Harry Truman (53 page)

The facts made the China-First Republican politicians look silly, and they responded with rage and a new determination to repeat their big lie until it became an article of Republican faith. Not love of China but hatred of Dad and his policies, and above all hatred of his stunning victory in 1948, was their motivation. They also stooped to mythmaking and invented a devil: Communists in the government. Here they received a priceless boost from the trial of Alger Hiss. The former State Department official, friend of Dean Acheson, adviser to President Roosevelt at Yalta, a man with impeccable credentials - Harvard law degree, clerk to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes - was tried for allegedly perjuring himself before the House Un-American Activities Committee by denying he had given state secrets to journalist Whittaker Chambers who was at that time a member of a Communist espionage ring.

When the subject was first brought to my father’s attention, during the summer of 1948, he bluntly condemned the investigation as “a red herring.” He had long detested the methods of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he had no hesitation about blasting their claim that there was a Communist spy ring operating in the capital. He said the evidence for such a ring existed largely in the head of Congressman Karl Mundt, then acting chairman of the committee. All the evidence their investigation had produced was submitted to a grand jury, and no indictments had been forthcoming. In the interim, Whittaker Chambers had produced his astonishing hoard of secret documents on microfilm, hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm. Dad, with his dislike of the Un-American Activities Committee still foremost in his mind, had the following discussion with a reporter, in a post-election news conference.

“Mr. President, do you still feel, as you did during the late summer, that this Congressional investigation has the aspects of a ‘red herring’?”

“I do,” Dad said stubbornly.

Another reporter asked, “Mr. President, are you at all interested in this charge of Mr. Nixon’s [Congressman Richard M. Nixon], that the Department of Justice proposes to indict only Chambers - or first Chambers, and thus destroy his usefulness?”

“The Department of Justice will follow the law,” Dad said.

Which, of course, is precisely what the Department did. Hiss was prosecuted for perjury, and he was found guilty, on January 25, 1950, after two of the longest, most bizarre trials in American history. Among those who had appeared as a character witness for him was Dean Acheson. Hiss’s brother, Donald, had been a partner in Acheson’s law firm. When reporters asked the Secretary of State what he thought of Hiss now, he replied: “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss,” and explained he was acting in accord with the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, beginning with verse thirty-four. (“I was hungry and you gave me food . . . a prisoner and you came to me.”) He immediately drove to the White House and told Dad what he had said. Dad calmly reminded him he was talking to an ex-vice president who had flown to the funeral of a friendless old man who had just been released from the penitentiary. He understood - and approved.

The real villain, the specialist in gutter tactics, Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, did not come onstage until February 1950. Bipartisanship had collapsed - or at least sagged badly - and both the Senate and the House were acting as if they might renege on the solemnly signed and consented-to North Atlantic Treaty. It is difficult, even frightening, to predict what might have happened if grim news had not arrived from Europe. First came an economic shock - Great Britain, for two centuries the world’s keystone of financial stability, was devaluing the pound. Then a military shock. The Russians had exploded an atomic bomb.

On September 3, 1949, an air force WB-29 weather reconnaissance plane on a patrol from Japan to Alaska was routinely exposing filter paper at 18,000 feet over the North Pacific east of the Kamchatka Peninsula. The crew suddenly noticed the paper, which was sensitive to radioactivity, was telling them there was an unusual amount of it in the air around them. A second filter paper, hastily exposed, produced an even higher radioactive count. Within hours, other planes were checking the air in different parts of the Pacific and reporting radioactivity as high as twenty times above normal. Within four days, the filter papers had been studied in our atomic laboratories and fission isotopes - proof of an atomic test - were found in them. My father was immediately informed.

