My father gave the same careful attention to selecting the other members of his committee. Majority Leader Alben Barkley and Vice President Henry Wallace did their utmost to pack the committee with Roosevelt yes-men. Dad dismissed more than a few of his fellow senators with remarks like, “He’s an old fuddy-duddy” or “He’s a stuffed shirt.” They finally settled on Tom Connally of Texas, Carl Hatch of New Mexico, James Mead of New York, Mon Wallgren of Washington, and Republicans Joe Ball of Minnesota and Owen Brewster of Maine. Senators Hatch and Wallgren were close personal friends of Dad’s and, like him, hard workers without an ounce of the grandstander in them. Senators Connally and Mead were Roosevelt men, but not in any slavish or dependent way. They were also tremendously influential in Washington, and they helped my father borrow investigators from government agencies so the committee could operate on its meager budget. Among these key men were a future Supreme Court Justice, Tom Clark; a future Democratic national chairman, Bill Boyle of Kansas City; and a future White House appointments secretary, a shrewd, witty Irishman named Matt Connelly.
My father knew his first and biggest problem was to convince his fellow senators - especially his fellow Democrats - that his committee could serve a positive purpose without doing a hatchet job on the Roosevelt Administration. At the same time, he had to convince the Senate there was something worth investigating out there. He chose as his first target the army camps. They were not controversial, and they dealt with fundamentals anyone who ever owned a house might understand.
In standard Truman style, the committee went to nine typical camps and conducted hearings on the spot. What they found was almost incredible. At Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, the estimate for construction of the camp’s utilities had been $125,000. The actual cost came to $1.72 million. At Camp Wallace, Texas, costs jumped from $480,000 to $2.54 million. At Camp Meade, Maryland, the commanding general had coolly ignored the advice of the architect-engineer and had chosen a site that was almost totally lacking in drainage, construction roads, and other necessities.
The prices the government paid enabled one architect-engineer to earn 1,478 percent above his average annual profits. A contractor earned 1,669 percent. Unions were no less guilty of plundering. Time-and-a-half and double-time wage rates at Fort Meade cost the government $1.8 million. The army’s attitude toward money almost gave Dad apoplexy. They claimed they had no way of knowing how much things should cost, because plans for expansion - five volumes, no less - had been drawn up in 1935 and then lost somewhere in the library of the Army War College. Often, instead of buying equipment, the army rented it and wound up paying twice as much as its original cost.
In August 1941, my father documented $100 million of waste in the $1 billion camp-building program. The army immediately went to work at changing its procedures, and Lieutenant General Brehon B. Somervell, who later became chief of the Quartermaster Corps Construction Division, estimated the army had saved $100 million by heeding the Truman Committee’s criticisms.
My father asked the Senate for more money to continue his investigations. This time he got $85,000. The Truman Committee was off and running. I know that is a cliché, but it is also an accurate description of the pace Dad set for himself for the next three years. He was always on a plane or a train en route to hear testimony at a shipyard or an aircraft production plant, an army base or a munitions depot. I missed him intensely while he was gone, but during these years, by way of consolation, he began to write me my first letters. I was now seventeen, and he obviously felt I was too old to be included in his letters to Mother with a side remark or a closing “kiss Margie for me.” Of course, this decision also involved a little self-improvement for me. It was understood I had to write letters to him, too. Or else.
The first of these letters came from Springfield, Missouri, dated October 1, 1941:
My dear Margie,
Your very nice letter came yesterday to the Melbourne Hotel in St. Louis. I am glad you like your Spanish and the teacher of it. In days to come it will be a most useful asset. Keep it up and when we get to the point when we can take our South American tour you can act as guide and interpreter.
Ancient History is one of the most interesting of all studies. By it you find out why a lot of things happen today. But you must study it on the basis of the biographies of the men and women who lived it. For instance, if you were listening in on the Senate committee hearings of your dad, you would understand why old Diogenes carried a lantern in the daytime in his search for an honest man. Most everybody is fundamentally honest, but when men or women are entrusted with public funds or trust estates of other people they find it most difficult to honestly administer them. I can’t understand or find out why that is so - but it is.
You will also find out that people did the same things, made the same mistakes, and followed the same trends as we do today. For instance, the Hebrews had a republic three or four thousand years ago that was almost ideal in its practical workings. Yet they tired of it and went to a monarchy or totalitarian state. So did Greece, Carthage, Rome. . . . I’m glad you like Ancient History - wish I could study it again with you. Buy this month’s National Geographic and see how like us ancient Egypt was. Here is a dollar to buy it with. You can buy soda pop with the change.
Lots of love to you, Dad
Four days later another, totally different letter came from Nashville, Tennessee:
Dear Margie,
I have a hotel radio in my room. The co-ed singing program is now on, and the charming young lady who is the “Charming Co-ed” hasn’t half the voice of my baby.
You mustn’t get agitated when your old dad calls you his baby, because he always will think of you as just that - no matter how old or how big you may get. When you’d cry at night with that awful pain, he’d walk you and wish he could have it for you. When that little pump of yours insisted on going 120 a minute when 70 would have been enough, he got a lot of grey hairs. And now - what a daughter he has! It is worth twice all the trouble and ten times the grey hairs.
