by Roy Jenkins
In late April Johnson ordered cancellation. The Secretary of the Navy, John Sullivan, whom he had not even bothered to inform beforehand, resigned. Truman was displeased. He supported Johnson on the issue, but thought that his handling was ham-fisted. The President was also beginning to be offended by Johnson’s general boastfulness and incontinent ambition. Although he remained as Secretary of Defense for another sixteen months, he never wholly recovered his position with Truman. Nothing was heard of his candidature in 1952. He did however secure from the Congress a considerable strengthening of the executive powers of the Secretary of Defense, well beyond the puny coordinating role which was all that Forrestal had created for himself. The modern administrative shape of the Pentagon stems substantially from this period of office. His one and a half storm-tossed years, for all the braggadocio, were therefore not without some result.
Still less than with Truman did his relations with the Navy recover. They were not helped by the appointment of Francis P. Matthews, a political ‘pro’ from the not notably nautical state of Nebraska, as Sullivan’s replacement as Secretary of the Navy. Sullivan was a Catholic, and Matthews was a still more prominent one. Truman apparently thought that act of balance was enough without any regard to whether Matthews could tell one end of a battleship from the other. It was a mistake which Roosevelt, for all his skilful playing from the episcopalian heights of Hyde Park of Catholic politicians of Brooklyn and the Bronx, would never have made, at least with the Navy. As a result the admirals, and many below them, were by the autumn not only discontented with the Navy’s role but disenchanted with both tiers of the political leadership in the Pentagon. The consequence of this was the so-called ‘admirals’ revolt’ of October 1949.
The House Armed Services Committee was holding hearings on the B-36 bomber programme, which the Navy regarded as pre-empting its role as well as its funds. Sparked off by a disputatiously bold naval captain called Crommelin, who published a statement claiming that the Navy’s offensive power was being ‘nibbled to death’, the majority of admirals of note rushed either to issue statements of support or to testify before the Committee in a sense deeply hostile to the views of their civilian chiefs. Denfeld, Chief of Naval Operations, did so, Radford, C-in-C Pacific, did so, as did the C-in-C Atlantic and a clutch of other senior serving officers. They were supported, from retirement, by several of the great naval names of World War II, Nimitz, King and Halsey. Radford’s testimony was the most hostile to Johnson, speaking of the lack of confidence in his office felt by senior officers throughout the Navy. But Denfeld’s caused the greater stir. He was the senior serving naval officer. His disloyalty was jugular. It was damaging to the administration, particularly in the month following the news of the Russian A-bomb. Truman, however, was better at dealing with insubordination than at avoiding it. A week or so later he laconically announced that Denfeld had been transferred ‘to another post’. He got the C-in-C Mediterranean, one of the few senior officers who had not been involved in the dispute, perhaps because he was far away, to accept the vacant command. Matthews tried to resign, but Truman allowed him to stagger on for nearly another two years, in spite of a major gaffe in August 1950, when he echoed Bertrand Russell in suggesting that a pre-emptive nuclear strike might be necessary and desirable. A State Department refutation was required and forthcoming. Acheson gladly supplied it. Until he got Marshall back, a month after this, without one kidney but still full of authority, Truman was not lucky in his Pentagon appointments.
The Navy, however, settled down much more quickly and calmly than might have been expected. They were floated off the shoals of inter-service dispute by the splurge of expenditure which followed the outbreak of the Korean War. The Air Force got its B-36S and they got the United States, a lot of other equipment as well, and ultimately the underpinning of their nuclear strike rôle through the development of the Polaris submarine programme. Once the exigencies of Korea had caused budgetary probity to be abandoned, there was room for everyone, admirals, generals and aviators, at the trough of public expenditure.