The news caused a kind of panic in the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission. They rushed to the White House and urged my father to issue an immediate statement, announcing the Russians had the bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer was one of the most vehement in this pressure group. Seldom in his two terms as President did Dad’s basic inner calm show to better advantage. He simply refused to be stampeded into making a statement. The UN was meeting in New York, and the Russians were showing signs of being more cooperative than they had been in years. The world was still reeling from the British devaluation of the pound. Even though there was a strong possibility of a leak, he decided to take his time and think over exactly what kind of statement he should make. Not even a visit from David Lilienthal, who was flown down from his vacation house on Martha’s Vineyard, changed Dad’s mind. He thought about it for another two weeks and then issued the following careful statement:

The leadership my father displayed in this announcement - plus the grim import of the news - had a dramatic impact on Congress. The billion-dollar military assistance to our NATO allies was swiftly passed. But Dad, with the responsibility for the future security of the nation on his shoulders, was forced to look beyond this victory to one of his most difficult decisions. The speed with which Russia had become an atomic power meant they were in possession of much more information and nuclear expertise than our scientists had thought possible. The year 1952 was the date most of them had set for Russia’s first atomic explosion. Some had predicted 1955.

This raised the grim possibility the Russians were perfectly capable of developing a new, more terrible weapon, which at this time was only being discussed in the laboratories - the H-bomb. The power of the hydrogen atom would be a hundred to a thousand times more destructive than the uranium atom. The debate over whether to create such a weapon split the Atomic Energy Commission and its leading scientists. The chairman, David Lilienthal, a man whom Dad liked, was opposed. So was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the A-bomb.

My father appointed Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and Lilienthal to a special committee to study “Campbell,” the code name for the superweapon. Dad thought about this hard choice throughout the fall and early winter of 1949. At one point, David Lilienthal warned him that the Joint Atomic Energy Committee of Congress, led by Senator Brien McMahon, were working themselves into a frenzy over the problem and preparing to descend on the White House to blitz Dad into saying yes.

“I don’t blitz easily,” Dad said with a hard smile.

The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy was a constant problem to my father. He did his utmost to work with them as he would and did work with any other congressional committee. But they were dealing with the most sensitive, highly confidential subject in the government, and it was extremely difficult to decide how much they should be told because of the constant danger of security leaks. There is nothing a senator or a congressman loves more than a headline, and some of them tend to put headlines ahead of the best interests of their country. Early in November 1949, while my father was still thinking about the H-bomb and waiting for his special committee to report to him, Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado blabbed the information about the H-bomb debate on a television show. Dad was furious and called in Chairman McMahon to give him an angry lecture. Senator Johnson replied by accusing David Lilienthal of trying to give away the secret of the H-bomb to Canada and Great Britain. Politics is really a lovely sport.

Senator Johnson’s blunder added the glare of publicity to the other agonizing aspects of the decision on the H-bomb. Then came confidential news from England that made everyone in the White House wince. The British had discovered that Dr. Klaus Fuchs was part of a Communist spy ring that had been operating at Los Alamos during the creation of the atom bomb. The German-born Fuchs, who was a naturalized British citizen, had given the Communists crucial information which undoubtedly enabled Russia to achieve an atomic explosion three years ahead of schedule. It was the most dismaying possible development. Klaus Fuchs had stolen most of his information during the war years. But he had returned to the United States as recently as 1947 as part of a British team that attended a conference that discussed declassifying hitherto secret scientific documents on atomic research. My father and his aides could only shudder at the impact this news would have on the Communists-in-government crowd in Congress.

On January 31, Secretary of State Acheson, Secretary of Defense Johnson, and Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lilienthal met with my father in his office at 12:35. They informed him that, after long and careful deliberation, they had agreed we should launch a program to investigate the possibility of building an H-bomb. At the same time, they recommended a searching re-examination of our foreign policy and our strategic plans. Lilienthal, who had signed the agreement with reservations, made his doubts about the decision clear in a brief statement. He pointed out we could no longer rely on atomic weapons for the defense of the country. As a weapon, the H-bomb really made no sense, because it could achieve nothing but the annihilation of an enemy - not a reasonable or tolerable goal for any nation, but especially intolerable for a democracy.

