Congress and Harry S. Truman: A Conflicted Legacy 1935503944, 9781935503941

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Congress and Harry S. Truman

Congress and Harry S. Truman: A Conflicted Legacy The Truman Legacy Series, Volume 7 Based on the Seventh Truman Legacy Symposium Truman and Congress: A Conflicted Legacy May 2009 Key West, Florida Edited by Donald A. Ritchie

Copyright © 2011 Truman State University Press, Kirksville, Missouri 63501 All rights reserved tsup.truman.edu Cover photo: President Truman appearing before a joint session of Congress, April 16, 1945. (US Senate Historical Office) Cover design: Katie Best

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Truman Legacy Symposium (7th : 2009 : Key West, Fla.) Congress and Harry S. Truman : a conflicted legacy / edited by Donald A. Ritchie. p. cm. — (Truman legacy series ; v. 7) “Based on the seventh Truman Legacy Symposium, Truman and Congress : a conflicted legacy, May, 2009, Key West, Florida” Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-935503-94-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-935503-96-5 (e-book) 1. Truman, Harry S., 1884–1972—Congresses. 2. United States—Politics and government—1945–1953—Congresses. I. Ritchie, Donald A., 1945– II. Title. E813.T718 2009 973.918092—dc22 2011015105 No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any format by any means without written permission from the publisher. The paper in this publication meets or exceeds the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.

Contents Series Editor’s Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Michael J. Devine

Foreword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Senator George S. McGovern

Introduction: Presidents Working with Congress, from Truman to Obama. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii Donald A. Ritchie

Section 1: Congress in the Truman Era What President Truman Thought of Congress and How He Chose to Deal with It . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Ken Hechler

Congress and Truman: A Clash of Parties and Personalities. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Raymond W. Smock

Triumphs, Tribulations, and Turnip Day Sessions in the 80th Congress: Harry Truman Copes with Divided Government . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Richard S. Conley

Graphic Essay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Raymond H. Geselbracht

Section 2: Domestic Policy Harry S. Truman and Congress: Presidential Effectiveness and the Liberal Scorecard. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Alonzo L. Hamby

Truman the Bipartisan? Reassessing the Record of the “Do-Nothing” Congress. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Robert P. Watson

Truman, Anticommunism, and Congress. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 Robert David Johnson

Section 3: Foreign and Military Policy Winning Bipartisan Support for a New Approach to the World: Truman, Foreign Policy, and the Eightieth Congress. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Susan M. Hartmann

Truman’s National Security Policy: Constitutional Issues. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 Louis Fisher

Truman, Congress, and the Military . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180 Burton I. Kaufman

Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203

Illustrations & Tables Triumphs, Tribulations, and Turnip Day Sessions in the 80th Congress Figure 1: Comparative Success Rate, House of Representatives. . . . . . . . . . . 31 Figure 2: Comparative Success Rate, Senate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Table 1: Truman’s Position Vote Success Rate, 80th Congress. . . . . . . . Table 2: Regression Analysis of Presidential Support Scores in the House of Representatives, 80th Congress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 3: Regression Analysis of Presidential Support Scores in the Senate, 80th Congress. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 4: Democrats in the 80th Senate with Expected Support Scores ≤ 10%. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 5: Democrats in the 80th Senate with Expected Support Scores ≥ 10%. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 6: Position Votes in the House of Representatives, 80th Congress. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 7: Position Votes of Senate, 80th Congress. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

28 34 34 37 39 46 48

Graphic Essay Images courtesy of Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, unless specified.

Harry Truman to Bess Wallace, n.d. [postmarked May 28, 1917] (excerpt). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . President Harry S. Truman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Matthew J. Connelly, ca. 1945. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . President Truman and members of the White House staff, Key West, Florida, March 13, 1951. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Charles Maylon to President Truman, April 26, 1951. . . . . . . . . . . . . . President Truman meeting with the “Big Four,” January 14, 1952 . . . . Charles F. Murphy and Stephen J. Spingarn to the President, September 12 [sic, perhaps September 1 or 2], 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

53 54 55 56 57 58 59

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President Truman delivering the State of the Union Address, January 4, 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Draft of President Truman’s radio address on his veto of the Taft-Hartley Act, September 20, 1947. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Truman personal writing, not dated (probably ca. March 21, 1947). . . Charles S. Murphy, Memorandum for the President, February 17, 1949. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Truman Diary, November 1, 1949 (excerpt) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Truman Personal Writing, November 30, 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Memorandum, Sam Rayburn to Harry S. Truman, November 10, 1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . President Truman offering farewell wishes, Washington National Airport, August 13, 1947. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . President Truman giving a press conference, Key West, Florida, March 30, 1950. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Senators William E. Jenner, Robert A. Taft and Homer E. Capehart talking prior to a Republican caucus, January 1, 1952. . . . . . . . . . . President Truman signs H.R. 4590, July 31, 1946. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Draft memorandum by George M. Elsey, n.d., ca. June 27, 1950 . . . . . “The ‘Fair Deal’: A Legislative Scorecard,” graphic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

60 62 64 66 67 68 70 72 73 74 76 78 81

Truman the Bipartisan? Table 1: Comparison of Federal Judicial Appointments Confirmed by the Senate. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 2: Comparison of Presidential Vetoes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 3: Comparison of “Significant Bills” (Public) Vetoed. . . . . . . . . Table 4: Outcome of Major Presidential Vetoes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table 5: Outcome of Presidential Vetoes of Significant Bills . . . . . . . . Table 6. Presidential Rationale Behind Vetoes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

