The Man with the Iron Heart (47 page)

Which didn’t keep her from filling up his beer mug again. She had serious muscles in her forearms, from hauling around so many steins and pitchers. He gave her a dime.
“Ja,”
she said softly as she made the small silver coin disappear. Would the old man with the gray mustache behind the bar see any of that? Bernie shrugged. It wasn’t his worry.

“Gonna get me a job where the most explosive thing I gotta mess with is the carburetor off an old Ford,” Benton was saying. “Gonna forget all the shit they learned me. Ain’t gonna study war no more, like it says in the Good Book.”

“Wow,” two or three GIs said together, longing in their voices. The Americans in the tavern amassed an impressive amount of lethal hardware. Nobody went anywhere unarmed these days. You might as well tie a bull’s-eye and a
SHOOT ME!
sign to your back.

“You know what, Sarge?” a soldier said. “Pretty soon we’ll all be coming home, regardless of points or whether the Army likes it or any of that crap. Congress’ll figure we wasted enough time fucking around over here, and that’ll be that.”

“Wouldn’t bother me none,” Benton answered. “Nobody likes the damn Nazis, but nobody wants to get his dick shot off, neither.”

“We want to go home!” several men chorused. Then they started laughing fit to bust. Discipline here was still pretty good—not great, but pretty good. From what Bernie heard, some places hardly anybody obeyed orders he didn’t happen to like.

Toby Benton called for more beer. “One bad thing about goin’ home,” he said, “is I’ll have to drink the horse piss they put in bottles back in the States.” Bernie wasn’t the only guy who nodded—not even close. The stuff they brewed over here had been a revelation to him. Beer didn’t just get you blasted after you poured down enough of it. It could taste good, too. Who would’ve thunk it?

The barmaid came over and filled up Benton’s stein. He gave her a K-ration can and a pack of Luckies.
“Ja!”
she said, as she had after Bernie handed her the dime, only she sounded a lot happier this time. In a cautious, experimental way, as if he were defusing a mine, Sergeant Benton patted her on the ass.

All the Americans in the tavern tensed. The other half-sloshed GIs must’ve thought the same thing Bernie did: if you messed with this babe, she’d knock your block off. Which only went to show you never could tell. The barmaid plopped herself down in the demolitions expert’s lap, threw her arms around his neck, and gave him the kind of kiss the Hays Office wouldn’t let you film. Bernie wondered if she’d screw him right there where he sat, but she didn’t—quite.

“Hot damn!” Benton said when he finally came up for air. “I’ll miss the easy nookie they got over here, too. Sure as hell can’t get an American girl to put out for beef stew and a pack of smokes.”

“Our side didn’t lose the war,” Bernie said.

“Who says theirs did?” Sergeant Benton regretfully untangled himself from the barmaid. She didn’t seem anywhere near so tough any more.

“You know what I mean,” Bernie persisted. “Other thing is, girls back home don’t know what all we’ve been through.”

“And every goddamn bit of it the past coupla years—all the bombs, all the rockets, all the snipers, all the crap—it’s been nothin’ but a waste of time,” Benton said. “You fuckin’ wait an’ see. We’re gonna chuck it in over here. We’re gonna go home an’ let the Jerries do whatever they want.”

“We’re gonna pay the price for it down the line if we do,” Bernie said.

Benton shrugged—and almost fell off his chair. Yeah, he’d taken on a lot of beer. “It’ll be somebody else’s headache then,” he said. “Long as it ain’t chewing on the guys who’re in right now, they won’t care.”

Whether Benton was drunk or not, that seemed like a pretty good bet to Bernie Cobb. And, now that the ice had been broken, so did the barmaid.

H
ARRY
T
RUMAN LOOKED HOPPING MAD.
S
INCE COMING BACK TO
Washington, Tom Schmidt had seen the President angry plenty of times. Truman delighted in sticking out such chin as he had and telling the world where to go and how to get there. He could be funny at the same time. He made Tom laugh, and Tom got paid for writing unkind things about him. But today he just looked ticked off.

