by Nancy Gibbs
Agriculture Secretary Clinton Anderson, who would be a crucial intermediary in the coming months, walked into a cabinet meeting and declared that no matter how much wheat American farmers produced, there would not be enough to meet U.S. commitments abroad. He called Hoover, who understood both the scope of the problem and the limits to how Truman could address it: the winter of 1946 was not an easy time to ask Americans to cut back their own consumption in order to free more food for export. With the war over, sacrifice no longer felt like service, but like suffering. People lined up to buy sugar and stockings and washing machines; as wartime price controls frayed, the threat of inflation grew while workers pressed for higher wages.
But Hoover didn’t believe in rationing and government control anyway. He was an evangelist for voluntarism: many people still remembered his leadership during the First World War, the “Hooverizing,” the Wheatless Wednesdays and Meatless Mondays that Hoover had organized as Wilson’s food administrator in 1917 to conserve food that could be sent abroad. Convince the president to launch such a voluntary conservation program, Hoover advised Anderson, which Truman promptly did. On February 6, Truman outlined a nine-point emergency food plan, including cutting U.S. whiskey and other grain alcohol production, limiting the use of grain to feed livestock, and extracting more flour from wheat, thus turning bread a little grayer.
Truman’s radio address came as a rattling shock. Most Americans knew that the job of feeding the world now fell to them—but most also thought they were doing a pretty good job. Now, without significant cutbacks to free up food to export, Europe faced disaster. A hundred million people were getting by on less than half what the average American ate: “More people face starvation and even actual death for want of food today than in any war year and perhaps more than in all the war years combined,” Truman declared.
Hoover immediately pitched in, warning of “the stern job ahead,” and urging Americans to heed their president, in a statement issued from his apartment at the Waldorf. But Truman needed more than cheerleading. Hoover was on a fishing trip in Florida in February when Anderson tracked him down. Would Hoover be willing to come immediately to Washington to chair an emergency citizens commission to raise awareness and promote conservation? They’d be willing to send a special plane, land or amphibious, to fetch him.
And there was some flattery: Anderson said that Hoover had given him better advice than anyone else the previous summer, and everything he’d warned about had come true. Lest Hoover worry about a trap, Anderson preemptively assured him that this “was not a politically cooked up arrangement.”
Hoover sent back a telegram, suggesting he was ready to help, but not to waste his time. A citizens commission can’t do enough, he argued: he had told Truman last May that all control over food should be placed in the agriculture secretary’s hands. “I am advised that this was not done,” Hoover complained to Anderson. “It should be done now.” He then walked Anderson through the next steps, including the need for a global assessment of food needs and surpluses, a national conservation plan, and coordination of the entire food industry. Anderson listened carefully—and Truman acted on the advice.
The next day, February 27, 1946, Truman sent a telegram to a handful of the most influential men and women in the country: Time-Life founder Henry Luce, Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer, pollster George Gallup, the chairman of General Foods, and the presidents of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the League of Women Voters.
“I am asking you and a very few other public spirited citizens to meet in the East Wing of the White House at three o’clock, Friday afternoon, March first,” Truman wrote, and then added a sweetener: “Ex-President Hoover has accepted my invitation and will be there. I count on your support.” Truman didn’t care that his mail ran two to one against having anything to do with “that contemptible character.” He called this “the most important meeting, I think, we have held in the White House since I have been the President.”
Hoover arrived early to meet privately with Truman, before the full committee gathered. They talked about the gap in Anderson’s estimates of food supply and demand, with Hoover noting that the numbers were “appallingly far apart, that if the figures were right, the world was faced with a gigantic catastrophe.” The best they could hope was to minimize the loss of life. “I have a job for you that nobody else in this country can do,” Truman told him. Somehow they needed to find a way to get the food from the people that had it to the ones that needed it—and come up with eleven million extra tons of cereal to close the gap. “You know more about feeding nations and people than anybody in the world,” Truman said. Take my plane, he offered, pick a staff, take whatever time you need but go see what we can do.
Recalling the request later, Hoover claimed that “I accepted with reluctance, since I was 71 years old and my time was committed to administer several educational, scientific and charitable institutions at home.” But Hoover, while often shy, was seldom modest, and he didn’t think anyone else was up to the job. Someone with stature needed to meet with the top people, face-to-face, as well as talk to the local people and press. Who better than a former president, who was already a hero to the hungry?
When the full committee met with Truman, Hoover, and key cabinet members later that day, it called for a 25 percent cut in wheat consumption, and cuts in fat consumption as well, long enough to see Europe through to the next harvest. “The fate of civilization,” Hoover declared when the meeting adjourned, “depends on whether the American people are willing to make a sacrifice for the next four months, if they are willing to save the world from chaos.” He stressed again the need for a central food czar to unblock bottlenecks and end the feeding of precious grains to livestock rather than starving people. But once again, he respected Truman’s presidential prerogatives. Asked by reporters how hard he had pressed his idea of a food administrator on Truman, he demurred. “I make it a practice to never say what I say to a president.” And everyone smiled.
