War has many faces; or, rather, in war men and nations wear many faces.
—ERIC SEVAREID
I
In “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:
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue…
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.”
But what saved his proposal was another one put forward in the House by a belligerent Georgia Democrat, Eugene Cox, who openly despised Roosevelt and wanted the establishment of a joint congressional committee to investigate “all activities” involving national defense. At a White House meeting, Jimmy Byrnes stressed to the President how much better off he would be “in friendly hands”—with a Truman committee—and Roosevelt agreed. Byrnes also wanted Truman to be given an absurdly modest funding of $10,000, a shoestring, to keep watch on expenditures that in 1941 alone would exceed $13 billion; though Truman objected vigorously, he managed only to get the appropriation raised to $15,000.
Resolution 71 was reported out on a Saturday afternoon in March, when a total of sixteen senators were on the floor, none of whom objected as Byrnes asked for immediate adoption. The vote was unanimous. A week later in a late-night session, after beating back isolationist amendments, the Senate passed the Lend-Lease Bill, which called for the spending of another $7 billion.
Its formal title was the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, but from the start it was spoken of almost exclusively as the Truman Committee. There were seven members, five Democrats, two Republicans. Except for Tom Connally of Texas, all, like the chairman, were junior senators and, in the words of one observer, distinguished only by their “unspectacular competence.” The Democrats included Connally, Carl Hatch of New Mexico, Monrad C. Wallgren of Washington, and James Mead of New York. The Republicans were Joseph H. Ball of Minnesota and Owen Brewster of Maine.
“Looks like I’ll get something done,” Harry wrote to Bess. The summer before, in the midst of the primary, he had told her, “The political situation is going to be something to write history about next year, and if I do win watch out.” He felt himself a participant in history again, as he had not since France. This second term in the Senate would be nothing like the first, he knew. Washington and the world were no longer the same. He was no longer the same. His proposal, as even his critics acknowledged, was a masterstroke. He had set himself a task fraught with risk—since inevitably it would lead to conflict with some of the most powerful, willful people in the capital, including the President—but again as in France, as so often in his life, the great thing was to prove equal to the task.
From his railway investigations he had learned the importance of a committee staff. Now, on the advice of Attorney General Robert Jackson, he hired a young Justice Department lawyer named Hugh Fulton, who had just convicted a federal judge for fraud. Fulton was only thirty-five years old and memorable, a big, apple-cheeked figure, over six feet tall and rotund, who wore a black derby and spoke with a piping voice. He told the senator he wanted a salary of $9,000, or more than half the whole appropriation. Truman hired him, confident that if they produced results, money would be no problem.
Like Truman, Fulton was an early riser and a steady worker. He was bright, tenacious, and, as time proved, a superb choice. For several months he would be all the committee could afford in a paid staff, though the problem was temporarily circumvented with the old senatorial device of “borrowing help” from some of the “downtown” (executive) agencies. The first investigator hired was young Matthew J. Connelly from Boston, who had worked for a Senate committee investigating campaign expenses. Others included George Meader, who would later become a member of Congress; Harold Robinson, a former FBI agent; Agnes Strauss Wolf, the one woman in the group; Morris Lasker, a recent graduate of the Yale Law School; William Boyle, a young man from Kansas City who had worked his way up in the Pendergast organization from precinct captain to acting director of the Kansas City police; and the ever faithful Fred Canfil, who operated out of Truman’s office in the Federal Building in Kansas City.
The only major change on Truman’s senatorial staff was the departure of Vic Messall under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Apparently, for all his devotion to the senator, Messall had been dipping into campaign funds for his own purposes—or Truman thought so—and he was told to find work elsewhere.
As a replacement for Messall, Truman brought his jovial friend Harry Vaughan to Washington and made him both his secretary, as the position of administrative assistant was still called, and a liaison for the committee with the military services, Vaughan being a lieutenant colonel in the reserves. (Later, Vaughan would leave to go on active duty with the Army Air Corps.)
