David McCullough Library E-book Box Set

by David McCullough

  Most important, concerning the Schenectady, he said that failure of steel plate in the ship had not been the cause of its breakup and even if that were the problem, the plate at the point where the break began was not a product of the Irvin Works.

  Of the senators present, it was Ferguson and Brewster, the two Republicans, who bore down hardest on Perry, while Fulton or Truman would move in with a question or comment from time to time. Ferguson picked up quickly on the question of where the Schenectady plate had been made. It was not made at Irvin, Perry affirmed again. Then where, asked Ferguson. Homestead, admitted Perry.

  “Didn’t you hear the witness testify here that he was taught how to cheat down at the Homestead Works?” Ferguson asked.

  “Senator, this word ‘cheat’…”

  “Have you a better one?”

  Senator Brewster then read aloud from the report of an investigation conducted by the Bureau of Ships, stating quite plainly that “a very poor quality of steel” had been “most directly responsible” for the failure of the Schenectady. The plate was “of definitely inferior quality,” Brewster read on. It was so brittle it was more like cast iron than steel.

  Had Perry read the report? He had read parts of it, he replied. Brewster, his anger becoming more apparent, wondered how Perry might feel if he had a son going overseas in a ship made of such steel.

  Perry answered, “Why, Senator, I don’t for a moment condone poor steel, defective steel in ships or anywhere else that has to do with the war effort. Don’t worry about how I feel about the sons going over there.”

  Truman interposed to explain that Senator Brewster had a son overseas in the war.

  “If a customer asks you for a strength of 60,000 pounds, the breaking point on a test,” Ferguson said, “and you give him a product of 57,000 pounds, but you represent to him in figures that you have tested it and it did test 60,000 pounds, is that a misrepresentation of a material fact?”

  PERRY: Yes, sir.

  FERGUSON: You understand that was done up to five percent of the material furnished?

  PERRY: That is the evidence here this morning.

  FERGUSON: Do you say that that was not selling a product to the United States Government under false representations?

  PERRY: If that was done, to that extent it would be.

  FERGUSON: You heard the testimony. Is there any doubt in your mind that it was done?

  PERRY: There is a doubt in my mind as to whether it was done in regard to material that was furnished to Government specification and testing where the Government made the inspection or supervised the inspection.

  FERGUSON: Do you mean to say—do I understand you now to say that you don’t believe the testimony of your own men here under oath?

  PERRY: Did they actually testify to that point that where inspection was made by the Navy…?

  FULTON: And also to the Navy where they said it was possible to cheat with the Navy inspector standing right there.

  PERRY: I have stated that where that was done it was a misrepresentation.

  FERGUSON: Do I understand that you still insist that no inferior material was sold to the Government?

  PERRY: I still insist that it was not inferior for the end use to which it was put….

  FERGUSON: In other words, you are the man who is stating what you think the Government should buy, is that right?

  PERRY: No, sir.

  FERGUSON: Then, why don’t you live up to the Government specifications?

  PERRY: We should.

  FERGUSON: Why didn’t you?

  PERRY: We will.

  TRUMAN: I’ll say you will….

  The hearing lasted five hours. When the company’s attorney, testifying after Perry, talked of his need to master the technicalities of the steel business before “justifying this situation,” Truman broke in to ask what knowledge of technicalities had to do with removing cheaters from jobs of critical responsibility. “I don’t know anything about the steel business,” Truman said, “and don’t expect to know about it, but I can tell you when the books have been tampered with and when there is a bunch of crookedness going on. That is plain enough for me to see.”

  But the question of who ultimately had been responsible for what went on—of how high up the blame should go—was never really answered. No one above the chief metallurgist, McGarrity, would admit to any knowledge of rigging tests or falsifying records. Nor did the hearing disclose a substantial motive for passing off the inferior steel. Those in the mill involved in the deception had nothing to gain by their actions and everything to lose if found out. The one plausible explanation offered was that it was all in an effort to set an impressive production record.

  In any event management promised to set everything straight, and in the final hour the president of U.S. Steel, Benjamin F. Fairless, promised Truman that whoever was responsible would “walk the plank.”

  “You realize, Mr. Fairless,” said Senator Brewster, “how incredible it seems that subordinates in the company would risk their entire future without hope of reward of any character. That, of course, is what impresses the committee and makes it so amazing.”

  Senator Ferguson was curious whether Mr. Fairless thought, from what he had heard during the day, that the operation of Carnegie-Illinois Steel was an example of good management. “I certainly do not,” said Fairless. “I consider it was very, very poor management.”

  At the close of the hearing, asked by a reporter for his personal comment on what had been divulged during the day, Truman said he did not think that could be printed.

  On the issue of the dollar-a-year men on the War Production Board, Truman stood fast, stressing with great feeling the essential injustice of the system, but giving in at last, much against his better judgment, because the production czar he had helped create, Donald Nelson, argued otherwise. Nelson wanted no change in the system, insisting it was the way to get maximum results from industry. He had to have people who understood how industry worked, he told the committee. Asked why such men should be allowed to retain their corporate ties and benefits, he said people with big salaries had big expenses—mortgages, insurance, and the like—and could not make the change to government pay without suffering hardship.

