The 40s: The Story of a Decade (53 page)

MAY 7, 1949 (ON THE NORTH ATLANTIC PACT)

T
he North Atlantic Pact was signed almost a month ago, but it isn’t in effect yet, and there is a chance that it never will be. That chance was somewhat reduced, however, late last week, when Dean Acheson announced a clearance-sale price on the lend-lease program for Western Europe. He said he thought that in the year coming up, the job could be done for $1,130,000,000, and that a good part of that sum would not be an immediate cash outlay, since we have a lot of spare parts in our military establishment that could be shipped abroad and be replaced here at our leisure. Up to the time of this statement, which was made in a closed session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, unofficial and semi-official quotations on the cost of the program had become more and more fanciful—fanciful, that is, if we assume that Mr. Acheson’s figure stands for the true cost. The earliest figures cited, when the speculation started a few months ago, were fairly close to the one named by Mr. Acheson, but in the meantime they had jumped a couple of hundred million every few days, and every time they jumped, another senator came down with a bad case of the shakes and declared that he was thinking of voting against the whole program, treaty and all, because we haven’t the money. One of the first to be affected by the bullish talk was Senator Walter F. George, of Georgia, a man whose devotion to the administration’s foreign policy has been equalled only by his devotion to hard money and double-entry bookkeeping. After hearing Mr. Acheson, the Senator authorized reporters to say that he was beginning to see things in a different light. Still, a number of people in Washington are wondering why we got all those high estimates in the first place. Were
they really miscalculations? Or could it be that the highest ones, which were double Mr. Acheson’s estimate, represented the whole loaf, and that the administration, mindful of a certain proverb, is settling for half a loaf, in order to push the treaty through? If this is the case, the consequences, naturally, could be tragic, for a lot of grief has come to the world because of too great a reliance on this proverb. There is a third way of accounting for the disparity; the fact that the State Department waited until the figures kicking around the Capitol were running above two billion dollars before it put out its “All Prices Slashed 50 Percent” sign could lead one to suspect that it was playing the old trick of marking the goods way up in order to make the reduced price look like an irresistible bargain.

If that was the game, it was a very foxy one, and up to now the administration has been just the opposite of foxy in the way it has gone about selling the Pact to the Senate. First off, it forgot Congress’s touchiness about its Constitutional responsibility for the declaration of war, and let the word get around that under the treaty we would be honor-bound to start shooting the moment Luxembourg, Iceland, Portugal, or anyone else ran up distress signals. Next, the State Department’s protocol people invited only a handful of senators to witness the signing of the Pact—an inexcusable oversight, for which only partial amends were made when, at the last minute, some of the more understanding guests were asked to shove over and provide room for the men who have the power to make the North Atlantic entente about as effective as the Alliance of the Three Emperors. Shortly after that, President Truman, apparently without realizing what he was doing, approved the proposal of Dr. Edwin G. Nourse, of the Council of Economic Advisers, that the money to rehabilitate the European armies be got in part by whittling down our own military budget—an idea that wasn’t at all what the President, to say nothing of the generals and admirals, had in mind. Dr. Nourse’s speech raised the hope in the Senate that the lend-lease deal could be worked not just cheaply but without cost, and it was up to the administration to dash this hope. Destroying pleasant illusions is a good way to lose friends, and the administration lost plenty. There were other blunders, too, and they came in such profusion that the belief was expressed in some quarters that the Pact would not be ratified, because it couldn’t get to the Senate floor in less than ten weeks, and within that time the administration would make enough blunders to insure its defeat.