104 105 105 106 106 114

Series Editor’s Preface This volume is the seventh in the Truman Legacy Series published by Truman State University Press. Prior volumes have focused on President Truman’s policies relating to foreign affairs, civil rights, Israel, Native Americans, the environment, and immigration. The subject here, and at a May 2009 conference in Key West, Florida, where most of these essays were presented, is the legacy Truman left with respect to relations between the president and Congress. President Truman has left an extraordinary legacy in many areas of public policy. His presidency occurred at a time of exceptional change in the United States and throughout the world, and Truman had to respond to all the challenges these changes presented. During my time as director of the Harry S. Truman Library, I have often felt that Truman’s presidency seems to be the first presidency of the modern world, and that the beginnings of all that was to come for the next half century were squeezed into his eight short years. Of course the Truman presidency is my job and perhaps I am biased. But historians, political scientists, and others have agreed on the great importance of the Truman years and have produced an immense literature about his presidency. Inevitably, though, this literature is uneven and incomplete, and many aspects of Truman’s legacy are imperfectly understood. Some areas, such as civil rights, are well understood but are in the midst of reexamination, while other areas, such as environmental policy, have never received much attention. The area explored in this volume appears to be suffering from too much more-or-less-unexplored conventional wisdom. President Truman advocated an incredibly ambitious set of domestic policies, and Congress failed to pass very many of them into law. As a result, Truman is often judged to have had poor relations with Congress. The authors whose essays are collected in the present volume, however, put forward collectively a view of Truman’s relations with Congress—and Congress’s relations with Truman—that transcends such a simplistic judgment. On the one hand, Truman established a good record of dealing with the problem of divided government during the 80th Congress, especially in the area of foreign affairs; however, he failed to deal effectively with

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the anti-Communist hysteria that infected Congress during much of his administration. His record in dealing with a Congress newly reformed to make it an effect counter to the increasingly powerful executive branch was solid, given the circumstances. But he made a serious error in going to war in Korea without receiving authorization from Congress. In pairing pluses and minuses, one could also say that Congress was so often wrongheaded during Truman’s presidency that bad relations between the White House and Congress were exactly the right thing. Or one could conclude that, given the difficult situation Truman inherited from President Roosevelt vis-à-vis Congress, it was a significant accomplishment to establish, through domestic policy proposals that Congress rejected, an agenda for the next generation of American liberals. All these views are present in the following pages. I am very grateful that Ken Hechler is again represented among the authors of a Truman Legacy Series volume. Ken is one of the most remarkable people I know. He is important to me in my daily life at the Truman Library because he worked on President Truman’s White House Staff from 1949 to 1953. The first two sentences of his essay in this volume show how he feels about his former boss in the White House: “Abraham Lincoln saved the Union. Harry Truman saved the world!” His White House service alone would have made him a great man to me, but in addition to this he is a bestselling author (The Bridge at Remagen, 1957) and served as a member of Congress for eighteen years and as secretary of state for West Virginia for sixteen years. Throughout his adult life he has served as an inspirational professor of political science and history. He is a lifelong idealist who recently was a prominent member of a protest against mining practices in his home state of West Virginia. I am leaving out other extraordinary things about Ken’s life, inevitably since a lengthy book would be needed to mention everything I should say about him. Congress and Harry S. Truman: A Conflicted Legacy, and the conference that gave rise to it, required the good work of many people. Don Ritchie served as program chair for the conference and edited the book; without him, neither would have been possible. Nancy Rediger and Barbara Smith-Mandell at Truman State University Press skillfully transformed a manuscript into an attractive book. Many people in Key West provided essential support, financial and otherwise: Ed Swift, president of the Harry S. Truman Little White House Foundation and of Historical Tours of America; Chris Belland, Piper Smith-Belland, and Monica Munoz of Historical Tours of America; the Spottswood Companies, Inc., which provided lodging for conference presenters and a beautiful venue for conference sessions; Sheila Jaskot and Delia Rios of C-SPAN, who



Series Editor’s Preface

enabled the conference presenters to make their arguments to a large audience of viewers throughout the country; and the Monroe County Tourist Development Council, which provided support for promoting the conference in South Florida. I have saved until last, because they are so important to the Truman Legacy conferences and also great friends and colleagues, Bob Wolz and Paul Hilson of the Truman Little White House, and Ray Geselbracht of the Truman Library. Michael J. Devine Director, Harry S. Truman Library

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Foreword Senator George S. McGovern

President Truman went to Key West often during his eight years in office, spending there a total of one hundred and seventy-five days—just four days short of half of a presidential year. But I happen to know that he always kept in the closest touch with what was going on back in Washington, and he meant it when he said, “The buck stops here, at my desk,” and it did. Truman was somewhat like President Washington, who much preferred his home in Mount Vernon for executive office. And like Thomas Jefferson, who much preferred his home in Monticello, President Truman was more at home in Key West than he was in the White House. It’s interesting that all three of these men, Washington, Jefferson, and Truman, were assailed nonstop during the years they were president. Take Jefferson, for example. He was accused of everything from being a pawn in the hands of the French to being an atheist, and his opponents said that if he was elected president, Bibles would be confiscated all over America. One Federalist author got so carried away that he said that if Jefferson were elected against the Federalist candidate, John Adams, that there would be French armies marching in the streets of Washington. Well, John Adams was a conservative Federalist but he had great good sense. Even though that blast against Jefferson was supposed to benefit Adams’ campaign for the presidency, he said, “I no more expect to see a French army in America than I do in heaven.” All these men had good sense in common. Certainly Truman was assailed, in spite of what I think was a very remarkable record. When he left the White House after eight years, his public approval in this country had sunk to only 22 percent. I think that’s an outrage. Truman was the president who led the way on civil rights, even before people like Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy were involved. He gave us the Marshall Plan, one of the most farsighted measures of reconstruction after a devastating xiii