Overhead lights flashed off his spectacle lenses as he glared out at the assembled reporters. “I called a press conference this afternoon so I could tell the American people why I’m vetoing this joke of a budget bill that has landed on my desk. I warned the Republicans who head up this new Congress—and I warned the Democratic leadership, too—that I would veto any bill that looks like this. They sent me one anyway, and I am sending it back—air-mail, special delivery.”

“Nice of him to get his own party mad at him, too,” Schmidt whispered to the guy sitting next to him.

The other fellow barely had time to nod before Truman went on, “I’m especially unhappy with the so-called Democratic leaders in the Senate.” No, he didn’t care if he antagonized them. “They told me this was the best they could do—a bill that cuts off funds for our boys in Germany at the end of the year instead of right away. If this is the best they can do, I’m here to tell them it isn’t good enough.”

“Why not?” a reporter called.

“I’ll take questions when I’m done with my statement,” the President said. “But since I was coming to why not anyway, it’ll look like I’m answering this one. Congress has got no business tying American foreign policy by the purse strings. Can you imagine what would have happened after Pearl Harbor if Congress told President Roosevelt, ‘You’ve got to win the war by the end of 1943, or we won’t give you any more money to fight it’? Can you imagine?” He quivered with indignation. “If Congress did something that stupid, why, Hitler would be holding a press conference here in the White House right now, for heaven’s sake!”

Several reporters laughed then. Newsreel cameras ground away. One day soon, people all across the country would see him when they went to the movies. “Is it really the same thing, Mr. President?” Tom called.

“You’d better believe it is,” Truman snapped—so much for taking questions after his statement. “We will do what we need to do. It may take longer than we expect right now. It may cost more. We will do it anyway.”

Since he’d got one answer, Schmidt tried for another: “But if you think we need to do this, sir, and Congress and most of the American people think we need to do that—?”

“I’m the President,” Truman said. “I didn’t want the job. I wish Franklin Roosevelt, God love him, were still here to do it. Just by the way, I believe he’d do it the same way I am. But that’s neither here nor there. For as long as I am President, I’m going to do things the best way I know how. And that includes keeping American soldiers in Germany to hold down the Nazis and hold back the Russians.”

“If you do that, you won’t stay President long,” said another member of the White House press corps.

“Chance I take,” Truman answered calmly. “If I leave, I’ll leave knowing I did the right thing. And if whoever the Republicans pick does something else, he’ll prove pretty darn quick how right I was.”

He didn’t lack for confidence. By all accounts, he never had. How much good did that do when he was so out of step with the rest of the country? Herbert Hoover had been confident, too, and look how much good it did him. You could be confident you knew a road, but all the confidence in the world wouldn’t help you if you drove off a cliff. You’d go smash at the bottom any which way—and so would all the other people you were driving.

“And let me tell you boys—and you ladies—something else.” Truman wagged a finger at the reporters. “You think you know what America thinks. Well, I’ve got news for you. There are a devil of a lot of Americans who don’t march around with placards on their shoulders. They keep their mouths shut and go to work every day and pay their taxes—oh, they don’t like paying them (who does?), but they do it. And even though they don’t kick up a fuss and get their photographs in the newspapers, they have the sense to know that we are doing the right thing in Germany and that we need to stay the course there. I wouldn’t be surprised—no, sir, I wouldn’t be one bit surprised—if there were more of them than there are of the noisy kind.”

Tom Schmidt’s shorthand scribbles barely kept up with the angry President. As Truman finally paused to draw breath, Tom wrote his own comment under the other man’s words.
Silent majority? Good luck!
Then he eyed the phrase and nodded to himself. It wouldn’t make a bad lead—might even do for a headline.

After that deep breath, Truman returned at last to his prepared remarks. He lambasted the Republican Congress for everything except violating the Mann Act. If you listened to him, everything was Congress’ fault. He hadn’t made a single mistake himself—not one, not in all his born days.

If you listened to him. How likely were the American people to do that? Looking at the folks they’d sent to Congress, maybe not very.

Truman finally got around to taking the questions he’d planned to take all along. “Does being an accidental President hinder you?” a reporter asked. “Is it harder to do your job knowing nobody elected you to do it?”

