by Jill Lepore
Dear Senator:
Please vote against all Compulsory Health Insurance Bills pending before the Legislature. We have enough regimentation in this country now. Certainly we don’t want to be forced to go to “A State doctor,” or to pay for such a doctor whether we use him or not. That system was born in Germany—and is part and parcel of what our boys are fighting overseas. Let’s not adopt it here.28
When Warren’s bill failed to pass by just one vote, he blamed Whitaker and Baxter. “They stormed the Legislature with their invective,” he complained, “and my bill was not even accorded a decent burial.”29 It was the greatest legislative victory at the hands of admen the country had ever seen. It would not be the last.
II.
RICHARD MILHOUS NIXON counted his resentments the way other men count their conquests. Born in the sage-and-cactus town of Yorba Linda, California, in 1913, he’d been a nervous kid, a whip-smart striver. His family moved to Whittier, where his father ran a grocery store out of an abandoned church. Nixon went to Whittier College, working to pay his way, resenting that he didn’t have the money to go somewhere else. He had wavy black hair; small, dark eyes; and heavy, brooding eyebrows. An ace debater, he’d gone after college to Duke Law School, resented all the Wall Street law firms that refused to hire him when he finished, and returned to Whittier. He went away again, to serve in the navy in the South Pacific. And when he got back, serious and strenuously intelligent Lieutenant Commander Nixon, thirty-two, was recruited by a group of California bankers and oilmen to try to defeat five-term Democratic incumbent Jerry Voorhis for a seat in the House. The man from Whittier wanted to go to Washington.
Voorhis, a product of Hotchkiss and Yale and a veteran of Upton Sinclair’s EPIC campaign, was a New Dealer who’d first been elected to Congress in 1936, but, ten years later, the New Deal was old news. The midterm elections during Truman’s first term—and the fate of his legislative agenda—were tied to heightening tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Nixon in California was only one in a small battalion of younger men, mainly ex-servicemen, who ran for office in 1946, the nation’s first Cold Warriors. In Massachusetts, another veteran of the war in the Pacific, twenty-nine-year-old John F. Kennedy, ran for a House seat from the Eleventh District. But, unlike Nixon, he’d been readied for that seat from the cradle.
Kennedy, born to wealth and groomed at Choate and Harvard, represented everything Nixon detested: all that Nixon had fought for, by tooth and claw, had been handed to Kennedy, on a platter decorated with a doily. But both Nixon and Kennedy were powerfully shaped by the rising conflict with the Soviet Union, and both understood domestic affairs through the lens of foreign policy. After Stalin broke the promise he’d made at Yalta to allow Poland “free and unfettered elections,” it had become clear that he was ruthless, even if the West had, as yet, little knowledge of the purges with which he was overseeing the murder of millions of people. Inside the Truman administration, a conviction grew that the Soviet regime was ideologically and militarily relentless. In February 1946, George Kennan, an American diplomat in Moscow, sent the State Department an 8,000-word telegram in which he reported that the Soviets were resolute in their determination to battle the West in an epic confrontation between capitalism and communism. “We have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure,” Kennan wrote. “This political force has complete power of disposition over energies of one of world’s greatest peoples and resources of world’s richest national territory, and is borne along by deep and powerful currents of Russian nationalism.” Two weeks later, Winston Churchill, speaking in Truman’s home state of Missouri, warned of an “iron curtain” falling across Europe.30
The postwar peace had been fleeting. As keenly as Roosevelt and Churchill had wanted to avoid repeating the mistakes of the peace made at the end of the First World War, political instability had inevitably trailed behind the devastation of the Second World War. The Soviet Union’s losses had been staggering: twenty-seven million Russians died, ninety times as many casualties as were suffered by Americans. Much of Europe and Asia had been ravaged. From ashes and ruins and graveyards, new regimes gathered. In Latin America, Africa, and South Asia, nations and peoples that had been colonized by European powers, began to fight to secure their independence. They meant to choose their own political and economic arrangements. But, in a newly bipolar world, that generally meant choosing between democracy and authoritarianism, between capitalism and communism, between the influence of the United States or the influence of the USSR.31
