American History Revised (19 page)
Read American History Revised Online
Authors: Jr. Seymour Morris
1941–44
The president was not pleased. An unknown junior senator had taken a campaign tour through the South, visited several military bases where he uncovered graft, won reelection, and was now pushing for a special “Senate Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program”—with himself as chairman. FDR hardly knew the man, and feared congressional interference in his management of the war. He had good history to go on:
there had been Senator Gerald Nye’s disastrous hearings into war profiteering in World War I, and the Senate’s interference with President Lincoln and the Northern generals, which Robert E. Lee had gleefully called “worth two Confederate divisions.”
Reminded that the senator was a Democrat and that his party controlled both the Senate and the House, the president reluctantly agreed: at least it wouldn’t be the Republicans doing a witch-hunt. The senator asked for an initial appropriation of $25,000. Lest his investigation “get out of hand,” his fellow senators whittled the initial appropriation down to $15,000.
The first thing Harry Truman did once the committee started was go to the Library of Congress and borrow the only copy of a book describing the Civil War committee. He read it carefully, determined not to repeat old mistakes. He then went to the attorney general for help in finding a lead counsel. Finally, he instructed the members of his committee on clear objectives and proper protocol. The key, he told them, was speed—to uncover graft and corruption while the deed was fresh and something could be done about it, not finger-point and gain political points years after the fact. “We were interested in doing a surgeon’s job to cure,” he said later, “not in performing an autopsy to find out why the patient died.” More specifically:
The committee was directed to examine every phase of the entire war program. It was not organized to tell the war agencies what to do or how to do it. It was not to substitute its judgment for their judgment….I was determined that the committee was not going to be used for either a whitewash or a smear in any matter before it but was to be used to obtain facts and suggest remedies where necessary.
It was a time when tensions were high: Nazi U-boats patrolling the East Coast were eating U.S. tankers for breakfast. The public clamored to know what was taking so long for the U.S. to mobilize and start going on the offensive.
Under the scrutiny of the Truman Committee, no one was spared. Corporations, dollar-a-year executives on loan to the government, military contractors, and labor unions all became culprits. The committee found that no less than sixty-six of the dollar-a-year executives were being paid their full salary on the side, and had succeeded in steering $3 billion of contracts to their companies within a year. It also found a pro-labor bias in the grants handed out by the government’s chief agency for managing the war effort, the Office of Production Management. When union workers threatened a walkout at an aluminum mine, the committee exposed their blackmail and averted a showdown. Even government officials got excoriated: “Contract award agencies,” said Truman, had become “infested with colonels whose military experience was limited to watching parades.”
Within a year, an impressed Senate increased
the committee’s annual budget to $100,000, and the committee went into overdrive. Its output and impact were prodigious. It interviewed almost 1,800 witnesses, conducted 432 public hearings, held three hundred executive sessions, and issued fifty-one reports. Such high-powered activity put everyone on notice. Asked to explain why his committee was so successful, Truman pointed not to the regulatory reforms that were enacted, but rather to its real-time watchdog function:
A number of suggestions in the committee reports were enacted into legislation by Congress, but the influence of the committee was beginning to make itself felt through other than legislative channels. In many cases the mere knowledge that we were interested in a particular subject was enough to cause everyone concerned, whether manufacturers, government officials, or labor, to clear up the problems themselves before the committee could get to them.
The committee worked hard to be even-handed and fair. Before printing a report, Truman sent a copy to the company or agency being investigated and asked for comment—only on facts, not opinions. This prevented the accused entity from trying to claim later that “the Committee didn’t know what it was talking about.” The overall theme of the investigation was the common good. In settling a coal strike, Truman stated, “It is about time people on both sides of the controversy are giving up what they are clamoring for and think about the
United States of America.” By sticking to the facts and eschewing controversy, the Truman Committee won the public trust. More important, by contributing to public understanding and reassuring the public that the war management was being improved, it helped generate public support for the war effort.
Senator Truman and his committee: nothing like this today to oversee all the money we’re spending in Iraq
The Truman Committee ended up saving the government $15 billion. In 1943, Harry Truman was on the cover of
Time
magazine. In 1944,
Look
magazine conducted a survey of Washington correspondents and asked them to rate the civilians who had been most helpful to the war effort, after FDR. The winner was Truman. Later that year he became FDR’s running mate. In looking back at the Truman Committee, one startling fact stands out: in all its reports, it achieved such bipartisan consensus that its Republican members never once felt the need to issue a minority report.
Fast-forward to America’s longest and most expensive war, Iraq, where war profiteering and lack of oversight set new records. Columnist Arianna Huffington wrote in 2005, “With the president preparing to hit up Congress for an additional $80 billion for the war in Iraq, I thought it might be a good time to crack open a history book.” Indeed, many people started brushing up on the long-forgotten Truman Committee. In 2007, Senator Charles Schumer of New York wrote:
The lesson of the Truman Committee is sorely in need of relearning today….nothing even close to the Truman Committee has taken root in this Congress. To the contrary, a bipartisan proposal in the House to create a modern-day Truman Committee in the wake of reports of scandal and abuse in Iraq was “blocked from consideration by GOP leaders for more than a year.”