  “I don’t think there should be any special class,” Truman responded. Only that morning he had received a letter from a man who had been earning $25,000 a year, a reserve officer who had been called up for duty. “He is going to get $140 a month, and he can’t draw his $25,000 while he is gone,” Truman said. “He is satisfied to do that because he wants to win the war, just as you do and just as I do, by every means possible, no matter what it costs him, because if he doesn’t win it his $25,000 a year won’t be worth a cent. I am laboring, and have been, under the delusion, maybe, that if the government had the power to take these young men away from their jobs and their outlook on life for the purpose of this emergency, the dollar-a-year men could face the same situation and face it adequately, and would be glad to do it.”

  He was not opposed to the dollar-a-year men because they were businessmen—he wanted more businessmen in government, especially in the war effort—but he knew how “human” it was for a steel executive on loan to the war administration to hesitate in ordering any action that might injure the standing of his company or industry once the war was over. He had learned that certain high-ranking dollar-a-year men had initially delayed the construction of new furnaces when they were needed because of concern over what increased ingot capacity might do to their postwar profits.

  But reluctantly he backed off, saying that if Nelson felt the system was what it took to win the war, then the committee should not stand in the way. In a letter to Nelson a few days later, he was more specific. The committee did not like having procurement matters entrusted to those who were such obvious hostages to fortune, he wrote.

  However, the committee believes that the best interests of the procurement program require that it be administered by a single head who will be ab
le to do things in his way and who will be judged by his accomplishments as a whole…. The committee will, therefore, support you even on matters in which it disagrees with you….

  By pushing harder on the issue, he felt, the committee could run the risk of overreaching its power, to the point of dictating policy, like the intrusive Civil War committee.

  In backing Nelson he was also standing by a fundamental conviction that control of the war effort must be kept in civilian hands. In just the first six months of 1942 military contracts added to the economy totaled $400 billion. He saw ambitious generals and admirals on all sides gaining influence over industry and agriculture and he worried what this could mean for the future. In the fall of 1942, on a broadcast for “The March of Time,” he called the issue of civilian control the foremost of the day and warned it could shape the whole political and economic structure of the country after the war. “The function of generals and admirals is to fight battles,” he said, “and to tell us what they need to fight battles with.”

  General Brehon Somervell, wearing three stars now, was again called before the committee to explain an incredible project, called Canol, after “Canadian oil.” The scheme was to build a four-inch oil pipeline across 1,200 miles from Canada to Alaska, and it had been launched “on the nod” from Somervell, secretly, with little thought to the realities of terrain, climate, available materials, available manpower, or the views of oil experts, the Corps of Engineers, and the War Production Board. An item was added to the War Department budget of $25 million with no description except that it was for the construction of military facilities in Canada and Alaska.

  The shroud of secrecy had been primarily to avoid interference from other civilian sides of government, and in particular the notoriously irascible Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior and head of the Petroleum Administration. Employees of the contractor, Stephen Bechtel, began calling Canol “the greatest project since the Panama Canal.” But then Ickes found out about it and went before the Truman Committee to say the whole project “grew entirely out of a one-page memorandum from General Somervell, who was anxious to conserve paper….” Ickes called the pipeline useless and the committee came to much the same conclusion, having heard more from Somervell’s chief adviser for the project, James H. Graham, a dollar-a-year man who, Ickes said, was “worth every penny of it.” Graham, the committee found, had no idea how long the pipeline was to be. He had made no estimate of the cost, nor did he believe anybody else had. “I don’t regard cost in time of war,” he told the committee more than once.

  “The committee damns it up and down while the War Department is as usual scrambling desperately to save face instead of having the guts to admit a mistake frankly and go on from there,” wrote a new observer on the scene, a young reporter for the United Press named Allen Drury, on the day of Somervell’s appearance. “All the desperate assertions of an embarrassed incompetence have been hurried forth to justify the thing, but the committee is unimpressed.”

  Somervell had paraded into the hearings flanked by four brigadier generals and several majors. At one point, as Drury happily recorded in his journal, Somervell asked for some water, handing his glass to a brigadier who handed it to a major who, finding no one of lesser rank available, filled the glass himself and returned it to the brigadier who returned it to the general.

  The committee hammered away at Somervell for four and a half hours, with Hugh Fulton and Senator Harley Kilgore doing most of the questioning. The chairman listened quietly. But in winding up the day Truman read Somervell a letter he had received from the Navy Department—a letter, he explained, written in answer to his own question whether the Navy had ever been asked for its opinion on Canol, or requested to participate. According to the letter, a search of Navy files had turned up no communication indicating such an inquiry. No officers or officials of the Navy Department had ever been questioned orally about Canol.

  Somervell said he never implied that he had asked the Navy. “It is not a Navy situation. Not any more than a bakery we might build….”

  Truman suggested that very possibly it could have to do with the Navy, since ships burn a good deal of oil.

