The General vs. the President

by H. W. Brands

  Mitchell was martyred professionally. Conviction by the court required but a two-thirds majority, which was what the prosecution obtained. Mitchell was suspended from duty, prompting his angry resignation. He died before the next war proved him a prophet.

  How MacArthur voted on the verdict forever remained a mystery. The balloting was secret, and MacArthur never said how he cast his vote. In his memoir he was evasive. “I did what I could in his behalf and I helped save him from dismissal,” he declared. But he might have been referring to the sentence rather than the verdict.

  —

  THE MITCHELL CASE revived MacArthur’s painful memories of his father, similarly martyred to politics. The old wound stabbed yet again when Franklin Roosevelt hauled him to Honolulu as a political trophy in 1944. And it stabbed whenever he thought of Harry Truman. Truman’s early reputation as a political hack, the fair-haired boy of Boss Tom Pendergast of Kansas City, was familiar even to one who disparaged politics as much as MacArthur did. MacArthur’s desire to restore honor to the White House had been a large part of his reason for running for president in 1948. Truman’s performance since then had done little to improve MacArthur’s opinion of him. Truman continued to obsess about Europe and ignore Asia, which was where, MacArthur was convinced, the struggle for the world would be won or lost. Truman had fiddled while China fell to the communists, and he seemed intent on undermining Chiang Kai-shek, the last hope for China, at every turn.

  The one benefit of Truman’s failure to focus on Asia was that it had allowed MacArthur a free hand in Japan. In the early summer of 1950, as the occupation approached its fifth anniversary, MacArthur felt pleased with what he had accomplished there. China was a new source of worry, and a serious one, but the reforms he had initiated in Japan were taking firm root, and the Japanese people were busily rebuilding their society along liberal, peaceful lines. MacArthur was confident that Japan, aided by the security alliance with America that would accompany any peace treaty, would be able to hold its own as the free world’s refutation of the pernicious doctrines of the Chinese Communists.

  In moments of reflection he asked himself if any other great country had ever owed more to one man. He could not think of an instance. He had done well. His father would be proud.

  8

  HARRY TRUMAN’S FATHER had set a different example from MacArthur’s. Where military heroes ran in the MacArthur line, marginal farmers and failed businessmen characterized the Trumans. John Truman was too young to have fought in the Civil War, though if he had been older, it would have been a toss-up which side he would have fought on. John Truman’s family owned slaves, but Missouri, where the family lived, stuck with the Union. Missouri sent soldiers to both sides in the war and itself experienced some of the conflict’s fiercest fighting, much of it Missourian on Missourian.

  John Truman married Mattie Young in 1881. Three years later they christened their first child Harry S. The S denoted nothing except the inability of the father and mother to agree on a middle name. The child’s grandfathers had names that started with S, and so his parents settled for the unaccompanied sibilant. The neighbors saw little odd in the compromise, for the thrifty Scots-Irish who populated western Missouri were sometimes known to economize on orthography this way.

  John and Mattie perceived promise in the boy, who read avidly, especially history, and who played the piano with gusto. On his tenth birthday Harry received a four-volume set, Great Men and Famous Women, in which the men, who substantially outnumbered the women, included such heroes of history as Hannibal and Andrew Jackson, Cyrus the Great and Cortés, Lafayette and Robert E. Lee. Harry’s piano playing, together with the eyeglasses that corrected his badly deficient vision, made him the object of ridicule among his peers. “It’s a very lonely thing being a child,” he observed later.

  The family moved to Independence, Missouri, when John decided to give business a try. Harry attended elementary school in Independence and graduated from Independence High School. Ever afterward he called Independence home.

  It was the home, as well, to Bessie Wallace, who lived on the town’s proudest street and was much admired by her classmates. Harry sat in front of her in school and dreamed of her at night. “If I succeeded in carrying her books to school and back home for her, I had a big day,” he remembered.

  John Truman’s ventures in commerce thrived at first but failed about the time Harry finished high school. The failure put college out of the question. Harry took work as a timekeeper for the Santa Fe Railroad and then as a teller in a Kansas City bank. He grew out of his shyness and discovered in himself an ability to get along with others. But he prospered insufficiently to resist a call from his father to return to the family farm. For a decade he plowed, planted, harrowed and harvested. The labor was tiring and tedious and only intermittently profitable.

  John Truman tried to supplement the family income by running for county office, giving Harry a taste of politics. He wasn’t impressed. “Politics is the sure ruination of many a good man,” he wrote to Bess Wallace. “Between hot air and graft he usually loses not only his head but his money and friends as well.” Still, it might beat farming or business. “If I were real rich I’d just as soon spend my money buying votes and offices as yachts and autos.” He couldn’t decide. “To succeed financially a man can’t have any heart. To succeed politically he must be an egotist or a fool or a ward boss tool.”

