by Nancy Gibbs
Selling that idea to the American people, however, much less a Republican Congress, would take energy, ingenuity, luck, and the help of the kind of super-lobbyist that only the club can provide.
What Truman set out to do was way too ambitious to do on his own—even if he hadn’t run into hard political times. When the war ended, Truman’s approval rating topped 80 percent; toward the end of 1946, it sank to 32 percent. He was called stupid, vulgar, late for cabinet meetings because he woke up stiff in his joints from trying to put his foot in his mouth. In the 1946 midterm elections, Democratic candidates asked him not to campaign for them; some ran recordings of old Roosevelt speeches at rallies. His party was crushed anyway, leaving Congress in Republican hands for the first time in sixteen years.
The German Problem
Truman’s immediate challenge at the start of 1947 was what to do about Germany, a flashpoint since the war ended. Do we keep it weak, a nice pastoral state that would never pose a threat again? Or was Germany fated to be the economic engine of Europe, in which case the sooner it was back on its feet, the better for everyone? Truman and Hoover agreed on the latter course; now the trick was persuading a tightwad Republican Congress to go along with a massive German aid program.
Truman had his own reasons for needing the emissary to be someone of Hoover’s international stature and domestic political clout, rather than some anonymous bureaucrat or diplomat. The president’s political motives were transparent even at the time: “President Hopes Investigator’s Findings Will Impress Republicans in Congress” read the headline the next day. Truman was looking for $300 million; if Hoover came back affirming that the U.S. approach was sound, the odds were much better that he’d get it. Of course, if Hoover came back from a third overseas mission rejecting Truman’s priorities, the president would have even bigger problems. It was a measure of his growing trust in Hoover that he was willing to run the risk.
By now there were elements in the administration that were actively conspiring to undercut the club’s clout. Sending Hoover back to Europe as a super-ambassador ruffled feathers in the War Department and raised “serious misgivings among career diplomats,” as the New York Times put it. German economic unification was supposed to be high on the agenda for incoming Secretary of State George Marshall, who was soon to attend the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers to discuss final peace terms for Germany and Austria. Calling Hoover in, the sources said, was “puzzling to us who know how delicate the problem is at this stage.” Germany was suffering a terrible winter, with temperatures in Berlin falling to zero, people dying of cold, and too little food or fuel or basic goods, and Hoover’s view was that Germany needed to begin supporting itself. But the State Department believed that making Germany anything other than a ward of the West would require rewriting the rules of Potsdam, which kept German industry so weak that waging future wars would be impossible. “I was not in a particularly conciliatory mood when I responded to the call to Washington to talk with the President,” Hoover recalled, but he went anyway. He made sure to meet with Republican leaders on the Hill before heading to the White House; some members later admitted that while they wanted to support Truman’s foreign policy, in the honored tradition of politics stopping at the water’s edge, they would welcome some political cover. “If the views expressed by Mr. Hoover in his report happened to coincide with those of the President,” reported the Times, the Republican lawmakers “would then vote their convictions without any liability for following the Administration’s program.”
When Hoover reached the White House, Truman referred to the critical newspaper leaks “with considerable indignation,” as Hoover told it. At one point Hoover actually sat at Truman’s desk and wrote out, in pencil, his view of the mission, just so there would be no misunderstanding. He agreed to undertake a “long-range study” of German recovery, with a guarantee of complete freedom, though Truman warned him about “some of my prima donnas in the State Department.”
Hoover set off on February 2 for a three-week mission, and this was no junket. Now seventy-two, he worked fifteen-hour days in unheated government buildings, where he sat wrapped in overcoats and blankets. He suffered a series of bad colds, and a rapid descent into Newfoundland in the unpressurized DC-4 ruptured his eardrum and damaged his hearing permanently. Food was once again terribly scarce; among his initiatives was the creation of canteens and soup kitchens across Germany, drawing on surplus Army rations, to give 3.5 million schoolchildren a hot meal at midday.
Upon his return, he reported to Truman of the grinding suffering Germany faced. He spent the next day talking with cabinet officials, including a two-hour meeting with Secretary of State Marshall. He testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee and had lunch with twenty-five lawmakers.
Back in New York, Hoover wrote up his report on Austria, and arranged to meet with Truman again. Upon reading it, the president sat down to write a note of thanks. “I want to express to you again my very high appreciation for your willingness to undertake these two surveys for the Secretary of War and me,” Truman wrote to Hoover. “You have made a very decided contribution to the situation in Germany and Austria and I am sure that it will have a bearing on the conference in Moscow.” He had all the more reason to be grateful, since he had just invited key lawmakers to a secret White House meeting to prepare them for news that Britain, its economy on life support, could no longer be responsible for saving Greece and Turkey. That job would fall either to the United States—or the Soviets. What would come to be known as the Truman Doctrine would decide which. No longer could the United States sit back safely on her side of the ocean and let Europe sort out her own affairs.