The outlook has improved during the past week, but not many people here would be rash enough to go on record with the statement that the
Pact is now certain to be ratified. The general feeling, I think, is that if a rollcall were taken this week or next, there would be not more than ten or twelve votes against ratification. In the present atmosphere, the lend-lease proposals, which, of course, involve the House as well as the Senate, would probably carry, too, though the fight would be tougher and the margin of victory slimmer. But there won’t be a rollcall this week or next, and since nowadays epochal events can occur in the time it takes to finish an average Senate committee hearing, it would be unwise to predict that the current Congressional attitude will last into the approaching summer. Two or three new people’s democracies could spring into being by then; Stalin could apprehensively come to terms with the West, or even take Winston Churchill’s advice and die. (However, Ex-Ambassador Smith has returned from Moscow with the news that nonagenarians are common in the Dzhugashvili family and with the opinion, based on observation, that the Generalissimo is feeling tiptop and has many years of rich, full living ahead of him.) Developments of this sort could drastically affect sentiment in Congress, and so could a number of less dramatic ones at home—an increase of troubles in the domestic economy, for example, or a realignment in Congress because of an issue with no bearing on the Pact. If a lot could happen while the Pact is in committee, a lot more could happen before it comes to a vote. The Pact will probably get to the Senate floor fairly soon after it has been approved in committee, which means about a month from now, but it’s going to stay there a long time. The party leaders plan to allow every member of the Senate to speak on the Pact; this will be what is known as a Historic Debate, so no one is likely to forgo his chance to be heard, and heard at length. The supporters of the Pact are doubtless at work now dusting off ancient pieties to put into the record, and the opponents are doubtless improving the delaying tactics with which they held up the authorization of more Marshall Plan funds for several days beyond the deadline. There isn’t any deadline on this one, and the betting here is that we’ll still be at it on the Fourth of July or even, some wise money says, Labor Day. Historic Debates are interesting, but one disadvantage is that they give some people the idea of running out and making a little history while the debating is going on.

· · ·

It isn’t news to anyone that J. Edgar Hoover, who will this year celebrate his completion of a quarter century as director of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, is a superb showman and a master politician. He has served under four Presidents—two Republicans and two Democrats—and has had seven Attorneys General shot out from over him in the course of achieving an endurance record unequalled by anyone else in high appointive office today. Somehow surmounting nature, which endowed him with a rather moist and commonplace personality, he has become for millions of Americans one of the most vivid and exciting figures in our public life. His career has been so replete with accomplishments that many of them have not received half the attention they merit. This was borne in upon me a few days ago when, in the agreeable company of some out-of-town high-school boys and girls, I went on a conducted tour of the F.B.I. headquarters, in the Department of Justice Building. This student group was one of the many that have come to Washington, from all over the East and the Middle West, this spring—as others have come in other springs—to spend a few days watching democracy at work and having themselves a good time. They make extensive tours in rubberneck buses, shake hands with their congressman and listen patiently as he tries to justify his ways to the teen-age mind, sit for a while in the House and Senate galleries, peer at historic documents in the National Archives, get some lessons in applied physics at the Bureau of Standards, watch paper money being made at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and, invariably, tour the F.B.I. headquarters. I had been told that by far the most popular feature of these junkets is the F.B.I. tour, so I decided to go along with a group and see what the show was like.

The F.B.I. has its own entrance to the Department of Justice Building, and its own handsome lobby. Our group assembled at noon in this lobby, where a sign announces that there are free tours every half hour from nine to four, Monday through Friday. On this day, though, which was at the height of the student-pilgrimage season, they must have been starting out every seven or eight minutes, for our cluster of forty or so was one of five in the lobby. In a few minutes, a brisk, neatly dressed, sandy-haired man in his early twenties came out of an elevator, introduced himself to us as our guide, and apologized for keeping us waiting and for the poor condition of his throat, which he had to clear about every half sentence. He said that it had been an unusually busy day; he and his fellow-guides had already escorted more than three thousand people through the building, and the strain on their voices was telling. He gave us a brief verbal preview and then said, “And now, folks, if there
are any particular questions at all, please don’t heztate.” This was the line with which he ended every one of his set speeches along the way. Since he had said nothing this time to provoke questions, none were asked. Our guide broke us up into groups small enough for the elevators and instructed us to go to a room on the fifth floor, where he would shortly rejoin us. This room, a lounge, is a tempering tank for tourists; on its walls are many photographs and brightly colored charts and diagrams explaining the F.B.I. and its operations. Moreover, it is right across the corridor from the office of J. Edgar Hoover himself. “The Chief works just the other side of that door,” our guide told us when he arrived. (It was a superfluous remark, for the famous occupant’s name and title are emblazoned on the door in lettering worthy of a California chain dentist.) “Don’t know whether he’s in or not right now. Lots of times, when he’s in, he likes to step outside and shake hands with all you folks.” We gaped hopefully at the door, but it didn’t open, and the guide herded us down a hall. A short distance away is the law library of the Department of Justice. It is necessary for sightseers to troop the entire length of the library to get to the great laboratories where human hairs are split and human blood is analyzed practically to the point of identifying the person from whom it leaked. “You’re now passing through the second-largest law liberry in the United States,” our guide said, “and I’m sure you’ll all understand what I mean when I say that we’ll appreciate it very much if you’ll be just as quiet as you can possibly be. You see, we’ve got a lot of our attorneys in here studying up on the books so they can present the government’s case on a lot of the spy and murder trials you’ve been reading about in your home-town papers, and we don’t like to disturb them.” It was a thoughtful request but an idle one to make of several dozen high-school students on vacation, and the most that can be said for our group is that it clattered along at a smart clip and didn’t stop to examine any of the books. Just as I thought it a remarkable fact that J. Edgar Hoover manages to get his important work done in an office across the hall from a public gathering place that is refilled every half hour, or less, I was deeply impressed by the knowledge that the government’s case is represented in the courts by men who do their legal research in a library in which traffic is as heavy as it is in the lobby of a large hotel.