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war. He did so many things, and yet at the end of all that service, only 22 percent of the American people said that they had confidence in his leadership. It’s little wonder that even George Washington, the father of our country, when asked to try for a third term, said he would rather be in his grave than spend another four years in the presidency. For these men who had done so much for us, sometimes the presidency was a pillory. I knew President Truman up close on three different occasions. First, when I was running for Congress the first time, as a Democrat in Republican South Dakota. If you think Florida is tough for a Democrat, try South Dakota. There is no way I could have been elected without at least a third of the Republicans in my state voting for me, so I’m not mad at Republicans, at least the ones who voted for me. If I had gotten 100 percent of the Democratic vote in my state, which I usually did, I still would have been overwhelmingly defeated without the support of a strong group of independents and Republicans. But I was in what seemed like trouble in that first race when my opponent started running full-page ads. I didn’t even have the money to think about matching that, but he was running a series of ads somehow implying that I wasn’t interested in the security of the country. I had advocated in 1956 that we recognize the government of China, which had been in power since 1949. It wasn’t that I approved of communism, but I thought the more dangerous a country is, the more important it is we have an embassy there to keep track of what’s going on. Interestingly enough, one of the political figures who used to wave the Communist flag against candidates he opposed was Richard Nixon, and historians now agree that Nixon’s greatest achievement was opening relations with Communist China. But when I advocated that in 1956, these big ads started appearing: “Do you want George McGovern in the Congress, a Friend of Communism in China?” and so on. So I called President Truman and said, “Mr. President, I know you’re awfully busy raising funds for your library and other things. I hate to ask you this, but I’m in a very tough race as the first Democrat who has a chance of being elected in this state in over a quarter of a century. Could you come out and make an appearance with me?” To my surprise, he said, “I’ll be out there.” He showed up and we sat on the back of a convertible in a parade through the heart of Sioux Falls, the biggest city in South Dakota. I told him what the problem was. I said, “What would you do if you were me and your opponent was running these full-page ads suggesting you must be soft on communism?” He said, “George, just kick him in the ass with the facts.” Anyway, I was riding with President Truman on the back seat of a convertible and a young man yelled at us as we came around the corner. He said. “President Truman, Alben Barkley just died.” The news had just broken



Foreword

and this newsboy had the story. Truman just slumped, and I remember the anguish on his face. He broke into tears; he was terribly upset about it. I was sorry that had to happen when he was in my state. Well, I won that election and four years later I boldly decided to run for US Senate against Karl Mundt, who had been in the Senate longer than anybody from either party in the history of South Dakota. I decided I was ready to take him on. I was in Washington at the Mayflower Hotel with our state chairman, and he said, “George, Harry Truman is up on the seventh floor. Why don’t I call up there and see if we can go up there and talk to him? Maybe he’ll come out and help you in South Dakota.” So we gave him a call and his secretary came on the phone and said, “Well, I talked to President Truman and I think that he is going to see you tomorrow morning. I’m going to put him on the phone.” President Truman came on the phone, and I said, “Mr. President, I’ve got a big favor to ask you.” He replied, “I know what you’re calling about. You want me to come out to South Dakota and knock out old Senator Karl Mundt, and I’ll be glad to do it.” He came out again in 1960, but we didn’t win. Jack Kennedy was the Democratic nominee and people were scared to death out in South Dakota about a Catholic in the White House. I wasn’t afraid, but enough of my fellow South Dakotans were. While Kennedy lost the state heavily in Democratic precincts, I came within a half of one percent of defeating Karl Mundt, and I think President Truman had something to do with that. President Truman died in 1972, the year I ran for president. The last time I saw him was in 1965, and he was then still raising money for his library. He wanted to come to South Dakota and he got a South Dakotan by the name of Joe Robby to head the library campaign. Joe Robby was the owner of the Miami Dolphins and the first owner to build a stadium with funds he raised himself, no government money at all in that stadium. I keep all those experiences with me to this day. But I could add one comment that’s a little more critical: When President Truman tried to get aid for Turkey and Greece, he was told they were threatened by Communist takeover. The British had pulled out of the Mediterranean and, in effect, said, “It is up to you Americans now to take care of security in that area.” Truman was seriously considering a $400 million grant to Greece and Turkey. He called on Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, a man better know for his pomposity than his wisdom. Vandenberg told Truman that if he wanted to get this through Congress, he would have to scare the hell out of the American people. He would have to build up this Communist threat as though it were a mortal danger to the American people. President Truman, in effect, did that, and got the $400 million. The only problem with that is when you have a leader

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as good as Harry Truman trying to scare the hell out of Congress and the American people, you also scare the hell out of the Russians and the people we’re arming against. I don’t blame all of this on President Truman, of course, but I think it’s fair to say that from that day forward, American foreign policy was driven more by fear than by any other factor. For my own part, I would rather have political judgments and diplomatic judgments not made in a climate of fear. There may be things to fear, I recognize that. There may be countries to fear. But that should not become the driving force of our policy. Too many times, we’ve gotten into deep trouble in foreign policy, including the war in Vietnam and the one now in Iraq with another threatening in Afghanistan. Too many of those policies were driven by an exaggerated fear of what the threat was to us. Neither Iraq nor Vietnam was the slightest threat to the United States. Now I want to be clear on this. I don’t think that there has ever been a time in my adult life when I wouldn’t have surrendered that life to save this country from a bona fide danger. That’s why, at the age of nineteen, I volunteered to become a bomber pilot in the Second World War. I flew thirty-five missions as the pilot of a B-24 bomber. We built eighteen thousand B-24s; it was the most produced airplane by any country in the Second World War. We had twelve thousand B-17s, a wonderful airplane, but the B-24 was the most produced, and half of those B-24 bomber crews, I regret to say, never made it through the war. That’s a heavy fatality rate. I don’t begrudge one minute of it. I felt that was a war we had to fight, against Hitler and his allies, but it is because of my memory of these friends of mine being shot out of the air that I am very cautious of young Americans being sent into a conflict that is not necessary to our national interests. I have written a book about another political figure, Abraham Lincoln. It’s one of a series on all of the presidents, focusing on the years that they were in the White House—in Lincoln’s case, on the four years before he was assassinated at the beginning of his second term. Each of those books is written by a different author. I was fortunate to get President Abraham Lincoln, whom I regard as our greatest president. I might say that he had certain characteristics in common with Harry Truman, as neither of those men had extensive formal education. In President Truman’s case, he just had a high school education. In Lincoln’s case, he had only one year of elementary education, but both of those men spent the rest of their lives reading, analyzing, studying. Truman had a lifetime love of history and biography. The great essayist Emerson said, “There’s no history, there’s just biography.” That’s probably not entirely true, but it’s true enough so that President Truman’s study of the biographies of our great leaders and his study of history, and the same with Lincoln, was an important part of their greatness.

