Harry Truman Read online

  Then he turned to General Vaughan with a twinkle in his eye and said: “And at all other times you will mind your own damned business.”

  Ike was very pleased by this arrangement. As he left the White House, he told General Vaughan that Pa Watson, Roosevelt’s military aide, had been given far more authority. FDR told the Secretary of War, “Whenever Pa Watson tells you anything it’s an order from me. Even if I never heard of it, it’s an order from me.”

  Ike shook his head. “You can imagine how Pa Watson ran the Army.”

  The opening round of the get-Truman attack on General Vaughan was led by Drew Pearson, who had made a fool of himself by filing an election eve column discussing Dewey’s cabinet choices. Pearson was not a reactionary, but he was more than ready to cooperate with them to serve his own dubious purposes.

  Dad’s opinion of Drew Pearson was summed up very succinctly in a letter he wrote to Bob Hannegan on September 10, 1946. Bob had written Dad a rather unnecessary note denying a Pearson broadcast which implied he would not be a Truman supporter in 1948. Dad replied:

  I appreciated your note of the ninth, but you didn’t have to write it.

  Whenever I get my information from Pearson, I hope somebody will have my head examined - I’ll need it.

  Articles like that are merely an attempt to upset the “apple cart” and Pearson and your friend Winchell are the “sphere heads” for that purpose. If either one of them ever tell the truth, it is by accident and not intentional.

  General Vaughan first ran afoul of Pearson in 1946, when one of Pearson’s assistants talked himself onto a government aid mission to Greece. The Greek government informed the White House, through General Vaughan, that the man, a Greek-American, was persona non grata because of his previous political activities. He was promptly bumped from the mission. Pearson warned General Vaughan he would “get him” if his man was not immediately restored to the official list. General Vaughan, with Dad’s complete approval, told Pearson to get lost.

  For the next two years, Pearson sniped continually at General Vaughan in his column. At one point, he formally accused him of taking a huge bribe to fix a tax case. Again with Dad’s knowledge and approval, the FBI investigated this claim for several years, questioning people in Kansas City, Washington, and New Orleans. They found nothing. But meanwhile, Pearson was able to scream that a man on the President’s staff was “under investigation.”

  In February 1949, Pearson made the horrifying announcement that General Vaughan had accepted a medal from the “fascistic” government of Argentina, which at that time was ruled by the dictator Juan Peron. Dad was told to fire General Vaughan immediately. There is in the Constitution a prohibition against an American officer accepting a decoration from a foreign government. For decades, the practice had been to accept such medals and turn them over to the State Department until permission to keep them was granted by Congress. Diplomatic experience had shown that many nations did not understand this constitutional prohibition and were very offended when our military men or civil servants refused the proffered medal.

  General Vaughan had duly informed Stanley Woodward, chief of protocol for the State Department, of the Argentine ambassador’s desire to confer the Grand Cross of the Order of the Liberator San Martin on him. He was told to accept it politely and turn it over to Protocol. The same decoration had been received without comment on August 31, 1948, by General Omar Bradley, chief of staff, and World War II Generals Devers, Hodges, Wedemeyer, Collins, and several others. Earlier, General Eisenhower and Admiral Chester Nimitz had been among the recipients.

  Pearson let it be known throughout Washington and the nation that anyone who attended the party at the Argentine Embassy when General Vaughan accepted his decoration would be persona non grata henceforth in Pearsonville - a decree which did not cause any shivers of fear in the White House. Pearson was not among those invited to the Embassy for the ceremony. But he stood outside glaring ominously at all those who dared to brave his wrath. They included senators, congressmen, and most of the ranking officers of the Pentagon. Pearson ran up and down peering into cars like something out of a Marx Brothers movie. The climax came when General Hoyt Vandenberg, commander of the air force, arrived. Pearson was busy peering into another car, so General Vandenberg strolled up to him, tapped him on the shoulder, and gave him his card. “I want to make sure you don’t miss me,” he said. The next day, Pearson wrote in his column that the General had sneaked into the Embassy through a rear entrance.