Went to the Baptist Church in Caruthersville this morning and the good old Democratic preacher spread himself. He preached to me and at me and really settled the whole foreign situation - but it won’t work. . . .
Last week I had dinner in Trenton and the Chinese Consul General at Chicago was on the program with me and he made a corking speech to the United States Senator present and not to the audience at all. It’s awful what it means to some people to meet a Senator. You’d think I was Cicero or Cato. But I’m not. Just a country jake who works at the job. . . .
Lots of love, Dad
A month later, he was down in Roanoke, Virginia, sending me another history lesson:
Dear Margie,
Yesterday I drove over the route that the last of the Confederate army followed before the surrender. I thought of the heartache of one of the world’s great men on the occasion of that surrender. I am not sorry he did surrender, but I feel as your old country grandmother has expressed it - “What a pity a white man like Lee had to surrender to old Grant.” She’d emphasize the white and the old. That “old” had all the epithets a soldier knows in it. But Grant wasn’t so bad. When old Thad Stevens wanted to send Lee to jail, Grant told him he’d go too. If Grant had been satisfied like Gen. Pershing to rest on his military honors and hadn’t gone into politics, he’d have been one of the country’s great.
But Marse Robert was one of the world’s great. He and Stonewall rank with Alexander, Hannibal and Napoleon as military leaders - and Lee was a good man along with it.
Kiss Mamma and lots for you,
Dad
A week later he was in a sentimental mood again:
My dear Margie,
I wanted to say my dear baby and then I thought what a grand young lady I have for a daughter - and I didn’t. You made your papa very happy when you told him you couldn’t be bribed. You keep that point of view and I’ll always be as proud of you as I always want to be. Anybody who’ll give up a
principle for a price is no better than John L. Lewis or any other racketeer - and that’s what John L. is. . . .
Your dad won the brass ring in the Washington Merry-Go-Round day before yesterday. Why? Because the two liars who write it said that publicity means not so much to him. It doesn’t, but they don’t believe it.
I am hoping I still get the nice letter. There is one awful three days ahead. I’m going to have to show up graft and misuse of govn’t funds. It will hurt somebody - maybe the one who doesn’t deserve it. But your dad has gotten himself into a job that has to be done and no matter who it hurts it will be . . .
Lots of love,
Dad
I’m sorry to report I can’t remember why I refused to be bribed. But I do remember all too vividly Dad’s attitude toward John L. Lewis, which was formed in the first days of the Truman Committee. Lewis was playing his usual game of threatening the nation with disaster by calling all his miners out on strike. Dad’s committee had been functioning less than a month, but he already regarded himself as the voice of the Senate in regard to the National Defense Program, and so he boldly inserted himself into the brawl and summoned Lewis to a hearing. Forced to negotiate in the glare of the spotlight my father was holding on him, Lewis was unable to perform any of his backstage antics. Then Dad turned the heat on the mine owners. When it became obvious the Southern branch of the coal mining establishment was blocking a settlement, my father warned them he was going to summon the real owners of the mines - Northern capitalists and bankers - to the witness stand and force them to admit their attempt to insist on lower wages for Southern workers was totally fraudulent. By nightfall, the strike was settled.
My father’s unflattering reference to the column, “The Washington Merry-Go-Round,” was also in character. He detested most columnists - especially those who wrote about Washington politics. Like most of his harsh dislikes, it was based on facts and experience.
Toward the press as a whole, my father’s attitude was more positive. He always recognized the importance of getting information to the people. He did his utmost to tell responsible reporters everything possible about the work of the Truman Committee. His releases came to be known as “Truman Hours” and were always timed to give both press and radio reporters a chance to meet their deadlines.
At the same time, he fretted over the dangers of too much publicity. Early in 1942 he wrote to one close friend: “My committee has had so much publicity in the last sixty days that its work is not nearly as efficient as it was before that time. We are in a situation where the slightest mistake will cause us serious difficulty. . . . One bad tactical error, political or otherwise, can ruin the whole structure much more easily than it could have done when we were first starting.”
By the time he wrote these words, the Truman Committee was no longer investigating the defense program - it was the war effort. On December 7, 1941, my father was in Columbia, Missouri, at a small hotel - the kind of place he retreated to at the end of the 48 election campaign. Already he had found the only way he could get any rest was to hole up in an isolated spot on a Sunday. That historic day was gray and gloomy in Washington. Nursing a cold, I stayed in the house and listened to the New York Philharmonic, simultaneously telling myself I should be doing my homework. Suddenly there was a voice interrupting the lovely music, announcing that Japanese planes had attacked some obscure, distant place known as Pearl Harbor. Since the Japanese had been attacking China for over three years, and Pearl Harbor sounded Chinese to me, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Mother wandered by, and I remarked crossly that the network had a heck of a nerve, interrupting good music to talk about a foreign war.
“What was the name of the place you said they were attacking?”
“Pearl Harbor.”