Introduction

Presidents Working with Congress, from Truman to Obama Donald A. Ritchie

The Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network (C-SPAN) conducted a survey on presidential leadership in 2009 that ranked Harry Truman fifth among all presidents, ahead of every one of his successors in the White House. The network contacted a cross section of the historians, political scientists, and journalists who had written on American political history and appeared on its programs. To counter the subjective and sometimes capricious nature of such polls, C-SPAN asked these judges to rate the presidents in ten categories as a way of determining which qualities set them apart. Truman scored high in crisis leadership, international relations, and pursuing equal justice for all. His worst categories were public persuasiveness and relations with Congress. There he came in sixteenth, behind Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, and Reagan.1 Without casting aspersions on the judges (having been one myself), there is a contradiction between Truman’s high and low scores. He placed his top priorities on international efforts from the Marshall Plan to US membership in NATO, which required congressional approval, and his accomplishments there made him “highly successful where he wanted to be.”2 His record on domestic legislation was less productive. Truman recommended programs to address significant issues ranging from national health insurance to civil rights and federal aid to education, but without a national consensus in the 1940s, these programs took another generation to enact. Still, Truman offered a more ambitious domestic agenda than xvii

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some of the presidents who scored higher than he did in congressional relations—notably Eisenhower, Ford, and Reagan—raising the question of whether asking too little from Congress deserves merit. Presidents have courted the legislative branch ever since George Washington held weekly dinners on a rotating basis for members of Congress, but by the twentieth century, the chief executive had assumed the mantle of chief legislator and chief lobbyist. The media and the voting public, along with historians and political scientists, have measured presidents by how much they get enacted into law and how often their vetoes are sustained, their nominees confirmed, and their treaties ratified. The different election cycle for president and Congress, as Lyndon Johnson pointed out, means that they run “on separate clocks.” Presidents come to office with powerful congressional committee chairs, who expect to outlast the president, already in place. Presidents seek to act quickly, taking advantage of the honeymoon months after the inauguration, while members of Congress prefer more incremental advancement. As a result, presidents appeal to the public to exert pressure on Congress for moving their bills faster. Since the president is not a prime minister, but holds office regardless of whether his party has the majority in Congress, passing legislation has also required the president to build bipartisan coalitions. Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Clinton, and both Bushes at times faced congressional majorities held by the opposition. Even when Truman had Democratic majorities in Congress—for six of his eight years as president—an alliance between conservative Southern Democrats and Republicans blocked his liberal initiatives. His experiences highlight a political truism that some presidents come to office with a full tank of gas while others start out on empty—circumstances that define their legislative effectiveness. In that respect, twelve years of the Depression and war had drained the tank for Harry Truman in 1945.3

Harry S. Truman White House congressional relations neither started nor ended with Harry Truman, but as in so many other areas, he played an important transitional role. Truman inherited from Franklin D. Roosevelt an enlarged White House staff and a vastly enlarged federal government. He set out to regularize the functions Roosevelt had handled on an ad hoc basis, creating what political scientists have described as an “institutionalized” presidency. In dealing with Congress, Truman continued Roosevelt’s practice of weekly meetings with leaders of Congress and tapped the personal friendships he had made as a senator. He also put into place the elements of



Introduction

congressional liaison for which his successor, Dwight Eisenhower, generally gets the credit. It was Herbert Hoover who persuaded Congress in 1929 to expand the executive office staff from one secretary to three so that he could appoint Minnesota Representative Walter Newton to handle his congressional relations. Hoover has earned scant credit for this innovation, largely because his scorn for Congress as parochial and patronage-driven undercut Newton’s efforts. President Roosevelt dispensed with Hoover’s precedent and served as his own congressional liaison.4 The Democrats’ sweeping victories in 1932 and 1934 swelled their ranks to two-thirds in both houses and allowed Roosevelt to dominate Congress throughout his first administration. When Roosevelt wanted something, he would send a special message to Congress, deliver a radio appeal to the nation, talk to the leadership, and dispatch a few aides to Capitol Hill to work behind the scenes. Operating at first with just a small White House staff, Roosevelt relied on his cabinet secretaries’ legislative liaisons to handle routine requests from Congress—a process that enabled him to skirt some controversial issues, telling cabinet secretaries, “It’s all your trouble, not mine.”5 FDR ranked third on the C-SPAN poll after Lincoln and Washington, and first in congressional relations, but the system that worked so well for him during his first term unraveled during his second after his proposal to enlarge the Supreme Court split the Democratic Party. Conservative Democrats began voting with Republicans against his proposals, creating a legislative stalemate. After a protracted battle, Roosevelt managed to enlarge the White House staff through the Executive Reorganization Act of 1939. The act also shifted the Bureau of the Budget from the Treasury Department to the White House, where it took the lead in clearing administration bills and agency proposals to Congress.6 Between 1937 and Roosevelt’s death in 1945, Democrats lost ninetytwo seats in the House and nineteen in the Senate. Although they retained slim majorities in both houses, effective control shifted to the conservative coalition. During the war, Roosevelt’s leadership as commander in chief relegated Congress to the backseat and fanned resentment. Notably, in 1944, the Senate’s Democratic majority leader, Alben Barkley, resigned in protest when Roosevelt vetoed a tax bill he had negotiated. Congress overrode the veto and Senate Democrats unanimously reelected Barkley as their leader—events that were vividly described by the journalist Allen Drury, who likened Roosevelt’s relations with Congress by the end of his presidency to a toboggan going downhill. Harry Truman inherited Democratic majorities that were fractious, diminished, and exhausted after a dozen years of the Depression and war—a record number died in

