There was too much talk in Congress “and everywhere,” Truman broke in. People were “so excited.” He didn’t see that he had any alternative.
“Can the Russians do it?” he asked the group. It was his only question. They all nodded.
“We don’t have much time,” interjected Admiral Souers.
“In that case,” said Truman, “we have no choice. We’ll go ahead.”
As he signed the statement, Truman said he recalled another meeting of the National Security Council concerning Greece, when “everybody predicted the end of the world if we went ahead, but we did go ahead and the world didn’t come to an end.” It would be “the same case here,” he said.
While the President went home to Blair House for lunch, Charlie Ross again handed out a mimeographed sheet.
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. Accordingly, I have directed the Atomic Energy Commission to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or superbomb….
Lilienthal described the mood at the AEC afterward as that of a funeral party. For him it was a night of heartache. “I hope I was wrong, and that somehow I’ll be proved wrong,” he wrote. “We have to leave many things to God….” Albert Einstein, in a rare appearance on television, talked of the radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere and warned, “General annihilation beckons.”
To what extent Truman had struggled with the decision, or dwelled on it afterward, is not known. He left nothing in writing. Nor can Acheson’s influence on him be readily gauged, though doubtless it was considerable. Acheson, as Truman said, was one of the most persuasive men he had ever known.
It would have been preferable surely—wiser, more prudent—to have given the entire question longer, closer examination, and under less stress, even assuming Truman would have decided no differently. The country could have been better prepared. There would have been time for a clear, explanatory presidential address to the nation, instead of a mimeographed announcement. So disquieting, so momentous, and so costly a step deserved better.
In any event, as anticipated, public and editorial approval of the decision was overwhelming—the President had made “the right and inevitable” decision. Then, in only a matter of days, the level of apprehension was raised still higher by news from London that Klaus Fuchs, a former atomic scientist at Los Alamos, had confessed to being a Russian spy, and by the sudden claim of Senator Joseph McCarthy that he had in his possession a list of more than two hundred known Communists employed at the State Department.
IV
With the onrush of so much sensational, seemingly inexplicable bad news—China lost, the Russian bomb, Alger Hiss, the treason of Klaus Fuchs—breaking with such clamor, all in less than six months, the country was in a state of terrible uncertainty.
“How much are we going to have to take?” asked Senator Homer Capehart of Indiana.
Life devoted much of one issue to show how vastly Russian military strength exceeded that of the United States—an army of 2,600,000 men, compared to an American force of 640,000, 30 Russian armored divisions to one American. The United States produced 1,200 new planes a year, the Russians 7,000. Only the American Navy stood first, but the Soviets already had a more powerful fleet than Germany had had at the start of the last war and three times the number of American submarines. While America spent 6 percent of its national income on military strength, the Russians were spending 25 percent. And so on. “War Can Come; Will We Be Ready?” asked the Life headline.
It was, of course, a question of paramount importance within the administration. For months behind the scenes Acheson had been arguing that Truman’s $13 billion limit on defense spending was no longer realistic. Now with his decision to proceed with the hydrogen bomb Truman authorized a complete review of military policy. At both the State Department and the Pentagon, work began on a sweeping new report, and with the pressure on, relations between the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense grew steadily more contentious. At a meeting in March, Louis Johnson exploded with such temper—banging down his chair, shouting objections, hammering his fist on the table—that Acheson could only conclude that Johnson, like Forrestal, had cracked under the strain.
When Acheson reported to Truman what had happened, Truman was appalled. Probably it was then he knew that Johnson would have to go—when the time was right.
Fear gripped Washington and the country. “The air was so charged with fear,” remembered Herb Block, “that it took only a small spark to ignite it.” And the spark was McCarthy. When Block, in one of his cartoons in the Post, labeled an overflowing barrel of tar “McCarthyism,” another new word entered the language along with the H-bomb.
Until that January, Joseph R. McCarthy, Wisconsin’s forty-one-year-old junior senator, had been casting about for an issue that might lift him from obscurity. All but friendless in the Senate, recently voted the worst member of the Senate in a poll of Washington correspondents, McCarthy appeared to be a hopeless failure. Over dinner one evening at the Colony Restaurant, a Catholic priest, Father Edmund A. Walsh of Georgetown University, suggested he might sound the alarm over Communist infiltration of the government, and McCarthy, who had already made some loud, if unnotable, charges about Communist subversion, seems to have realized at once that he had found what he needed. A month later, in a Lincoln’s Birthday speech in West Virginia, he waved a piece of paper, saying he had “here in my hand” the names of 205 “known Communists” in the State Department. The speech went largely unnoticed, but at Salt Lake City and Reno soon afterward he made essentially the same claim, except the number was cut to fifty-seven, and they were referred to now as “card-carrying” Communists. He made headlines across the country. Back at the Senate he carried on for five hours, claiming to have penetrated “Truman’s iron curtain of secrecy” and come up with eighty-one names.