On Wednesday, March 12, Truman and Hoover met in the morning; Hoover declined the job of overseer of American relief, but stressed again the importance of controls on how aid money would be used. Afterward Truman headed to the Hill—where he proceeded to lay out an entirely new framework for the use of American aid and power. He asked for $400 million in aid to Greece and Turkey, arguing that coercion and intimidation of free people by rising totalitarian regimes undermined world peace. “I believe it must be the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” he declared.
The stunned lawmakers seemed “somewhat bewildered,” reporters observed, as they “saw their country’s foreign policy undergo radical change in the space of twenty one minutes.” There was evidence of “a congressional storm of great dimensions in the making.” Republicans in particular were in no mood to write a Democratic president a blank check to remake the world in America’s image.
So in this crusade, the hardheaded Hoover was an essential ally. He testified all through the spring on the importance of American aid—especially if administered with safeguards against misuse and constructed around the premise that it would eventually be paid back.
He arranged to have breakfast with ten Republican lawmakers, but told his friend Rickard he would not accept Truman’s offer to stay at Blair House “as [it] will not provide independence he desires; suggests that Blair House may be wired.” Hoover was working both sides in what he believed to be the national interest: he didn’t trust Truman’s bleeding-heart profligacy or the Republicans’ reflexive isolationism. As the bill finally took shape, it did incorporate many of Hoover’s cost-control suggestions. And so from the foundations he and Truman laid together arose the great edifice of American statesmanship that was the Marshall Plan. Once again, Truman had every reason to be very grateful for his surprising—and therefore especially influential—ally.
Over the course of that year of 1947, Truman offered a series of olive branches to his proud partner. In April he signed a congressional resolution restoring the name of the Hoover Dam: he used four pens, and asked that they all be sent to Hoover.
A month later the unprecedented partnership finally went public, when Hoover appeared at the annual Gridiron Dinner of Washington�
��s power elite for the first time since 1932. Since Truman had a reelection campaign approaching, Hoover said in his remarks that he wanted to avoid “an indelicate implication that I am seeking to recruit him to my exclusive union of ex-presidents.” He commiserated about the ordeal of handling an opposition Congress: “Here again I can sympathize with Mr. Truman more than any other living person,” he said. He went on to praise Truman for his strength and principle: “Amid the thousand crises which sweep upon us from abroad, he has stood firm with his feet rooted in the American soil. He has brought to the White House new impulses of good will toward men.”
When Hoover finished, Truman reached over and wrote a note on his program: “with high esteem and keen appreciation to a great man.” In December Truman invited him to a White House reception; the following month he offered him the use of the presidential retreat in Key West. Hoover was especially touched when the Trumans hung a portrait of his wife, Lou, in the White House.
The longer Truman occupied the office, the more aware he was of ways that his predecessor, perhaps uniquely, could help him, and he was not too proud to ask. Hoover found ways to return the favor; it had been during the last year of his administration that Congress had made all government salaries, the president’s included, taxable. This made little difference to independently wealthy men like Hoover and Roosevelt, who by 1944 was paying more than half his salary in tax, but made quite a difference to the permanently pinched Truman. The salaries of the White House staff and servants were paid by the government, but not their meals. When it was just the family eating, it was usually leftovers. Truman told friends his typical weekly take-home pay was about $80.
Hoover helped lead the charge to get the president a raise. Truman was lucky, Hoover argued, if he had enough left over each month for cigarette money (Truman didn’t smoke). Early in 1949, Congress finally voted to raise his salary by a third, to $100,000, and added $50,000 tax free to his expense account to use as he chose.
A Gift for the Club
It’s one thing for Congress to provide the president more money; quite another to grant him more power.
Truman, again, would turn to Hoover to help him get it.
There had been at least a half dozen attempts, starting in 1798, at a comprehensive reorganization of the executive branch, all sorts of commissions and committees that began with high hopes and went largely nowhere.
Most efforts at executive branch reorganization were aimed at keeping the president in a box—but modern presidents were ill served by the tangled mess of agencies beneath them. In his first message to Congress in May 1945, Truman asked for the authority to restructure the executive branch. Hoover backed him up at the time; he wrote to Ohio congressman George Bender (and made sure Truman saw a copy) that “six successive Presidents over 35 years have recommended such reorganization. The overlap, waste and conflict of policies between executive agencies have been a scandal for the whole 35 years.” Truman appreciated the boost. “The fight for this measure has been long and futile,” Truman wrote to Hoover. “It is heartening to know that you approve the bill in principle.” And useful knowledge for the battles to come.
But throughout Truman’s first term, Congress managed to foil most of his reorganization efforts. Especially after the Republicans took over in 1946, they were looking mainly for a smaller government, not a more effective one. Hoover’s administration had cost $4 billion a year; in the postwar years, Truman’s was running more than ten times that. The 604,000 civilian employees were now two million. The government owned a quarter of the continental United States, more than five thousand buildings, a million cars and trucks, paint factories, sawmills, a distillery in the Virgin Islands, and a $20-million-a-year fertilizer operation in Tennessee. A single salmon in the Columbia River swimming upstream to spawn came under the jurisdiction of twelve different federal agencies.