Four days after Hoover and Truman met at the White House, Truman was back in his home state with Winston Churchill, who shook the very foundations of the postwar peace with the speech he gave in Fulton, Missouri. He too warned of Europe’s condition: “None can compute what has been called ‘the unestimated sum of human pain.’” But hunger was not the only threat. “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent,” Churchill warned, and certainly underlying Hoover’s mission was a determination not to let that Soviet sphere grow any larger because of a complete breakdown of order among desperate people.
Feeding them was important. Winning their allegiance even more so. The next day, the New York Times ran a pointed editorial tying the two together. “The United States has lost some popularity abroad since VE and VJ days. It is pleasant to think that by a neighborly act now we can recover much of it.” Hoover’s trip could serve many useful purposes, the paper suggested. “The ‘American Way’ will have an advantage over other and different ‘ways’ if it obviously stands for food for the hungry. Mr. Hoover taking up where he left off so long ago is a splendid argument for Americanism.”
Herbert Hoover had become Truman’s first weapon in the Cold War.
The Fifty-Thousand-Mile Mission
Before leaving, Hoover delivered a national radio address, invoking America’s moral duty to rise to the occasion. Half a billion people were at risk, and the available food surpluses would only solve half the problem; creativity and conservation would have to do the rest. If your neighbor were starving, he argued, you would feed them: “Could you not imagine one of these helpless women or children as an invisible guest at your table?”
After a week of consultations, on Sunday, March 17, Hoover and his team took off from LaGuardia Airport aboard an Army C-54 nicknamed the “Faithful Cow,” because of the mooing noise it made on takeoff and landing. The trip would cover twenty-two countries in fifty-seven days. What he saw in the weeks that followed haun
ted him for years. Touring Warsaw, where nine of ten houses had been destroyed, he observed that “the city was a horror of vengeance.” He visited slums and soup kitchens and orphanages; “we are weary of dying,” one woman told him. When the team went to Rome to enlist the pope’s help, one member noted that even the luxury hotel menu was “just sufficient for a robust canary.”
It was the ultimate puzzle, collecting the data and then putting the pieces together both to increase the supply of available food and to direct it to where it was needed most. In Norway, Hoover learned that the 200,000 tons of surplus fish could more than double if only there were more salt to preserve it; so he arranged through American officials in Germany to get the needed salt supply.
“He dug out a tremendous amount of stored food and black market supplies that we probably would have missed had we not had his knowledge, background, understanding and acquaintance with the communities themselves,” observed Treasury Secretary John Snyder, recalling Hoover’s relentless crusade. “Because of his experience and because of his stature, [it] worked out to our great advantage, as we knew the tricks that the citizens and the governments had worked in the past.”
Still, Truman was coming to the realization that Hoover was not just a useful stand-in overseas; if played right, he could help Truman even more at home. As Hoover headed to Cairo in mid-April, Truman had lunch with Anderson and Famine Emergency Committee head Chester Davis, and decided he wanted to bring Hoover back home to make speeches and raise awareness. The president sent a cable the next day. “An urgent need has developed in this country to bring forcibly and dramatically to public attention,” Truman wrote, “as a spur to the food-for-famine-effort, the facts about conditions in Europe which your visit and inquiries have brought to light.”
Hoover pushed back hard. For one thing, people in India, China, and Japan would be very disappointed, at some cost to goodwill, if he postponed his trip. But he proposed something more radical and unprecedented: the first ever club radio broadcast in which a sitting president facing multiple pressures at home enlisted a former president to be his partner and enhance his clout. And so they prepared a joint message delivered from Truman in the White House and then Hoover in Cairo, which would air on all four networks on the night of April 19.
Truman went first: Hoover’s reports from the front lines, Truman said, “have driven home again and again the desperate plight of the people over there. . . . Millions will surely die unless we eat less.” He asked Americans to go on a European “austerity” diet two days a week. And in a tacit admission that voluntary conservation would not be enough, he added some muscle to the effort. That night Anderson announced a reduction of wheat used by bakers, a huge government purchase of oats for export, and an extra 30-cent bonus above the ceiling for every bushel of wheat delivered before May 25.
It was Hoover’s turn next. Where Truman was practical, Hoover was preacherly, searching for language to scrape the conscience. Though he had been sounding the alarms for years, Hoover sensed that this was the first time people were really paying attention. Tens of millions tuned in, by far the largest audience he’d had since leaving the White House. He argued the strategic imperative and for personal duty. “The saving of these human lives is far more than an economic necessity to the recovery of the world,” he said. It was “a part of the moral and spiritual reconstruction of the world.”
By this time Hoover was acting not only as Truman’s ambassador and proxy; he was his intelligence officer abroad and his public relations manager at home. A few days later he warned Truman of “a very active propaganda” campaign in various European countries to blame the United States for any failure in food supplies. He included a cartoon from Britain’s Punch accusing the United States of greed and selfishness. Truman sent back an eyes-only cable, thanking him for the heads-up, and for all Hoover was doing to see that America got credit for her efforts. “I fully recognize the personal sacrifice and risk which you have taken in taking such a hazardous journey,” Truman wrote, “but the excellent results which you have obtained will be of inestimable value to this country.”
