Truman (94 page)

One of the primary objectives of American policy, Truman said, was “the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free of coercion.” This had been a fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan, countries that had tried “to impose their will, and their way of life, upon other countries.”

Dressed in a dark suit and dark tie, he read from an open notebook slowly and with great force. His audience listened in silence. Hardly anyone moved. In the front row, John Snyder had his head bowed. Beside him the perfectly tailored Acheson sat as stiff and straight as if at a memorial service, hands folded in his lap. Further along in the same row, Senator Taft fiddled with his glasses, rubbed his face, then yawned. On the dais behind Truman, Speaker Martin and Senator Vandenberg were following the speech line by line in printed copies.

To many who were listening there in the chamber and over the radio, it seemed an odd, ironic time for a crisis. The United States was the richest, strongest country in the world and prospering as few could have ever imagined. Production was up. Incomes were up. There were few strikes. There was no more waiting for new automobiles, no meat shortages any longer. White shirts, nylon stockings, fishing tackle, and golf balls were back on store shelves. Because of the GI Bill, more than 4 million veterans were attending college, as most never could have in other times. Yet the speech seemed disturbingly like a call to arms, “Well, I told my wife to dust off my uniform,” an ex-soldier enrolled at the University of Oklahoma remarked to a reporter.

The cost of winning the war had been $341 billion. Now $400 million was needed for Greece and Turkey. “This is a serious course upon which we embark,” Truman said at the finish, and the look on his face was serious indeed. “I would not recommend it except that the alternative is much more serious…. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world, and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this nation.”

The entire room rose in applause, but as Acheson later wrote, it was more as a tribute to a brave man than a unanimous acceptance of his policy. Truman, holding the closed notebook with the speech in front of his chest with both hands, nodded to the applause left and right, several times, but he never smiled.

Editorial reaction was overwhelmingly supportive.
The New York Times
compared the speech to the Monroe Doctrine. To the editors of
Time
and
Life
it was a great clearing of the air at long last. “Like a bolt of lightning,” said
Life,
“the speech cut through the confused international atmosphere.” The President, said
Collier’s,
had “hit the popularity jackpot.” But support was often expressed with troubling reservations—“Are we to shoulder the mantle of nineteenth century British imperialism?” asked the San Francisco
Examiner
—and some of the liberal press was outraged.
PM
charged Truman with scrapping Roosevelt’s whole policy on Russia.

Most important was the objection of Walter Lippmann, who, though favoring aid to Greece, disapproved of the President’s tone. “A vague global policy which sounds like the tocsin of an ideological crusade, has no limits,” Lippmann warned. “It cannot be controlled. Its effects cannot be predicted.”

That the speech was of immense importance, signaling a turning point, no one seems to have doubted. “If words could shape the future of nations,” wrote
Newsweek,
“these unquestionably would. They had clearly put America into power politics to stay.”

On Capitol Hill Senator Vandenberg was quick to stress that he did not consider Greek-Turkish aid as a “universal pattern,” but something only “to fit a given circumstance.” Acheson, too, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the bill was not intended to establish a pattern for the future. The United States, he stressed, would “of course” act “according to the circumstances of each specific case.”

Objections in Congress came from liberals and conservatives alike. Senator Pepper was sure such a policy would destroy all hope of reconciliation with Russia. Senators Byrd and McKellar were opposed chiefly because of cost. “I guess the do-gooders won’t feel right until they have us all broke,” said Republican Representative Harold Knutson of Minnesota.

Truman, within minutes after delivering the speech, had been on his way to the airport and another flight to Florida. The President, explained Wallace Graham, had been “going pretty hard lately” and needed a rest. In plain truth, the President was exhausted. Writing to Margaret from Key West, he said no one had any idea how “worn to a frazzle” he was by “this terrible decision.” But the police state of communism was no different from the police state of the Nazis, he told her. He had known that since Potsdam.

In the time between Truman’s dramatic appearance before Congress and the final vote on aid to Greece and Turkey, the fight in the Senate over the Lilienthal nomination grew intense and abusive. The opposition was nearly all Republican. Senator John Bricker of Ohio, who had been Dewey’s running mate in 1944, warned that it might be the last chance ever to get the Atomic Energy Commission out of the hands of leftists. Capehart of Indiana said that especially now, in view of the situation in Greece and Turkey, control of atomic energy ought to be returned to the Army, an idea that appealed also to Senator Taft. Brewster of Maine, who had once served on the Truman Committee, claimed Lilienthal’s indifference to communism made him no less a threat than if he were an outright party member.

“If Mr. L. is a communist so am I,” Truman wrote privately. He would carry the fight to the end, Truman vowed. “It is a matter of principle and we cannot let the peanut politicians ruin a good man….” Taft, Truman thought, was succeeding only in making himself look like a fool.

A few Republicans—Knowland of California, Saltonstall of Massachusetts, Aiken of Vermont—declared support for the nominee. But the decisive moment came when Vandenberg spoke to a tense session on the afternoon of April 3, giving what many thought was his finest speech ever.

David Lilienthal, Vandenberg said, was “no part of a communist by any stretch of the imagination.” When Vandenberg called for Lilienthal’s confirmation, the galleries roared with applause.