So in July of 1947 Congress created the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, which had more latitude than any past attempt at restructuring. The commission’s stated goal was to “promote economy, efficiency, and improved service” in going about the public business; its report was due after November of 1948, neatly ensuring that the proposals could be a blueprint for housecleaning by a new Republican president. Speaker Joe Martin appointed Hoover to the panel, who, characteristically, refused to serve unless he was named chairman.
As the only living ex-president, he was a natural choice: an esteemed elder statesman with close ties to congressional Republicans. Those most intent on rolling back Roosevelt’s legacy trusted Hoover to deliver the fatal blow to “the traitors who call themselves liberals,” as he had been known to call New Dealers, and introduce sound management practices to the public sphere.
But Truman by this time understood something about Hoover that his Republican backers did not. It was a powerful impulse shared by virtually all former presidents: you protect the office, regardless of who holds it at the moment. “Mr. Hoover was not about to take part in any attack on the Presidency,” observed his commission aide Don Price. Hoover had sat in the chair during a national crisis and taken the blame for failing to do enough to relieve it; if he managed to transform the office, he could protect his successors from a similar fate.
Some Democrats thought Truman was naive to sign off on what could only be a plot to roll back his entire progressive agenda. But Truman sensed by now that Hoover was not opposed to the notion of the enhanced, institutionalized presidency, merely with how Roosevelt had chosen to use it. Truman told the commission to send back “the most honest findings you can get and don’t worry whom it might or might not please.” When the once and future house speaker Sam Rayburn protested, Truman brushed him back. Hoover, he declared, was “the best man that I know of, and he’ll do the job for me. . . . You politicians leave him alone and we’ll get an organization in the government. Now Sam, that’s all—you help!”
Hoover called it his “last public service.” The commission had a mandate to examine 2,500 departments and agencies, in hopes of whittling down a $40 billion budget. About half the government’s purchasing orders, for instance, were for items that cost less than $10—and the paperwork to process them cost $11.20. Hoover predicted that creating a central purchasing agency to cut red tape could save $250 million a year.
Hoover set up two dozen task forces, which met in private; he hired research staff and recruited hundreds of specialists, including two former cabinet members, thirteen undersecretaries, three former senators and five governors, and ten university presidents. Many had a conservative, pro-business bent, and helped steer the commission in that direction, though the group never split purely on partisan lines. Truman’s delegates worked to hold off the assault on New Deal agencies, but they were outnumbered. “Hoover definitely thought he was going to use the Commission as a vehicle to overturn the New Deal in substance,” recalled member James Rowe, a lawyer, New Dealer, and advisor to every president from Roosevelt to Johnson. “I think he was a very earnest, very sincere man, and worked like the devil. He was seventy-five at this time. I remember we used to break up Saturday morning and he’d say, ‘I’ll be back Monday morning with three drafts of various reports.’ He’d get on the train; he’d work all Saturday and all Sunday; and on the train coming back he’d have these reports written. They weren’t very well written, they had terrible style, but he’d been working on them.”
Helping government “do more with less” was the nominal mission, but for conservatives it was actually “do less with less.” In a memoir of the commission that he never published, Hoover described Truman’s representatives as “sycophantish. . . . They all believed the Republicans would win the campaign and their remarks were seldom complimentary to Mr. Truman. I seemed at times the only member who spoke kindly of him.”
There was one area of inquiry Hoover declined to delegate: that would be the treatment of the presidency. “I guess I’ll take that one myself,” he said. “Who is there who ought to
know more about it?”
He reached out to Truman’s budget chief, James Webb, for help, and told him he’d be investigating the demands of the presidency personally; this, Webb told Truman, was “a happy development.” There were all sorts of ideas being floated, Webb noted, and “the evaluation of such proposals by persons who have not either occupied the Presidential office itself, or worked in extremely intimate relationship with it, is extraordinarily difficult. From my several conversations with Mr. Hoover, I am convinced of his appreciation of the difficulty and delicacy of dealing with the whole problem.”
Meanwhile, the Other Campaign . . .
Hoover was not inclined to make things worse for a president who faced long odds going into the 1948 campaign against New York governor Thomas Dewey. He also did not want his precious commission to become a partisan football. He had lunch with Truman’s press secretary, Charlie Ross, and told him that he’d turned down an invitation to deliver the keynote address at the Republican convention—which tells you how far his rehabilitation had progressed. He’d take a smaller role, he assured Ross, and avoid any attack on the president. The gesture was not entirely welcome news at the White House. At a staff meeting, according to assistant press secretary Ayers, “[Clark] Clifford and others laughingly expressed regret that he was not going to be the Republicans’ keynoter as they felt it would be a help to the Democrats.”
Hoover gave his convention speech; “Few Republicans had been so bitterly assailed during the years of Democratic supremacy,” Time observed, “but Hoover’s prepared speech cast aside partisanship to talk of the nation’s place in the world.” He affirmed the importance of strengthening Western Europe and defending liberty. “If you follow the counsel of those who believe that politics is only a game to be played for personal advantage, you are wasting your time,” Truman wrote to him, praising it as “the utterance of a statesman.”