The Yanks Are Coming! (31 page)

Without immediate American action, which meant deploying troops stationed in Japan to Korean battlefields, South Korea would have fallen. Even with American intervention, South Korea was nearly overrun. But under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, the South Korean and UN forces, chiefly American, drove the North Koreans back over the 38th parallel, which divided the two Koreas. Truman authorized MacArthur to keep going as along as neither the Soviets nor the Red Chinese intervened. But the Chinese did indeed come, troops pouring in by the tens of thousands, ultimately more than a million—and the apparently imminent Allied victory suddenly looked like the opening rounds of World War III. The prime objective of the Truman administration was to tamp down the war's flames so that they didn't engulf China, the Soviet Union, and the United States in a much greater war. That put the president at odds with his commander, Douglas MacArthur, who believed there was no substitute for victory. It says something about Truman's political unpopularity that MacArthur, returning stateside after Truman relieved him of duty for public dissent from administration policy, was greeted as a hero across the country and invited to address a joint session of Congress, where his speech was greeted with rapturous acclaim.

Hardly anyone was in raptures about Harry Truman's leadership. In May 1951, less than a quarter of Americans approved of
his performance. Though his feistiness convinced an unimpressed American public that he would run for reelection, Truman thought eight years in the White House was enough. His second term, like many second terms, was mired in administration scandals; and he would leave the resolution of the Korean War, now stalemated, to someone else. His frustration revealed itself when he attempted to nationalize the nation's steel companies to stave off a national strike that he thought intensely unpatriotic when the country was at war, though he was much more sympathetic to the steelworkers (labor union Democrat voters) than to the companies, which refused to settle. The companies sued the president and won a judgment—endorsed by the Supreme Court—that the president had acted unlawfully. It was a stinging rebuke, a 6-to-3 ruling by justices who were all Democrat appointees.

Seeking someone to inherit his presidential mantle, Truman turned to General Dwight Eisenhower, then serving as NATO's supreme commander, to run as the Democrat nominee for president, apparently unaware—a tribute to Eisenhower's discretion—that Ike's own political leanings were considerably more conservative than Truman's. Eisenhower said he had no interest in running for office. Not much later, prominent Republicans like Dewey and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. convinced Eisenhower that he needed to run, lest the GOP nomination be carried by the anti-internationalist, anti-NATO Robert Taft. Eisenhower beat Taft for the nomination and trounced the Democrat Party's nominee, Adlai Stevenson, in the 1952 election, taking not only Stevenson's home state of Illinois and Harry Truman's Missouri—along with thirty-nine other states (out of forty-eight)—but sweeping Republican majorities into both houses of Congress. In the presidential transition, Eisenhower and Truman's relationship was cold and curt.

“GIVE 'EM HELL HARRY”

Harry Truman, the man of the people—though the people didn't much care for him in January 1953—returned to Independence, Missouri. Loyal Democrat that he was, he campaigned against Eisenhower's reelection. Even though he didn't like the Democrat ticket of Adlai Stevenson and Estes Kefauver (toward whom he had a personal antipathy), he disliked Eisenhower more. Eisenhower, however, had ended the Korean War and was easily reelected.

Truman hated Richard Nixon—Eisenhower's vice president and the Republican nominee for president in 1960—and was chilly toward John F. Kennedy. Kennedy's father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had been Franklin Roosevelt's ambassador to Britain and a leading isolationist prior to America's entry into the Second World War. After the war, John F. Kennedy had supported, and his brother Robert had worked for, Senator Joseph McCarthy. Truman loathed McCarthy and disliked the Kennedys,
père et fils
. Truman thought John F. Kennedy too young to be president and thought it wrong to put a Catholic at the top of the Democrat ticket, though he commented, “It's not the Pope I'm afraid of. It's the pop.”
²⁸
He tried to block Kennedy from getting the nomination, but JFK's personal diplomacy eventually won him over; Truman's crotchetiness could be assuaged by deft, sincere flattery and shared policies. He approved of Kennedy's “New Frontier” domestic agenda and his Truman-like mixture of caution and committed anti-Communism in foreign policy.

