Not all the Truman Committee’s efforts were successful. The Canol Project went on and wound up costing $134 million, all money that need never have been spent, and more serious even than the financial waste was the misuse of vitally needed manpower and materials. (At one point 4,000 troops and 12,000 civilians were involved.) Corporations and government agencies found to be bungling things or committing outright fraud, like Carnegie-Illinois Steel, were frequently let off the hook to keep production rolling. “We want aluminum, not excuses,” Truman said after the committee’s tangle with Alcoa.
Yet overall the committee’s performance was outstanding. It would be called the most successful congressional investigative effort in American history. Later estimates were that the Truman Committee saved the country as much as $15 billion. This was almost certainly an exaggeration—no exact figure is possible—but the sum was enormous and unprecedented, and whatever the amount, it was only part of the service rendered. The most important “power” of the committee was its deterrent effect. Fear of investigation or public exposure by the committee was enough in itself to cause countless people in industry, government, and the military to do their jobs right, thereby, in the long run, saving thousands of lives.
It was not just that the production of defective airplane engines or low-grade steel had been exposed; the committee also made positive contributions to the production of improved military equipment. The most notable—and one that saved many lives—was the famous, hinge-prowed Higgins landing craft used for amphibious assault, which was built and ordered by the Navy’s Bureau of Ships only after heavy prodding from the committee. With the new Higgins craft troops could be landed on a variety of shallow beaches, rather than just established harbors. It increased mobility for the offense, made obsolete much of the old coastal defenses. Yet until the committee looked at the subject with a fresh eye, Navy bureaucrats had been trying to force the adoption of a plainly inferior design.
The committee was also a continuing source of information about the war effort for the whole country. In its report on the loss to U-boats, for example, the committee said 12 million tons of American shipping were destroyed in 1942, an alarming figure. This was 1 million tons more than all the nation’s shipyards were then producing. The Navy immediately denied the validity of the report. But when Secretary of the Navy Knox appeared before the committee in executive session, he admitted the committee was telling the truth.
Unquestionably, the relentless “watchdog” role, the attention to detail during the hearings, the quality as well as the quantity of the reports issued, all greatly increased public confidence in how the war was being run. Further, anyone called before the committee could count on a fair hearing. The chairman would have it no other way.
From what he had observed of Chairman Truman during the day of General Somervell’s testimony, Allen Drury of United Press recorded: “He seems to be a generally good man, probably deserving of his reputation.” But after watching several more sessions, including one in which Truman went out of his way to keep some of the other senators from browbeating a witness, Drury could hardly say enough for the head of the committee:
April 12, 1945: Harry S. Truman takes the oath of office from Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone in the Cabinet Room at the White House.
Expressions of grief, as well as confidence in Harry Truman, fill the front page of the Independence Examiner.
James F. Byrnes (left) and Henry A. Wallace, ardent candidates for the vice-presidential nomination only the summer before, wait with Truman for Roosevelt’s funeral train at Washington’s Union Station. Below: The new President of the United States at his desk.
July 1945: Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Truman, and Generalissimo Joseph Stalin, “The Big Three,” meet at Potsdam, Germany.
Conference table, Cecilienhof Palace.
Truman in Berlin with Generals Eisenhower and Patton. Eisenhower was high on the new President’s list of favorite generals; not so Patton.
Above: Truman’s headquarters during the Potsdam Conference was No. 2 Kaiserstrasse, the “nightmare” house where the decision on the atomic bomb was made. Below: Truman’s desk in the second-floor study.
Above: Truman’s order, handwritten in pencil to Secretary of War Stimson, to use the atomic bomb on Japan. Below: At his desk in the Oval Office, 7:00 P.M., August 14, 1945, Truman announces the surrender of Japan.