There was to be no whitewash or witch-hunt, Truman told his committee staff, no grandstanding for headlines or any attempt ever to forestall the defense effort. But neither were they to be cowed by rank or political pressure. The primary task was to get the facts. “There is no substitute for facts,” he would say. They must know what they were about. “Give the work all you’ve got,” he urged, warning them never to tell those under investigation they were doing a good job. “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.”
Their time was to be spent only where there were clear and present problems. They were not to go looking for trouble where none was known—and this applied to staff investigators and committee members alike. Once, in a closed, or executive, session, a senator not on the committee, Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin, who was sitting in, asked out of curiosity, “What are you fishing for this morning?” It seemed a fair question, he thought, in an executive session.
Truman was offended. “This committee does not go on fishing expeditions,” he answered.
“I think the distinguished chairman resented my question,” Wiley observed.
“I do not like it,” said Truman. “I resent it. We are not on a fishing expedition.”
All findings were to be reported as the work of the full committee, not of any one senator or of the chairman. The committee would have no say on military strategy, military personnel, or the size or disposal of the defense effort.
What Truman came to appreciate most in Hugh Fulton was his “honesty of purpose,” and Fulton’s contribution overall was to be of such obvious value that some observers would later speak of him as the driving force of the committee. But this was not the case. The driving force was Senator Truman.
The long process began on April 15, 1941, with the appearance before the committee of a dozen highest-ranking officials, military and civilian, including the elderly Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, and Chief of Staff Marshall. When the problem of seniority in the Army was discussed, Marshall insisted on the need for selective promotion. “You give a good leader very little and he will succeed,” he said, looking at the chairman; “you give a mediocrity a great deal and he will fail.” Years later, Truman would say that his respect for George Marshall had its beginning at this first session of the committee hearings.
On April 23, the committee went to nearby Camp Meade in Maryland, the first of nine camps on a cross-country inspection tour. One camp, at Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, was found to have cost more than ten times the original estimate. Another, Camp Wallace in Texas, which was supposed to have been built for $480,000, wound up costing $2,539,000. In several instances the Army had shown “fantastically poor judgment” in selecting camp sites (Fort Meade was a prime example), and an estimated $13 million had been wasted just by renting trucks and other construction equipment instead of buying it all outright at the start.
The Army had made a special study of camp construction following the last war, when rampant waste and inefficiency had also prevailed, but as the committee discovered, this special study had been lost, news that left the chairman “utterly astounded.” If plans for the country’s military campaigns were comparable to those for construction, Truman reported to the Senate, the situation was truly deplorable.
The central problem was the system of cost-plus contracts. “There was no attempt to ask contractors what they had been in the habit of making in peacetime or even what they were willing to take,” Truman would write. “Huge fixed fees were offered by the government in much the same way that Santa Claus passes out gifts at a church Christmas party.” Some contractors were making in a few months three to four times what they normally cleared in a year, and at no risk. One architect-engineer was found to have increased his income through an Army contract by 1,000 percent.
Lieutenant General Brehon B. Somervell, the hot-tempered Chief of Services of Supply, who was known for his efficiency, complained loudly about the committee as a creature “formed in iniquity for political purposes.” It was “axiomatic,” he said, that time and money could not be saved at the same time.
“General Somervell was a very brilliant general,” remembered Matt Connelly, the chief investigator, “but he was also a martinet, and he resented any intrusion or stepping on his toes. But that did not impress Senator Truman. He went ahead anyway.”
Later Somervell would concede that in fact the Truman Committee’s investigations of Army camp building alone had saved the government $250 million. Further, as the committee had strongly recommended, the responsibility for camp construction was taken away from the Quartermaster Corps and given to the Corps of Engineers, as it should have been in the first place.
The senators on the committee worked extremely hard, almost without exception, and the chairman hardest of all. A few nights before the first interviews with Stimson and Marshall in April, Truman had what was diagnosed as a gallbladder attack. He had been wrenched from his sleep by such excruciating pains that Bess thought he must be having a heart attack. But there was no easing up on his schedule, and by June he was again badly exhausted.
“My standing in the Senate and down the street [at the White House] gets better and better,” he wrote on June 19, 1941, in a letter to Bess, who was back in Missouri once more. “Hope I make no mistakes.” If he weren’t working so hard, from daylight until dark, he didn’t know what he would do without her, he said, adding plaintively, “Hope I won’t be long here alone.”