“At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life,” Truman said. He conceived of a choice between freedom and oppression. Much about this conception derived from the history of the United States, a refiguring of the struggle between “freedom” and “slavery” that had divided nineteenth-century America into “free states” and “slave states” and during which opponents of slavery had sought to “contain” it by refusing to admit “slave states” into the Union. In the late 1940s, Americans began applying this rhetoric internationally, pursuing a policy of containing communism while defending the “free world.”32
The same rhetoric, of course, infused domestic politics. Republicans characterized the 1946 midterm elections as involving a stark choice: “Americanism vs. Communism.” In California, scrappy Richard Nixon defeated the diffident Voorhis by debating him on stage a half-dozen times, but especially by painting him as weak on communism and slaughtering him with innuendo and smear. Nixon adopted, in his first campaign, his signature tactic: making false claims and then taking umbrage when his opponent impugned his integrity. Voorhis was blindsided. “Every time that I would say that something wasn’t true,” he recalled, “the response was always ‘Voorhis is using unfair tactics by accusing Dick Nixon of lying.’” But Nixon, the lunch-bucket candidate, also exploited voters’ unease with a distant government run by Ivy League–educated bureaucrats; he found it took only the merest of gestures to convince voters that there was something un-American about people like Voorhis, people like them. His campaign motto: “Richard Nixon is one of us.”33
In November 1946, the GOP won both the House and Senate for the first time since 1932. The few Democrats who were elected, like Kennedy in Massachusetts, had sounded the same themes as Nixon: the United States was soft on communism. As freshmen congressmen, Kennedy and Nixon struck up an unlikely friendship while serving together on the House Education and Labor Committee. Nixon and his fellow Republicans supported a proposed Taft-Hartley Act, regulating the unions and prohibiting certain kinds of strikes and boycotts—an attempt to rein in the power of unions, whose membership had surged before the war, from three million in 1933 to more than ten million in 1941. After Pearl Harbor, the AFL and the CIO had promised to abstain from striking for the duration of the conflict and agreed to wage limits. As soon as the war ended, though, the strikes began. Some five million workers walked out in 1946 alone. Truman opposed Taft-Hartley, and, when Congress passed it, Truman vetoed it. Republicans in Congress began lining up votes for an override. Nixon and Kennedy went to a steel town in western Pennsylvania to debate the question before an audience of union leaders and businessmen. Each man admired the other’s style. On the train back to Washington, they shared a sleeping car. Kennedy’s halfhearted objections would, in any case, hold no sway against Republicans who succeeded in depicting unionism as creeping communism. Congress overrode the president’s veto.34
On foreign policy, Truman began to move to the right. Disavowing the legacy of American isolationism, he pledged that the nation would aid any besieged democracy. The immediate cause of this commitment was Britain’s decision to stop providing aid to Greece and Turkey, which were st
ruggling against communism. In March of 1947, the president announced what came to be called the Truman Doctrine: the United States would “support free peoples who are resisting subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” (Truman aides later said that the president himself was unpersuaded by the growing fear of communism but was instead concerned about his chances for reelection. “The President didn’t attach fundamental importance to the so-called Communist scare,” one said. “He thought it was a lot of baloney.”) He also urged passage of the Marshall Plan, which provided billions of dollars in aid for rebuilding Western Europe. The Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, the president liked to say, were “two halves of the same walnut.” Abroad, the United States would provide aid; at home, it would root out suspected communists. Coining a phrase, the financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch in April 1947 said in a speech in South Carolina, “We are today in the midst of a cold war.”35
Instead of a welfare state, the United States built a national security state. A peace dividend expected after the Allied victory in 1945 never came; instead came the fight to contain communism, unprecedented military spending, and a new military bureaucracy. During Senate hearings on the future of the national defense, military contractors including Lockheed, which had been an object of congressional investigation in the merchants-of-death era of the 1930s and had built tens of thousands of aircraft during the Second World War, argued that the nation required “adequate, continuous, and permanent” funding for military production, pressing not only for military expansion but also for federal government subsidies.36
In 1940, when Roosevelt pledged to make the United States an “arsenal of democracy,” he meant wartime production. A central political question of postwar American politics would become whether the arsenal was, in fact, compatible with democracy.