  Truman fought in World War I, though much less spectacularly than Douglas MacArthur. He had joined Missouri’s national guard a decade before the war, out of the same combination of patriotism, boredom and desire for belonging that motivated militia membership for generations. He quit after a few years, deciding he wasn’t cut out for the military, even as a part-timer. The onset of war pulled him back. The war touched his sense of duty; it promised to be exciting; it gave him an excuse to leave the farm. And it prompted Bess, whom he had wooed since school, to agree to marry him. But he surprised her, and perhaps himself, by withdrawing his offer. He was going off to fight, he said. He might die. He might be maimed. He couldn’t bear to think of her as a widow or, worse, bound to half a man. They had waited this long. They could wait until he returned from France.

  He surprised himself a second time by getting elected lieutenant of his artillery battery. He hadn’t thought of himself as a leader or a vote-getter, but the men of the battery apparently did. He had never before been responsible for much beyond himself and some farm animals. Now he had his men to look after.

  They shipped out in the spring of 1918 and reached France after zigzagging through waters infested with German submarines. Paris opened his eyes, though not to Frenchwomen, he assured Bess. “Have only seen one good-looking French woman and she was married to some general or admiral or something,” he wrote. “Anyway he had seven or eight yards of gold braid on him.”

  After training with French artillerists, he rejoined his regiment and was given charge, as captain now, of Battery D. Most of his men were Irish Catholics from Kansas City, with a rowdy reputation. They had driven off previous captains and appeared intent on doing the same to Truman. They laughed at his glasses and ignored his commands.

  It was the first crisis of his public life. “I could just see my hide on the fence when I tried to run that outfit,” he recalled later. “Never on the front or anywhere else have I been so nervous.” But he rose to the challenge. After a barracks brawl that sent several men to the infirmary, he busted the noncommissioned officers who should have kept the men in line. “I didn’t come over here to get along with you,” he told the other NCOs. “You’ve got to get along with me. And if there are any of you who can’t, speak up right now and I’ll bust you.”

  His decisiveness got the attention and won the respect of the men. It helped matters that they soon saw battle and so could fight Germans instead of one another. Artillery batteries were positioned behind the trenches, and most escaped the horrors of machine gun fire and hand-to-hand combat. But they paid for the
ir dispensation by being targeted by enemy artillery.

  Battery D’s heaviest action came in September 1918. Truman’s unit took part in one of the most savage outpourings of high explosives in history, at the opening of the Meuse-Argonne offensive. Thousands of American guns pounded the Germans and were pounded in return. Truman’s battery did its brutal part, the gun barrels growing so hot that they sizzled the soaked gunnysacks laid over them for cooling.

  After three hours the American artillery stopped firing, to let the infantry charge forward against the softened German defenses. The artillery followed. Horses and men dragged the guns across the shattered landscape, sinking every few feet in the cratered mud. German shells and rifle fire rendered the going deadly. Reports circulated of an imminent German counterattack. Truman and his men would be ordered either to retreat across the broken terrain or to stand their ground and die firing.

  Things never reached this point. The Germans did not counterattack. The offensive continued, ultimately claiming more than a hundred thousand Americans killed, wounded, captured or missing. The greatest losses were among the infantry. Yet Truman and his gunners received their baptism by fire. “It isn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” he wrote to Bess. “But it’s bad enough.”

  The war ended a month later. Truman’s battery fired right up to the hour of the armistice. At eleven o’clock in the morning of November 11, all the guns fell silent. Truman was stunned by the sudden absence of their roar. “It made me feel as if I’d suddenly been deprived of my ability to hear,” he wrote. “The men at the guns, the captain, the lieutenants, the sergeants and corporals looked at each other for some time, and then a great cheer arose all along the line. We could hear the men in the infantry a thousand meters in front raising holy hell. The French battery behind our position were dancing, shouting and waving bottles of wine.” The celebration continued throughout the day and into the evening. “I went to bed about 10 p.m. but the members of the French battery insisted on marching around my cot and shaking hands. They’d shout, ‘Vive le Capitaine Américain, vive le Président Wilson,’ take another swig from their wine bottles and do it over. It was 2 a.m. before I could sleep at all.”

  —

  KANSAS CITY GAVE its soldiers a grateful welcome on their return from France, and Truman’s battery boys swore eternal loyalty and friendship to their captain. They promised their business as well. Tired of farming, Truman opened a haberdashery with Eddie Jacobson, a buddy from the war. The shop, on a bustling street in Kansas City, became a reunion ground for Battery D. At first the business flourished. The returning soldiers had wads of money they hadn’t been able to spend in the service, and civilians joined the reconversion from wartime production to peacetime consumption. Truman’s boys would drop by to see Captain Harry and stay to purchase a tie, a shirt, a belt or a pair of gloves.

  But the economy hit a bump and the country pitched into recession. Sales at Truman & Jacobson slid, then plunged. Less than three years after it opened, the store closed, leaving the partners deeply in debt.

  Truman, determined to pay the debt, reconsidered his opposition to politics. Tom Pendergast was the local Democratic boss, head of the political machine that ran Kansas City the way Tammany Hall ran New York and comparable machines ran other cities. Pendergast bought votes with favors financed by kickbacks from city contractors and levies on officeholders. Like the head of any large enterprise, Pendergast was always on the lookout for fresh talent, and in Truman he thought he detected it. Truman was smart, hardworking and apparently honest. This last trait might have seemed, to the uninitiated, unimportant or even counterproductive in a system dependent on the bending and breaking of laws. But in fact it was crucial. Pendergast cheated taxpayers, but he didn’t want his subordinates cheating him. The fact that Truman could rely on the loyalty of the Battery D boys counted strongly in his favor, for each of those boys was worth up to several votes, depending on how many relatives he had.

