Harry Truman

by Margaret Truman

  In the next paragraph, my father added, “I think you will find . . . that the Russians will turn out to be the ‘foreign devils’ in China and that situation will help establish a Chinese Government that we can recognize and support.”

  On the day after Dad took his oath of office for the second term, Chiang Kai-shek resigned and handed what was left of his government over to General Li Tsung-jen. He was powerless to prevent the onrushing Communists from crossing the Yangtze and seizing south China. On May 5, Dad received a letter from him which, I think, says more about what really happened in China than any other document I have seen on the subject:

  General George C. Marshall, under the instructions from your good self, took up the difficult task of mediation in our conflict with the Chinese Communists, to which he devoted painstaking effort. All this work was unfortunately rendered fruitless by the lack of sincerity on the part of both the then government and the Chinese Communists.

  In spite of this, your country continued to extend its aid to our government. It is regrettable that, owing to the failure of our then government to make judicious use of this aid and to bring about appropriate political, economic and military reforms, your assistance has not produced the desired effect. To this failure is attributable the present predicament in which our country finds itself.

  In late 1948, the State Department professionals had urged Dad to issue a statement to the American people explaining the gross inadequacies and corruption of the Nationalist government. They were hoping to defend themselves and Dad from the wild accusations about China that were already being flung around by the “China First” politicians in Congress. From the point of view of domestic politics, it was shrewd advice. By taking the offensive on the subject, Dad might easily have saved himself a lot of abuse. As usual, however, he preferred to risk his domestic political reputation for the best interests of the United States abroad. He turned down the idea because it would have administered the coup de grâce to Chiang’s government.

  In the summer of 1949, with the Communists in complete control of China, this was no longer a consideration, and my father felt it was only just to himself and to Secretary of State Acheson to make a thorough explanation of what had happened in China to the American people. On August 5, Secretary of State Acheson issued the China White Paper, a massive document, which, with appendices, ran to over 1,000 pages. It detailed overwhelmingly reasons for the Communist victory which I have summarized here.

  The facts made the China-First Republican politicians look silly, and they responded with rage and a new determination to repeat their big lie until it became an article of Republican faith. Not love of China but hatred of Dad and his policies, and above all hatred of his stunning victory in 1948, was their motivation. They also stooped to mythmaking and invented a devil: Communists in the government. Here they received a priceless boost from the trial of Alger Hiss. The former State Department official, friend of Dean Acheson, adviser to President Roosevelt at Yalta, a man with impeccable credentials - Harvard law degree, clerk to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes - was tried for allegedly perjuring himself before the House Un-American Activities Committee by denying he had given state secrets to journalist Whittaker Chambers who was at that time a member of a Communist espionage ring.

  When the subject was first brought to my father’s attention, during the summer of 1948, he bluntly condemned the investigation as “a red herring.” He had long detested the methods of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he had no hesitation about blasting their claim that there was a Communist spy ring operating in the capital. He said the evidence for such a ring existed largely in the head of Congressman Karl Mundt, then acting chairman of the committee. All the evidence their investigation had produced was submitted to a grand jury, and no indictments had been forthcoming. In the interim, Whittaker Chambers had produced his astonishing hoard of secret documents on microfilm, hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin on his Maryland farm. Dad, with his dislike of the Un-American Activities Committee still foremost in his mind, had the following discussion with a reporter, in a post-election news conference.

  “Mr. President, do you still feel, as you did during the late summer, that this Congressional investigation has the aspects of a ‘red herring’?”

  “I do,” Dad said stubbornly.

  Another reporter asked, “Mr. President, are you at all interested in this charge of Mr. Nixon’s [Congressman Richard M. Nixon], that the Department of Justice proposes to indict only Chambers - or first Chambers, and thus destroy his usefulness?”

  “The Department of Justice will follow the law,” Dad said.

  Which, of course, is precisely what the Department did. Hiss was prosecuted for perjury, and he was found guilty, on January 25, 1950, after two of the longest, most bizarre trials in American history. Among those who had appeared as a character witness for him was Dean Acheson. Hiss’s brother, Donald, had been a partner in Acheson’s law firm. When reporters asked the Secretary of State what he thought of Hiss now, he replied: “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss,” and explained he was acting in accord with the twenty-fifth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew, beginning with verse thirty-four. (“I was hungry and you gave me food . . . a prisoner and you came to me.”) He immediately drove to the White House and told Dad what he had said. Dad calmly reminded him he was talking to an ex-vice president who had flown to the funeral of a friendless old man who had just been released from the penitentiary. He understood - and approved.