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office during the 79th Congress. Their constituents were pressuring them for relief from price controls and wartime taxes, and demanding that their sons in the military be brought home from overseas. This was hardly an optimal time to assume the presidency.7 With the war ending, Congress took a long summer recess and was scheduled to stay out until October 1945. Truman encouraged them to return to session a month earlier. Rather than wait until January for his State of the Union message, he sent Congress a compilation of his legislative objectives on September 21, 1945, the date he identified as his assumption of the presidency in his own right. The message detailing his 21-point program was so long that instead of delivering it in person, he let the clerks of the House and Senate read it for him, a decision that drained the drama from the event. His liberal message ran contrary to the conservative trends in the postwar Congress and encountered much resistance.8 One of the few parts Congress passed was the Employment Act of 1946, which fell far short of the full employment act that Truman had sought. Southern Democrats watered down the bill to prevent it from affecting racial policies in their region. Although New Dealers viewed this as a sign of Truman’s incompetency, some historians have noted that Truman could have passed more of his program if he had abandoned pressing for fair treatment of African Americans and argued that his refusal to do so was a sign of strength rather than of weakness.9 Campaigning in 1946 under the slogan “Had Enough?” Republicans won majorities in the House and Senate. This pitted Truman against the Republican majority on domestic policy at the same time that he sought to collaborate with them on foreign policy. He managed this feat by cultivating the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI) so assiduously that the ranking Democrat on the committee, Senator Tom Connally (D-TX), complained that he got “damn tired of hearing Vandenberg this and Vandenberg that.”10 Republican opposition to his domestic legislation enabled Truman’s campaign against the “Do-Nothing” 80th Congress. He won an improbable reelection in 1948, and Democrats took back the majority, but Truman had little success with the Democratic 81st and 82nd Congresses. Their failure to pass the education, health, and civil rights legislation he sought suggested he lacked the “power to persuade.”11 Truman’s second term was also hounded by congressional investigations into corruption and communism in the government, with some of the hearings conducted, ironically, by the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations—the old “Truman Committee” that investigated the national defense program.



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Getting bills passed and nominations approved requires spending time seeking votes on Capitol Hill, which in turn involves hearing congressional demands for everything from patronage to pork to presidential support for legislators’ own pet bills. Mounting requests from senators and representatives who wanted something fell to the president’s appointment secretary, Matt Connelly, whose main objective was to deflect them away from Truman. The job grew too burdensome for Connelly, and in 1949 he recruited two legislative assistants: Joseph Feeney, the US Navy’s liaison man in the Senate, and Charles Maylon, who covered the House for the US Army. Truman admired military personnel and did not want politicians in those jobs. Never policy makers, Feeney and Maylon did the daily legwork on the Hill that allowed Truman’s policy aides to concentrate on the major issues. The liaisons maintained low profiles and never attained the prominence of their successors. Truman even failed to mention them in his memoirs.12 “Liaison” is a suggestive word, with clandestine, romantic, and even dangerous connotations, but it is a more prosaic task requiring meetings with members of Congress on a day-to-day basis, both to promote the president’s programs and to report back to the White House on the mood in Congress, all the while trying to prevent the president from being inundated with congressional requests. Members of Congress all had candidates they wanted the president to appoint to federal jobs, while the president wanted to get his nominees confirmed, which prompted a considerable amount of quid pro quo. Congressional liaisons must work especially hard for nominees, knowing that their approval rate will serve as a benchmark of the president’s effectiveness. In his oral history, Joseph Feeney recalled how President Truman called him aside after a morning staff meeting to make it clear that “he would be the quarterback as far as the Senate was concerned and I would be the ball carrier.”13 That description encapsulates the reasons why political analysts have described Truman’s dealings with Congress as halfway between the “designed chaos” of his predecessor and the “structural purity” of his successor.14

Dwight D. Eisenhower On his way to Korea after the 1952 election, president-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower was accompanied by his old friend, Major General Wilton (Jerry) Persons. General Persons used the time to convince Eisenhower of the need for a formal office of congressional liaison in the White House. Persons had been congressional liaison for the army while Ike was US