Selling Sacrifice
When the two presidents met again in person, their fourth encounter in a year, they had more on their minds than hunger. Most of their conversation was about the Soviets; Truman complained about how hard they were to deal with. “I told him,” Hoover recorded in his notes, “that there was only one method of treating this present group of Russians and that that was with a truculent spirit.” That was the only language they would understand. Hoover even drafted a telegram for Truman to send to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, urging that the Soviets increase their food aid to Finland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia to help ease the crisis.
Then Hoover was back on the radio with a passionate sermon unlike any he had ever managed as president. “Of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the one named War has gone—at least for a while,” he said. “But Famine, Pestilence and Death are still charging over the earth. Hunger is a silent visitor who comes like a shadow. He sits beside every anxious mother three times each day. He brings not alone suffering and sorrow, but fear and terror. He carries disorder and the paralysis of government, and even its downfall. He is more destructive than armies, not only in human life but in morals. All of the values of right living melt before his invasions, and every gain of civilization crumbles.”
There was one more chance to turn the corner: but that involved getting Latin America, especially Argentina, to step up its food exports. And that made for some delicate diplomacy, not just with the new president, Juan Perón, but among Truman, Hoover, and the U.S. State Department.
Regarding the idea of sending Hoover to Latin America next, Anderson warned Truman that “the State Department will protest.” Professional diplomats tended not to welcome freelancers, even when they are former presidents. To which Truman replied, “we won’t give them a chance. I will announce it at once.” The United States had worked hard to prevent Perón’s ascension; as a result, relations with Argentina were so bitter, Hoover wrote in his diary, that the effort could be a total waste of time. But the stakes—possibly adding a million tons of food—were too high not to try.
So this was Hoover’s next mission for Truman, in June of 1946. It was not a happy trip, through eleven countries in twenty-five days. In Venezuela, he fell in a bathtub and broke several ribs. In Argentina he attended a state dinner and was seated 196th out of 219 guests: but “I was resolved . . . to eat even Argentine dirt if I could get the 1.6 million tons.”
Perón had been in office all of forty-eight hours when Hoover landed in Buenos Aires. The U.S. embassy had served as a kind of opposition headquarters during the election campaign, in a “total war” against Perón, and the U.S. ambassador stalled in any effort to set up a meeting for Hoover. But the Mexican ambassador pitched in and the pope had already laid the groundwork. Hoover had two meetings with Perón, who was “most cordial.” Perón even attributed the size of his victory to the American opposition: it allowed him, he told Hoover, to rally his countrymen to “fight off tyranny of the Colossus of the North.” Perón’s wife, Eva, Hoover observed, had the brains of Eleanor Roosevelt and the looks of Hedy Lamarr.
Perón complained that even ten months after the war’s end, the United States had not lifted its wartime trade restrictions, which were driving up Argentine unemployment. Plus, Argentina’s gold reserves were still held frozen in New York’s Federal Reserve Bank. Could Hoover do anything about this?
His fight was not with the people of Europe, Perón added, and issued an executive order to release more grain within a matter of weeks. Hoover kept his promise as well: he met with Truman as soon as he got back to Washington and told him about the gold seizure and trade restraints. As Hoover remembered it, Truman said he couldn’t believe this was true, picked up the phone, and called the State Department.
“I heard only one side of the conversation,” Hoover recalled, “but that was sufficient.” The p
resident ordered the trade barriers lifted and the gold released. Hoover asked if he could let Perón know, “as it would relieve the strain between the United States and the Argentine. Mr. Truman agreed, and I sent a cordial telegram to President Perón.”
In barely a year Truman and Hoover had gone from total strangers and political foes to trusted teammates at home and abroad, in public and private. Together they broke through the red tape, defied the bureaucrats, wooed the dictators, moved a mountain or two. The first year of Truman’s presidency was played for the very highest stakes—and it was Hoover who ensured his victory. By the end of that month, Truman could announce that America had shipped five and a half million tons of grain, thereby keeping the nation’s promise and forestalling a humanitarian disaster.
“Every molecule in my body yells at me that it is tired,” Hoover told a friend. “I am going away for a rest.”
“Yours was a real service for humanity,” Truman wrote privately to Hoover as the year came to an end. By now the two had battled enough common enemies to have seeded something like a friendship. “I know that I can count upon your cooperation if developments at any time in the future make it necessary for me to call upon you again.”
2
“Our Exclusive Trade Union”
—HERBERT HOOVER
Together Truman and Hoover prevented a humanitarian catastrophe. Now all that remained was preventing another war.
It was already clear that the Soviets and the Americans held very different visions of the future of Europe and the balance of power. At a time when Americans wanted nothing more than to retreat, recover, rebuild, and reject any further involvement in the continent that kept sucking the United States into wretched wars, Truman understood that there was no going back. This was now the American Century, and America would have to lead.