Truman (43 page)

In the first weeks the odds were heavily in favor of Stark, with Milligan second, Truman a very distant third. (A cartoon by Daniel Fitzpatrick in the
Post-Dispatch
showed two heavy trucks marked “Stark” and “Milligan” in head-on collision high above a tiny toy truck marked “Truman.” “No place for a Kiddie car,” said the caption.) The Milligan candidacy rapidly faded, however. It soon became a race between Stark and Truman, and one of Truman’s chief advantages proved to be Stark himself, as Harry Truman seems to have known intuitively from the beginning. Over dinner at the Willard Hotel one evening in Washington, well before the campaign began, he had told friends he was sure Stark would attack him personally and that if he, Harry, were not even to mention Stark, then Stark would begin making mistakes—“enough errors to give me a definite opportunity.”

As predicted, Stark tore into Truman at first chance, calling him a Pendergast lackey, a rubber-stamp senator, and a fraud. “The decent, honest, God-fearing, law-abiding citizens of Missouri,” said Stark in a speech at Joplin, “know him for what he is—a fraudulent United States Senator, elected by ghost votes, whose entire record in public office has been devoted to one purpose alone, and that is to the service of the corrupt master who put him into power….”

In Truman’s files still was the letter from Stark thanking him for the introduction to Tom Pendergast. Learning of this, several on the campaign staff urged Harry to release it, certain it could settle the outcome of the election in one blow. But Harry refused, saying he would let Stark destroy himself.

Little things about Stark began to draw attention. It was noted, for example, that his chauffeur was required to give him a military salute. Then, with only weeks to go, Stark went to the national convention in Chicago as an announced candidate for the vice-presidential nomination, as well as for the Senate, and Bennett Clark, who had at last concluded that Harry Truman deserved his help, rose to the occasion in grand style. To a reporter for the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch,
Clark observed:

Stark was one of seventeen in a vice-presidential race that included Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Speaker of the House William B. Bankhead, William O. Douglas, Jimmy Byrnes, Henry A. Wallace, and Congressman Sam Rayburn. At Chicago, Stark passed out bushels of apples and wound up with 200 votes on the first ballot. The final decision, however, was made in Washington by Roosevelt, who had by then accepted the draft of the convention for a third term. He chose Henry A. Wallace, the Secretary of Agriculture, a former Republican from Iowa, a former editor of
Wallace’s Farmer,
which had been founded by his grandfather, and an ardent liberal.

Truman had come to Chicago with the Missouri delegation and held a seat on the resolutions committee, an important role. The convention opened on July 15. But in Kansas City the following day, an event took place that rocked him as very little ever had. The Republicans who controlled the county court had decided to foreclose the court-held mortgage on the homeplace at Grandview, and on Tuesday, July 16, 195 acres of the farm were sold at auction on the courthouse steps in Kansas City. The
Star
carried a front-page picture of the auction crowd and a caption explaining that the farm belonged to Martha E. Truman, mother of the Missouri senator. How much warning Harry had is unknown, but clearly he was helpless to find the money to save his mother from eviction. He was also certain it had been done for political reasons only, to humiliate him in the middle of the campaign, which seems to have been exactly the case.

Two days later at the convention, in the middle of the fight over the vice-presidential nomination, Harry felt suddenly so tired and weak he thought he was having a heart attack. Reaching out desperately, he clutched at a railing and hung on for ten or fifteen minutes, totally unable to move, until someone, seeing what was happening, helped him to a chair.

The homeplace on Blue Ridge was gone—though it would be recovered later. His mother and sister moved into a small, rented house in Grandview, where, not long afterward, Mamma Truman slipped on the unfamiliar steps and broke her hip. As broken hips were then often fatal, Harry thought it meant the end for her. But it was not, nor did she complain about the new quarters.

In a letter home, he asked Bess to try to imagine the shame she would feel if her mother were evicted from 219 North Delaware.

Election day for the primary would be August 6; from Washington in late July, he wrote, “I’m thinking August 6 all the time.” Theodore Roosevelt had once written that “black care rarely sits behind the rider whose pace is fast enough.” It seemed to be his own cure, too.

