Harry Truman (54 page)

Dad dashed off a letter to Byrnes, in which he wrote, “I now know how Caesar felt when he said,
Et tu, Brutus.”

Byrnes, a tough man to beat in a verbal exchange, flashed back, “I am no Brutus, I hope you are not going to think of yourself as Caesar, because you are no Caesar.”

At the same time Bernard Baruch, who spent most of his time in South Carolina, slashed at Dad with a wholly untrue statement that an industrial mobilization plan for the possibility of war had been rejected by the White House. A reporter asked Dad: “Do you think there is any connection between Mr. Byrnes’s attack and Mr. Baruch’s?”

“Draw your own conclusions,” Dad replied.

Dad discussed Bernard Baruch with David Lilienthal around this time. “He’s the same old Bernie. Gave five thousand to Dewey, then the day after election tried to give Bill Boyle money for us Democrats. He’s behind Byrnes, financing him. He’s just a disappointed man. When he had FDR down to his place in South Carolina, he had news photographers take pictures of the bedroom where FDR slept, with Bernie’s picture big over it all. Next day after this appeared FDR went straight home.”

Two years later, when Dad was preparing the book
Mr. President,
the memory of his nasty little exchange with Byrnes prompted him to include in it a verbatim copy of the handwritten letter he read to him early in 1946, telling him to stop “babying the Soviets.” He thought people would be interested to see this great neo-conservative had a gift for being on several sides of the issues, depending on where he thought his political advantage lay. Byrnes, maneuvered into a very embarrassing corner, took the easy way out. He denied ever seeing or hearing of such a letter.

The reactionary attack of 1949 darkened Dad’s already dim view of the objectivity of our free press. Looking back on his experience after he left office, Dad said: “After I sent my message on domestic policy to the Congress on September 6th, 1945, a campaign of vilification and misrepresentation in editing the news by the special interest controlled press began. It is difficult for the average citizen of this great republic to understand how a “free press” can be used to distort facts as a means of character assassination. I do not mean to condemn the whole press and charge all of the newspapers and magazines with this campaign, but the vast majority was guilty. This systematic attack was not confined solely to matters of policy and administration. Individuals were singled out and made the victims of character assassination in the hope of destroying public confidence in my administration.”

Dad exempted most of the reporters from this accusation. During his two hundredth press conference early in October 1949, one newsman asked him, “Do you become a little annoyed with us at times?”

“I never get annoyed with you,” Dad replied. “I get annoyed with your bosses sometimes. I think most of you try your best to be entirely fair. I’ve never had any reason to quarrel with you.”

He exempted columnists from this testimonial, however. Mingling fact and opinion as they invariably do, and frequently descending to personalities, they were among the chief distorters of the truth, in Dad’s opinion. At one point, he wrote an ironic memo to himself on the subject: “I have appointed a secretary of columnists. His duties are to listen to all radio commentators, read all columnists in the newspapers from ivory tower to lowest gossip, coordinate them and give me the results so I can run the United States and the world as it should be. I have several men in reserve beside the present holder of the job, because I think in a week or two the present secretary for columnists will need the services of a psychiatrist and will in all probability end up in St. Elizabeth’s [the mental hospital in Washington].”

With the pounding he was already taking from the China First Republicans, the Southern conservatives, and the “Sabotage Press” as my father called the really reactionary papers, it is understandable, I think, that he did not see anything particularly new or menacing in Senator Joe McCarthy’s emergence. The Wisconsin senator persisted, of course, in hurling about figures and names which, to the day of his death, never produced the conviction or even the exposure of a single Communist. The next time he was mentioned in a press conference, Dad took him a little more seriously. “If people really were in earnest and had the welfare of the country at heart, and they really thought that somebody in the government was not loyal or did not do his job right, the proper person with whom to take that up is the President of the United States.”