In his post-presidential retirement, Truman lived humbly. He rejected offers to capitalize on his name, devoting himself instead to writing his memoirs and establishing his presidential library. He admired the example of Cincinnatus and George Washington, the hero who returns to his farm. Truman had no intention of farming
again, but he was content, more or less, to live in his old home in Independence. He missed the limelight and mental stimulation of being at the center of power, but he traveled, and he corresponded with friends like Dean Acheson. He worked every day in his office until he was eighty-four and maintained an image as a straight-talking, no-nonsense, no-special-airs, common-man democrat.

He died on 26 December 1972, aged eighty-eight. He had, by then, overcome the poor reputation he had when he left office and become an iconic American figure. A few years after his death,
Give 'em Hell, Harry!
, a popular play and film, immortalized him as a tough, honest, tenacious statesman.
²⁹
But of all the experiences that had shaped him, one stood out. It was his service in World War I. As a biographer noted, his war service “was the most successful and satisfying experience of Truman's first thirty-five years.” He had demonstrated “an inner courage and an ability to lead other men,” and Truman himself “frequently remarked that his political career was based on his military experience.”
³⁰
If Truman was “Give 'em Hell Harry,” it was because he had first given the Huns hell as a captain of artillery in the Meuse-Argonne.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

WILLIAM J. DONOVAN (1883–1959)

T
he grandson of Irish immigrants to Buffalo, New York, William Joseph (his confirmation name) Donovan grew up stereotypically Irish—pugnacious (his father set up a boxing ring for him in the backyard) and with a taste for poetry (though a mediocre student, he was excellent at declaiming). The Donovan home was full of books, and his parents were keen on their children's educational success. While his father had disdained going to college, being eager to make his way in the world, he was an autodidact who had worked himself out of the Irish ghetto and into the suburbs. He was also independent minded—a Republican among a sea of Irish-Catholic Democrats.

Growing up, Will, as they called him, played football for Saint Joseph's Collegiate Institute (a Catholic high school) and then attended Niagara University (a Catholic college) for three years, where he mulled a priestly vocation before transferring to Columbia College (later University) in New York City with the thought that he might become a lawyer. Though an indifferent student, he had the gift of blarney, which suited him well as a debater and could be of use in a courtroom, and he played football (until an injury ended his career), rowed, and ran cross country. He completed his undergraduate studies in 1905 and enrolled in Columbia Law School, where he finally showed some academic moxie, graduating in two years.

His law degree didn't immediately translate into professional success. Indeed, he moved back to Buffalo, lived with his parents, and was uncertain what to do. He finally joined a well-respected and well-paying local law firm in 1909, when he was twenty-six. Two years later, he was bold enough to hang out his own shingle with a friend, Bradley Goodyear. After three years, they folded their law firm into that of John Lord O'Brian. At Columbia, Donovan, a soft-spoken, charming young man with dazzling blue eyes, had dated a string of socially prominent beauties. Now he was a partner of two socially prominent lawyers. O'Brian, nearly a decade Donovan's senior, was a politically ambitious and well-connected Republican. He had been a New York State assemblyman and was appointed district attorney by President Theodore Roosevelt.

Donovan was successful enough that he helped pay for the schooling of his younger siblings.
¹
He was also a founding member of a National Guard cavalry unit set up by a group of local businessmen who wanted an excuse to ride and camp. Donovan was elected captain and made a hobby of reading up on military subjects. That
was 1912. Two years later he married Ruth Rumsey, heiress to a fortune from her late multimillionaire father.
²
Three years later he was preparing for war.

“THE LINE IS THE REAL PLACE”

Donovan first saw the Great War in Europe in 1916 representing the Rockefeller Foundation, which was trying to bring war relief to the continent; and his military skills were polished that same year when his National Guard cavalry unit, Troop I, was dispatched to Texas for Pershing's punitive campaign against Pancho Villa's banditos. In 1917, he joined the Fighting 69th, New York City's Irish National Guard regiment, which became part of General Douglas MacArthur's 42nd “Rainbow” Division. Given charge of a battalion, he knocked it into shape with cross country runs and boxing competitions.

