Harry Truman (21 page)

Dad soon became philosophic about being out of the fighting war. Even before he went to California with Harry Vaughan, he was consoling Eddie McKim, who had met with similar frustration when he tried to join up: “Ed, somebody must do just what you are doing; create the wealth to make the wheels go around and help the guns to fire. The fact that you are sending a boy and have four more children to support is reason enough for you to stay on the job where you are. . . . Harry Vaughan would have been much more useful in the operation of the war as my Secretary than he will be as a Lieutenant Colonel of the Field Artillery teaching a lot of shave-tails the fundamentals, and that is what he is doing. . . . Keep on producing . . . to pay the bill, and I will keep on standing on the lid as hard as I can to keep the costs down.”

More than anything else, my father’s memories of his World War I days were the source of his determination to let no one stand in the way of winning the war as fast as possible. He reacted almost angrily when a friend on the Chicago
Times,
Herb Graffis, told him he was building a reputation that would make him a good presidential candidate: “Regarding the last paragraph of your letter, the ruination of more good legislative workers is brought about by that Presidential bee than any other one thing. I can name you a half a dozen fellows in the United States Senate who have been ruined by just having the bee fly close to them. I have no further political ambition, and the thing I am most interested in now is to win this war as quickly as possible. I think I told you I was on the Front in the last war firing at ten forty five on November Eleventh, and I am not so sure all my gang would have come back if I had moved forward. . . . I am not a candidate for anything but reelection to the United States Senate in 1946, and I am announcing that right now.”

During these war years my father worked so hard and was away from home so much, I sometimes wondered if he might forget what Mother and I looked like. But this was a foolish fear. First, last, and always Dad was a family man. When we went back to Independence during the summer months and left him to his own devices in Washington, he often sounded as if we had abandoned him on a desert island. In 1942, after being alone for almost a month, he wrote: “It has been a most dull and lonesome June for me. Get up at 5:30, drink tomato juice and milk, go to work, eat some toast and orange juice and work some more, maybe have a committee fight and a floor fight, go home, go to bed and start over.”

During one of these abandoned periods, he startled me by reporting he had gone to “a picture show.” I was one of the great movie addicts of the 30s and 40s, but Dad rarely if ever went and when he did go, he seldom enjoyed himself. This time was no exception. “I’ve forgotten what it was,” he coolly informed me. “I know it was rather silly and I did not see it all.” (The thought of seeing a movie from the middle and not waiting to see the first part made me gasp with horror.) However, the movie house threw in a “good old-fashioned vaudeville show,” as Dad called it, and this inspired a flood of reminiscence, which gave me a short course in the history of the theater in Kansas City:

In the Senate, Dad continued to prove he was afraid of nobody in Washington. He found that the powerful labor leader Sidney Hillman had deliberately ignored a Michigan company’s low bid on a defense housing project, because he claimed their labor practices would have led to a strike. Hillman had been designated by FDR as one of the two top men in the defense program and was a White House intimate in the bargain. My father strode onto the Senate floor and declared: “I cannot condemn Hillman’s position too strongly. First the United States does not fear trouble from any source; and, if trouble is threatened, the United States is able to protect itself. If Hillman cannot or will not protect the interests of the United States, I am in favor of replacing him with someone who can and will.”

The more my father studied the defense program, the more he became convinced it was a two-headed monster, with the business representative, William S. Knudsen, and the labor representative, Hillman, pulling in opposite directions. The Truman Committee’s first annual report recommended the whole setup be junked, and the production side of the war effort be placed in the hands of a single man with authority to make all the major decisions. In line with his determination not to embarrass the President, Dad had let Roosevelt see the report well in advance of its publication. The day after the report appeared, the President announced the establishment of the War Production Board under the leadership of Missourian Donald M. Nelson. According to most historians of these days, he was Harry Hopkins’s choice for the job - and Harry Hopkins was the Roosevelt man Dad knew and liked best.

It is clear, from my father’s own words, he played no small part in the choice. He said to Nelson when he appeared before the committee: “We have fought to get you this job. We are going to fight to support you now in carrying it out. If you meet any obstacles in the carrying out of this job where this committee can turn the light of publicity on the subject to call attention to legislation that should be enacted to give you the necessary means to carry the job out, we want to be informed, and we are at your service.”

Obviously, the Truman Committee was doing a lot more than simply criticizing the war effort. It was playing a major role in giving it shape and direction.

The facts that prove this are a little dry, but I think they are important. Dad’s support of Nelson was part of his fundamental conviction that the war effort had to be controlled by civilians. Everywhere he looked, he saw generals and admirals taking over the civilian economy, and issuing orders and making decisions as if they were on a military base. He became so alarmed that on November 26, 1942, he went on the “March of Time” news broadcast and told the nation civilian control of the economy was “the most important question of the day. . . . Any attempt on the part of these ambitious generals and admirals to take complete control of the nation’s economy would present a definite threat to our postwar political and economic structure.”

On February 11, 1943, Dad made another speech on the subject in the Senate. He was particularly incensed at this time because his good friend Lou E. Holland, of Kansas City, whom Dad had helped name as chairman of the Smaller War Plants Corporation, had been ousted and replaced with an army colonel. “I believe uniforms should be reserved for the purposes for which they were adopted; namely to distinguish the combatants on the field of battle,” Dad said. He insinuated rather strongly that these “so-called” officers were nothing more than big businessmen in disguise, and he pointed to facts he had already publicized in committee hearings, about the army’s tendency to favor big business in their procurement programs.