My father went on to point out he had created a comprehensive federal loyalty program in 1947, which was in the process of screening every employee in the government. This loyalty program was worked out, Dad said, “with civil liberties in view.” He referred the reporters to a speech which he had recently made to the nation’s district attorneys and law enforcement officers, in which he stressed the vital importance of upholding the Bill of Rights,
“the
most important part of the Constitution of the United States.”

Unfortunately, the Truman loyalty program satisfied neither the right-wing extremists, who were ready to sacrifice the Bill of Rights in their hunt for an infinitesimal minority of disloyal government employees, nor the super-liberals, whose books even years later continued to condemn the mere fact that he instituted a loyalty program. With his long experience in Washington, my father was no stranger to reckless charges about communism and disloyalty. He had seen Martin Dies, first chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, in action and had been appalled when Vice President Garner told him, “The Dies Committee is going to have more influence on the future of American politics than any other committee of Congress.” Dad did not agree with him, but in the next fifteen years, Garner’s prophecy came dismayingly true.

My father’s creation of a loyalty program, once the cold war became a fact of life, was simply a continuation of President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9300 which set up a Committee of Five to consider charges of subversive activity made against government employees. When Dad issued Executive Order 9835, creating his loyalty program, he put Seth Richardson, a prominent conservative Republican, in charge of it, to prove to everyone in the nation he had no interest in playing politics with the problem.

Along with careful provisions for review and appeal of findings, my father laid down one fundamental principle which explained not a little of the hostility which right-wing congressmen displayed toward his program. Under no circumstances was any committee of Congress to be given access to the confidential files of any government employee. These files contained large amounts of raw, unevaluated data collected by the FBI, which an unscrupulous congressman could use to wreck an honest man’s reputation. At the same time, Dad never wavered from his conviction that a loyalty review board was necessary in the current climate of world politics. The super-liberals who sneeringly point out that only .002 percent of the government employees examined were dismissed from their jobs or denied employment are incredibly naive. Espionage rings are not large operations. It only took a half-dozen disloyal scientists and couriers to steal the secret of the atomic bomb.

What dismayed my father about the McCarthy phenomenon, more than anything else, was the eagerness with which supposedly respectable senators such as Styles Bridges of New Hampshire and Robert Taft of Ohio boarded the Wisconsin senator’s sleazy bandwagon. Senator Taft said Senator McCarthy “should keep talking and if one case doesn’t work out, he should proceed with another.” To his everlasting credit, my father did not run away from the fight. In his March 30, 1950, press conference, he bluntly told the assembled reporters, “I think the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy.” While the reporters gasped, Dad coolly analyzed Republican Party policy: “The Republicans have been trying vainly to find an issue on which to make a bid for the control of the Congress for next year. They tried statism. They tried welfare state. They tried socialism. And there are a certain number of members of the Republican Party who are trying to dig up that old malodorous dead horse called isolationism. And in order to do that, they are perfectly willing to sabotage the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States. And this fiasco which has been going on in the Senate is the very best asset that the Kremlin could have in the operation of the cold war.”

Behind the scenes, my father tried to combat Senator McCarthy by arming his Cabinet with knowledge. He had a very illuminating 5,000-word paper written under his direction, entitled, “A Study of Witch Hunting and Hysteria in the United States.” It covered periods of public madness from the actual witchcraft craze in Salem, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798-1800, the anti-Masonry agitation of 1826-1840, the Know-Nothing anti-immigrant movement of 1840-1856, the Ku Klux Klan operation in the Reconstruction Era, and the post-World War I anti-Communist hysteria which coincided with a resurgence of the KKK. Reading it, you can’t help but wonder if there is a permanent lunatic fringe in this country (and probably in other countries) which becomes swept up in these insane mass movements that thrive on hate and fear.

