Truman (46 page)

“Harry Truman was one of the liveliest, most vital Senators in my time,” wrote a veteran Senate employee, the liaison for the press, Richard Riedel, who had first come to work as a Senate page at the age of ten in 1918. Riedel had observed them all, from the days of Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., and doubted that any had ever enjoyed public life as much as Truman, or took it so in stride. “An easygoing joviality emanated from him…[he had] an interest in everything and everyone….” But often at the hearings of his committee, Truman seemed to present a different face to the world. “When he got down to business, the twinkle in his eyes would be replaced by a look of concentration. At such times, at close range the thick lenses of his glasses gave his eyes a fearsome, eerie stare so stern that it gave the weird illusion that one was confronting an entirely different person.” At such times, said Riedel, he was grateful Senator Truman was his friend.

In the frenzied, confusing weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Under Secretary of War, Robert Patterson, had urged the President to do away with the committee, saying it would “impair our activity if we have to take time out to supply the Truman Committee all the information it desires.” But Roosevelt had no such wish, and as the work of the committee continued, the energy and effectiveness of its chairman drew increasing attention. The first annual report was presented to the Senate on January 15, 1942. In time would come 50 additional reports, as a consequence of extensive, careful research, and more than 400 hearings at which 1,798 witnesses appeared. Amazingly, all reports of the committee were to be unanimous. Asked how this could happen, Republican Owen Brewster said it was not hard to get men to agree when the facts were known.

Early 1942 was a dark time. Singapore fell to the Japanese, then Bataan, with the surrender of General Wainwright and some 75,000 American and Filipino troops, the largest surrender of an American fighting force since Appomattox. Leningrad was still under siege, after more than six months, and along the eastern seaboard of the United States, off shores long thought safe from Europe’s wars, German U-boats were sinking oil tankers almost at will—and “so close,” wrote Eric Sevareid, “that a chorus girl in a Miami penthouse could see men die in flaming oil.” Washington made ready for air raids. Bess Truman had blackout curtains on order for the Connecticut Avenue apartment. The senator took his World War I helmet to the office and at night would lie awake tossing and turning, “fighting the war.” In April, driving through North Carolina on committee business, he tried to think only of spring returning, “the return of Ceres from Pluto’s palace.” The dogwood and apple orchards were in bloom along the winding road, and at the hotel at Chapel Hill all was quiet and restful. Still he couldn’t sleep, fretting over the course of the war.

In a speech on the Senate floor that summer of 1942, he called for a second front in Europe to relieve the Russians—as a matter of clear military necessity. In a speech at home in Jackson County he said the war was only a tragic continuation of “the one we fought in 1917 and 1918.” The victors in that war, he argued, “had the opportunity to compel a peace that would protect us from war for many generations. But they missed the opportunity.” A “spirit of isolationism” had brought the worse calamity of the present conflict. It must never happen again.

Disclosures produced by his committee were shocking. Curtiss-Wright was discovered manufacturing faulty airplane engines for delivery to combat forces. One inspector for Curtiss-Wright, a man with two nephews in the Army Air Corps, broke down and wept as he told a committee investigator what was going on. “If I were the executive in charge of a plant of that sort, I would know what was going on,” Truman told an Air Corps officer who testified, “and I think it is plain negligence, and maybe worse than that…that they didn’t know. They should have known.” The officer agreed. “No doubt about it,” said Truman. The Air Corps had denied that there were problems. Curtiss-Wright launched an advertising campaign stressing the company’s contribution to winning the war. But the faulty engines were a reality, and as Truman surmised, more than negligence was involved. As an aftermath of the committee’s investigation one Air Corps general involved was sent to prison.

Questioning the cause of troubles with the B-26 bomber built by the Glenn Martin Company, the committee was informed by Martin himself that the wings were not wide enough. Truman asked why the wings weren’t fixed. Martin said plans were too far along and that besides he already had the contract. Truman said that if that was how Martin felt, then the committee would see the contract was ended. Martin said he would correct the size of the wings.

They saw a lot of the seamy side of the war effort, Truman once remarked, speaking for the committee. Yet for Truman the disclosures appeared to confirm many of his worst suspicions about big business in America. He was truly a Jeffersonian in spirit; William Jennings Bryan remained a political hero. The things Truman had said in the Senate in earlier years about the evils of big banks, big insurance companies, big corporations had been said in earnest. He had never really known any industrialists or heads of giant corporations, most of whom were Republicans. He had never counted such people among his personal or political friends.

Nor, at this stage, does he appear ever to have accepted the view that a certain amount of corporate stupidity and corruption was inevitable in an undertaking so massive and involving so many interests as the war effort. In fact, the American industrial powerhouse, America’s phenomenal productivity was what would turn the tide against Germany and Japan. It would prove the decisive factor in the war, and Truman was to give too little credit to the vast majority of patriotic business people and industrialists who were making this happen. At times, in what he wrote and said, he made it seem as though the committee and its investigators were the only ones doing their duty. He didn’t believe that, of course. Also, from what he and his investigators were finding, it is easy to understand why he might have felt as he did.

A classic case and one of the most memorable days of testimony concerned the United States Steel Corporation and its subsidiary, Carnegie-Illinois Steel. At issue was the quality of steel plate being produced for ships.