  The real villain, the specialist in gutter tactics, Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, did not come onstage until February 1950. Bipartisanship had collapsed - or at least sagged badly - and both the Senate and the House were acting as if they might renege on the solemnly signed and consented-to North Atlantic Treaty. It is difficult, even frightening, to predict what might have happened if grim news had not arrived from Europe. First came an economic shock - Great Britain, for two centuries the world’s keystone of financial stability, was devaluing the pound. Then a military shock. The Russians had exploded an atomic bomb.

  On September 3, 1949, an air force WB-29 weather reconnaissance plane on a patrol from Japan to Alaska was routinely exposing filter paper at 18,000 feet over the North Pacific east of the Kamchatka Peninsula. The crew suddenly noticed the paper, which was sensitive to radioactivity, was telling them there was an unusual amount of it in the air around them. A second filter paper, hastily exposed, produced an even higher radioactive count. Within hours, other planes were checking the air in different parts of the Pacific and reporting radioactivity as high as twenty times above normal. Within four days, the filter papers had been studied in our atomic laboratories and fission isotopes - proof of an atomic test - were found in them. My father was immediately informed.

  The news caused a kind of panic in the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission. They rushed to the White House and urged my father to issue an immediate statement, announcing the Russians had the bomb. J. Robert Oppenheimer was one of the most vehement in this pressure group. Seldom in his two terms as President did Dad’s basic inner calm show to better advantage. He simply refused to be stampeded into making a statement. The UN was meeting in New York, and the Russians were showing signs of being more cooperative than they had been in years. The world was still reeling from the British devaluation of the pound. Even though there was a strong possibility of a leak, he decided to take his time and think over exactly what kind of statement he should make. Not even a visit from David Lilienthal, who was flown down from his vacation house on Martha’s Vineyard, changed Dad’s mind. He thought about it for another two weeks and then issued the following careful statement:

  We have evidence that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR.

  Ever since atomic energy was first released by man, the eventual development of this new force by other nations was to be expected. This probability has always been taken into account by us.

  Nearl
y four years ago I pointed out that “scientific opinion appears to be practically unanimous that the essential theoretical knowledge upon which the discovery is based is already widely known. There is also substantial agreement that foreign research can come abreast of our present theoretical knowledge in time.”

  This recent development emphasizes once again, if indeed such emphasis were needed, the necessity for that truly effective, enforceable international control of atomic energy which this government and the large majority of the members of the United Nations support.

  The leadership my father displayed in this announcement - plus the grim import of the news - had a dramatic impact on Congress. The billion-dollar military assistance to our NATO allies was swiftly passed. But Dad, with the responsibility for the future security of the nation on his shoulders, was forced to look beyond this victory to one of his most difficult decisions. The speed with which Russia had become an atomic power meant they were in possession of much more information and nuclear expertise than our scientists had thought possible. The year 1952 was the date most of them had set for Russia’s first atomic explosion. Some had predicted 1955.

  This raised the grim possibility the Russians were perfectly capable of developing a new, more terrible weapon, which at this time was only being discussed in the laboratories - the H-bomb. The power of the hydrogen atom would be a hundred to a thousand times more destructive than the uranium atom. The debate over whether to create such a weapon split the Atomic Energy Commission and its leading scientists. The chairman, David Lilienthal, a man whom Dad liked, was opposed. So was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the A-bomb.

  My father appointed Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and Lilienthal to a special committee to study “Campbell,” the code name for the superweapon. Dad thought about this hard choice throughout the fall and early winter of 1949. At one point, David Lilienthal warned him that the Joint Atomic Energy Committee of Congress, led by Senator Brien McMahon, were working themselves into a frenzy over the problem and preparing to descend on the White House to blitz Dad into saying yes.

  “I don’t blitz easily,” Dad said with a hard smile.

  The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy was a constant problem to my father. He did his utmost to work with them as he would and did work with any other congressional committee. But they were dealing with the most sensitive, highly confidential subject in the government, and it was extremely difficult to decide how much they should be told because of the constant danger of security leaks. There is nothing a senator or a congressman loves more than a headline, and some of them tend to put headlines ahead of the best interests of their country. Early in November 1949, while my father was still thinking about the H-bomb and waiting for his special committee to report to him, Senator Edwin Johnson of Colorado blabbed the information about the H-bomb debate on a television show. Dad was furious and called in Chairman McMahon to give him an angry lecture. Senator Johnson replied by accusing David Lilienthal of trying to give away the secret of the H-bomb to Canada and Great Britain. Politics is really a lovely sport.