Finally, in 2008 Senator Jim Webb of Virginia succeeded in getting an investigation committee passed. In sharp contrast to FDR, who accepted the committee’s recommendations and made its leader his running mate, President Bush called the new committee “a threat to national security.”
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For the final word on this dispute, listen to Abraham Lincoln: “A lamb has four legs and one tail. You can call his tail a leg and say he has five legs. However he still only has four legs and one tail. Doesn’t matter what you call his tail … it’s still only a tail.” Either Washington was our first president or he was our eleventh—take your pick—but our first was not John Hanson.
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And, once elected, to stay that way. In 1900, Mark Hanna, chairman of the Republican National Committee, was scared “that dammed cowboy”—Vice President Theodore Roosevelt—would become president should McKinley die. He sent the newly reelected President McKinley a cable: “Your duty is to live for four years.” Shortly thereafter, McKinley was assassinated.
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A most remarkable compliment, coming from an adversary: Clinton was the leader of the Federalist Party, the opposition to Jefferson’s Republican Party.
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To amuse fans during pregame warm-up, he would put two baseballs in his left hand and throw them in such a way that the balls remained parallel to each other all the way to the catcher’s mitt. No other pitcher in eighty years has been able to replicate this feat.
The Past Was Different Then
T
he past is “a foreign country,” a place full of surprises, a place quite different from present-day perceptions. This is especially true of technology: the automobile, for example, was once viewed as a useless contraption because it couldn’t go over dirt fields like a horse. Same for the telephone: Why would a person in Maine ever want to talk to a person in Texas? Indeed! Why not write a letter?
So whenever we are confronted by change, we limit our ability to perceive reality by standing on the present. Our grandchildren will view us differently. Just go back fifty-plus years, when Detroit ruled the world. It was a time when the “Big Three” controlled more than 90 percent of the American automobile market—plus a good portion of the overseas market as well. The popular magazines of the 1950s “predicted that the world of 2000 would feature commuters traveling to work in atomic-powered cars and personal helicopters,” yet they made no mention of personal computers. Go back another fifty years—to 1900—and cars were virtually nonexistent. In New York City, people relied on horses. Long before people had heard of global warming, the key issue of the day was horse waste. Every day horses deposited
2.5 million pounds of manure and 60,000 gallons of urine. Every year some 15,000 dead horses had to be collected off the street and taken away.
Ask people what was the greatest achievement of the twentieth century, and most people will say “the automobile,” “computers,” “putting a man on the moon,” or “the Internet.” But go back one hundred years, and different answers emerge. In 1900 the male life expectancy was forty-six years; now it is seventy-three. For females it was forty-eight; now it is eighty. The number of Americans completing high school in 1900 was 6 percent; today it is 85 percent. Would you not agree that the improvement in health care and the spread of education, permitting nearly 300 million Americans to live fuller lives, are the century’s stellar achievements?
Go back another forty years, to the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1860, what was the largest industry in America? Flour milling. Go back another twenty years, and what was the biggest? Exporting ice to India and the Caribbean.
If we go back to our early past—to the American Revolution—we might easily wonder why the British walked away after eight years of stalemate. After all, they had lost no major battles other than Yorktown, and still had the world’s mightiest army and navy. They could have kept fighting another couple of years if they had wanted to. Then when they waged war again and clearly won the second time (the War of 1812), they still refrained from pressing their advantage and seizing territory. Why?
America at the time was no prize jewel. Says the historian Gerald Gunderson:
When Britain acceded to independence for the Americans, she yielded them all the territory out to the Mississippi River, most of which was unsettled. Moreover, in the following sixty years, that area was more than tripled as Americans possessed all the land to the Pacific Ocean. The British assumed all this vacant territory would keep the Americans safely preoccupied for a long, long time. Extrapolating from the rate of settlement in the Colonial period, it would take them “three hundred years to reach the Mississippi River, and a minimum of six hundred more to reach the Pacific!”
When Thomas Jefferson consummated the Louisiana Purchase, he never expected the United States would spread across the entire continent: the distances were too great. He predicted it would be a thousand years before the American frontier reached the Pacific Ocean, and that the land might split up into two confederations, one up to the Alleghenies, the other beyond. In looking where the United States might expand, he cast his eyes in a different direction and identified his prize as Cuba: “the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states.” The meanderings of a Monticello dilettante? Hardly. Even John Adams, an experienced political
pro, viewed the annexation of Cuba as nothing less than “indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself.”
Thomas Hart Benton, the expansionist senator from Missouri, certainly had firsthand knowledge about expansion and Western territory. His view? The U.S. should stop at the Rocky Mountains, and whatever occurred westward of that point should separate itself “from the mother Empire as the child separates from the parent.” Daniel Webster agreed, calling for the creation of an independent Pacific Republic.