Only a swinging door separates the library from the laboratories. “In here, folks,” our guide said, pointing down a corridor with a series of rooms opening onto it from both sides, “you will see millions of dollars’
worth of scientific crime-detecting equipment. These are the most up-to-date crime laboratories in the entire world.” I must confess that although I never doubted the claims being made by the guide for all this equipment, I found the equipment itself rather unstimulating. It looked like what one sees, in smaller quantity, in any doctor’s office or in the high-school physics and chemistry laboratories with which my companions were unquestionably familiar. I gathered, though, that not many of the students shared my disappointment. The glamour the equipment lacked in appearance seemed more than made up for by the glamour imparted to it by the setting and by the rhetoric of our guide. “Here, on your right, now,” he was saying, “is where we can identify a murderer or a sabatoor beyond the shadow of a doubt, with only a drop or two of his saliva. The police department in your home town could send us a sample of saliva, and it wouldn’t take us hardly any time to let them know whether they’d got their man.” The guide proceeded learnedly on the subject of saliva analysis before asking if there were any particular questions at all. Naturally, there were several, all of them highly technical, except for one from a youngster who wanted to know how the police would locate the drops of incriminating saliva. The guide thought for a moment and then said that saliva might be found on an envelope recently licked by the killer. The boy asked where they’d get the envelope, but by that time we had moved along to the hair-splitting apparatus: “One little piece of hair, and we can substanchewate right off whether it’s animal hair and, if so, what kind of animal, or, if it’s human hair, what race it came off of—Mongoloid, Niggroid, or Caucasian. The Bureau does this free of charge for any law-enforcement agency in the United States. You see, folks, every hair on your head is made up of tiny cells you can only see in these high-power machines, and the cells on everyone’s head are different, so that …”

Thus we progressed, down through the Serology Section, the Toxicology Section (“just a little piece of brain or kidney …”), the Adhesive Tape Section (“samples here of every kind of adhesive tape ever manufactured in the United States and many from foreign lands”), the Tire-Tread Section, the Rubber-Heel Section, the Typewriter Section, the Reference Firearms Collection, and the rest. The trip through the laboratories makes one feel certain that our struggle against crime, espionage, and subversion is in good hands, and that whenever Mr. Hoover’s bloodhounds latch onto an old envelope or a heelprint, a couple more enemies of society are gone geese. What stirred me most, however, was
not so much the proof of the F.B.I.’s efficiency—of that I had already been persuaded by news stories, gossip columns, and comic books—as the wonderful ingenuity with which the laboratories, and most of the rest of the F.B.I. headquarters, are laid out. The laboratories may or may not be arranged in the most utilitarian fashion, but from the broader standpoint of the public interest they are very nearly perfect. Not even Norman Bel Geddes could improve on the job. The microscopes, the spectrographs, and all the other scopes and graphs in the various rooms, handsomely framed in large picture windows that extend almost from floor to ceiling, are arrayed along both sides of the corridor. The charts and specimen collections, such as the Reference Firearms Collection, face outward toward the public rather than inward toward the technicians, and so does almost everything else, including the better-looking filing cabinets. This way, everything serves a double purpose; it plays its part in the war on crime and it helps to build up confidence in our form of government. Unfortunately, on the day of our visit we couldn’t see how this policy works out when the equipment has to be used, for, crime apparently being at a low ebb, none of the instruments we were shown was actually being put to any use by anyone.