Before then, however, still in the autumn of 1949, Truman was further damaged by the suggestions that his staff, although certainly not himself, were taking a few teaspoonsful out of that public trough. It was very minor stuff, centred around General Vaughan. He had done a few favours for gentlemen of mild dubiety of character who claimed that they could procure government contracts on a 5% basis, and had given the General one or two unsolicited but durable consumer goods. As a result the terms ‘Five Percenters’ and ‘Deep Freezers’ acquired the temporary status of catch-phrases which could be depended upon to send Republican audiences into paroxysms of derision and mirth. Truman reacted to this with his usual fierce, incautious loyalty. When Vaughan offered to resign he said ‘Don’t ever mention such a thing to me again. We came in here together and we’re going out of here together. Those so-and-sos are trying to get me, through you. I understand exactly what’s going on.’4
The wound to Truman at this stage was only a fairly light flesh one. But it paved the way to more damaging accusations a couple of years later. ‘Deep Freezers’ helped to create an atmosphere in which by 1952 ‘the mess in Washington’ was accepted as having an objective reality. The 1949 scandals were about as relevant to the record of the Truman administration as the equally petty Belcher scandal was to the achievement of the Attlee Government in Britain. The main difference was that while both were totally honest, Attlee was sharply censorious of pecadillos in others while Truman (if he liked them) was tolerant.
More serious in substance than these attacks was the solid refusal of the Southern conservative Democrats to vote for the Fair Deal. By the end of 1949 it was obvious that the President was not going to get any effective civil rights legislation, that Taft-Hartley was to remain unrepealed, that the Brennan Plan for agricultural support was not to be enacted, and that social security and education legislation had run into the sand. Almost the only enactment of a domestic plank of the 1948 platform was the National Housing Act. ‘I’ve kissed and petted more consarned [sic] S.O.B. so-called Democrats and left wing Republicans than all the Presidents put together. I have very few people fighting my battles in Congress as I fought FDR’s’5 he wrote in his diary on November 1st. However he consoled himself with the thought that he had got enough through on the international front that on balance things could be regarded as going ’fairly well’. And his daughter insists that throughout the first eighteen months of the second term, that is up to the outbreak of the Korean War, Truman was fairly content with life. She wrote in relation to this whole period that ‘Dad’s optimism soared’.1 Not even the first effusions of McCarthy in his ‘McCarthyite’ period, which began quite abruptly in February 1950, dimmed this ebullient mood.
McCarthy was a strange phenomenon. At the beginning of 1950 he was a forty-one-year-old small-town lawyer from Wisconsin who had got himself elected as a circuit judge in 1939, and then, in the Republican primary of 1946, after a period of war service in the Pacific, had defeated Robert M. La Follette, Jr, who had recently been voted in a poll of newspaper correspondents and political scientists ‘the best’ of the 96 senators. He had done so by a campaign of energy, calumny, indestructible bounce and massive (and mostly lying) direct mail advertising. After three rather tawdry years in the Senate, he was still looking for a satisfactory groin into which to put his knee. He had achieved little beyond that of reversing La Follette’s distinction and being voted ‘the worst’ Senator. Then he alighted, half by accident and half by a pervertedly inspired populist instinct, on the anti-Communist issue.
For its exploitation he had several unusual advantages. He half wanted to be liked, but he was quite indifferent to being respected. Truth or logic meant nothing to him. He could not be effectively caught out, because this is at least half a subjective state, and he was impervious to refutation. He simply moved on to the next unsupported accusation. He was argumentatively indestructible. What cast him down was the failure to
attract attention, not the failure to convince. Even when he had no notable issue, he was good at the phrase which stuck, the scene which had to be reported.