There was a test vote on an amendment. Lilienthal was with Truman at the White House when Charlie Ross put his head in at the door to report the result. They had won by a margin of 14 votes, more than anyone had thought possible. Truman and Lilienthal shook hands. Atomic energy was “the most important thing there is,” Truman remarked, looking subdued and thoughtful. “You must make a blessing of it, or,” he said, pointing to a large globe in the corner, “we’ll blow that all to smithereens.”

The final, formal vote in the Senate came on April 9, when a total of twenty Republicans defied Taft to support Lilienthal. Of the southern Democrats, only four besides McKellar voted against him. The nomination was confirmed by 50 to 31. It was Truman’s first test of strength with the new Congress and a sweet victory.

Yet the issue of loyalty—the issue of who was or who was not, in Taft’s phrase, soft on communism—was by no means ended. The Republican leadership, having made communism a theme with such success in the fall elections, would keep up the demand for investigations, and Truman, to head off such attacks from conservatives in both parties, had by this time accepted the view of a special commission—and of Attorney General Clark and the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover—that a program of loyalty reviews was necessary. The whole concept troubled him. In notes he made of a conversation with the President in May 1947, Clark Clifford wrote: “[He is] very strongly anti-FBI…. Wants to be sure to hold FBI down, afraid of ‘Gestapo.’ ”

Further, much too much was being made of “the Communist bugaboo,” Truman thought, and said so in a letter to a former Pennsylvania governor named George Earle. The country was “perfectly safe so far as Communism is concerned—we have far too many sane people.”

The political pressures bore heavily, however. Attorney General Clark, conceding that the number of disloyal employees in the government was probably small, argued that even one such person posed a serious threat. J. Edgar Hoover wanted authority to remove anyone from public service whose views were politically suspect. Such people, Hoover warned, might well influence foreign policy in a way that could “favor the foreign country of their ideological choice.” Like many Republicans on Capitol Hill, Hoover saw the State Department as the core of the problem. In his first speech as the new Speaker of the House, Joe Martin had declared there was “no room in the government of the United States for any who prefer the Communistic system.” Accusations that the New Deal had been riddled with Communists were made repeatedly and widely believed, however unfounded. “The long tenure of the Democratic Party had poisoned the air we Republicans breathed,” remembered Martin much later. “Fear of Communist penetration of the government was an ugly new phenomenon. Suspicion of the State Department was rife. We were disturbed and bewildered by the new power of the Soviet Union.”

Truman worried particularly about the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the extremes it might go to under its vile-tempered, and to Truman contemptible, Republican chairman, Representative J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey. By acting first on the loyalty issue, Truman hoped to head Thomas off. Also, importantly, he wanted no accusations of administration softness on communism at home just as he was calling for a new hard approach to communism abroad.

On Friday, March 21, 1947, nine days after his address to Congress, Truman issued Executive Order No. 9835, establishing an elaborate Federal Employees Loyalty and Security Program. And he did so with misgivings.

Roosevelt, in 1942, had empowered the Civil Service to disqualify anyone from government employment where there was a “reasonable doubt of loyalty,” and by executive order Roosevelt later assigned the Justice Department and FBI to check on the loyalty of government workers. But that had been during the war. Until now, no such step had ever been taken in peacetime.

His purpose, Truman later wrote, was twofold: to guard against disloyal employees in the government work force, and to protect innocent government workers from unfounded accusations. To show that he had no intention of playing politics with the program, he put a conservative Republican, a prominent Washington lawyer named Seth Richardson, in charge of its Review Board.

All federal employees were to be subject to loyalty investigations, whatever their jobs. FBI files and the files of the House Un-American Activities Committee would be called into use. Anyone found to be disloyal could no longer hold a government job. Dismissal could be based merely on “reasonable grounds for belief that the person is disloyal,” yet the term “disloyal” was never defined. Moreover, those accused would be unable to confront those making charges against them, or even to know who they were or what exactly the charges were. In addition, the Attorney General was authorized to draw up a list of subversive organizations.

To David Lilienthal, who well knew the torment that self-proclaimed Communist-hunters could bring down on a loyal government employee, the whole program looked ominous. Anyone serving in the government could be at the mercy of almost any malevolent accuser. “In practical effect,” Lilienthal wrote in his diary, “the usual rule that men are presumed innocent until proved guilty is in reverse.” Yet Lilienthal, too, conceded that something of the sort probably had to be initiated, and so staunch an upholder of liberal principle as the New York
Post
called the program a logical answer to subversion. At his next press conference, Truman was asked little or nothing about it. Of more interest was his letter to the former Pennsylvania governor. Was he truly so unconcerned about “the Communist bugaboo”?

“I am not worried about the Communist Party taking over the government of the United States,” Truman replied, “but I am against a person, whose loyalty is not to the government of the United States, holding a government job.” At the time it seemed all the answer anyone could ask for.

In another few months the FBI would begin running “name checks” on every one of the 2 million people on the federal payrolls, a monstrous, costly task. Over four years, by 1951, 3 million employees would be investigated and cleared by the Civil Service Commission, and another 14,000 by the FBI. Several thousand would resign, but only 212 would be dismissed as being of questionable loyalty. None would be indicted and no evidence of espionage would be found.

Clark Clifford would say sadly years later that the whole program had been “a response to the temper of the times,” and that he did not see how Truman could have done otherwise.