May 25, 1946: As he calls on Congress for the power to draft striking rail workers into the Army and thus break a nationwide shutdown, Truman is handed a note saying the strike has ended. Left: He and the First Lady had hosted a reception for wounded veterans the day before, just as worries over the rail strike were at their worst. The postwar burdens of his office bore heavily on Truman (opposite). But he had discovered a retreat away from Washington, the naval base at Key West, Florida, and aide Clark Clifford (shown below with Truman at Key West) had emerged as a bright new star on the White House staff.
Two who helped turn the tide in 1947: Left: Republican Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg shaking hands on March 12, as Truman is about to ask Congress for aid to Greece and Turkey—the speech that introduced the Truman Doctrine; and (opposite) Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the “great one,” as Truman called him, who in a commencement speech at Harvard on June 5 proposed what came to be known as the Marshall Plan.
Eddie Jacobson, a behind-the-scenes key figure in the decision to recognize Israel, talks with his old friend and former business partner.
Chaim Weitzmann, the new president of Israel, presents Truman with the Torah scrolls during a first official call at the White House.
Opposite: In the first address ever made by a President to the NAACP, Truman speaks from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a crowd of ten thousand, June 29, 1947.
America’s best-known walker steps out in a 35th Division Reunion parade in Kansas City.
Past 2:00 A.M., July 15, 1948, his hands chopping the air, Truman tells cheering convention delegates at Philadelphia, “Senator Barkley and I will win this election…arid don’t you forget that!” His odyssey began in September. Below: From the rear platform of the Ferdinand Magellan at Richmond, Indiana, Truman makes one of hundreds of “whistle-stop” speeches.
After Stalin clamped a blockade on Berlin on June 24 (the day Dewey was nominated), Truman launched the Berlin Airlift. Tensions over Berlin continued for months.
Republican candidate Thomas E. Dewey and his wife. According to the press, only a miracle or a series of unimaginable Republican blunders could save Truman from defeat.
In one of the most memorable photographs in the history of American politics, the “sure loser” holds aloft a premature Chicago Tribune headline. Heading east after the election, Truman’s train had stopped at St. Louis where he was handed a copy of the paper. Below: Part of the throng that welcomed Truman back to Washington. Some 750,000 people filled the streets in the largest outpouring for a President that the capital had ever seen.
There are a number of times, when it is quite easy to find oneself thanking whatever powers there be that the country has Harry Truman in the Senate. He is an excellent man, a fine Senator and sound American. The debt the public owes him is great indeed. And Boss Pendergast put him in. Politics is funny business….
III
For quite some time staff investigators had been picking up puzzling hints of a secret enterprise larger even than the Canol Project, odd bits and pieces of information indicating huge, unexplained expenditures for something identified only as the Manhattan Project. On June 17, 1943, Truman telephoned Secretary of War Stimson. Their conversation was brief:
STIMSON: Now that’s a matter which I know all about personally, and I am the only one of the group of two or three men in the whole world who know about it.
TRUMAN: I see.
STIMSON: It’s part of a very important secret development.
TRUMAN: Well, all right then—
STIMSON: And I—
TRUMAN: I herewith see the situation, Mr. Secretary, and you won’t have to say another word to me. Whenever you say that to me that’s all I want to hear.
STIMSON: All right…
TRUMAN: You assure that this is for a specific purpose and you think it’s all right. That’s all I need to know.
STIMSON: Not only for a specific purpose, but a unique purpose.
TRUMAN: All right, then.
STIMSON: Thank you very much,
Apparently, however, more information kept coming to Truman in one way or other, and by July he had been told enough to know the essential nature of the “very important secret development.” Incredibly, he even put it in a letter to Lewis Schwellenbach, who had since left the Senate to become a federal district judge in Spokane. Schwellenbach had been concerned over sudden, enormous land condemnations for the DuPont Company along the Columbia River near a desolate railroad town called Hanford. Nearly half a million acres were involved and he had written to Truman to inquire about it. On July 15, 1943, Truman wrote to say he shouldn’t worry.
“I know something about that tremendous real estate deal,” he said, “and I have been informed that it is for the construction of a plant to make a terrific explosion for a secret weapon that will be a wonder.” He added, “I hope it works.”