  “Yes, sir,” replied Somervell, who now said the Chief of Naval Operations and others had “expressed themselves in favor of the project.”

  “The Secretary of the Navy, however, has the other opinion,” said Truman. “The committee will stand adjourned.”

  Worn down at day’s end, he would complain to Bess that the pressures on him had begun to tell again. She knew of his headaches and exhaustion and worried he might push himself to the point of collapse. Witnesses at the hearings got on his nerves far more than he let on, he told her. He talked of just going away somewhere and reading Shakespeare and Plutarch “over and over and over.”

  Yet nothing about his public manner revealed any of this. He was brisk and cheerful as always. He radiated good health and youthful energy. In contrast to so many among the congressional brotherhood, the gray, double-chinned, food-stained veterans of Capitol Hill, he appeared abnormally fit and his good clothes, his one indulgence, were spotless. Though not a fancy dresser—he remained too much the midwesterner for that—he looked always, as Margaret said, as if he had just stepped from a bandbox. His suits were perfectly cleaned and pressed, his shirts immaculate. (He had had a time his first few years in Washington finding a dry cleaner who could do his clothes to his satisfaction.) He had dozens of suits—some old favorites custom-made by Ted Marks, others from Eddie Jacobson’s new store in Kansas City or from Garfinckel’s in Washington, mostly double-breasted, grays and blues, and cut to accentuate how trim he was. (He could still get into his old Army uniform, he liked to tell people.) Lately, too, he had begun wearing bow ties—a departure viewed by his wife and daughter with considerable disfavor—and there was always a fresh, perfectly folded handkerchief in the breast pocket showing five points, always the World War I service pin in his lapel. He looked crisp. He moved with a bounce, even in the heat of summer, his two-tone summer shoes clicking down the marble halls more rapidly than any. Richard Riedel, the young press liaison who prided himself in being able to get about the Capitol in double-quick time, remembered Truman’s good-natured approval of the pace he set. “One day in a typical kidding mood he [Truman] started in behind me and walked lock-step through the Lobby to the amusement of all who saw him.”

  His vitality seemed greater than ever, in keeping with his new confidence. He had “arrived” in the Senate, as everybody knew, and it agreed with him. He was having a splendid time being Senator Harry Truman of the Truman Committee.

  Yet he acquired no airs, for all this. He was as unpresuming, as accessible as always, despite the extraordinary new power he had and the urgent, wartime atmosphere of Washington. Self-importance was on display in the city in many quarters to a greater degree than ever in memory, but Truman seemed somehow unaffected. A reporter for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat described later how he had been sent by his editor to see the senator, who was reportedly back in town briefly after one of his committee forays and staying at the Jefferson Hotel on 16th Street:

  I went up to the front desk and asked the room clerk for the number of Senator Truman’s room. He gave it to me. I went to a house phone and called the Senator’s room. The phone was answered not by a security guard, not by an aide, not even by a secretary. It was answered by Harry Truman. I identified myself, and he said sure, come on up. I knocked on his door, and the door was opened by Senator Truman. He was alone, in his shirt sleeves, with a book held closed on a finger. He put the book aside, offered me a chair, poured us each a bourbon highball, and sat back with a friendly smile. We talked, without interruption, for almost an hour. What we talked about, what I later wrote, I have no real recollection of. All I remember is that the book he was reading was Volume III of Douglas Southall Freeman’s biography of Robert E. Lee. That the bourbon we drank was Old Crow. That he was completely relaxed and responsive. And that there was no one els
e around.

  Nearly everything being said about him in the papers was complimentary, and the committee and its work now had the respect of the administration. “I am more surprised every day at the respect with which the special committee is regarded by people in high places,” he wrote to Bess, very pleased. “If I can just keep from making any real errors, we are on the way to really help win the war and to make the job more efficient and quicker. That means fewer of our young men killed and a chance for a more honorable settlement. So you must pray for me to go the right way.”

  In the Senate, where he was always well liked, he had achieved a new stature, even among liberals who, until now, had regarded him as pleasant enough and conscientious, but bland. “The man from Missouri,” remembered Claude Pepper, “had dared to say ‘show me’ to the powerful military-industrial complex and he had caught many people in the act.”

  He was notable too for so much that he was not. He was not florid or promiscuous. He made no pretense at being superior in any regard. He did not seem to need the limelight, flattery, or a following. He did not want to be the President.

  To his pleasure, he was recognized now in restaurants and hotel lobbies, as he had never been before except in Missouri, and not always there. “Now you’ve got to help me more than ever so I won’t be a damn fool or stuffed shirt,” he told Bess.

  Margaret, now in her late teens, had begun singing lessons and was doing splendidly, he thought. She was talking already of a singing career. Neither he nor Bess was a singer. Margaret never heard him even try to sing, which seemed odd for someone with such love for music. But he did nothing to discourage her, said only that she must first finish college.

  He called her “Margie” or “Miss Skinny.” Alert and energetic, with a sunny disposition, she was one of the great satisfactions of his life.