On June 22 came the stunning news that Hitler had turned and attacked Russia along an 1,800-mile front. Asked what he thought of this colossal turn of events, Truman spoke his mind in a way no one could fail to understand and that would not be soon forgotten. “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia,” he said, “and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.” It was hardly an appropriate observation at this juncture, but like many Americans, and many in Congress, Truman saw little difference between the totalitarianism of Fascist Germany and Communist Russia, and particularly since the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 and Russia’s invasion of tiny Finland. Nor was he willing to close his eyes to the realities of the Soviet regime just because suddenly it was Russia under Nazi assault. Stalin was only getting what he had coming to him was the feeling, and one shared by a very large segment of the American people.
Worried about the world, worried about himself, he went to the Bethesda Naval Hospital for a checkup, only to be told there was nothing the matter with him beyond fatigue. He was suffering from severe headaches and nausea, he told the examining physician, who recorded in the senator’s medical record:
Last year he ran for reelection and had a particularly fatiguing campaign…in which a great deal of vilification was hurled at him…. The attack on him affected him and caused him much mental anguish. His symptoms increased more than ever from this time on. In the last few months there has been an increased amount of activity in the Senate…he felt that he would be unable to continue his present pace.
But back to work he went, the pressures on him only growing, his pace easing not at all, as increasingly the investigations seemed to cast a shadow on the White House. He refused to equivocate and people began taking notice as they had not before. In August, while speaking in the Senate, he was pressed by Senator Vandenberg to admit that the President was culpable. “In other words,” said Vandenberg, a leading Republican, “the Senator is now saying that the chief bottleneck which the defense program confronts is the lack of adequate organization and coordination in the administration of defense…. Who is responsible for that situation?”
“There is only one place where the responsibility can be put,” Truman answered.
“Where is that—the White House?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I thank the Senator.”
With others on the committee, senators and staff investigators, he traveled the length of the country—mostly by plane. They would put down at a city or military base, go through their routine for a day or so, and then be off again, like a roadshow, everybody by now knowing just what to do. War plants were inspected, hearings held in local hotels. In some places they found nothing out of line. They were in Memphis and Dallas in late August, then on to San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Spokane. Bess was kept posted nearly every day, by letter or phone call, often by both, no matter how grueling his schedule. Some letters spoke candidly of what they were finding:
Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles, Calif.
Thursday, August 21, 1941
Dear Bess:
Well I spent yesterday at San Diego. The navy sent a big transport plane for us. We left the airport at 9:00 A.M., arrived at San Diego at 10:00, and Admiral Blakely took us in charge for the usual show around. Looked at marine barracks under construction and had lunch with the recruits. A Missouri boy from St. Louis waited on me, one from New York took care of Mead, and one from Washington, Wallgren.
Looked over the new marine base camp and then got another walk around a plane plant, the Consolidated—said to be the biggest of ’em all. The managers are all such liars you can’t tell anything about the facts. Each one says he’s having no trouble and everything is rosy but that the other fellow is in one awful fix. By questioning five or six of them separately I’ve got an inkling of the picture, and it’s rather discouraging in some particulars but good in others. We are turning out a very large number of planes and could turn out more if the navy and army boys could make up their minds just what they want.
Labor is a problem. The same brand of racketeer is getting his hand in as did in the camp construction program. Some of ’em should be in jail. Hold some hearings today and tomorrow, spend Saturday and Sunday in San Francisco, and open in Seattle Monday….
Kiss Margie, love to you,
Harry
Flying in and out of Washington’s new National Airport, he looked down on the tremendous gouge in the mud flats along the Virginia side of the Potomac, downstream from Arlington Cemetery. It was the site of a gigantic new five-sided headquarters for the military, the Pentagon, a larger office building than any in the world and a clear sign of the direction the country was taking.