This was a terrible breach of security on Truman’s part, an astonishing lapse of simple good judgment—to have passed on such information in so offhand a fashion in an ordinary letter sent through the mail. It was exactly the sort of “insider” talk, one member of the senatorial “club” to another, that gave generals and admirals nightmares and little desire ever to tell politicians anything more than necessary. Truman had not bothered even to write in private, but dictated the letter to Mildred Dryden, which means that as of then she too was aware of the making of “a terrific explosion.”
But apparently no one ever found out about the letter. Neither Schwellenbach nor Dryden said a word more on the subject, as far as is known.
Curiosity and concern over the DuPont operations at Hanford did not end there. Senator Elbert Thomas of Oklahoma wanted the situation investigated. He, too, apparently had been hearing stories. A staff man on the Truman Committee informed the chairman confidentially that complaints of waste and inefficiency at Hanford had become “chronic,” and added, “In my humble opinion, I believe that this is another ‘Canol,’ wherein the guise of secrecy is being resorted to by the War Department to cover what may be another shocking example when the lid is finally taken off.”
Truman felt pressured to know more, his agreement with Stimson notwithstanding.
On November 30, 1943, he informed Senator Thomas, “I have sent an investigator to look into it, and I hope we can find out what is wrong.”
A few weeks afterward, Fred Canfil walked into a Western Union office in Walla Walla, Washington, and sent the following telegram, collect to Senator Truman. It must have made interesting reading to whoever put it on the wire:
COLONEL MATHIAS, COMMANDING OFFICER DUPONT PLANT, TOLD ME THAT YOU AND THE SECRETARY OF WAR HAD AN UNDERSTANDING THAT NONE OF YOUR COMMITTEE WOULD COME INTO THE PLANT. THROUGH ANOTHER AGENCY I FOUND THAT WITHIN THE LAST 10 DAYS A CONFIDENTIAL LETTER WAS RECEIVED FROM THE WAR DEPARTMENT…TO ARMY OFFICERS AND TO HIGH CIVILIAN ENGINEERS…. TO THE EFFECT THAT THESE PEOPLE WERE TO SEE THAT NO SENATOR OR ANYONE CONNECTED WITH THE SENATE WAS TO BE GIVEN ANY INFORMATION ABOUT THE PROJECT.
Canfil, who may not have known as much as Truman about the purpose of the plant, was only doing his duty. Truman thought him overly efficient. “Whenever he finds out that I want something,” he once said of Canfil, “he never stops until it is done….”
But after the wire from Walla Walla, committee interest in the Manhattan Project cooled. The understanding with Stimson was honored again. Nor is there anything in the record to suggest that Truman ever heard of separating plutonium from U-238 (the work going on at Hanford) or had any idea how “the terrific explosion” was to be made.
Only a few months later, Stimson, General Marshall, and Vannevar Bush, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, drove to the Capitol for a private meeting in Speaker Sam Rayburn’s office. Present besides Rayburn were the House majority and minority leaders, John McCormack and Joe Martin. It was then, in February 1944, that Stimson and Marshall revealed “the greatest secret of the war” for the first and only time on the Hill. As Joe Martin wrote years later:
The United States was engaged in a crash program to develop the atomic bomb before the Germans perfected one. Marshall described the design of the bomb in some technical detail. Stimson said that if the Germans got this weapon first, they might win the war overnight. They told us that they would need an additional $1,600,000,000 to manufacture the bomb. Because of an overriding necessity for secrecy, they made the unique request that the money be provided without a trace of evidence to show how it was spent.
The three legislators agreed to do what was necessary. Senator Truman was told nothing.