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Army chief of staff. Eisenhower agreed and appointed Persons as head of the office, which handled day-to-day relations with the House and Senate much the same way as Truman’s liaisons had. As a sign of continuity, Persons asked Joseph Feeney to stay on the job, although he declined. Persons, the brother of the Democratic governor of Alabama, then hired another Democrat, Bryce Harlow, the staff director of the House Armed Services Committee. Persons operated as a general troubleshooter for the president, while Harlow handled the daily contacts with Capitol Hill, and in 1958 Harlow was promoted to chief congressional lobbyist.15 With a less extensive legislative agenda than Truman’s, Ike used his Office of Congressional Liaison more to head off or scale down measures churning up from Congress and to shield himself from congressional pleas for patronage. “I’ll be darned if I know how the Republicans ever held a party together all these years,” Eisenhower complained about all the job requests he was getting. Republicans in Congress grumbled that the Truman administration had shown them more courtesy over constituent jobs than they were getting from Eisenhower.16 Standing eighth in the C-SPAN poll, Eisenhower ranked below Truman and John F. Kennedy overall, but ahead of them both in his relations with Congress. The journalist William S. White noted that within a few months into Eisenhower’s first term, it became clear to “every adult observer in Washington” that the president had struck a tacit understanding with the Democratic leadership in Congress that he would not try to undo Roosevelt and Truman’s domestic programs if the Democrats protected him from “the unwelcome pressures of the right-wing Republicans, who had never liked him, never wanted him, and never trusted him.” Bryce Harlow regularly arranged for Eisenhower to invite members over for drinks but did not publicize these meetings since they were so often with Democratic leaders House Speaker Sam Rayburn and Senator Lyndon B. Johnson.17 Under Truman, the executive branch’s liaison with Congress had been carried out more by bureau chiefs than by cabinet secretaries. This had enabled agencies to build personal relations with congressional committee chairmen, which helped boost their budgets and win authorization for new programs. After the president sent Congress his budget, the agencies were ordered not to tamper with it. If the army wanted more funds for tanks than the president was willing to authorize, army liaisons would use their contacts to slip friendly senators requests to ask army brass about the tanks at the next committee hearing. The army liaisons could then argue that they had not volunteered information that contravened the administration’s official position, but simply answered the questions asked of them. Congress would put the tanks back in the budget. Seeking to get a grip on



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the bureaucracy, Eisenhower instructed his cabinet secretaries to appoint department-level congressional liaison staff.18 A deep recession led to Democratic congressional victories in 1958 that eroded Eisenhower’s support on Capitol Hill, symbolized by a rare Senate defeat of a cabinet nominee in 1959. Ike’s congressional relations also grew more brittle as a crowd of senators put themselves forward as presidential candidates to succeed him.19

John F. Kennedy “The great Washington riddle is why a Democratic president doesn’t do better with a Democratic Congress,” veteran Washington correspondent Richard L. Strout wrote in 1963. He described John F. Kennedy’s legislative program as a shambles.20 Nevertheless, Kennedy placed sixth in the C-SPAN poll, immediately behind Truman, and ahead of Truman in congressional relations, despite major defeats for his New Frontier programs and the lowest percentage of presidentially endorsed bills approved by Congress in the twentieth century. Kennedy’s razor-thin victory in the 1960 election did not provide a mandate for his liberal agenda, and fiscally conservative Democrats chaired many of the congressional committees. Kennedy compensated by building a strong congressional liaison team and applying his considerable personal charm to lobbying. Joe Waggonner (D-LA), who served in the House from the Kennedy to the Carter administrations, judged that presidential relations with Congress intensified or relaxed depending on their personalities and their ability to articulate their positions: “Some could, some couldn’t. President Kennedy was a warm, warm, warm individual. He was the type of individual—if you never ever agreed with him, if you knew him, you would like him.”21 Kennedy listened to Richard Neustadt, the Harvard professor who had once worked in Truman’s Bureau of the Budget, who advised him to put a high priority on congressional relations. From his campaign staff, Kennedy appointed Lawrence O’Brien to handle congressional liaison and patronage, elevating his title to special assistant to the president. Kennedy complained that during his fourteen years in Congress, “I don’t recall that Truman or Eisenhower or anyone on their staffs ever said one word to me about legislation.” O’Brien’s five-man liaison staff was about the same size as Eisenhower’s but was insufficient to meet all of Kennedy’s demands. O’Brien summoned the heads of congressional relations from some forty executive branch agencies and insisted that there would be one administration legislation

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program, not dozens of competing programs. He required each department and agency to submit a report every Monday of its congressional activity for the past week and its plans for the week ahead. His staff summarized these reports for the president’s review prior to meeting with legislative leaders on Tuesday morning.22 Kennedy bolstered his liaison’s standing on Capitol Hill by letting members know that O’Brien had the president’s ear. Congressional staff rated Kennedy’s liaison team highly because they had known them before they “went downtown.” It was an asset to have experienced Hill liaison people who “didn’t have to get broken in.” Politically savvy, O’Brien and his staff prevailed on Kennedy to invite as many members of Congress to the White House as possible, for luncheons, receptions, and “coffee hours,” sometimes a euphemism for cocktails. According to O’Brien’s count, Kennedy had 2,500 separate contacts with members of Congress during his first year as president. These were “soft-sell sessions,” setting the atmosphere but rarely asking for votes on specific legislation. He left it to O’Brien to twist arms.23 Still, despite these efforts, Kennedy encountered deadlock and defeat. Some liberal critics grumbled that he “just couldn’t seem to get anything going.” Kennedy’s defenders argued that the early months of his administration were “a shaking down period” for both the White House and the new congressional leadership, and that his record had improved over time so that by the time his administration was tragically cut short, he had learned how to get along better with Congress.24 Kennedy himself took a pragmatic view of his legislative defeats. Criticized for asking too much of Congress, he commented in 1963, “If I had sent up half as many major bills in ’61–’62, they would have passed only half as many as they did.” He mused that Congress looked more powerful from the White House than it did when he was in the House and Senate. From the perspective of Capitol Hill, the presidency had seemed all-powerful. It was not until after he became president that Kennedy realized how much power Congress had collectively, and how it could frustrate a president’s ambitious programs.25

Lyndon B. Johnson Given the nature of Congress in the early 1960s, with the Democratic majority sharply split between its liberal and conservative wings, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. speculated that if Lyndon Johnson rather than John Kennedy had been elected president in 1960, “his programs would have been no more successful than Kennedy—perhaps less, because he was less