From modest beginnings and in only a few months, the committee proved its value, producing both results and attention. By fall its appropriation was increased from $15,000 to $50,000, its membership enlarged by one more Democrat, Harley Kilgore of West Virginia, and two Republicans, Harold Burton of Ohio, who was to become one of the most dedicated members, and Homer Ferguson of Michigan, a former judge, who, like Brewster of Maine, was to be a particularly tenacious interrogator at hearings. The staff, too, was expanded. Eventually there would be fifteen investigators and as many clerks and stenographers.
Hearings were held in the committee’s headquarters on the fourth floor of the Senate Office Building, Room 449, or, in special cases, in the great marble Caucus Room on the third floor. Frequently business was also transacted in what was called the Dog House, a small room behind Truman’s office with a few worn leather chairs, refrigerator, whiskey, and walls covered with Civil War scenes and photographs and cartoons telling the chairman’s political life story.
At Truman’s insistence any member of the Senate was welcome to sit in and take part in the hearings. When presiding, he seemed invariably well prepared and in charge, yet he seldom dominated. Instead, he would go out of his way to let other senators hold the stage. No one could remember congressional hearings being handled with such straightforwardness and intelligence. As in his earlier railroad investigations, witnesses were shown every courtesy, given more than ample time to present their case. There was no browbeating of witnesses, no unseemly outbursts tolerated on the part of anybody. One reporter wrote of a “studious avoidance of dramatics, no hurling of insults or threats of personal violence that characterize so many other congressional hearings.” Yet Truman could be tough, persistent, in a way that took many observers by surprise. It was a side of the man that they had not known. Columnist Drew Pearson wrote that one of the most remarkable developments of the committee was its chairman. “Slightly built, bespectacled, a lover of Chopin and a shunner of the limelight, Truman is one of the last men in Congress who would be considered a hard-boiled prober. In manner and appearance he is anything but a crusader.”
Above all the chairman was eminently fair. Once, during testimony from one of the dominant figures in the American labor movement, the flamboyant, pugnacious head of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis, Senator Ball questioned whether the witness was to be taken at his word when he said workers were going hungry:
“Mr. Lewis, you are not seriously trying to tell the committee that any large number of workers in the United States don’t get enough to eat? That is demagoguery, pure and simple, and you know it.”
Lewis, sitting forward on the edge of his chair, a dark scowl across his massive face, responded angrily in a deep stentorian voice that filled the room:
“If you ask the question, I will answer it. But when you call me a demagogue before you give me a chance to reply, I hurl it back in your face, sir.”
Truman broke in. “Now, Mr. Lewis, we don’t stand for any sassy remarks marks to the members of this committee,” he said, “and your rights will be protected here just the same as those of everybody else. I don’t like that remark to a member of the committee.”
“Senator, did you object when the Senator called me a demagogue?” replied Lewis, a man of fierce pride.
“Yes,” Truman said, “it works both ways. I don’t think the Senator should have called you a demagogue.”
The documenting of waste and mismanagement in the construction of Army camps had been comparatively easy work, a way to give the committee credence in about the least time possible, which was why Truman had started with the camps. The larger work—more difficult, more time-consuming, more important, and much more risky politically—was the investigation of defense production, the gathering of facts, figures, specific detail, and no end of opinion on the building of ships and warplanes, on ordnance plants, automobile plants, labor unions, government contracts, the roles played by the giant corporations and small business, the stockpiling of vital materials. And what the committee turned up was extremely alarming: bad planning, sloppy administration, sloppy workmanship, cheating by labor and management, critical shortages everywhere.
There was too little aluminum, so vital for warplanes, too little copper, zinc, and rubber. Even after drastic cutbacks in production for civilian use, the annual output of aluminum was only about half the demand for building planes. One producer, Alcoa, the Aluminum Company of America, had a near monopoly on the manufacture of the lightweight metal and kept claiming it could supply both domestic and defense needs, yet could not come even close. Production of magnesium was even more woefully behind, and the reason, when revealed, would cause a sensation. An arrangement had been made through an interlocking cartel, between Alcoa and the giant German firm of I. G. Farben. To safeguard its American market for aluminum, Alcoa had agreed to hold back on producing magnesium, also to sell what magnesium it owned to the Germans at a cut price, with the result that Germany had far more magnesium than the United States.