The night of the big speech with Barkley in St. Louis was a fiasco. In a hall big enough to seat more than three thousand people, a grand total of three hundred showed up.

And yet it was in St. Louis in the final week that events turned suddenly and unexpectedly in Harry’s favor. When the campaign was over and the results final, he would comment to Bess, “Anyway we found out who are our friends….”

As valuable as any, surprisingly, ironically, was Bennett Clark. From a hotel room in St. Louis, Clark began calling people all over the state. “He finally ended up in a hospital and we continued to push him even there,” remembered a Truman campaign worker, “and he kept his telephone busy.”

Still more important was Clark’s influence on a hale, broad-shouldered young Irish-American named Robert E. Hannegan about whom until now Truman knew nothing. A St. Louis police chief’s son, Hannegan had been a star athlete at St. Louis University and for a while, after law school, played semi-professional baseball. Since 1933, he had been extremely active in Democratic politics, in the rough school of the Dickmann organization, eventually becoming city chairman. But up to now, Hannegan had been working for Stark. Whatever it was that Bennett Clark said or promised to make him switch must have been extremely convincing, for with just two days to go before the primary, Hannegan suddenly deserted Stark and went to work feverishly for Truman. In hindsight, Harry would see it as the biggest break of the campaign, and thereafter the tall, good-looking young man in the loud neckties could do no wrong in Harry’s estimation, though had anyone ever walked out on him as Hannegan had on Stark, it would have been seen as rank betrayal.

On election night Truman was heard to remark, “Well…I guess this is one time I’m beaten,” to which his friend Edgar Hinde replied that it was a long time until morning.

Margaret, however, would remember her father going to bed after calmly announcing he would win. They had been listening to the returns on the radio in the living room. By eleven o’clock Stark had an 11,000 vote lead. For her mother, Margaret would write, it was one of the worst nights of her life. They were both in tears. When the phone rang in the middle of the night, after everyone was in bed, it was Bess who answered. A campaign worker in St. Louis, David Berenstein, wished to congratulate the wife of the Senator from Missouri. Bess took it as a bad joke and slammed down the receiver. But Berenstein called back. Truman was carrying St. Louis.

It was an extremely close shave, as Truman said. He won by not quite 8,000 votes out of 665,000 cast. And 8,411 votes were also his margin over Stark in St. Louis, where, thanks to Bennett Clark, Hannegan had done his last-minute work. But the black vote, too, had gone to Truman, and he did better with the farmers this time than he had in 1934. Most importantly, he carried Jackson County by 20,000 votes, which was only a fifth of his margin in 1934, but still 20,000 votes in the place where supposedly anyone ever associated with the Pendergasts was done for. His own standing with the people, the work of Jim Pendergast and what remained of the organization, had counted more than all the sensation of the scandals, the charges of his opponents, and the relentless opposition of the
Star.
It was truly an extraordinary victory.

Maurice Milligan sent his congratulations and promised Truman his support in the fall election. Governor Stark said nothing publicly, but in private correspondence with Roosevelt blamed his defeat on “the machine vote, backed by Bennett Clark with every force at his command,” plus “virtually all the Federal appointees, including Postmasters and WPA workers,” who had made the difference for Truman. Besides, said Stark, “our rural vote, which is strong for me,” had failed to materialize, “due primarily to the severe drought.”

In order to run in the primary Milligan had been required to quit as district attorney. When Milligan applied for reappointment, Truman wrote Roosevelt a letter saying that in fairness Milligan should have his job back. However, when Stark’s term as governor expired and word reached Truman that Stark was being considered by Roosevelt for a position on the Labor Mediation Board, Truman saw that he did not get it. Stark, who had seemed so destined for glory, was to withdraw from politics in disgust, never again to hold public office.

Three days after the primary election, when Harry Truman walked into the Senate Chamber, both floor leaders and all the Democrats present “made a grand rush” to greet him. Les Biffle, Secretary to the Majority, told him that no political contest in memory had ever generated such interest in the Senate as had his race in Missouri. Biffle had arranged a surprise lunch in his honor. “I thought Wheeler and Jim Byrnes were going to kiss me,” Harry later wrote Bess, his joy in the day still overflowing. “Barkley and Pat Harrison were almost as effusive. Schwellenbach, Hatch, Lister Hill, and Tom Stewart, and Harry Schwartz almost beat me to death. Dennis Chavez hadn’t taken a drink since the Chicago convention but he said he’d get off the wagon on such an auspicious occasion, and he did with a bang. Minton hugged me…. Well, as you can see it was a grand party.”