  Senator Johnson’s blunder added the glare of publicity to the other agonizing aspects of the decision on the H-bomb. Then came confidential news from England that made everyone in the White House wince. The British had discovered that Dr. Klaus Fuchs was part of a Communist spy ring that had been operating at Los Alamos during the creation of the atom bomb. The German-born Fuchs, who was a naturalized British citizen, had given the Communists crucial information which undoubtedly enabled Russia to achieve an atomic explosion three years ahead of schedule. It was the most dismaying possible development. Klaus Fuchs had stolen most of his information during the war years. But he had returned to the United States as recently as 1947 as part of a British team that attended a conference that discussed declassifying hitherto secret scientific documents on atomic research. My father and his aides could only shudder at the impact this news would have on the Communists-in-government crowd in Congress.

  On January 31, Secretary of State Acheson, Secretary of Defense Johnson, and Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Lilienthal met with my father in his office at 12:35. They informed him that, after long and careful deliberation, they had agreed we should launch a program to investigate the possibility of building an H-bomb. At the same time, they recommended a searching re-examination of our foreign policy and our strategic plans. Lilienthal, who had signed the agreement with reservations, made his doubts about the decision clear in a brief statement. He pointed out we could no longer rely on atomic weapons for the defense of the country. As a weapon, the H-bomb really made no sense, because it could achieve nothing but the annihilation of an enemy - not a reasonable or tolerable goal for any nation, but especially intolerable for a democracy.

  My father agreed with what Lilienthal was saying. “I’ve always believed that we should never use these weapons,” he said. “I don’t believe we ever will have to use them, but we have to go on making them because of the way the Russians are behaving. We have no other course.” Then, in a grimmer tone, he added that if Senator Johnson had kept his mouth shut, it might have been possible to examine the whole issue quietly, but now, so many people were in a furor about the possibility of Russia achieving such a weapon, he had no alternative but to go ahead.

  My father sat down and signed the already prepared statement for the press, announcing in the simplest possible terms the decision to pursue the superweapon. “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,” he said. As he signed the statement, he remarked: “I remember when I made the decision on Greece. Everybody on the National Security Council predicted the world would come to an end if we went ahead. But we did go ahead and the world didn’t come to an end. I think the same thing will happen here.”

  Two days later, the British Embassy reported Klaus Fuchs would be arraigned on February 3. My father looked grimly at the man who brought him the news, Admiral Sidney Souers, his chief of intelligence, and said: “Tie on your hat.”

  ON FEBRUARY 9, 1950, six days after the news of Klaus Fuchs’s treachery stunned the Western world and nineteen days after Alger Hiss was found guilty, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin addressed the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia. He held up a piece of paper on which he said was a list of 205 names of Communist party members in the State Department. The list had been given to the Secretary of State, declared the senator, yet these men were still in the State Department, “shaping policy.” From Wheeling, the senator flew to Salt Lake City, where he made a similar speech, and then to Reno, where he repeated his charges and wired the White House, demanding action. Ten days later, he talked until nearly midnight on the floor of the Senate, denouncing “eighty-one known Communist agents in the State Department,” one of whom was “now a speech writer in the White House.”

  This was absolute nonsense, of course, and my father did not take it seriously. The first time Senator McCarthy’s name was mentioned in a press conference, Dad curtly dismissed him. His reckless accusations seemed, at that time, simply one more attempt by the reactionaries in Congress to sabotage the Truman program.

  In his letter to Dr. Chaim Weizmann in late 1948, my father remarked, “It does not take long for bitter and resourceful opponents to regroup their forces after they have been shattered. You in Israel have already been confronted with that situation; and I expect to be all too soon.”

  The prediction came true, a few weeks after his second administration began. The reactionaries, an unimaginative lot, first tried the most obvious trick in the political book -smearing the President by finding corruption in his administration. Their target was Major General Harry Vaughan.

  General Vaughan had a unique ability to make Dad laugh. He has one of the quickest wits I have ever known, and a fine eye for the more absurd aspects of life. Mother sometimes took a dim view of his humor;
it was irrepressible, and nothing and no one was sacred. One day she wore a flowered hat to a luncheon with Senate wives, who were all similarly attired. General Vaughan remarked that they all looked like a “collection of well-tended graves.”

  Dad valued Harry Vaughan, not only for his humor but because he knew he was absolutely loyal to Harry S. Truman. He was also an efficient, intelligent liaison with a unique ability for putting people at ease. He handled many non-military chores, somewhat in the style of “Pa” Watson, President Roosevelt’s military aide. But Dad never gave General Vaughan the authority that Pa Watson possessed.

  When my father appointed General Eisenhower the chief of staff in 1946, he called in Harry Vaughan and said: “Harry, I called you in here because I wanted you and the General to have an absolutely clear understanding about how I wanted this to work. Whenever I want anything brought particularly to General Eisenhower’s attention, I will give it to you and you will give it to the General and call it to his attention.”

  Then my father turned to Ike and said: “General, whenever you want anything to come to my attention quickly without any loss of time, you send it to Harry and he will bring it in and give it safe hand to me.”