Standard Oil of New Jersey, through its agreements with I. G. Farben, had intentionally delayed the development of synthetic-rubber plants. “Standard Oil,” reported Truman,
had agreed with the German I. G. Farben Company that in return for Farben giving Standard Oil a monopoly in the oil industry, Standard Oil would give the Farben Company complete control of patents in the chemical field, including rubber. Thus when certain American rubber manufacturers made overtures to Standard Oil Company for licenses to produce synthetic rubber, they were either refused or offered licenses on very unfavorable terms…. Needless to say, I. G. Farben’s position was dictated by the German government.
There was no “unpatriotic motive” involved here, concluded the committee in its report. It was only “big business playing the game according to the rules,” with a heavy price “to be borne by the entire nation.”
The American government, too—specifically the Office of Production Management—had been negligent in seeing the need for a greatly increased output of copper, lead, and zinc. For his part, Truman worried that shortages of steel were the most serious of all.
Automobile manufacturers had been allowed to do as they wished, which was to keep turning out cars as usual in 1941, on the grounds, they said, that only 10 percent of their equipment could be used for war production anyway. Automobile production for the first eight months of 1941 actually exceeded production during the same months in 1940, and consumed quantities of strategic materials—some 18 percent of the nation’s available steel, 80 percent of available rubber. The aircraft program was dawdling because the Army and the Navy had left it largely to the manufacturers to decide what planes to build. “There is no planned or coordinated program for the production of aircraft,” Truman would report. The committee uncovered “negligence and willful misconduct” in the Navy Bureau of Ships. (When Admiral S. M. Robinson, Chief of the Bureau of Ships, said he believed the efficiency of private and Navy shipyards to be about the same, but told the committee that comparisons were difficult because of different bookkeeping systems, the committee declared that in a matter of such importance the Navy should take steps to ascertain the actual facts.) With private shipbuilders the Navy was found to be “extremely liberal.” A representative of the Todd Shipyards Corporation in testimony about one contract with the Navy said that if it weren’t for taxes the company could not have handled its profits with a steam shovel.
By late October the German Army had advanced to within seventy miles of Moscow and Roosevelt offered Stalin a billion dollars worth of supplies.
The root of most troubles and delays, the committee concluded, was the Office of Production Management, the President’s own ungainly creation, where there were two heads instead of one, William S. Knudsen, formerly of General Motors, and labor leader Sidney Hillman, founder of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. Roosevelt wanted the power divided. He had no wish to create a so-called “production czar,” which, the committee decided, was exactly what was needed most, a strong man with clear authority. This was the conclusion of the committee’s first annual report being prepared in the final months of 1941. Truman in particular had been outraged to discover Hillman withholding a construction contract from a low bidder because of his fear of trouble from “irresponsible” elements in the American Federation of Labor. “First of all,” Truman told the Senate on October 29, “the United States does not fear trouble from any source…. If Mr. Hillman cannot, or will not, protect the interests of the United States, I am in favor of replacing him with someone who can and will.”
The record of the OPM, said the report, was not impressive. Its leadership was inept. “Its mistakes of commission have been legion; and its mistakes of omission have been even greater. It has all too often done nothing when it should have realized that problems cannot be avoided by refusing to admit that they exist.”
The committee had also decided it would be best for the country and for the defense effort to dispense as soon as possible with all dollar-a-year men, of whom there were more than 250 in the Office of Production Management. Such corporate executives in high official roles were too inclined to make decisions for the benefit of their corporations. “They have their own business at heart,” Truman remarked. The report called them lobbyists “in a very real sense,” because their presence inevitably meant favoritism, “human nature being what it is.” They should be paid government salaries in keeping with other government positions of comparable responsibility, concluded the committee, and required to disassociate themselves from any other employment or any payment from companies with defense contracts. Divided loyalties, like the divided command at the top of the Office of Production Management, were a bad idea.