Though in the general election in the fall Truman failed to do as well as Franklin Roosevelt in his race with Wendell Willkie, he nonetheless won resoundingly, defeating his Republican opponent, Manvel Davis, by 44,000 votes.

His one last worry, before returning to Washington, was over delay of the papers certifying his reelection—papers that, by law, required the signature of Governor Lloyd C. Stark. “Has my certification of election been officially received by you?” he anxiously cabled the Secretary of the Senate, Colonel Edwin A. Halsey, on December 13. By return telegram Halsey assured him that all was in order.

In a brand-new pearl gray, two-door 1941 Chrysler Royal, a car that was to be in steady service for the next fifteen years, he and Bess set off again for Washington.

I
n “Locksley Hall,” the poem by Tennyson that young Harry Truman had copied down in his last year in high school, and that he carried still, neatly folded in his wallet, were lines describing an aerial war of the future, lines written well before the invention of the airplane:

In July of 1940 began the first great air battle in history, the Battle of Britain, as day after day Hitler’s
Luftwaffe
crossed the Channel to bomb British ports, airfields, and London, and the Spitfires and Hurricanes of the Royal Air Force went up to “grapple” in defense. It was all Tennyson had foreseen and worse. In a raid on London, September 7, there were 375 German bombers, an unprecedented force. Then the night raids began, and devastation from incendiary bombs that Americans read about in dispatches by correspondents Robert Bunnelle and Helen Kirkpatrick, or heard described firsthand by the dramatic radio voice of Edward R. Murrow. “As I watched those white fires flame up and die down, watched the yellow blazes grow dull and disappear,” said Murrow in his broadcast of October 10 at five in the morning, London time, “I thought, what a puny effort is this to burn a great city.” Hitler boasted that his air
Blitz
would break the will of the English people. On Sunday, December 29, London was subjected to the most savage bombing yet. More than a thousand fires raged across the city.

In Washington that same night, Franklin Roosevelt was wheeled into the oval-shaped Diplomatic Reception Room on the ground floor of the White House to deliver by radio the “fireside chat” to be known as his “Arsenal of Democracy” speech. The Nazis, he said, were determined to enslave the world and he warned that stroking a tiger would never make it a kitten. He saw American civilization in graver peril than at any time since Plymouth and Jamestown. It was not war he wanted, but all-out, massive production for war to supply those nations under Nazi attack. “We must become the great arsenal of democracy. For this is an emergency as serious as war itself….”

On January 6, 1941, at a joint session of the new Congress, Senator Harry Truman listened as Roosevelt delivered a second ringing summons to action, in support of those nations fighting in defense of what he called the Four Freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, freedom from fear. To Truman, it was the President at his best. A few days later came Roosevelt’s plan for Lend-Lease, to send Britain arms on credit, and in both houses of Congress the fight was on. Isolationists in the Senate—Wheeler, Vandenberg, Bennett Clark, Gerald P. Nye, Taft of Ohio—objected bitterly, calling the bill the road to war. Wheeler, Truman’s old mentor, was the most scathing of all, saying it would “plow under every fourth American boy,” which Roosevelt called “the rottenest thing” that had been said in public life in his generation. Wheeler, Clark, and the others could not have been more wrong or shortsighted, Truman felt. Bennett Clark had made himself a favorite of the America First movement, praised Lindbergh, and claimed, “We have everything to lose and nothing to gain in a war.” Clark opposed aid to Britain, opposed further involvement of any kind by the United States. If Hitler conquered Europe, he said, “we’re better off defending the United States than frittering away our supplies in Europe.”

Clark was destroying himself politically, Truman was certain, and plainly Clark was having increasing difficulty staying sober. Repeatedly, Truman voted against amendments designed to restrict Roosevelt’s execution of the bill.