The dangers my father saw in this growing military control were many and diverse. He did not really fear a military takeover of the government. But he did believe the military were very insensitive to civilian needs and, if unchecked, were inclined to starve the civilian side of the economy to the point where severe morale problems might have developed. Also, when it came to signing contracts for war material or inspecting the finished products, a man in uniform can be ordered to do things, while a civilian, in Dad’s words, “can tell the admirals and the generals where to head in.”

In this capacity, Donald Nelson was a severe disappointment to my father. He frequently crumpled under military pressure and gave the brass hats more and more control. Grimly Dad went to work to prove the dangers with facts. He was in an ideal position to do so, because every day he received hundreds of letters, telegrams, and phone calls from people working in defense plants and in shipyards, telling him about corruption or mismanagement in their immediate area.

In January 1943, army inspectors in an Ohio plant of the Wright Aeronautical Corporation, a subsidiary of Curtiss-Wright, told my father defective engines were being delivered to our combat forces. These army men had turned to the Truman Committee in desperation, because their superior officers at the plant, and their superiors in Washington, had overruled and suppressed their reports and blithely collaborated with Curtiss-Wright executives to accept these defective engines and parts.

The story was so shocking that my father’s first inclination was to conceal it from the public, because of the terrific impact it was certain to have on morale. But to his amazement and wrath, in secret hearings the army absolutely refused to admit there was anything to the charges. Dad and his fellow senators had to sit there and listen to generals and colonels blatantly lie. Then the army announced it was making its own inspection and issued a complete whitewash. That was too much for Dad, and he ordered the committee to publish their facts. The same day the Department of Justice went to court and formally accused Curtiss-Wright of delivering defective material.

The army fought back with a ferocious publicity campaign. Under Secretary of War Robert Patterson flatly denied the validity of the Truman Committee’s findings. Curtiss-Wright, which was second only to General Motors in the procurement of war contracts, filled newspapers and magazines with an advertising campaign that trumpeted its own excellence, and inspired innumerable articles and stories accusing the Truman Committee of serving “a half baked loaf” and damaging civilian and military morale out of a greedy hunger for political sensationalism. Even
The New York Times,
I regret to say, swallowed the story and called the committee’s report “ill-advised.”

Dad sent Hugh Fulton to New York to talk to the
Times
brass, and show them the facts. He then informed Under Secretary of War Patterson he was going to call him before the committee. Patterson had declared the army never received a single defective engine from Curtiss-Wright. Dad knew that the army, once the committee broke the story, had dismantled hundreds of engines and reinspected them. On this second go-around, a shocking percentage of the engines had been found to contain defective parts, and, worse, they failed critical tests. Once the Under Secretary of War was confronted with these facts, he was man enough to admit he was wrong. He called on Dad in his office, apologized, and promised to stop the anti-Truman Committee publicity campaign.

Around this same time, my father tangled with the admirals, with equally spectacular results. He caught them collaborating with a subsidiary of U.S. Steel, accepting steel plate for warships that had been produced with fake specifications and falsified records. When the committee broke the story, Charles E. Wilson, vice chairman of the War Production Board, publicly reprimanded the chairman of the Board of U.S. Steel for “poor management.” Just as in the Curtiss-Wright fiasco, the admirals and the steel company’s executives collaborated in a publicity campaign to deny the charges. Dad evened the score by attacking from the opposite flank.

In a committee report issued on April 22, 1943, my father stressed the need for new ship construction because of the enormous losses we had been taking from German submarines. The navy had been working hard to give the public the impression the antisubmarine war was going well. Dad, acting on his conviction that “certainty is always better than rumor,” gave the public the facts - during 1942, we had lost a million tons of shipping a month. Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox blandly dismissed the figures. “Senator Truman got his figure,” he said, “. . . from some uninformed source, probably common gossip.” This time, Dad let one of his fellow senators do the fighting for him. Owen Brewster of Maine called on fellow Republican Knox and informed him he was headed for an open committee session, where he was going to have to do some public word-eating. Lamely, the Secretary of the Navy issued a statement that Senator Truman’s figures were correct.

Another point on which my father tangled with the generals was their manpower demands. Again and again he spoke out against their tendency to build an army too big for the country to support. These criticisms forced them to reduce the size of the army by several million, and to his satisfaction, this reduction did not have the slightest effect on their overall strategic planning. In 1943, a bill was introduced in the Senate which would have empowered the government to draft workers and shift them around the country at will. Again Dad rose to severely criticize such a measure, which he insisted was unnecessary. Like the generals, the people running the War Manpower Commission tended to vastly exaggerate shortages in various parts of the country, and when all these imaginary shortages were added up, we had a manpower crisis.

To prove there was no crisis, my father did an investigation of Dallas, Texas, where the War Manpower Commission reported the North American Aviation plant was short 13,000 workers. But Dad had received a complaint from a source inside the plant, which stated that far from there being a worker shortage, the plant was actually overstaffed, and there was widespread loafing. Truman Committee investigators soon confirmed this complaint. A subsequent investigation of Dallas by the War Production Board under its executive vice chairman, Charles E. Wilson, confirmed Dad’s conclusion that there was no critical shortage of manpower in the Dallas area. Even then, however, the War Manpower Commission refused to take Dallas off its critical list. Only when my father forced Paul McNutt, head of the WMC, to appear before the committee at a public hearing did he face up to the facts and agree to revise his list.