The charges were wild and unsupported. McCarthy had no names, he produced no new evidence. He was a political brawler, morose, reckless, hard-drinking, a demagogue such as had not been seen in the Senate since the days of Huey Long, only he had none of Long’s charm or brilliance. The press called him desperate, a loudmouth and a character assassin. His Communist hunt was “a wretched burlesque of the serious and necessary business of loyalty check-ups.” But he was no more bothered by such criticism than by his own inconsistencies, and whatever he said the press printed, his most sensational allegations often getting the biggest headlines. To more and more of the country it seemed that even if he might be wrong in some of his particulars, probably he was onto something, and high time.
Harry Truman, McCarthy charged, was the “prisoner of a bunch of twisted intellectuals” who only told him what they wanted him to know. Attacking Acheson, he said, “When this pompous diplomat in striped pants, with the phony British accent, proclaimed to the American people that Christ on the Mount endorsed Communism, high treason, and betrayal of a sacred trust, the blasphemy was so great that it awakened the dormant indignation of the American people.” As McCarthy kept up the assault, Acheson received so much threatening mail that guards had to be posted at his house around the clock.
While numbers of his fellow Republicans silently deplored McCarthy’s methods, others—Bridges, Brewster, Capehart, Mundt, Wherry—began lending support. “I will not turn my back on Joe McCarthy,” said Brewster. Encouragement came too from Senator Taft, who had been the first to introduce the “soft on Communism” issue in the 1946 elections and who now admitted publicly that he was egging McCarthy on, to press the attack, to “keep talking and if one case didn’t work out, to bring up another.” All the anger and resentment felt by Republicans like Taft over Truman’s surprise upset in 1948 had found an outlet.
Senate Democrats, meanwhile, called for a complete investigation of McCarthy’s charges. A special subcommittee of the Foreign Relations Committee began hearings under the
chairmanship of Millard Tydings of Maryland, one of the most respected, influential Democrats in the Senate. The assumption was that in the bright light of public exposure, McCarthy and his tactics could not long survive.
But the attention only magnified him. The hearings in the Senate’s marble-columned Caucus Room gave him center stage and the full attention of the press day after day. “You are not fooling me,” he said. “This committee [is] not seeking to get the names of bad security risks, but…to find out the names of my informants so they can be kicked out of the State Department tomorrow.” By the end of March, in the six weeks since his initial outburst at Wheeling, McCarthy had not named a single Communist.
He announced he had the name of the “top Russian espionage agent” in the United States, indeed the “onetime” boss of Alger Hiss and his espionage ring. The man, said McCarthy, was Owen J. Lattimore, formerly of the State Department and currently director of the Johns Hopkins School of International Relations. As time would show, Lattimore was neither a Communist nor ever an influential figure at the State Department. He had worked for the department all of four months in 1946, as an adviser on a reparations mission in Japan. The accusation was a fraud. “If you crack this case,” McCarthy told the committee, “it will be the biggest espionage case in the history of this country.” He was willing, he said, to stand or fall on that.
In mid-February 1950, at about the time McCarthy’s reckless charges were first making headlines, Truman agreed to an exclusive interview with Arthur Krock of The New York Times, during which he impressed Krock as a man of exceptional inner calm and strength.
In an age of atomic energy, transmuted into a weapon which can destroy great cities and the best works of civilization, and in the shadow of a hydrogen detonant which could multiply many times that agent of destruction, a serene President of the United States sits in the White House with undiminished confidence in the triumph of humanity’s better nature and the progress of his own efforts to achieve an abiding peace.
Harry S. Truman, said Krock, might seem to many a controversial figure. But to those who had the chance to talk with him intimately, his faith in the future had a “luminous” quality.
He sits in the center of the troubled and frightened world…. But the penumbra of doubt and fear in which the American nation pursues its great and most perilous adventure…stops short of him. Visitors find him undaunted and sure that, whether in his time or thereafter, a way will be discovered to preserve the world from the destruction which to many seems unavoidable….
David Lilienthal, who came to the Oval Office on February 14 for a final farewell meeting with the President, described it later as “one of the happiest sessions I’ve ever had with him.”
“About these scientists,” Truman said, “we need men with great intellects, need their ideas. But we need to balance them with other kinds of people, too.”
Lilienthal, perhaps as much as anyone, knew the weight of the burdens Truman carried. Yet Truman looked “tip-top…his eye clear.” Studying him, listening to him talk, Lilienthal was amazed. As he later wrote, “My admiration and wonder at his relaxed way of looking at things, and his obvious good health…reached a new high.”
But his wife of thirty years knew differently, and to her alone, he portrayed himself differently. She grew increasingly concerned about his health, the stress the McCarthy attacks put on him. His headaches had returned. In mid-March Bess urged another retreat to Florida, to recover his strength. “You see everybody shoots at me, if not directly, then at some of the staff closest to me,” he wrote to her from Key West.
In the Senate, Republican Styles Bridges had now joined McCarthy and stepped up the attack. Truman had liked Bridges, long considered him a friend. John Snyder had become a target lately. Rumors were Snyder was drinking too much.
