reality. The 1949 scandals were about as relevant to the record of the Truman administration as the equally petty Belcher scandal was to the achievement of the Attlee Government in Britain. The main difference was that while both were totally honest, Attlee was sharply censorious of pecadillos in others while Truman (if he liked them) was tolerant.

More serious in substance than these attacks was the solid refusal of the Southern conservative Democrats to vote for the Fair Deal. By the end of 1949 it was obvious that the President was not going to get any effective civil rights legislation, that Taft-Hartley was to remain unrepealed, that the Brennan Plan for agricultural support was not to be enacted, and that social security and education legislation had run into the sand. Almost the only enactment of a domestic plank of the 1948 platform was the National Housing Act. ‘I've kissed and petted more consarned
[sic]
S.O.B. so-called Democrats and left wing Republicans than all the Presidents put together. I have very few people fighting my battles in Congress as I fought FDR's'
⁵
he wrote in his diary on November 1st. However he consoled himself with the thought that he had got enough through on the international front that on balance things
could be regarded as going
'fairly
well'. And his daughter insists that throughout the first eighteen months of the second term, that is up to the outbreak of the Korean War, Truman was fairly content with life. She wrote in relation to this whole period that ‘Dad's optimism soared'.
¹
Not even the first effusions of McCarthy in his ‘McCarthyite' period, which began quite abruptly in February 1950, dimmed this ebullient mood.

McCarthy was a strange phenomenon. At the beginning of 1950 he was a forty-one-year-old small-town lawyer from Wisconsin who had got himself elected as a circuit judge in 1939, and then, in the Republican primary of 1946, after a period of war service in the Pacific, had defeated Robert M. La Follette, Jr, who had recently been voted in a poll of newspaper correspondents and political scientists ‘the best' of the 96 senators. He had done so by a campaign of energy, calumny, indestructible bounce and massive (and mostly lying) direct mail advertising. After three rather tawdry years in the Senate, he was still looking for a satisfactory groin into which to put his knee. He had achieved little beyond that of reversing La Follette's distinction and being voted ‘the worst' Senator. Then he alighted, half by accident and half by a pervertedly inspired populist instinct, on the anti-Communist issue.

For its exploitation he had several unusual advantages. He half wanted to be liked, but he was quite indifferent to being respected. Truth or logic meant nothing to him. He could not be effectively caught out, because this is at least half a subjective state, and he was impervious to refutation. He simply moved on to the next unsupported accusation. He was argumentatively indestructible. What cast him down was the failure to attract attention, not the failure to convince. Even when he had no notable issue, he was good at the phrase which stuck, the scene which had to be reported.

As a result he quickly became a figure of world fame. In his own country his lowering features and rather flat, dispassionate voice became still more familiar than the sights and sounds of Truman, Eisenhower or Stevenson. He was the first demagogue of the television age, a poor speaker but the provider of compulsive viewing. In his five-year span of dreadful influence he weakened two presidents, but he was never himself even a remote prospect for the White House. He sapped other men's leadership rather than promoted his own. His demagogy did not set the nation alight. It was too wheedling and his self-righteousness too shallow. He at least half knew that he was a fraud. His anti-Communism was more of a racket than a crusade. He once shared an elevator with Dean Acheson and greeted him with the off-duty false bonhomie of one travelling salesman in a line of doubtful goods to another in a different but similar line. This was a technique which often produced a friendly, almost grateful response from weak opponents. With Acheson it was less successful. The murderously cold silence and apoplectic forehead of the Secretary of State penetrated even to McCarthy. He was amoral rather than immoral. In the words of Richard Rovere, ‘though a demon himself, he was not a man possessed by demons'. As a result, when his spell was broken, he collapsed more quickly and completely than most of his victims. He passed into obscurity in 1954 and died less than three years later, still only 48, and probably as a result of a drinking bout instigated by bad news from his stockbroker. It was a death suited to neither a hero nor a fanatic. It did not even attract much attention.

Nor, as a matter of fact, did his early 1950 effusions, although that was a weakness soon to be rectified. Armed with his new issue he asked the Republic campaign committee to arrange some speaking engagements for him over the Lincoln's birthday weekend in mid-February. They gave him a fairly undistinguished list: a Women's County Republican Club at Wheeling, West Virginia and meetings of similar grade at Salt Lake City and Reno. But if the venues were unnotable the speeches were not. He spoke without texts and there has always been some uncertainty as to what exactly he said. The best authenticated version is that at Wheeling he announced:

‘While I cannot take time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist
Party and members of a spy ring I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.'