  Pendergast offered Truman a nomination for county judge. This was an administrative post rather than a judicial one, but it sounded impressive and its holder, with the other two judges on the court, controlled spending on roads and bridges. Kickbacks from construction were a major source of revenue to the Pendergast machine.

  Truman accepted the offer. He discovered during the campaign that he liked the give-and-take of politics. His plainspoken style appealed to Missourians, and the support of his battery mates suggested he was the kind of man his constituents could count on. The race was closer than comfort allowed, but in the end he eked to victory. Captain Harry became Judge Truman.

  Yet he remained Tom Pendergast’s protégé. And when Pendergast requested favors, Truman was expected to deliver. Small requests, of the sort one friend did for another, came easily. But a larger imposition evoked a bout of angst. “The Boss wanted me to give a lot of crooked contractors the inside,” Truman wrote afterward. He wrestled with the matter. He couldn’t deny Pendergast without jeopardizing his job. He had a family to consider, for he had married Bess and they had a small daughter, Margaret. Yet he had to live with himself. “Since childhood at my mother’s knee, I have believed in honor, ethics and right living.”

  He met with Pendergast, who was flanked by the expectant contractors. “These boys tell me that you won’t give them contracts,” the boss said.

  “They can get them if they are the low bidders,” Truman replied. “But they won’t get paid for them unless they come up to specifications.”

  He held his breath, his future passing before his eyes.

  Pendergast shook his head. Truman anticipated an explosion. Instead he got mere exasperation. “Didn’t I tell you boys?” the boss said to the contractors. “He’s the contrariest cuss in Missouri.”

  For reasons best known to himself, Pendergast allowed Truman to indulge his conscience. Possibly he reckoned the political value of being seen as tolerating independence on the county board. Certainly he reasoned that with the other two judges in his pocket, he could still get what he wanted. Maybe something in Truman appealed to a hidden streak of honor in Pendergast.

  Truman had no further trouble with Pendergast until he decided to seek a promotion. Pendergast had less control over nominations to Congress than in local elections, but Truman applied for his support in preparing to make a bid for the House of Representatives. Pendergast refused. Truman, stung, abandoned hopes of advancement to Washington.

  But then, without warning, Pendergast offered him something better: a nomination to the Senate. Truman guessed he wasn’t the boss’s first choice, but he was in no position to look this gift horse in the mouth.

  He campaigned vigorously and won narrowly. Most observers credited Pendergast. The boss sent him off to Washington with simple advice: “Work hard, keep your mouth shut and answer your mail.”

  He did all that. And he supported Franklin Roosevelt, author of the most ambitious reform program in American history. “I was a New Dealer from the start,” Truman explained decades later, still proud of his Roosevelt connection. Truman’s humble Missouri Valley background could hardly have been more different from Roosevelt’s patrician Hudson Valley upbringing, yet the two shared a belief that America owed the support of government to people who suffered distress and privation through no fault of their own, as millions were suffering in the depths of the Great Depression.

  Truman’s support for Roosevelt transcended conviction, though. Truman had discovered in himself a desire to make a mark on the world. He saw Roosevelt as a ticket to influence, even power. He had valued the loyalty of his men during the war, and he had given loyalty, if not obedience, to Tom Pendergast. In both cases loyalty had served him well. He would give loyalty to Roosevelt. “I am hoping to make a reputation as a Senator,” he explained to Bess.

  A critical test came when Roosevelt sought to expand the Supreme Court and appoint friendly justices. Roosevelt’s advisers warned him against the attempt, editorialists decried it, and even ardent New Dealers t
hought it risky. But Roosevelt pressed ahead. And Truman backed him.

  Roosevelt lost. He had pushed too far. The failure cost the president badly, depriving him of the aura of inevitability that had cloaked him from the start of the New Deal. With three years left in his second and presumably final term, he appeared the lamest of political ducks.

  But then a new war erupted. The fighting began in Asia, where Japan attacked China. It spread to Europe when Germany invaded Poland. Americans didn’t want to get involved, but many heeded arguments floated tentatively at first, then with greater conviction, that the danger abroad warranted lifting the hoary but never formalized ban on presidential third terms. Roosevelt’s experience might be just what was needed to keep America safe. The Democrats obligingly nominated him again, and voters reelected him.

  Missouri voters simultaneously reelected Truman. His Pendergast connection had become a liability when the boss was convicted of tax evasion, yet Truman campaigned as hard as ever, and his constituents continued to admire his forthrightness and pluck. He won by the narrowest of margins.

  As Roosevelt surveyed the capital after the elections, he could see that the ranks of his loyalists had thinned. Yet there in the Senate sat the most loyal of all, Harry Truman.

  That loyalty was repaid when Roosevelt needed a replacement for Henry Wallace in 1944. And it made Truman president when Roosevelt died.