My father agreed with what Lilienthal was saying. “I’ve always believed that we should never use these weapons,” he said. “I don’t believe we ever will have to use them, but we have to go on making them because of the way the Russians are behaving. We have no other course.” Then, in a grimmer tone, he added that if Senator Johnson had kept his mouth shut, it might have been possible to examine the whole issue quietly, but now, so many people were in a furor about the possibility of Russia achieving such a weapon, he had no alternative but to go ahead.

My father sat down and signed the already prepared statement for the press, announcing in the simplest possible terms the decision to pursue the superweapon. “It is part of my responsibility as commander in chief of the Armed Forces to see to it that our country is able to defend itself against any possible aggressor,” he said. As he signed the statement, he remarked: “I remember when I made the decision on Greece. Everybody on the National Security Council predicted the world would come to an end if we went ahead. But we did go ahead and the world didn’t come to an end. I think the same thing will happen here.”

Two days later, the British Embassy reported Klaus Fuchs would be arraigned on February 3. My father looked grimly at the man who brought him the news, Admiral Sidney Souers, his chief of intelligence, and said: “Tie on your hat.”

ON FEBRUARY 9, 1950, six days after the news of Klaus Fuchs’s treachery stunned the Western world and nineteen days after Alger Hiss was found guilty, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin addressed the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. He held up a piece of paper on which he said was a list of 205 names of Communist party members in the State Department. The list had been given to the Secretary of State, declared the senator, yet these men were still in the State Department, “shaping policy.” From Wheeling, the senator flew to Salt Lake City, where he made a similar speech, and then to Reno, where he repeated his charges and wired the White House, demanding action. Ten days later, he talked until nearly midnight on the floor of the Senate, denouncing “eighty-one known Communist agents in the State Department,” one of whom was “now a speech writer in the White House.”

This was absolute nonsense, of course, and my father did not take it seriously. The first time Senator McCarthy’s name was mentioned in a press conference, Dad curtly dismissed him. His reckless accusations seemed, at that time, simply one more attempt by the reactionaries in Congress to sabotage the Truman program.

In his letter to Dr. Chaim Weizmann in late 1948, my father remarked, “It does not take long for bitter and resourceful opponents to regroup their forces after they have been shattered. You in Israel have already been confronted with that situation; and I expect to be all too soon.”

The prediction came true, a few weeks after his second administration began. The reactionaries, an unimaginative lot, first tried the most obvious trick in the political book -smearing the President by finding corruption in his administration. Their target was Major General Harry Vaughan.

General Vaughan had a unique ability to make Dad laugh. He has one of the quickest wits I have ever known, and a fine eye for the more absurd aspects of life. Mother sometimes took a dim view of his humor; it was irrepressible, and nothing and no one was sacred. One day she wore a flowered hat to a luncheon with Senate wives, who were all similarly attired. General Vaughan remarked that they all looked like a “collection of well-tended graves.”

Dad valued Harry Vaughan, not only for his humor but because he knew he was absolutely loyal to Harry S. Truman. He was also an efficient, intelligent liaison with a unique ability for putting people at ease. He handled many non-military chores, somewhat in the style of “Pa” Watson, President Roosevelt’s military aide. But Dad never gave General Vaughan the authority that Pa Watson possessed.

When my father appointed General Eisenhower the chief of staff in 1946, he called in Harry Vaughan and said: “Harry, I called you in here because I wanted you and the General to have an absolutely clear understanding about how I wanted this to work. Whenever I want anything brought particularly to General Eisenhower’s attention, I will give it to you and you will give it to the General and call it to his attention.”

Then my father turned to Ike and said: “General, whenever you want anything to come to my attention quickly without any loss of time, you send it to Harry and he will bring it in and give it safe hand to me.”

Then he turned to General Vaughan with a twinkle in his eye and said: “And at all other times you will mind your own damned business.”

Ike was very pleased by this arrangement. As he left the White House, he told General Vaughan that Pa Watson, Roosevelt’s military aide, had been given far more authority. FDR told the Secretary of War, “Whenever Pa Watson tells you anything it’s an order from me. Even if I never heard of it, it’s an order from me.”