As frequently happened, the committee’s first hint of trouble came in letters from employees who felt it their patriotic duty to report what was going on. At first little was done. The volume of similar complaints and warnings from around the country had become too great to handle. Much of it was obviously crank mail and to follow every lead would have been impossible. But when a newly launched ship, a tanker called
Schenectady
built by Henry J. Kaiser, broke in two at Portland, Oregon, in January 1943, the question of steel plate became one of vital importance.

At the Irvin Works, the Carnegie-Illinois rolling mill at West Mifflin, Pennsylvania, investigators for the Truman Committee found that at least 5 percent of the plant’s production, or about 3,000 tons of steel per month, failed to meet Navy specifications, yet was being labeled and delivered as up to standard. The results of quality tests—chemical analysis conducted in the mill to determine the quantity of carbon and other elements in the steel—were simply altered (as were other tests for tensile strength) “to conform to what the customer expected to receive,” in the words of the chief specifications examiner, a man named Murray Stewart. If the chemical analysis of a “heat” of steel wasn’t known, he said, then they would just make one up for the record book.

Stewart was among the first to appear on the day of the hearing, March 23, 1943, and he provided some of the most damaging of all testimony, as well as a touch of unintended humor, when Hugh Fulton encouraged him to explain how exactly the system worked:

An assistant metallurgist, David B. Ireland, Jr., testified—apparently hoping to put operations at the Irvin mill in a better light—that he learned how to fake the tests at the Edgar Thomson Works, another giant Carnegie-Illinois mill near Pittsburgh. Indeed, he had become so proficient, said Ireland, that he could readily fool a Navy inspector, whenever one was on hand. To date only one tester had been caught cheating by a Navy inspector, Ireland continued, but there was an explanation for that: “He cheated more than he was supposed to cheat.”

Was the man fired, asked Senator Homer Ferguson. No, said Ireland, he was demoted. Was he demoted because he went too far, Chairman Truman asked a higher-ranking employee, chief metallurgist W. F. McGarrity.

“Yes, sir,” said McGarrity.

“Going a little too far, he was demoted,” repeated Truman. “He wasn’t fired, he was just demoted.”

“And through satisfactory work elsewhere he was brought back to a better paying job,” added McGarrity.

Three investigators from the committee had gone to the Irvin Works earlier in March, or roughly two months after the
Schenectady
incident. They had called first at the Carnegie-Illinois headquarters in Pittsburgh, where they were told by the president of the corporation, J. Lester Perry, that they could speak to no employee unless a company attorney were present. Nor would they be permitted inside the mill until he, Perry, put through a call to Senator Truman to see what this was all about, a move that infuriated Senator Truman and made him immediately suspicious that Perry was trying to hide something. When the investigators arrived at Irwin about noon they were kept waiting for half an hour, then invited to lunch at the company cafeteria. They did not want lunch, they said, they wanted to see the record book from the mill at once. But they were kept waiting another hour, and when the book was at last made available at two in the afternoon, they learned it had been taken apart the night before and distributed among several people who were “doing work” for the company attorney. Two hours had been required to put it back together again. How much had been removed or altered they had no way of knowing, wrote one of the investigators in his report to Chairman Truman.

“I don’t think that was exactly strong cooperation, Mr. Perry,” Truman said when Perry took his place at the witness table, after Stewart, Ireland, and McGarrity had all completed their testimony. “And I was also rather surprised…that you didn’t take immediate action to clean the plant and find why this procedure was followed. I want you to explain to the committee fully why that was.”

“Senator Truman, it is not my intention to explain this and to be controversial,” Perry answered smoothly.

“You can be as controversial as you like,” said Truman. “It is your privilege.”

He had never had any desire except to cooperate, Perry insisted. Perhaps he had not appreciated the full importance of the investigators’ visit, perhaps he should have done more. He had demonstrated goodwill, he thought. As he recalled, it was only late in the day when the seriousness of the situation became clear to him. “That afternoon, late, it appeared definitely that they wanted to make an investigation,” he said.

“We don’t send investigators to plants just for fun,” Truman snapped.

“I understand that now,” replied Perry.

Truman pressed him again on what action had been taken to straighten things out in the mill. Had anybody been fired? What corrections had been made? Trying first to evade the questions, Perry admitted that as yet nothing had been done. He needed time to get all the facts, “the fullest implications.” Truman found that unacceptable. If he had been president of the company, he said, he would have gotten to the bottom of the situation at once. “You had all this information as soon as our investigators had it.”

It was Perry’s position, as expressed in a prepared statement and in the course of testimony, that while management deplored such devious practices as had been disclosed by the committee’s investigators—practices that higher management had no part in—even the substandard plates supplied by the mill were “entirely suitable for their intended use.” If the Navy was not getting what it ordered exactly, what it was getting was good enough for the purpose. “The only explanation which can be given for the failure to carry out prescribed testing procedures is that a few individuals…grew lax under the pressure of heavy production….” He found the word “cheat” as used in other testimony unacceptable. He preferred “misrepresentation.”

Most important, concerning the
Schenectady
, he said that failure of steel plate in the ship had not been the cause of its breakup and even if that were the problem, the plate at the point where the break began was not a product of the Irvin Works.

Of the senators present, it was Ferguson and Brewster, the two Republicans, who bore down hardest on Perry, while Fulton or Truman would move in with a question or comment from time to time. Ferguson picked up quickly on the question of where the
Schenectady
plate had been made. It was not made at Irvin, Perry affirmed again. Then where, asked Ferguson. Homestead, admitted Perry.