The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  Harry Truman said Fulbright’s RFC investigation was “asinine.” It wasn’t, and Fulbright proved it wasn’t. Under klieg lights and amplifying equipment in the Senate Caucus Room, he paraded before the press evidence that Dawson, while sitting at the President’s right hand, had been closely associated with men who had been lining their pockets at the expense of the public. One memorable exhibit was the office diary of Walter Dunham, director of the RFC. In it were carefully logged scores of phone calls from people putting in the fix for disreputable and discredited speculators who had found the door to politicians of easy virtue. Washington had seen nothing like it since Teapot Dome, but Truman continued to wear blinders. Young was indicted by a grand jury for perjury; the White House had no comment. Boyle was allowed to resign “for reasons of health” after the President had staunchly defended him for three months. Dawson, like Vaughan, continued to sit on presidential councils and make final decisions on personnel matters. It was literally wicked.

  And there was more to come. As then organized, the Bureau of Internal Revenue was a standing invitation to malefaction. Its sixty-four regional offices were each headed by a collector of internal revenue. They, their deputy collectors, and the hierarchy in Washington were all political appointees. The jobs went to Democrats who had done the best job of shepherding voters to the polls in the last national election. Secretary of the Treasury Snyder, an honest Missourian, had felt scandal coming for some time and had been trying to nail down hearsay about bribery. He had gone so far as to demand the resignation of James P. Finnegan, the St. Louis collector, but Finnegan’s ties to Truman were strong, and he hung on.

  Now all that changed. With circumstantial evidence from a congressional committee, Finnegan was indicted by a grand jury; he quit then, and was later convicted of failing to report $103,000 on his own tax returns. Next Snyder suspended collector James G. Smyth of San Francisco and eight members of his staff; indictments for conspiracy to defraud the government followed. Dennis Delaney, the Boston collector, resigned and was indicted for accepting bribes. Collector Joseph Marcelle of Brooklyn was found to have omitted $32,000 in taxable income from his returns; he and Mordecai Miller, a sidekick, were sacked for refusing to identify the sources of their outside income for the committee. George J. Schoenman, the Commissioner of Internal Revenue and a former White House aide, handed in his resignation, pleading ill health. Altogether, nine Democrats were on their way to prison, including Matthew H. Connelly, who had been President Truman’s appointments secretary.

  The sheer weight of evidence finally provoked Truman into reacting. Dismissing T. Lamar Caudle, chief of the Justice Department’s tax division, the President sent Congress plans for reorganization of the RFC and the Bureau of Internal Revenue.1 In the future the bureau would be known as the Internal Revenue Service; its personnel would all be under the civil service. But that was no longer enough to appease administration critics. The next presidential election was now less than a year away. The “mess in Washington” had become a vigorous campaign issue. Something had to be done to steal the Republican thunder, and therefore he announced the establishment of a presidential commission to investigate charges of corruption in the federal government.

  Republicans wondered aloud whether there was a Democrat upright enough to head the commission. That was no joke to Truman. He first appointed Thomas F. Murphy, the prosecutor of Alger Hiss and now a federal district court judge. After accepting, Murphy changed his mind at the last minute without giving a reason—a stinging blow to presidential prestige. Next Truman announced that the housecleaning would be conducted by his Attorney General, J. Howard McGrath. The critics said that would be worse than nothing. The scandals had touched his department, too, and as a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, McGrath had brought the very men now being indicted into the government. The GOP cried whitewash; so did the ADA; so did the House Judiciary Committee, which voted its own investigation of McGrath and Justice.

  The farce now approached its climax. The desperate President named Newbold Morris, a liberal New York Republican lawyer, as chief commissioner. In rapid succession Morris appeared on Meet the Press to divulge unsupported suspicions of the Justice Department, rejected McGrath’s offer of office space and had quarters opened in a downtown Washington office building instead, asked Congress for subpoena power and was turned down, and finally was subpoenaed himself—as a witness before a Senate committee which wanted to question him about the role of his own law firm in the illegal sale of surplus oil tankers to a foreign government. Morris then offended everyone in the government by mailing long questionnaires to all U.S. employees, including cabinet members, instructing them to list their net worth and their sources of income. When McGrath’s questionnaire arrived, he blew up. Under the mistaken impression that Morris was answerable to him, he sent him a five-word memorandum: “Your employment is hereby terminated.” Truman learned about it from an AP teletype. Then he blew up—and dismissed McGrath.

  ***

  In those last months before the political conventions of 1952, Truman’s grip seemed less and less firm. His handling of the steel strike that year was a parody of his resourceful disciplining of John L. Lewis six years earlier. When the steel companies refused to abide by a Wage Mediation Board award of March 20, offering higher wages to workers without any rise in steel prices, Truman directed Secretary of Commerce Charles Sawyer to seize the mills and run them as government property. He thought his emergency powers allowed him to do that, and he believed the Supreme Court would agree. It didn’t; on June 2 it ruled that the seizure was illegal. The United Steel Workers then struck anyway, and to get the union’s 600,000 men back on the job with a 16-cent increase, the President had to accept a $5.20 per ton rise in the cost of steel—the very thing he had been trying to avert.