Ike shook his head. “You can imagine how Pa Watson ran the Army.”

The opening round of the get-Truman attack on General Vaughan was led by Drew Pearson, who had made a fool of himself by filing an election eve column discussing Dewey’s cabinet choices. Pearson was not a reactionary, but he was more than ready to cooperate with them to serve his own dubious purposes.

Dad’s opinion of Drew Pearson was summed up very succinctly in a letter he wrote to Bob Hannegan on September 10, 1946. Bob had written Dad a rather unnecessary note denying a Pearson broadcast which implied he would not be a Truman supporter in 1948. Dad replied:

General Vaughan first ran afoul of Pearson in 1946, when one of Pearson’s assistants talked himself onto a government aid mission to Greece. The Greek government informed the White House, through General Vaughan, that the man, a Greek-American, was persona non grata because of his previous political activities. He was promptly bumped from the mission. Pearson warned General Vaughan he would “get him” if his man was not immediately restored to the official list. General Vaughan, with Dad’s complete approval, told Pearson to get lost.

For the next two years, Pearson sniped continually at General Vaughan in his column. At one point, he formally accused him of taking a huge bribe to fix a tax case. Again with Dad’s knowledge and approval, the FBI investigated this claim for several years, questioning people in Kansas City, Washington, and New Orleans. They found nothing. But meanwhile, Pearson was able to scream that a man on the President’s staff was “under investigation.”

In February 1949, Pearson made the horrifying announcement that General Vaughan had accepted a medal from the “fascistic” government of Argentina, which at that time was ruled by the dictator Juan Peron. Dad was told to fire General Vaughan immediately. There is in the Constitution a prohibition against an American officer accepting a decoration from a foreign government. For decades, the practice had been to accept such medals and turn them over to the State Department until permission to keep them was granted by Congress. Diplomatic experience had shown that many nations did not understand this constitutional prohibition and were very offended when our military men or civil servants refused the proffered medal.

General Vaughan had duly informed Stanley Woodward, chief of protocol for the State Department, of the Argentine ambassador’s desire to confer the Grand Cross of the Order of the Liberator San Martin on him. He was told to accept it politely and turn it over to Protocol. The same decoration had been received without comment on August 31, 1948, by General Omar Bradley, chief of staff, and World War II Generals Devers, Hodges, Wedemeyer, Collins, and several others. Earlier, General Eisenhower and Admiral Chester Nimitz had been among the recipients.

Pearson let it be known throughout Washington and the nation that anyone who attended the party at the Argentine Embassy when General Vaughan accepted his decoration would be persona non grata henceforth in Pearsonville - a decree which did not cause any shivers of fear in the White House. Pearson was not among those invited to the Embassy for the ceremony. But he stood outside glaring ominously at all those who dared to brave his wrath. They included senators, congressmen, and most of the ranking officers of the Pentagon. Pearson ran up and down peering into cars like something out of a Marx Brothers movie. The climax came when General Hoyt Vandenberg, commander of the air force, arrived. Pearson was busy peering into another car, so General Vandenberg strolled up to him, tapped him on the shoulder, and gave him his card. “I want to make sure you don’t miss me,” he said. The next day, Pearson wrote in his column that the General had sneaked into the Embassy through a rear entrance.

After fifteen years in Washington, my father was used to ignoring Drew Pearson. But he was galled to see a supposedly responsible paper, the Washington
Post,
taking up the Argentine accusation on their editorial page. A few days later, Dad attended a dinner given by the Reserve Officers Association in honor of General Vaughan. They were enormously proud of the fact that a reserve officer was the President’s aide - a fact which, incidentally, raised hackles among the regular army brass in Washington. Kiddingly, Dad began an off-the-cuff speech by saying, “I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell all I know on Vaughan or not.” But as he reviewed General Vaughan’s career and their long friendship, his temperature rose, and he ended by saying, “If any S.O.B. thinks he can get me to discharge any member of my staff or Cabinet by some smart-aleck statement over the air, he’s mistaken.”

