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 prevai
led, 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. Fr
equently 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:
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