Truman was by now a member of both the Military Affairs Committee and the Military Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee. In September he had voted for the first peacetime draft. By December, more than $10 billion had been awarded in defense contracts in a country that was officially still at peace. Testifying on the Hill, the Army’s Chief of Staff, General George C. Marshall, had called for a force of 2 million men, and another $1 billion to cover expenses, and said the money was only a start. Questioned whether he was not asking for more than necessary to meet the emergency, he replied, “My relief of mind would be tremendous if we just had too much of something besides patriotism and spirit.”

Senator Truman, who was by now a colonel in the reserves, and who knew how critical was the shortage of qualified officers, went to Marshall’s office in the rabbit warren of the old Munitions Building and tried to enlist. Pulling his reading glasses down on his nose, Marshall told him he was too old and could better serve his country in the Senate.

Events were moving rapidly. An older, simpler way of life in Washington was passing. It was becoming a different city overnight. All through the Depression years, even with the changes imposed by the New Deal since 1933, it had remained a small town in most ways, southern at heart and unhurried. Now there were new people everywhere, swarms of new federal employees, more automobiles, more rush and confusion. The year before, it appeared the old “temporaries” on the Mall, acres of unsightly structures like the Munitions Building put up during the First World War (as it was now being called), might at last be torn down and taken away. Instead, the demand was to increase their number. A hodgepodge of new war agencies was sprouting with names and initials difficult to keep straight—the NDMB, National Defense Mediation Board, the OPM, Office of Production Management, and later the OEM, Office of Emergency Management. There was the SPAB, Supplies Priorities and Allocations Board, and the DPC, Defense Plants Corporation.

Every month was adding five thousand people to the city’s population. Already, the shortage of housing was more acute than in 1918. The Trumans were extremely lucky to find a new apartment, five small rooms at 4701 Connecticut Avenue, on the street side of the building, second floor, for $120 a month. And this time they would hold on to it, Bess—the Madam or the Boss, as the senator referred to her—having decided she and Margaret would stay through the year.

There were lines at movie theaters, constant crowds at Union Station. Hotel bars and the best restaurants were a hubbub of manufacturers’ agents in search of defense contracts and influence peddlers claiming to have an inside track. The talk was different, more urgent and full of new expressions like “stockpile,” “tooling up,” and “mobilize.” The New Deal was passé now, the Depression a bygone era. The hero of the hour, so different from the kind who had flocked to Washington in the early Roosevelt years, was the “dollar-a-year man,” a high-powered, high-priced corporation executive who had taken a government post but kept his old corporate salary, an innovation that some, like Senator Truman, looked on with great skepticism.

Yet as fast as the pace was picking up, it was hardly enough, given the urgency of the crisis. To those like General Marshall who knew the truth of the country’s military strength and were trying desperately to do something about it, the overriding worry was how slowly change was taking place.

In the beginning Truman had little idea what he was getting into.

Concerned about complaints from constituents of gross extravagance and profiteering in the construction of Fort Leonard Wood, a new camp for draftees in south-central Missouri, concerned also that his home state was not getting its share of defense contracts, he decided on “a little investigation” of his own. Setting off from Washington in the old Dodge, he drove south as far as Florida, then on into the Midwest, eventually swinging north to Michigan, stopping at Army installations and defense plants all along the way. It was another of his automobile odysseys, like the courthouse survey of earlier years, and he later claimed to have rolled up 30,000 miles, or 5,000 miles more than the distance around the world, which was preposterous. Still, he probably covered 10,000 miles, and the experience was an eye-opener, as he said. Hard times were plainly in retreat in the biggest boom in the history of the country. But great haste in the buildup for war was making unconscionably great waste. It was the same everywhere, he found. Millions of dollars were being squandered. Had there been such mismanagement of federal help for the poor and unemployed a few years earlier, he thought, the outcry would have been overwhelming. As it was, no one seemed to care or to be saying anything. If national defense was the issue, the sky was the limit.

At Fort Leonard Wood he found costly equipment and material lying about in the snow and rain “getting ruined, things that could never be used, would never be used….” The contractor had had no previous construction experience. “And there were men, hundreds of men, just standing around collecting their pay, doing nothing.” Truman walked about this and other sites taking notes on what he saw and whatever people were willing to tell him. Unless asked, he seldom said who he was.