“Not even a little bit,” Truman said. “People elected Roosevelt President four different times. This last time, he and the Democratic Party chose me as his running mate. There is always the chance that a President of the United States will die in office. In 1944, it was an open secret that President Roosevelt was not a well man. Whoever ran with him might have to succeed him. I wish that hadn’t happened—I wish it with all my heart. But it did, and I’m just as much President as if I’d been elected unanimously. So I have to do my best, like I say, and that is what I am doing.”

No red meat there, Tom judged. Anybody in the same spot would say the same thing. Too bad.

“Why do you think it’s so important to stay in Germany when everybody else is sick of being there?” another reporter asked.

“I told you before, not everybody is,” Harry Truman said. Tom underlined
Silent majority.
Truman went on, “Anybody who wants to risk seeing the Nazis come back to power needs to have his head examined too.”

Tom’s hand flew up. After a pause, Truman nodded his way. “How dangerous can they be in a country that got stepped on?” he asked. “I was over there till—”

“Till you got thrown out, and for good reason, too,” Truman broke in.

“I don’t think believing in freedom of the press is a good reason to expel a man, sir,” Tom said with dignity.

Truman only sniffed. “Believing in getting a better byline is more like it, if you ask me. But to get back to your question. How dangerous can the Nazis be? Why don’t you ask the English while they clean up London? Why don’t you ask the French after four years of occupation? Why don’t you ask the Russians—the survivors, I should say? The only question is whether they lost twenty million or thirty million in the war. Pennsylvania plus California plus maybe Illinois—gone. Gone to graveyards, when people got buried at all. So how dangerous can the Nazis be?”

“What about the atom bomb?” Tom and three other reporters asked the question at the same time. Two of those others worked for papers that normally favored the administration, which was…interesting, anyhow.

“Yes, we have it,” Truman said. “The first thing the Nazis do will be to try to get it on their own. The radium treatment they gave to innocent civilians in Frankfurt is proof of that. The next thing they’ll do is, they’ll try to find a way to throw it at us. They could reach London with the V-2, though that isn’t strong enough to carry an atom bomb. They had plans on the drawing board for a rocket that could reach our East Coast from Europe. How long do you suppose it will be before they dust off those plans and start building rockets like that?”

A rocket that could reach the East Coast from Europe? It sounded like science fiction, the stuff in the cheap pulp magazines with the lurid covers. Of course, up until August 1945 the atom bomb itself had sounded the same way. So maybe Truman and the German engineers knew what they were talking about. On the other hand, maybe they didn’t.

Another reporter beat Tom to the question he wanted to ask: “How do we know this is true? How do we know this isn’t just you talking, Mr. President, to try to justify the mess in Germany?”

Truman glared at the man. “I am giving you the information I’ve got, Wilbur,” he said. “Sometimes I cannot give you all the information I’ve got, because that might help the enemy. But I am not lying to you. I am not making things up. And if you say I am, you can go—” The phrase he used would not be printed in any family newspaper in the United States.

“Love you, too, Mr. President,” Wilbur said, which got a laugh from the press corps and even a chuckle from Harry Truman. The reporter went on, “After all the stuff the administration has tried to hide about the way things in Germany are going, can you blame us for having our doubts about the things you say?”

“Blame you? Damn right I can blame you,” Truman answered. “You are trying to make me run the country by Gallup poll. I am here to tell you, that does not work. By the nature of things, it can’t work. Sometimes you have to stick it out even when things don’t look so good at the moment and not everybody likes what you’re doing. If nobody pays any attention to what may happen in the long run, you’ve got yourself a problem.”

Truman doesn’t care about democracy,
Tom wrote. It wasn’t a completely fair summary of what the President said, but it wasn’t completely unfair, either. If Truman thought he had the right to override the will of the people whenever he felt like it, what were the checks and balances in the Constitution worth? Not even the paper they were printed on.

“What will you do if Congress sends you another appropriations bill like this one?” somebody asked.

“Veto it again,” Truman said promptly.

“What will you do if Congress passes the bill over your veto?” the reporter asked.

“What will I do? I’ll be very surprised, that’s what,” Truman said. “If Congress somehow manages to sabotage our foreign policy in that way, it will be a sad day in the history of the United States.”