Yet according to Stimson’s diary, the chairman of the investigating committee was soon after him once more. Truman was now asking that a member of the committee staff, General Frank Lowe, be taken into Stimson’s confidence about the Hanford Works. Stimson by now was extremely annoyed with Senator Truman. Stimson thought he had an agreement. He told Truman no, a response Truman did not take lightly. “He threatened me with dire consequences. I told him I had to do just what I did,” said Stimson in his diary, adding, “Truman is a nuisance and a pretty untrustworthy man. He talks smoothly but he acts meanly.” Under no circumstances was Senator Truman to be told anything more.
8
Numbered Days
I hardly know Truman.
—FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, JULY 1944
I
It was in early summer of 1943, one year in advance of the Democratic National Convention, that Senator Truman recorded on paper for the first time that in some circles he was being talked of as a candidate for Vice President, assuming the President were to run for a fourth term. He had been invited to Sunday lunch at the Washington home of Senator Joe Guffey, a staunch New Dealer who took him out into the garden to ask “very confidentially” what he thought of Vice President Henry Wallace. Truman had smiled and said Wallace was the best Secretary of Agriculture the country ever had. Guffey, laughing, said that was what he thought, too. “Then he wanted to know if I would help out the ticket if it became necessary by accepting the nomination for Vice President,” Truman recorded. “I told him in words of one syllable that I would not….”
And though the idea was talked about with increasing frequency thereafter, Truman, when asked his opinion, always gave the same answer. He wanted to stay in the Senate.
Moreover, he believed in being realistic. Franklin Roosevelt had shown no sign of dissatisfaction with the Vice President, nor any inclination to abandon him. And even if Roosevelt were to change his mind, there were a number of others—Jimmy Byrnes and Alben Barkley, to name the two most obvious possibilities—who were better known, more experienced, and who would leap to the opportunity. Jimmy Byrnes, a small, tidy, vivid man whom Truman greatly admired, was a southerner, a lapsed Catholic, and sixty-four years old, all of which could count against him. But he had done virtually everything there was to do in government, his experience ranging across all three branches, beginning with seven terms in the House before going to the Senate. Named to the Supreme Court in 1941, Byrnes had resigned after only one term to become Roosevelt’s War Mobilization Director, with an office in the East Wing of the White House. Popularly referred to as “Assistant President,” he was the consummate “insider” whose political judgment, whose ability to funnel money where needed in the party (such as to Senator Truman in 1940) were thought second to none. Roosevelt relied heavily on him and liked him. By contrast to such a man as Byrnes, Truman was small potatoes, as he well knew, and no closer to Roosevelt now than he had ever been.
In fact, lately, a distinct ch
ill had been felt at the White House concerning Truman, ever since publication in American Magazine of a ghost-written article about the findings of the committee that Truman had allowed to be published under his name without bothering to read it very carefully. Too late had he discovered how critical it was of the administration’s handling of the war effort. (“Leadership is what we Americans are crying for,” the article said. “We are fighting mad, and ready to tackle any job and to make any sacrifice…. All we ask is that we be intelligently and resolutely led.”) He was certain that the President didn’t like him, Truman told friends in the Senate.
Still the vice-presidential speculation continued, and with Truman’s name spoken often, for the reason that certain influential figures in the Democratic Party had joined in a pact to keep Henry Wallace off the ticket.
They were only a handful, only a half dozen or so to begin with, but they were among the most powerful men in the party, and they had taken it upon themselves to talk down Wallace at every opportunity and begin organizing wider opposition to him. They included the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Frank Walker, who had replaced Jim Farley as Postmaster General; Ed Pauley, a wealthy California oilman who was treasurer of the national committee; George E. Allen, a jovial man-about-Washington, lobbyist, and secretary of the national committee; and Robert E. Hannegan, Truman’s last-minute savior in the 1940 campaign, who had since advanced to Commissioner of Internal Revenue and was now not only a great favorite of the President’s but in line to replace Walker as national chairman. General Edwin “Pa” Watson, appointments secretary at the White House, had also agreed to clear the way whenever possible for anti-Wallace Democrats to see the President. Watson, it was hoped, could serve as counterbalance to Mrs. Roosevelt, a known champion of the Vice President.
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