Much camp construction, he discovered, was being done on a cost-plus basis—the contractor was paid for all costs plus a fixed percentage profit—which could be virtually an open ticket for piling up excessive profits. He was disturbed, too, by the obvious fact that the vast part of defense work was going to a small number of large corporations and these mainly in the East. He feared that many of the safeguards usually observed in government transactions were being thrown aside. He felt the President should be informed at once.

Returning to Washington, he called the White House for an appointment and from the moment he was ushered into the Oval Office, his reception could not have been more cordial, or more gratifying personally. Roosevelt was in grand form. He gave the senator a hearty welcome from his chair, flinging one arm in the air in characteristic gesture. He called him “Harry,” repeatedly, as for half an hour they talked across the clutter of papers and knickknacks covering the big mahogany desk. Yet, when the session ended, Truman came away wondering if he had made any impression at all. As he wrote to a friend, Roosevelt was so courteous and cordial it was hard to know just what he thought or where one stood with him. “Anyway,” he concluded, “I’m going to lay it before the Senate.”

He spent weeks preparing a speech, consulting other senators, asking for suggestions from friends and staff. He told William Helm he was outraged over the greed of big business at such a time, and of some of the labor unions. “There’s too much that is wrong here!” he insisted.

On Monday, February 10, 1941, Truman stepped into the well of the Senate to describe the problem as he saw it and to propose the establishment of a special committee to look into the awarding of defense contracts. It was his own idea, his own moment. His obscurity in national life, and in the course of the war, was about to end—and it was of his own doing.

Reaction in the Senate was immediately favorable. (Besides sounding an alarm on the scandalous state of military spending, he struck a responsive chord everywhere on the Hill by calling it grossly unfair for the War Department to ignore the suggestions of members of Congress concerning defense contracts. “It is a considerable sin,” he said, “for a United States Senator from a State to make a recommendation for contractors, although he may be more familiar with the efficiency and ability of our contractors than is anybody in the War Department.”) Referred first to the Committee on Military Affairs, Resolution 71 was reported out unanimously in a matter of days. But then back it went to the Committee to Audit and Control the Contingent Expenses of the Senate. There it might have languished indefinitely, for the committee’s chairman was Jimmy Byrnes of South Carolina, who was close to the administration, and the administration had no wish to see its method of handling things scrutinized or stalled by any congressional committee. Roosevelt’s continuing admonition to everyone involved with defense production was, “Speed, speed, speed.”

To bring some semblance of order to operations Roosevelt had established a National Defense Advisory Commission, then an Office of Production Management, but there was really no clearcut administrative system, or any one person in charge. In effect, the sprawling defense effort was being handled by the White House, where the last thing anyone wanted was a pack of congressional investigators to contend with. There was alarm, too, at the War Department. A single nettlesome senator could mean unending problems and bad publicity, let alone an ambitious chairman of an investigating committee whose main, underlying intent, more than likely, would be to advance his political fortunes. Constant congressional probing could well delay or deter the whole program.

Only one voice cautioned against a “resentful attitude”—Chief of Staff Marshall, who said it “must be assumed that members of Congress are just as patriotic as we.”

Truman understood the potential peril in what he was proposing. From his reading of Civil War history he knew what damage could be done to a President by congressional harassment in a time of emergency, and the lives it could cost by prolonging the war. Abraham Lincoln had been subjected to unrelenting scrutiny by the powerful Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, which caused continuing trouble and delays. Its Radical Republican leadership had insisted even on a say in the choice of field commanders and battle strategy, and as often as not it was the Confederates who benefited. Robert E. Lee once remarked that the committee was worth two divisions to him, an observation Truman would often cite. He had gone to the Library of Congress for the Civil War records to verify for himself what mistakes the committee had made.

Like others, Truman had little use for investigations after-the-fact such as those conducted by Senator Gerald P. Nye and his committee, who in examining the causes of the First World War had raised a conspiratorial theory of the role played by the munitions makers. The Nye Committee, Truman felt, had been a major cause of isolationist sentiment in the Congress and contributed more than anything else to the nation’s woeful unpreparedness. It did no good, Truman said, to go digging up dead horses once a war was over. “The thing to do is to dig this stuff up now and correct it.”