Introduction

effective as a national persuader.”26 Yet one-on-one, Johnson was the more powerful persuader. Senator George Smathers (D-FL), a close friend to both men, said that Kennedy was not a “hands-on person” like Johnson. “Kennedy was reluctant to ask people to do things,” Smathers explained. “Johnson had grown up asking people to do things.” Johnson would tell the members that he was expecting them to help him on a matter: “If you’ve got problems, tell me what they are and maybe we can resolve them. But I’m counting on you, old pal! Man, you’ve got to help me.” Senator Smathers insisted that “Kennedy couldn’t do that. Eisenhower couldn’t do that. I don’t think Truman did that too well, but that was why Johnson got things done.”27 Larry O’Brien continued as congressional liaison under LBJ and said that he saw even more of Johnson than he had Kennedy because Congress was Johnson’s “number one interest.” LBJ regarded a vote against one of his bills as “a personal rebuff.” He has been described as a “congressional president” who operated as a supermajority leader.28 On the C-SPAN poll, Johnson ranked eleventh overall and second only to FDR in relations with Congress. Johnson believed that the only way for a president to deal with Congress was “continuously, incessantly, and without interruption,” insisting that the relationship had to be “almost incestuous.” He understood the importance of giving members of Congress “a feeling of participation” in drafting his bills to insure their commitment to their passage. He attributed his record to his “genuine and rapport” with members of the House and Senate, noting that he “understood and respected” people who had dedicated their lives to elective office. “Merely placing a program before Congress is not enough,” he noted. Without constant pressure, a bill could move at glacial speed. He concentrated congressional attention on the top items on his agenda, hearing their objections and negotiating “workable compromises.”29 Johnson also owed his success to his electoral landslide in 1964. In Larry O’Brien’s view, Medicare passed “for all practical purposes” on election day, when Democrats picked up forty more seats in the House. Those who swept in on Johnson’s coattails were sympathetic to his Great Society objectives. Yet even with that massive victory, Johnson felt that his mandate would be short-lived and he would have to hustle to get as much done as soon as possible. “You’ve got to give it all you can, that first year,” he told his aide Harry McPherson. “You’ve got just one year when they treat you right, and before they start worrying about themselves.” He was right. His track record was best in 1965, and diminished each year after as the Vietnam War escalated.30 Johnson felt compelled to act quickly, but Ike’s liaison, Bryce Harlow, had reservations about his strategy, privately

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warning that Johnson was “stockpiling adversity” by forcing such a rush of legislation on Congress.31 Reporters who watched the Johnson style up close commented on his overwhelming desire to prevail, which translated into “a total effort to convince the other party that he was right and everybody else was wrong.” He was a difficult man to argue with because he was not interested in listening. By always being on the offensive, he gave the impression of wanting to impress, to cajole, to dominate. This worked with many members of Congress but was counterproductive with others, especially those who concluded that he was lying to them about his foreign policies.32

Richard M. Nixon Lyndon Johnson made himself readily accessible to members of Congress, whereas senators said “it took an act of God to reach Nixon.”33 Richard Nixon did not share Johnson’s fixation with Congress. Years later, when his congressional liaison staff listened to the tapes of LBJ’s telephone conversations, they could not imagine what it must have been like to work for a president who knew more about a bill than they did, knew what subcommittee was handling it, and was eager to talk to the chairman. While Johnson approached Congress from his experiences as a Senate majority leader, Nixon thought more like a lawyer. He preferred legal briefs, so his liaison team wrote briefs with boxes for him to check off, out of which would emerge a legislative plan. They could get Nixon to call members on the Hill, but knew that he was not comfortable doing it. Like Kennedy, Nixon had trouble asking for someone’s vote. He was also sensitive about his powers of persuasion. Once a vote occurred, he wanted a list of how all those he called had voted, to see how well he had done. Nixon was far more likely to make calls and engage Congress on issues of foreign policy and defense; he bored easily on domestic issues. His liaison staff used to watch his State of the Union messages to determine where his priorities really lay. They decided that the more he cared about an issue, the more slowly he spoke and the more he used his hands. When he got to something that did not engage him personally, such as Medicare or welfare, he would start reading more quickly. As the first president in a century to come to office without a majority in either house of Congress, Nixon was expected to seek bipartisanship, particularly when he brought Bryce Harlow back to the White House to head his congressional liaison office. Harlow planned to operate the same way he had during the Eisenhower administration, but he had not counted on how intense politics had grown during the turbulent 1960s. The leg-



Introduction

islative staff was also overwhelmed by the increased demand on its time. Kenneth BeLieu recalled that it was not unusual for him and William Timmons to sit down at eight o’clock at night with eighty to a hundred pink slips of unanswered phone calls spread over the desk and try to call each person back.34 Bryce Harlow reminded them all of the importance of maintaining trust by never promising members of Congress something the administration could not deliver, but this time he was working for a president who trusted nobody and therefore was not trusted by others. Six months into Nixon’s presidency, Nixon decided that Harlow was not handling Congress properly. Rather than cooperation, he began talking about confronting Congress on “making it an issue.” Harlow left, and the tone of the Nixon administration shifted from conciliation and compromise to conflict and circumvention.35 Timmons, who took over as chief congressional liaison, described his office’s work as principally “running to put out fires,” to stop efforts such as the Cooper-Church Amendment to end the Vietnam War.36 While Nixon scored low in his relations with Congress in the C-SPAN poll, he won 74 percent of the roll-call votes regarded as tests of support of his views in his first year in office. He signed legislation creating OSHA, the Consumer Product Safety Act, and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Over time, however, that rate diminished. In 1972, Nixon won only 66 percent of roll-call votes, and in 1973 his success rate plunged to 43 percent of the recorded votes. The Nixon administration is better remembered for its increasingly bitter clashes with the Democratic majorities. In his memoirs, Nixon declared that while he considered himself “a man of the Congress,” he had concluded that Congress had become “cumbersome, undisciplined, isolationist, fiscally irresponsible, overly vulnerable to pressures from organized minorities, and too dominated by the media.” He saw himself engaged in an epic battle with the legislative branch, which justified any tactic.37 After the Watergate scandal broke, Nixon brought Bryce Harlow back into the administration to rebuild bridges to Capitol Hill. Nixon’s congressional liaison staff considered their jobs “nonpartisan,” since they had to work with the Southern Democrats as well as the Republicans to accomplish anything. They had kept out of the 1972 election and none of them were implicated in Watergate. Overall Nixon ranked twenty-seventh on the 2009 C-SPAN poll, a marked improvement over his last-place finish in a New York Times presidential poll a decade earlier.38 Not surprisingly, his lowest scores were for “moral authority” and relations with Congress. By contrast, his successor, Gerald R. Ford, received some of his strongest ratings in those categories.