Caustic comments in the press about Harry Vaughan, the almost constant abuse of Dean Acheson, and belittling comments on his own performance, all that he seemed impervious to, in fact bothered Truman greatly and he was feeling not just a little sorry for himself.
The general trend of the pieces [he wrote to Bess] is that I’m a very small man in a very large place and when some one I trust joins the critical side—well it hurts. I’m much older and very tired and I need support as no man ever did.
What has made me so jittery—they started on Snyder and have almost broken him, then Vaughan, whose mental condition is very bad. Now they are after my top brain man in the Cabinet. The whole foreign policy is at stake just as we are on the road to a possible solution…. I’m telling you so you may understand how badly I need your help and support now.
McCarthy, he felt, was a temporary aberration, “a ballyhoo artist who has to cover up his shortcomings by wild charges.” Even so he had had enough. On March 30, midway through his Key West stay, Truman decided to speak out. By then, according to the polls, half the American people held a “favorable opinion” of the senator and thought he was helping the country. Truman’s own standing, by stark contrast, had plunged to 37 percent, nearly as low as in the spring of 1948.
He called a rare press conference on the lawn beside the Little White House, where with sunny skies overhead and a breeze stirring the palms, talk of the junior senator from Wisconsin seemed strangely incongruous. Looking well tanned and fit in a light linen suit and open shirt, Truman sat in a white wicker chair, with reporters gathered about him in a circle.
Did he expect Senator McCarthy to turn up any disloyalty in the State Department?
“I think,” he said with a hard look, “the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy.”
And there were others, he said—Wherry and Bridges. The Republicans had been searching in vain for an issue for the fall elections. They had tried “statism,” the “welfare state,” “socialism.” Some were even trying to dig up “that old malodorous dead horse called ‘isolationism.’” He was furious. This “fiasco” going on in the Senate, he said, jabbing a finger in the air, was an attempt to sabotage bipartisan foreign policy. It was a dangerous situation, and it had to be stopped. Dean Acheson, he added emphatically, would go down in history as one of the great secretaries of state. There was no question about that.
Was Owen Lattimore a Russian spy?
“Why of course not. It’s silly on the face of it.”
It was a dramatic moment, a performance, reporters thought, that equaled Franklin Roosevelt at his angry best.
Taft accused Truman of having libeled McCarthy. “Do you think that’s possible?” Truman responded, when a reporter raised the question at the next press conference, back in Washington.
To a gathering of the Federal Bar Association, he gave his assurance that no known instance of Communist subversion, or subversion of any kind, had gone uninvestigated by the FBI or as a result of his own Loyalty Program. “There is no area of American life in which the Communist Party is making headway, except maybe in the minds of some people….” That his own Loyalty Program might have contributed to the overall atmosphere that gave rise to McCarthy is a thought he seems not to have entertained—not then at least.
“I think our friend McCarthy will eventually get all that is coming to him. He has no sense of decency or honor,” Truman wrote to Owen Lattimore’s sister.
You can understand, I imagine, what the President has to stand—every day in the week he’s under a constant barrage of people who have no respect for the truth and whose objective is to belittle and discredit him. While they are not successful in these attacks they are never pleasant so I know just how you feel about the attack on your brother. The best thing to do is to face it and the truth will come out.
Yet nothing Truman or anyone else said seemed to diminish McCarthy or the fear he spread in the government and the nation. When Truman, who had first refused to turn security files over to the Tydings Committee as a matter of principle, decided to let Tydings and the committee come to the White House to look at the files of the eighty-one people accused by McCar
thy—in an effort to help Tydings discredit McCarthy and answer a Republican charge that he, Truman, was “covering up” evidence—it proved a bad decision. Now even the President appeared to be caving in to Joe McCarthy.
Tydings, in a state of near panic, was on the phone to the White House three and four times a day. Truman’s staff grew extremely worried and on edge. Truman told them to stay calm. McCarthy would destroy himself, he said. The man was a liar. He would be found out and expelled from the Senate. That was how these things worked, and that was how it should be handled. Truman wondered only if there was anyone in the Senate with backbone enough to do the job.
When, in the first week of June, the senator with backbone turned out to be a Republican and the Senate’s only woman, Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who declared she did not want to see the Republican Party “ride to victory on the four horsemen of calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry, and smear,” Truman told his staff she had done “a fine thing,” though he thought she should have been tougher still and more specific.
It was on a particularly glorious day that spring, on Sunday, April 9, 1950, with lilacs and azaleas blooming in profusion and the cherry blossoms coming full around the Tidal Basin, that Truman drafted a statement in his own hand that he planned to make public two years hence. April 11 marked the end of his fifth year in office, and he had decided not to run for another term.
In 1947, as a rebuke to the memory of Franklin Roosevelt and his four terms, the Republicans of the 80th Congress had passed the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution, an amendment Truman opposed, limiting presidents to two terms. With ratification by the states, it would become law in 1951. But since it had been worded not to include Truman, he was free to run again in 1952, as many if not most people assumed he would.
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