As a result he quickly became a figure of world fame. In his own country his lowering features and rather flat, dispassionate voice became still more familiar than the sights and sounds of Truman, Eisenhower or Stevenson. He was the first demagogue of the television age, a poor speaker but the provider of compulsive viewing. In his five-year span of dreadful influence he weakened two presidents, but he was never himself even a remote prospect for the White House. He sapped other men’s leadership rather than promoted his own. His demagogy did not set the nation alight. It was too wheedling and his self-righteousness too shallow. He at least half knew that he was a fraud. His anti-Communism was more of a racket than a crusade. He once shared an elevator with Dean Acheson and greeted him with the off-duty false bonhomie of one travelling salesman in a line of doubtful goods to another in a different but similar line. This was a technique which often produced a friendly, almost grateful response from weak opponents. With Acheson it was less successful. The murderously cold silence and apoplectic forehead of the Secretary of State penetrated even to McCarthy. He was amoral rather than immoral. In the words of Richard Rovere, ‘though a demon himself, he was not a man possessed by demons’. As a result, when his spell was broken, he collapsed more quickly and completely than most of his victims. He passed into obscurity in 1954 and died less than three years later, still only 48, and probably as a result of a drinking bout instigated by bad news from his stockbroker. It was a death suited to neither a hero nor a fanatic. It did not even attract much attention.
Nor, as a matter of fact, did his early 1950 effusions, although that was a weakness soon to be rectified. Armed with his new issue he asked the Republic campaign committee to arrange some speaking engagements for him over the Lincoln’s birthday weekend in mid-February. They gave him a fairly undistinguished list: a Women’s County Republican Club at Wheeling, West Virginia and meetings of similar grade at Salt Lake City and Reno. But if the venues were unnotable the speeches were not. He spoke without texts and there has always been some uncertainty as to what exactly he said. The best authenticated version is that at Wheeling he announced:
‘While I cannot take time to name all the men in the State Department who have been named as members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring I have here in my hand a list of 205 that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.’
The language was neither elegant nor precise, but the broad message was clear. The United States Government was riddled with Communists, and it was the mission of the Junior Senator from Wisconsin, armed with the most detailed evidence, to get them out. Perhaps his cleverest trick was his appreciation that detail always sounds convincing. It did not greatly matter if it was spurious or even non-existent, provided that claim was laid to it. The detail of Wheeling was certainly spurious. What he ‘held in his hand’ might have been anything from a blank sheet of paper to a laundry list, but it was not a list of 205 State Department Communists. Nor did he have any particular attachment to 205. By the time that he got to Salt Lake City it had become 57 ‘card-carrying members’. On the floor of the Senate eleven days later it had become 81. Three months later, again in the Senate, it had climbed back to 121. ‘I am tired of playing this silly numbers game’, he replied when asked to explain the contradictions.
Immediately, the Wheeling speech was not widely reported. The Chicago Tribune, appropriately, was the only newspaper outside West Virginia to pick it up on the following day. The others soon caught up. McCarthy was launched on his five year parabola. At first the trajectory was more that of a turbo-prop than a jet. Truman did not take the onslaught too seriously—he was used to almost equally immoderate attacks from more senior Republican figures—although he did pay McCarthy the hidden compliment of writing him one of his famous unsent letters on the day after Wheeling. And six weeks later he told a press conference that ‘the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy’.6
At first the Korean War stole McCarthy’s thunder. Then it gave him a still more favourable climate in which to operate. He spent the later summer and early autumn of 1950 working quietly against two Democratic senators—Tydings of Maryland and Lucas of Illinois—who had been particularly vociferous against him on Capitol Hill. By November he had destroyed them both. He began to acquire a certain reputation for electoral omnipotence which made senators treat him with a new wariness. Senators attach a great importance to the standards of the club, but most are at least equally concerned with their continued membership of it. The general Republican mood towards him began to change. Towards the end of twenty years of Democratic power, ‘two decades of treason’ as he was later hyperbolically to describe them, the Grand Old Party was sick for power. Perhaps this vulgar huckster had found the key. Perhaps he could help to achieve it, where Landon, Willkie and Dewey, Taft, Vandenberg and Knowland had failed. They were not squeamish in its quest.