My mother gasped and rushed for the telephone. The next thing I heard was her voice excitedly talking to my father in Missouri, telling him the Japanese were attacking Hawaii.
Out in the Pennant Hotel in Columbia, Missouri, Dad put on his clothes and raced across the road to a private airport, where he begged the owner to get him to St. Louis as fast as possible. They flew in a small plane, and he arrived just in time to catch a night flight to Washington. It was quite a trip. Every time the plane landed, another congressman or a senator got on. Ordinary citizens were ruthlessly ejected, and pretty soon the plane was a congressional special. They arrived in Washington around dawn. With no sleep, Dad rushed to the Capitol. I soon followed him, thanks to a neat trick I pulled on my mother. I was still running a fever, but I fooled Mother into thinking it was gone by holding my mouth open after she inserted the thermometer. I was not going to let a cold keep me away from seeing history made. Mother gave me her entrance ticket, and I zoomed to the special session of Congress. By the time I got there, the only seat left was in the photographers’ gallery. This gave me the same view the rest of the nation later saw in the movie theaters, as President Roosevelt announced the day of infamy and called for war. I then followed the senators back to the Senate, where I heard my father vote for a declaration of war.
Almost immediately, powerful voices in Washington, who wanted to run the war their own way, tried to dismantle the Truman Committee. Under Secretary of War Robert P. Patterson wrote to President Roosevelt: “It is in the public interest that the Committee should suspend for the time being. It will impair our activities if we have to take time out to supply the Truman Committee all the information it desires.” But my father was no slouch at Washington infighting. Secretary Patterson wrote this letter on December 13, 1941. On December 10, Dad had written the President, assuring him the committee would be “100 percent behind the Administration” and would scrupulously avoid interfering in military or naval strategy or tactics.
This statement was rooted not only in sound political instinct but in my father’s deep knowledge of American history. Shortly before he formed the committee, he had borrowed from the Library of Congress “Reports of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War,” the hearings of the congressional committee that had played watchdog during the Civil War. This outfit had considered themselves great strategists, and were constantly interfering in strictly military affairs, sniffing treachery in every lost battle, hiring and firing generals and generally harassing President Lincoln to the point of near distraction. After Pearl Harbor, Senators Vandenberg, Brewster, and Taft came to my father and asked him to broaden his committee by appointing more Republicans and widen its jurisdiction to include all aspects of the war. My father did expand the committee to ten senators, but he absolutely refused to make it a Committee on the Conduct of the War. “Thank goodness I knew my history and wouldn’t do it,” he said later.
At the same time, when it came to watchdogging the war effort, Senator Truman was, if anything, tougher than he had been on the defense program. To one new committee investigator, early in 1942, he wrote: “Go into the investigation . . . with all you’ve got. Don’t let those fellows get any statement out of you that they are doing a good job. Don’t compliment them. . . . If you do and it is later found they haven’t done a good job, then they can say our committee agreed with what they did.”
With this approach, Dad soon took on some of the biggest names in Washington.
One was Jesse Jones, who wore so many hats he sometimes sounded like a one-man government. As head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, he had the power to lend hundreds of millions to various companies to enable them to do defense work. He was also Secretary of Commerce, and in this office he had access to very powerful business connections, aside from being a millionaire himself. An arrogant man, he was not used to having his decisions questioned. But my father discovered from Harold Ickes, among others, that Jones was largely responsible for a truly alarming aluminum shortage. Alcoa (The Aluminum Corporation of America) dominated the production of this metal, so vital for aircraft manufacturing, and they conned Jones into signing a plant expansion contract which gave them monopoly control of the market w
hile the government put up all the money to build the plants.
The mere possibility of being summoned before a committee to answer for his actions aroused Jesse Jones’s wrath, and he turned on every iota of influence he had in Washington to make Senator Truman back down. This only made Dad madder, and Jones soon appeared before the Truman Committee, where he weakly admitted the original contract was a flagrant violation of the government’s interest and agreed to renegotiate it. At the hearing, my father treated him courteously. He made it a point, no matter how mad he might be at a man in private, never to browbeat him when he was a witness before his committee. He detested congressional committees that abused their powers and turned their hearings into witch-hunts or circuses. At one point in the committee’s tussle with John L. Lewis, one of the senators called the coal miners’ leader a “charlatan.” Dad instantly called his colleague to order with a sharp rebuke.
In the aluminum mess, my father found far more fault with Alcoa than he did with Jesse Jones. He was enraged and astounded by the way this supposedly great American company had disregarded the national interest in making interlocking agreements with I.G. Farben, the German corporate giant. In order to keep Farben out of Alcoa’s American markets, Alcoa agreed to stay out of the magnesium production field, and even let Farben buy American magnesium, which Alcoa owned, at prices far below those charged American users of the metal. As a result, in 1941, Germany was producing 400 percent more magnesium - another vitally needed metal for war planes - than the United States. When my father released these findings in January 1942, as part of his first annual report, they created a sensation. The New Republic and The New York Times joined in calling the revelations a decisive contribution to the prosecution of the war.
Harry Truman Page 17