This got into the papers, and General Vaughan soon became a target for headline hunters in Congress. In August 1949, a subcommittee headed by Senator Clyde R. Hoey of North Carolina began an investigation into so-called “five percenters,” who supposedly peddled their influence to government agencies for 5 percent of the government contract. The star witness was a character named John Maragon, a Greek-American, who, it turned out, was drawing $1,000 a month from an importer while he worked for the Allied mission to Greece. Because General Vaughan had helped to get him the job, he was pilloried as hopelessly corrupt. Pearson went almost berserk, picturing Maragon’s enormous influence in the Truman Administration. He claimed that Maragon had stood beside my father when he reviewed the Atlantic fleet, accompanied Dad to Potsdam, and cajoled him into giving away half of Europe to Stalin. The truth is, Maragon was a passenger agent for the B&O Railroad, and General Vaughan had recommended him as a suitable person to handle travel accommodations and the transfer of baggage for the American commission visiting Greece. Pearson magnified this into Maragon as a State Department adviser and architect of the Truman Doctrine.

Maragon was one of those little men who loved to be on the fringes of big-time politics. They are tireless in attempting to do favors for anyone who will let them, and when they are out of earshot, they will loudly proclaim their important contacts in the White House, or Congress, or the State Department, alleging to their friends, or anyone who will listen to them, that the inner wheels of the government cannot turn without their advice and consent. General Vaughan, who was relatively inexperienced in the duplicities of the Washington scene, took several years to realize that Maragon was misrepresenting his relationship with him. Only during Maragon’s trial for perjury (committed before the Hoey Committee) did the General learn that Maragon had a habit of claiming to speak for him on various occasions, thus gaining access to various official and unofficial Washington functions.

General Vaughan appeared before the Hoey Committee for two days, testifying about his relationship with Maragon and another reputed five percenter, Colonel James V. Hunt. The General had accepted the gift of a factory reject deep-freeze from one of Colonel Hunt’s clients - again totally unaware that his name was being used to peddle influence.

With great reluctance, Senator Hoey was forced to admit there was no evidence of corruption on the General’s part. But that did not prevent headlines and editorials about deep-freezes and influence peddling, which gave the impression the Truman Administration was riddled with corruption. General Vaughan, dismayed and horrified, went to Dad and said he felt he should resign as his military aide.

“Harry,” snapped Dad, “don’t even mention such a thing to me again. We came in here together and we’re going out of here together. Those so-and-so’s are trying to get me, through you. I understand exactly what’s going on.”

When reading the headlines the investigation created with practically no evidence of guilt by anyone, it is frightening to think of what might have happened if some of the behind-the-scenes plotting had succeeded. A loyal Louisiana congressman informed Dad that Pearson legmen were scouring New Orleans and its environs for Democrats willing to take a bribe and swear Harry Vaughan had helped them fix an income tax case. General Vaughan has in his files affidavits from some of the men who were approached. Fortunately, these smear tactics got nowhere. A few others who regarded the General as fair game found out he could take care of himself rather handily. In the files of the Truman Library, there are the papers of a libel suit General Vaughan instituted against the
Saturday Evening Post
for calling him a crook. It took him until 1960 to win it. He collected $10,000.

Senator Hoey was from North Carolina and conservative to his high-buttoned shoes and wing collar. Sulking in South Carolina was retired Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes. He suddenly decided the believers in yesterday were the men of tomorrow, and began harshly attacking the Truman Administration’s Fair Deal, making it sound as if the world was going to come to an end if we gave the federal government enough power to improve the health and guarantee the civil rights of all the people. Speaking at Washington and Lee University late in June 1949, Byrnes predicted that “the individual - whether farmer, worker, manufacturer, lawyer or doctor - will soon be an economic slave pulling an oar in the galley of the state.”