Ironically, while the know-nothings in Congress ranted and raved and made some people think the government was about to collapse from internal subversion, my father was calmly directing a sweeping reappraisal of America’s relationship to the Communist world. It flowed directly from the H-bomb decision, which had called for such a study. This could have been a perfunctory performance if the President had chosen to rely on weapons of terror. But Dad meant it when he said he hoped no nation would ever use atomic weapons again. Moreover, he was dissatisfied with a foreign policy which limited itself merely to checking Communist ambitions. This was much too negative and ultimately defeatist for a man who thought as positively as Harry S. Truman.

Although few of his biographers have noted it, he specifically rejected the policy of containment. “Our purpose was much broader,” he said. “We were working for a united, free and prosperous world.” The Berlin airlift, the Russian retreat from Iran, their diplomatic collapse in the face of the Marshall Plan and NATO had confirmed the wisdom of Dad’s fundamental policy, to negotiate with the Russians from positions of strength. This insight was at the heart of Paper No. 68 of the National Security Council, NSC-68, for short, the policy review which he had ordered in January.

Charles Murphy remembers vividly the genesis of NSC-68. “The President quietly set up a task force of State Department and Defense Department people to reexamine the strategic defense position of the United States and they came up with a memorandum toward the end of 1949. The President gave me a copy of this memorandum. I didn’t get to read it during the day - I was busy working on something else - and I took it home with me that night. What I read scared me so much that the next day I didn’t go to the office at all. I sat at home and read this memorandum over and over, wondering what in the world to do about it. The gist of it was that we were in pretty bad shape and we damn well better do something about it. So I recommended to the President that he put this into the machinery of the National Security Council where it had not been before. That is how it became the paper that got so well known as NSC-68.”

In alarming detail, NSC-68 described the relative military weakness of the Western world, vis-à-vis the Communists. We were vastly outnumbered in terms of standing armies and our equipment, still World-War-II vintage, was rapidly becoming obsolete in the face of Russian advances in weaponry, planes, and tanks. Since the Communists were obviously determined to continue to build their military capability, while we maintained a status quo approach, the long-range project of Communist versus non-Communist strength was grim. By 1954, Russia would achieve a stalemate in nuclear weapons. This meant the Russians and the Chinese would have the power to deploy their vastly superior conventional forces and use them at will. The United States was therefore faced with three alternatives.

One, it could withdraw behind the shield of “fortress America” and let the rest of the world slide inexorably into the Communist orbit.

Two, it could attempt a quick preventive war, a combined atomic-conventional assault on Russia to eliminate the seat of Communist power.

Three, it could begin a massive program of rebuilding the defensive potential of the free world. This program envisioned the United States as the dynamic center of a free world community, sharing its wealth and its military and scientific knowledge to guarantee the long-range survival of free societies everywhere. This, of course, was the alternative which the NSC-68’s authors recommended as the only reasonable policy for our nation.

We have been following that policy for so long, it is hard for us to realize that it was based on some drastic revisions of fundamental assumptions. Until NSC-68, for instance, it was assumed we could not spend much more than $12 or $13 billion a year on defense without bankrupting the nation. The NSC’s planners reported we could devote as much as 20 percent of our gross national product to security without harming our economy. A military budget of $50 billion was recommended to implement the new goal of negotiation from strength. At the same time, NSC-68 placed on the President a new burden - the need to view the security of the free world as synonymous with America’s security. This required the most astute judgment to determine where a crisis situation in some distant part of the world threatened our security and where it did not threaten it.

In implementing this policy, my father was faced with some very difficult choices, particularly in Asia. Japan was only beginning its economic revival; its government was wholly dependent on U.S. support. The other great power in that region, China, was now in the hands of the Communists. Elsewhere, local governments were weak or nonexistent, because for decades, and in some cases for centuries, the nations had been colonies. Korea, for instance, had been occupied by Japan since 1895. Divided in half by Stalin and Churchill at Yalta, it swiftly became a part of the cold war. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was created in the northern half of the country, and a large army was trained and equipped by the Russians. We in turn encouraged the people of South Korea to proclaim a republic, and when we withdrew our troops on June 29, 1949, we left 500 officers and men behind to help train a South Korean defense force of 65,000 men.