Favoured by this new atmosphere McCarthy soared to even greater heights of destructive misrepresentation during 1951. He inflicted major damage on figures of moderate note such as Owen Lattimore and Philip Jessup. He weakened the morale and self-confidence of much of the State Department. And he even forced Acheson on to the defensive to the extent of making him assure a Senate hearing that Communist China would never be recognized, and such a course was not even discussed within the Department. In June he launched a 60,000 word indictment of General Marshall. He read part of it on the floor of the Senate, and put the rest unread into the Congressional Record. Even he stopped short of claiming that the Secretary of Defense was himself a Communist, but he did claim that, ‘steeped in blood’ Marshall was a man ‘whose every important act for years has contributed to the prosperity of the enemy’. He ‘would sell his grandmother for any advantage’. How could he be believed ‘under oath or otherwise’? The effrontery of the attack was breathtaking. Even some of his normal allies were a little shocked, but, like all McCarthy’s enterprises at that time, it half worked. Marshall was off his pedestal for a lot of Americans.
Thus with Marshall chipped and Acheson scarred, McCarthy inflicted substantial damage on the last three years of the Democratic administration. Truman was staunch but he lacked the guile in dealing with him that Roosevelt would have shown. He was not good at digging pits for the Senator and mocking him when he fell into them. Lack of guile, however, was better than lack of courage, which was the deficiency which Eisenhower displayed, and which was to make the period of his campaign and the first eighteen months of his presidency the apogee of McCarthy’s parabola. In Truman’s day he sullied America. In Eisenhower’s he ran amok and threatened to undermine the Army as well as the State Department. Fortunately he over-reached himself and the quick collapse began.
10
TRUMAN’S THIRD WAR
The dominant event of 1950 was not however the eruption of McCarthy but the outbreak of the war in Korea. It was also the great test of Truman’s second term. Did it strike him out of a clear blue sky? The answer is mixed. In his State of the Union message on January 4th he had stated unequivocally: ‘The greatest danger has receded …’ He was referring, with justification, to the improvement of the position in Europe. But the statement was geographically unqualified, and was given practical backing by the fact that he announced a defence budget for the fiscal year July 1st, 1950 to June 30th, 1951 of $13.5 billion against $14.4 billion for the year then in progress. Despite the early Russian achievement of an atomic weapon the United States was planning to continue with its post-1945 policy of a military establishment dictated by economy rather than by any attempt at conventional balance.
Nevertheless, within a month, Truman commissioned a major internal government study of the future risks and needs of US defence policy. This was carried out largely by
Paul Nitze, working under the direction of Acheson, although with some Pentagon participation. The result was a secret document known as NSC (National Security Council) 68. It was delivered to the President on April 7th. It was an explosive state paper. It predicted Soviet nuclear equality by 1954 and said that by then the United States, because of a defence budget totally inadequate to the commitments it had assumed, would be in a ‘disastrous situation’. The shield of atomic superiority, let alone monopoly, would be gone, and the American people would be placed ‘in their deepest peril’ by their weakness in conventional forces. This danger could only be counteracted by an entirely different scale of defence effort. What was needed was a budget not of $13-14 billion, but of $40-50 billion.
What Truman would have done, in the absence of the Korean War, about this deeply disturbing document is almost impossible to conjecture. It was not without its critics within the government. Kennan and Bohlen thought it exaggerated and even hysterical. But its message was such that it could not comfortably be set aside. But its costs were such that they seemed impossible to accommodate within the framework of responsible peace-time finance. The only assuagement was that while the threat was dire it was not immediate in the sense of requiring action within a few weeks. In any event the recommendations clearly could not be implemented without a major programme for the education of public and congressional opinion.
This was a fence that Truman did not rush. In May he made the most extensive speaking tour of his second term. The nominal purpose was to dedicate Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State. He did the journey both ways in the presidential train and was away from Blair House for two weeks, making 57 speeches in twelve states. It was nominally a non-political trip, but this did not unduly inhibit the President’s combative style. There were a lot of pre-election swipes at the Republicans. Margaret Truman, who was of the party, wrote of it as the high point of the second term, engendering in her father a feeling which presaged ‘smashing Democratic victory in the fall elections’.