After the war, the United States committed itself to military supremacy in peacetime, not only through weapons manufacture and an expanded military but through new institutions. In 1946, the standing committees on military and naval affairs combined to become the Armed Services Committee. The 1947 National Security Act established the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency; created the position of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and made the War Department, now housed for the first time in a building of its own, into the Department of Defense.
In this political climate, the “one world” vision of atomic scientists, along with the idea of civilian, international control of atomic power, faded fast. Henry Stimson urged the sharing of atomic secrets. “The chief lesson I have learned in a long life,” he said, “is the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him; and the surest way you can make a man untrustworthy is to distrust him and to show your distrust.” Truman disagreed. Atomic secrets were to be kept secret, and the apparatus of espionage was to be deployed to ferret out scientists who might dissent from that view.37
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists began publishing a Doomsday Clock, an assessment of the time left before the world would be annihilated in an atomic war. In 1947, they set the clock at seven minutes before midnight. Kennan, in a top secret memo to Truman, warned that to use an atomic or hydrogen bomb would be to turn back time. These weapons, Kennan argued, “reach backward beyond the frontiers of western civilization”; “they cannot really be reconciled with a political purpose directed to shaping, rather than destroying, the lives of the adversary”; “they fail to take into account the ultimate responsibility of men for one another.”38
No caution slowed the development of the weapons program, and Soviet aggression and espionage, along with events in China, aided the case for national security and undercut the argument of anyone who attempted to oppose the military buildup. With every step of communist advance, the United States sought out new alliances, strengthened its defenses, and increased military spending. In 1948, the Soviet-supported Communist Party in Czechoslovakia staged a coup, the Soviets blockaded Berlin, Truman sent in support by air, and Congress passed a peacetime draft. The next year, the United States signed the North Atlantic Treaty, joining with Western Europe in a military alliance to establish, in NATO, a unified front against the USSR and any further Soviet aggression. Months later, the USSR tested its first atomic bomb and Chinese communists won a civil war. In December 1949, Mao Zedong, the chairman of China’s Communist Party, visited Moscow to form an alliance with Stalin; in January, Klaus Fuchs, a German émigré scientist who had worked on the Manhattan Project confessed that he was, in fact, a Soviet spy. Between 1949 and 1951, U.S. military spending tripled.39
The new spending restructured the American economy, nowhere more than in the South. By the middle of the 1950s, military spending made up close to three-quarters of the federal budget. A disproportionate amount of this spending went to southern states. The social welfare state hadn’t saved the South from its long economic decline, but the national security state did. Southern politicians courted federal government contracts for defense plants, research facilities, highways, and airports. The New South led the nation in aerospace and electronics. “Our economy is no longer agricultural,” the southern writer William Faulkner observed. “Our economy is the Federal Government.”40
Nixon staked his political future on becoming an instrument of the national security state. Keen to make a name for himself by ferreting out communist subversives, he gained a coveted spot on the House Un-American Activities Committee, where his early contributions included inviting the testimony of the actor Ronald Reagan, head of the Screen Actors Guild, a Californian two years Nixon’s junior. But Nixon’s real chance came when the committee sought the testimony of Time magazine senior editor and noted anticommunist Whittaker Chambers.