On October 30, the American destroyer Reuben James was attacked and sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Iceland, with a loss of 115 men. Talk of war had become commonplace in Washington, though no one seemed to be doing anything very specific about it. Writing in his diary on December 2, during a stop in the city, David Lilienthal, head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, said it looked as if a war with Japan, not Germany, was only days off. Yet people seemed unconcerned. He wondered if the democratic system was capable of coping with the world as it was. On December 4, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox declared, “No matter what happens the U.S. Navy is not going to be caught napping.”
Having no wish to embarrass the administration—and thereby harm the defense effort—Truman saw that the President received an advance copy of the committee’s findings, and in an eleventh-hour decision, before the report was released, Roosevelt disbanded the OPM and announced the establishment of an all-new War Production Board under a single head, Donald M. Nelson of Sears, Roebuck. Others had been pressing Roosevelt to make the change, including Secretary of War Stimson, but for the Truman Committee it was a signal victory. “We have fought to get you this job,” Truman would tell Nelson later. “We are going to fight to support you now in carrying it out.”
But by then the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and it was Nelson’s task to mobilize for all-out war. By then even the likes of Burton K. Wheeler were saying that the only thing left to do was beat the hell out of them.
Truman had been in Missouri the first week in December, busy with political chores. The night of December 6, he checked into a hotel in Columbia, hoping to catch up on some greatly needed sleep. How he heard the news the next day and managed to get back to Washington in time for Roosevelt’s momentous address to Congress on December 8, he recounted a week later in a letter to Ethel Noland, probably because he had always seen her as the one in the family with the greatest feeling for history.
Dec. 14, 1941
Dear Ethel:
Well at last I am sitting at my desk, the office is empty for the first time since I returned. One reason is the doors are locked and it’s Sunday, I came down to clean off my desk and find out just how many important letters were covered up on it. Do you remember that picture with W. C. Fields as the efficiency filing expert. Well my desk is just like his was. Whenever the girls can’t find a letter in the files they are morally certain it’s lost on my desk and the pitiful part about it is sometimes it’s true.
Well there’s been a lot of happenings since I was calling on you on my daddy’s birthday [December 5]. I have been afraid it would come but not just the way it did. We’re always surprised of course even when the expected happens—if it’s war anyway. I left Saturday for Columbia to get a good night’s sleep over the weekend before Monday at Jeff City. In fact I was hoping for two. Went to bed at the Pennant Hotel outside of town about seven o’clock Saturday night and had breakfast Sunday at 8. Called the madam and went back to bed. The boy who drove me down left about noon and at three o’clock called me from Cross Timbers (I bet you never heard of it) and told me that the Japs had bombed Honolulu. The boy was a Deputy U.S. Marshal and he was on his way to Springfield. Well I phoned the St. Louis office of T.W.A. and told ’em I had to be in Washington the next morning and about that time Bess called and said the Sec. of the Senate had called to say there’d be a joint session Monday and that I should be there. Well I had no car and no driver so I called the little airport at Columbia right across the road from the hotel and the manager said he had a plane and would take me to St. Louis. We left at 4:50 and I was on the ground and in the station of the St. Louis Airport at 5:35. It took us just 40 minutes to fly 130 miles. Then my trouble began. I tried to go to Chicago and then tried Memphis and finally I think T.W.A. dumped somebody off and I got on the 11 P.M. plane for Pittsburgh. Sat up all night and listened to the radio, got to Pittsburgh at 3:30 where I met Senator Chavez of N. Mex who came from Chicago, Sen. Davis of Pa. who lives there and Curley Brooks, the great Republican Isolationist from Chicago. He’s a new Senator from Ill, Legionnaire, fat, curly haired, has a small synthetic blonde wife and is a most important Chicago Tribune Senator. He looked as if he’d swallowed a hot stove and that’s the way all those anti-preparedness boys looked the next day. It wasn’t because they’d been up all night getting there either.
I went home (we got here at 5:30 A.M.), found Bess up getting breakfast. My new secretary, Harry Vaughan, was at the airport with my car and I was at home by 6 o’clock. Went to bed and slept until ten and then came to the Senate. It was quite an occasion. Guess you heard it on the radio. Then on the 11th we had to accept another invitation from Germany and Italy. Goodness knows where it will end. I wish I was 30 and in command of a Battery. It would be a lot easier….