  Accompanying this stumbling performance in the White House was a dismaying rise in Republican irresponsibility. Too long out of power, losing faith in an electorate which had rejected it in five straight presidential elections, the minority party was determined to discredit the Democrats at all costs. Exposing the pilferers hiding under Truman’s umbrella was its prerogative and even its duty. Hammering away at administrative incompetence was an additional service to the country; that is how the democratic system is supposed to work. But the GOP’s extraordinarily savage attacks on Dean Acheson and General George C. Marshall were another matter. Neither had any connection with crooks like Caudle and Finnegan. As America’s spokesmen abroad they represented the entire country. They deserved, at the very least, an acknowledgment that they were decent men in pursuit of honorable objectives.

  Acheson was a patrician, with a distant, even arrogant manner toward his adversaries. General Marshall was altogether different. He was a military hero, like Eisenhower, identified with neither party. His service as presidential envoy to China had been as nonpartisan as Eisenhower’s invasion of Europe. In the cabinet he had avoided all political winds. His only controversial position had been taken in the uproar which followed the dismissal of MacArthur. He had argued eloquently then for the concept of limited war. Doubtless that had angered MacArthur’s admirers on the Hill, but the same position had been warmly defended by Omar Bradley and the Joint Chiefs. Besides, Republican antagonism toward Marshall had been marked before MacArthur’s recall. In September 1950 twenty Republican senators had gone on record against his appointment as Secretary of Defense. Congressman Dewey Short of Missouri had called him “a cat’s-paw and a pawn” for Truman; Joe Martin had characterized him as “an appeaser” responsible for Mao’s takeover of China.2 What had aroused them? Why were they stalking a distinguished officer who had been called the “greatest living American”?

  The answer lay right there: Marshall was above the battle, a national symbol, and in the ruthless struggle for power any man who was above criticism was a threat to them. If he was not with them now, he might be ranged against them one day. That being so, they needed to spike his guns now, dis
crediting him so thoroughly that any future opinion from him would be discounted in advance. The last stage of the job went to McCarthy. In midafternoon on June 14, 1951, he began his longest and most famous Senate speech, charging Marshall with “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man.”

  Liberal Republicans were trying to establish an intelligent, responsible opposition to the Truman administration. Margaret Chase Smith had declared that she did not want to see her party ride to victory on “the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry and Smear.” Emmet John Hughes shunned the phrase “mess in Washington” as “petty, self-righteous, and extravagant.” Hughes also thought it dangerous to challenge the patriotism of Democrats, but by early 1952 such advice had been rejected by the party’s dominant Old Guard. Throughout that year Republican polemicists even persisted in calling the opposition “the Democrat party,” insisting that it was grammatically correct, when in fact it was meant as a slight.

  Speeches from the Republican right divided all Democrats into five categories: the criminals, the traitors, the cowards, the incompetents who always blundered into war, and the effete, who lacked sufficient vigor to invade China and conquer it. Differing politicians are usually tolerant of one another, but the consequence of this sort of oratorical thrust was to drive a deep schism between the parties.

  The GOP line was popular. Most Americans had come to disapprove of Truman’s Presidency, and no amount of whistle-stopping could have restored him to their good graces now. According to recurring Gallup samplings, his first-term low in public support had come in 1946, when just 32 percent of his constituents had been for him. Throughout 1950 the figure had varied between 37 and 46 percent. Thereafter—during his last two years in office—approval of him never rose above 32 percent. At times it dipped to 23 percent, which meant that fewer than one American in four stood behind him. He had never displayed the charm and magnetism of personal leadership. At best he had seemed to be a plucky fellow who had overcome his lack of talent by sheer determination. He saw himself that way. At his three hundredth press conference in April 1952 he told reporters: “I have tried my best to give the nation everything I have in me. There are a great many people—I suppose a million in this country—who could have done the job better than I did it. But I had the job and I had to do it. I always quote an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Tombstone, Arizona. It says: ‘Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest.’”

  Nevertheless, to a Democrat of his convictions the prospect of a Republican administration was something to be regarded with horror. Who besides Truman could head the Democratic ticket? Estes Kefauver’s name was heard everywhere. He had entered his name in all the primaries; his following was immense. Truman was unimpressed. A machine politician and proud of it, the President had no use for reformers who blackened the names of fellow Democrats. Yet most of the other possible candidates carried one handicap or another. Alben Barkley was seventy-two, too old. Russell of Georgia was anathema to the liberal wing. Harriman had never run for office. In the autumn of 1951 Truman thought he had found the best of all possible successors. Inviting Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson to the presidential retreat on Key West, he proposed that he step down from the bench and became the standard-bearer. Vinson hemmed and hawed, argued that the Supreme Court should not be a stepping-stone to the White House, and finally agreed to talk it over with his wife. She liked the idea even less; the chief judge, Truman regretfully noted in his papers, “firmly declined.” With that, the President turned to Illinois. In the election of November 1948 the head of the state ticket there had forged a remarkable personal triumph, winning by the historic margin of 572,067 votes. Truman’s own margin in Illinois had been 33,612. Alone, he doubtless would have lost the state. To David Lloyd, one of his presidential assistants, he said that he wanted to be notified of the next Washington visit of Governor Adlai E. Stevenson.