On August 3, 1948, Chambers, forty-seven, told the committee that, in the 1930s, he’d been a communist. Time, pressured to fire Chambers, refused, and published this statement: “TIME was fully aware of Chambers’ political background, believed in his conversion, and has never since had reason to doubt it.” But if Chambers’s past was no real surprise, his testimony nevertheless contained a bombshell: Chambers named as a fellow communist the distinguished veteran of the U.S. State Department, former general secretary of a United Nations organizing conference, and now president of the widely respected Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, forty-three-year-old Alger Hiss—news that, by the next morning, was splashed across the front of every newspaper in the country.
Hiss appeared before the committee on August 25 in a televised congressional hearing. He deftly denied the charges and seemed likely to be exonerated, especially after Chambers, who came across as unstable, vengeful, and possibly unhinged, admitted that he had been a Soviet spy (at that point, Time publisher Henry Luce accepted his resignation). Chambers having presented no evidence to support his charges against Hiss, the committee was inclined to let it pass—all but Nixon, who seemed to hold a particular animus for Hiss.41 Rumor had it that in a closed session, not seen on television, Nixon had asked Hiss to name his alma mater.
“Johns Hopkins and Harvard,” Hiss answered, and then added dryly, “And I believe your college is Whittier?”42
Nixon, who never forgave an Ivy League snub, began an exhaustive investigation, determined to catch his prey, the Sherlock Holmes to Hiss’s Professor Moriarty. Meanwhile, the press and the public forgot about Hiss and turned to the upcoming election, however unexciting it appeared. Hardly anyone expected Truman to win his first full term in 1948 against the Republican presidential nominee, Thomas Dewey, governor of New York. Few Americans were excited about either candidate, but Truman’s loss seemed all but inevitable. “We wish Mr. Dewey well without too much enthusiasm,” Reinhold Niebuhr said days before the election, “and look to Mr. Truman’s defeat without too much regret.”43
Truman had accomplished little of his domestic agenda, with one exception, which had the effect of alienating him from his own party: he had ordered the desegregation of the military. Aside from that, a Repu
blican-controlled Congress had stymied nearly all of his legislative initiatives, including proposed labor reforms. Truman was so weak a candidate that two other Democrats ran against him on third-party tickets. Henry Wallace ran to Truman’s left, as the nominee of the Progressive Party. The New Republic ran an editorial with the headline TRUMAN SHOULD QUIT.44 At the Democratic convention in Philadelphia that summer, segregationists bolted: the entire Mississippi delegation and thirteen members of the Alabama delegation walked out, protesting Truman’s stand on civil rights. These southerners, known as Dixiecrats, formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party and ran a candidate to Truman’s right. They held a nominating convention in Birmingham during which Frank M. Dixon, a former governor of Alabama, said that Truman’s civil rights programs would “reduce us to the status of a mongrel, inferior race, mixed in blood, our Anglo-Saxon heritage a mockery.” The Dixiecrat platform rested on this statement: “We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race.” As its candidate, the States’ Rights Party nominated South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond.45
Waving aside the challenges from Wallace and Thurmond, Truman campaigned vigorously against Dewey, running on his chief campaign pledge: a national health insurance plan. Dewey, on the other hand, proved about as good a campaigner as a pail of paint. From Kentucky, the Louisville Courier-Journal complained, “No presidential candidate in the future will be so inept that four of his major speeches can be boiled down to these historic four sentences. Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. Our future lies ahead.”46
Truman might have felt that the crowds were rallying to him, but every major polling organization predicted that Dewey would defeat him. Truman liked to mock leaders who paid attention to polls. “I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he’d taken a poll in Egypt,” he said. “What would Jesus Christ have preached if he’d taken a poll in Israel?”47 The week before Election Day, George Gallup issued a statement: “We have never claimed infallibility, but next Tuesday the whole world will be able to see down to the last percentage point how good we are.”48 Gallup predicted that Truman would lose. The Chicago Tribune, crippled by a strike of typesetters, went to press with the headline DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. A victorious Truman was caught on camera two days later, holding up the paper and wearing a grin as wide as the Mississippi River.