He looked the part of a soldier: fit, quietly commanding, with “eyes like blue ice that drilled straight through you.” The chaplain of the Fighting 69th, Father Francis Duffy, had his eye on Donovan as an eventual colonel, a proper Irish Catholic officer for the regiment who was “cool, untiring, strenuous,” of “fine character,” with an “alert and eager intelligence.”
³
Donovan worked hard at the Field Officers' School in France and pooh-poohed any disappointment that he was not swiftly made a colonel. In January 1918 he wrote his wife, “The line is the real place. And truly the Major has the best job in the war. It is low enough so that you still have touch with the men and high enough so that you can use your intellect.”
⁴

Donovan and his men moved into the trenches at the end of February 1918. He was a diligent and conscientious officer and expected the same virtues from his platoon commanders. He was
also aggressive. Advancing with his 3rd Battalion in late July 1918 at the Battle of the Ourcq River, he pressed forward despite the battalions on his flanks failing to keep up. He suppressed enemy fire with well-placed machine guns and snipers, while his men darted ahead in ones, twos, or threes, dropped, got up, and darted again. Donovan and his men had scant regard for the Germans, regarding them as dirty fighters who would surrender when things got tough. During the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, the doughboys swept through the enemy, collecting so many thousands of prisoners that Donovan worried about keeping his own men disciplined and sharp.

During the Meuse-Argonne Campaign, Father Duffy noted of Donovan, “He goes into [battle] in exactly the frame of mind that he held as a college man when he marched out on the gridiron before a football game, and his one thought throughout is to push his way through. ‘Cool' is the word the men use of him and ‘Cool' is their highest epithet of praise for a man of daring, resolution and indifference to danger.”
⁵
In his first action, Donovan had helped dig men out of a bunker that had been buried under a German bombardment—and won a Croix de Guerre, which he refused to accept until a Jewish sergeant of his unit was awarded one too. For his work at the Battle of the Ourcq he had been awarded a Distinguished Service Cross. He came to the Meuse-Argonne a highly regarded young officer who had been gassed, wounded by shrapnel, and shown the right stuff as a battlefield commander, earning the nickname from his men of “Wild Bill”—referring not to his manner, which was not wild at all, but to his courage and toughness.

Now he was a lieutenant colonel commanding the 1st Battalion and charged with breaching the
Kriemhilde Stellung
. His men had advanced the farthest, but the offensive was stalled, and Donovan, trying to press on, had been shot through the leg. Nevertheless he
stayed on the field, directing his men until loss of blood forced him to accept evacuation. A month later the war was over. In January 1919, Donovan, now recovered, was assigned as a staff officer to the provost marshal general, policing American occupation troops. It was uncongenial duty. In April he was shipped home and restored to his old regiment as colonel of the Fighting 69th. He told his brother Vincent, “When I think of all the boys I have left behind me who died out of loyalty to me, it's too much.”
⁶
When he was awarded a belated Medal of Honor in 1923, he left it to the regiment, citing the sacrifices of those who had died in its service.

INTELLIGENCE WORK

Donovan had promised his wife a trip, a sort of second honeymoon, which took them to Asia and allowed Donovan to do a little freelance intelligence work on Japan's imperial ambitions and on the civil war in Russia. Indeed, he was far more absorbed with gathering intelligence, which became a postwar hobby for him, than with spending time with his wife; she returned home alone. If Donovan was not a dutiful husband, he was certainly ambitious. He often traveled abroad on further business-building and intelligence-gathering jaunts,
⁷
while assuming a nascent political career as well. In 1922 he was named U.S. attorney for western New York, including Buffalo, where he gained a reputation as a tough enforcer of Prohibition laws—even against the social elite who presumed they were immune—and ran as the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor (he lost). In 1924 he became an assistant attorney general at the United States Department of Justice. Herbert Hoover, elected president in 1928, liked Donovan, had employed him as a speechwriter and campaign advisor, and promised to promote him to
attorney general (Donovan had often been the de facto acting attorney general in the Calvin Coolidge administration). But ranged against Donovan were a wide variety of political enemies—Democrats, of course; anti-Catholics (including Prohibitionists who doubted someone like Donovan could sincerely be on their side); and perhaps most important, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation. The colorful high-flyer Donovan and the scheming bureaucrat J. Edgar Hoover shared a deep personal antipathy for each other. In the midst of all this, President Hoover backed down and offered to make Donovan governor of the Philippines; instead, Donovan resigned.