  After fifteen years in Washington, my father was used to ignoring Drew Pearson. But he was galled to see a supposedly responsible paper, the Washington Post, taking up the Argentine accusation on their editorial page. A few days later, Dad attended a dinner given by the Reserve Officers Association in honor of General Vaughan. They were enormously proud of the fact that a reserve officer was the President’s aide - a fact which, incidentally, raised hackles among the regular army brass in Washington. Kiddingly, Dad began an off-the-cuff speech by saying, “I don’t know if I’m supposed to tell all I know on Vaughan or not.” But as he reviewed General Vaughan’s career and their long friendship, his temperature rose, and he ended by saying, “If any S.O.B. thinks he can get me to discharge any member of my staff or Cabinet by some smart-aleck statement over the air, he’s mistaken.”

  This got into the papers, and General Vaughan soon became a target for headline hunters in Congress. In August 1949, a subcommittee headed by Senator Clyde R. Hoey of North Carolina began an investigation into so-called “five percenters,” who supposedly peddled their influence to government agencies for 5 percent of the government contract. The star witness was a character named John Maragon, a Greek-American, who, it turned out, was drawing $1,000 a month from an importer while he worked for the Allied mission to Greece. Because General Vaughan had helped to get him the job, he was pilloried as hopelessly corrupt. Pearson went almost berserk, picturing Maragon’s enormous influence in the Truman Administration. He claimed that Maragon had stood beside my father when he reviewed the Atlantic fleet, accompanied Dad to Potsdam, and cajoled him into giving away half of Europe to Stalin. The truth is, Maragon was a passenger agent for the B&O Railroad, and General Vaughan had recommended him as a suitable person to handle travel accommodations and the transfer of baggage for the American commission visiting Greece. Pearson magnified this into Maragon as a State Department adviser and architect of the Truman Doctrine.

  Maragon was one of those little men who loved to be on the fringes of big-time politics. They are tireless in attempting to do favors for anyone who will let them, and when they are out of earshot, they will loudly proclaim their important contacts in the White House, or Congress, or the State Department, alleging to their friends, or anyone who will listen to them, that the inner wheels of the government cannot turn without their advice and consent. General Vaughan, who was relatively inexperienced in the duplicities of the Washington scene, took several years to realize that Maragon was misrepresenting his relationship with him. Only during Maragon’s trial for perjury (committed before the Hoey Committee) did the General learn that Maragon had a habit of claiming to speak for him on various occasions, thus gaining access to various official and unofficial Washington functions.

  General Vaughan appeared before the Hoey Committee for two days, testifying about his relationship with Maragon and another reputed five percenter, Colonel James V. Hunt. The General had accepted the gift of a factory reject deep-freeze from one of Colonel Hunt’s clients - again totally unaware that his name was being used to peddle influence.

  With great reluctance, Senator Hoey was forced to admit there was no evidence of corruption on the General’s part. But that did not prevent headlines and editorials about deep-freezes and influence peddling, which gave the impression the Truman Administration was riddled with corruption. General Vaughan, dismayed and horrified, went to Dad and said he felt he should resign as his military aide.

  “Harry,” snapped Dad, “don’t eve
n mention such a thing to me again. We came in here together and we’re going out of here together. Those so-and-so’s are trying to get me, through you. I understand exactly what’s going on.”

  When reading the headlines the investigation created with practically no evidence of guilt by anyone, it is frightening to think of what might have happened if some of the behind-the-scenes plotting had succeeded. A loyal Louisiana congressman informed Dad that Pearson legmen were scouring New Orleans and its environs for Democrats willing to take a bribe and swear Harry Vaughan had helped them fix an income tax case. General Vaughan has in his files affidavits from some of the men who were approached. Fortunately, these smear tactics got nowhere. A few others who regarded the General as fair game found out he could take care of himself rather handily. In the files of the Truman Library, there are the papers of a libel suit General Vaughan instituted against the Saturday Evening Post for calling him a crook. It took him until 1960 to win it. He collected $10,000.

  Senator Hoey was from North Carolina and conservative to his high-buttoned shoes and wing collar. Sulking in South Carolina was retired Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes. He suddenly decided the believers in yesterday were the men of tomorrow, and began harshly attacking the Truman Administration’s Fair Deal, making it sound as if the world was going to come to an end if we gave the federal government enough power to improve the health and guarantee the civil rights of all the people. Speaking at Washington and Lee University late in June 1949, Byrnes predicted that “the individual - whether farmer, worker, manufacturer, lawyer or doctor - will soon be an economic slave pulling an oar in the galley of the state.”

  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.