  ***

  In that same month a Republican governor, Sherman Adams of New Hampshire, became chairman of the state’s Eisenhower for President committee. At once he encountered a problem. To enter a name in New Hampshire’s approaching presidential primary, he was required by law to offer evidence that his candidate was a member of the Republican party. Adams sent an inquiry to Eisenhower’s county seat in Kansas. Back came this reply from County Clerk C. F. Moore:

  Mr. Eisenhower has never voted in this county as far as I know, the Primary laws were first put into operation in the year 1928 and he has never voted since then, I have been county clerk since January 14th, 1927, Dwight has never been in the city as far as I know of until after war No. 2 at least he has never voted or I would have known it as the party filiation books are still here ever since the primary or branding law was passed in the spring of 1927 and never went into effect until the Primary Election of 1928.

  Dwights father was a republican and always voted the republican ticket up until his death, however that has nothing to do with the son as many differ from their fathers of which I am sorry to see, the multitude beleives in going into debt and see how much they can spend, it has become a habit & will sink this nation into bankrupsy.

  I don’t think he has any politics.

  Not only had Eisenhower no politics; he had no religion, no conspicuous guiding principles, and few known views on most of the great issues of his time. For the second time in four years he was being offered the most powerful office in the world, yet the men making the proposal had no idea what he would do with it if he got it. To be sure, as president of Columbia University he had made such conservative remarks as “If all that Americans want is security, they can go to prison.” At the same time, he had used his prestige to rally public opinion behind the Roosevelt-Truman foreign policy, and his accomplishments, including his present post as commander of NATO in Europe, had been achieved while representing Democratic administrations. All his fellow countrymen could be sure of was that he was a man of strength, decency, and tolerance; that he had won the respect of European statesmen; and that he displayed many of the ordinary characteristics which a democratic people like to find in their leaders—a fondness for dialect jokes, for example, and a bent for informal dress best expressed in the Eisenhower jacket.

  He turned out to be a Republican, though the question remained unsettled for several agonizing weeks. Returning from France on January 6, 1952, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. of Massachusetts told reporters that the general would accept the Republican nomination if it were offered, and that he would not disown this statement by Lodge. He came close to it, though. In Paris next day he refused to identify his party affiliation for reporters; he merely said that the senator had given “an accurate account of the general tenor of my political convictions and of my Republican voting record.” He dodged the question of accepting a draft. Persons working in his behalf, he warned, did so at his displeasure. While there could be “no question of the right of American citizens to organize in pursuit of their common convictions,” their convictions in this case were not shared by the man they were meant to honor. He added: “Under no circumstances will I ask for relief from this assignment in order to seek nomination to political office, and I shall not participate in the preconvention activities of others who have an intention with respect to me.”

  Apparently the door was closed. In the next breath, however, he reopened it a crack. If he had no choice he would, of course, answer a call to “duty that would transcend my present responsibility.” That was enough for Adams and Lodge, and they were off running for him. Among those now convinced that Eisenhower would be the Republican choice—and that he would soon forget his pledge to remain in Paris—was Harry S. Truman.

  On January 20 Governor Stevenson spoke before the annual banquet of the Urban League in New York. He arrived in Washington at four o’clock the following afternoon for a conference on mine inspection and found that the Metropolitan Club had no room for him. A room had been reserved for him at the Roger Smith H
otel. Checking in, he was handed a message from Blair House; the President wanted to see him that very evening. At 11:15 P.M. Stevenson was back in his hotel room, feeling dazed. Calling a friend, he said, “This is Adlai, and I’ve just had the most incredible experience. Would you mind terribly coming down to the hotel for a little talk?” The friend found him in his shirtsleeves. Stevenson said, “I’ve just come from Blair House, and the President wants me to save the world from Dwight Eisenhower.”

  In Truman’s memoirs he wrote that he had told the governor:

  …that I would not run for President again and that it was my opinion that he was best-fitted for the place…. I told him what I thought the Presidency is, how it has grown into the most powerful and greatest office in the history of the world. I asked him to take it and told him that if he would agree he could be nominated…. But he said: No! He apparently was flabbergasted.

  Stevenson had reminded Truman that he was an announced candidate for gubernatorial reelection, and “One does not treat the highest office within the gift of the people of Illinois as a consolation prize.” He had obligations toward his two younger sons, who had been virtually abandoned by their socialite mother; blinding publicity could warp their lives. In addition, he doubted that he was ready for the Presidency. After another term in Springfield he might be equipped for it, but not now. Stevenson did not, of course, suggest that this would be a difficult year for the Democratic nominee, but it must have crossed his mind; unlike Truman, he knew how much the administration had been hurt by the recent scandals.