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Gerald R. Ford Before the presidency, Gerald Ford had spent most of his adult life in Congress, where he served on the House Appropriations Committee, was Republican minority leader of the House, and presided over the Senate as vice president. From a congressional liaison’s perspective, Ford was an ideal president, Bryce Harlow noted, because he “knew all the techniques for measuring congressmen and their likely responses. He was very familiar with which buttons would need pushing in a particular situation.”39 Yet if President Johnson acted as a supermajority leader, President Ford saw his relations with Congress from the perspective of a minority leader, resigned to fighting losing battles. Congress regarded Ford as a vast improvement over Nixon, but there was little cooperation between the two branches, and Ford’s congressional relations were largely defined by his use of the veto. Ford aimed to “stem the tide” against all the legislation congressional Democrats were eager to pass. In his efforts to define himself as something more than an “unelected president,” Ford vetoed more bills than Kennedy and Johnson combined and had twelve of his vetoes overridden, the most since Truman. He depended on congressional Republicans to sustain his vetoes, but many of the issues proved more popular than the president.40 While John F. Kennedy confronted committee chairmen who operated as independent barons, Gerald Ford lamented that legislative reforms had diminished the chairmen’s power during the 1970s. The democratization of the congressional committees had made Congress less hierarchical and its power more defused, so the committee chairs had less independent ability to cut deals. At the same time, Ford believed Congress had gone too far in exerting authority over foreign policy and had encroached on executive prerogatives. Ford accused Congress of being too beholden to singleissue special interests, being too focused on minutiae rather than national problems, and of, in general, “beginning to disintegrate as an organized legislative body.” This assessment contrasted to his previous opinion, during his many years in the House, that Congress “fulfilled its constitutional obligations in a very responsible way.” As it did to Kennedy, Congress looked very different to Ford from the perspective of the Oval Office.41

Jimmy Carter When Ford lost the election of 1976, congressional Democrats looked forward to the return of a Democratic president with favorable majorities in the House and Senate to end the gridlock of the past eight years. Before long, however, they were complaining that “Jimmy Carter never learned to



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drive in Washington.” Being an outsider had helped Carter win the office, but did not help him govern. Carter’s attempts to exert leadership through rational persuasion and moral virtues were not successful substitutes for experience in dealing with Congress.42 Both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill regarded Carter as distant and disdainful. When a member got a letter from him, it was always addressed “Dear Congressman,” never “Dear Joe.”43 Carter ranked twenty-fifth overall in the C-SPAN poll and an even more dismal thirty-second in his congressional relations. Carter got off to a poor start by showering Congress with legislative proposals with little advance consultation. While members of a president’s party normally feel an incentive to make him look good, which enhances their own chances of reelection, Carter’s efforts made some of them determined to disabuse the president of the notion that they were simply an adjunct to the executive branch. Carter clearly sensed the resistance, since he titled a chapter in his memoirs “My One-Week Honeymoon with Congress.”44 Since Truman’s time, presidents had followed a “people-centered” approach to congressional relations. Their liaisons kept in constant touch with members of Congress rather than simply waiting until they wanted something from them. The idea was that the more time liaisons spent on the Hill, the more accurately they could report back the climate of congressional opinion. By contrast, Carter saw little purpose in cultivating members of Congress on a personal basis or voting blocs and instead organized his liaison team around such issues as energy, environment, health, and foreign policy. The White House advisors would put together the best plan and Congress should accept it. The problem, as one of his legislative liaison team members expressed it, was that they did not get around to talking to many members until it was too late.45 Formerly a governor, Carter seemed to see the Congress as just a larger version of the Georgia state legislature, which he had bypassed by appealing to public opinion. He appointed Frank Moore, who had handled his liaison to the Georgia legislature but lacked national political experience and ties to Capitol Hill, as his chief liaison. Moore drew flack from Congress for not returning phone calls, missing meetings, and seeming to be overwhelmed by the job. Carter also moved Moore’s office out of the West Wing and over to the Executive Office Building, where it had more space but was cut off from the center of power. Democrats had been waiting for eight years for a Democratic president and had high expectations that Carter and Moore could not fulfill.46 Vice President Walter Mondale regretted the lack of “backslapping” between Carter and Congress. Carter defined what he wanted done and

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expected Congress to respond. “The result was that many of these congressmen did not feel there was anything to be gained from cooperating,” Mondale observed, “and thus we did not get the support in Congress that we should have.” There were lots of petty gripes. Where other presidents handed out the pens they used to sign bills to the congressional sponsors, Carter would put the pen back in his pocket. His legislative track record was not as bad as his critics suggested, but was uneven enough to create an image of himself as inept. In his memoirs, Carter attributed his problems with asking Congress for too much too soon, but from the congressional perspective it was less a problem of volume than that the programs were out of step with prevailing legislative sentiments.47 Symptomatic of Carter’s mishaps was his reaction to the presidential yacht Sequoia, which he regarded as too closely identified with the “imperial presidency.” From Herbert Hoover to Gerald Ford, the yacht had been a handy device for getting the president together with small groups of congressmen in an intimate setting. Congressional liaisons would arrange to take regular groups of members and their spouses for short sails down the Potomac, usually to Mount Vernon, where they would watch the flag being lowered and hear “Taps” played before returning. Carter sold the boat.48 Early during the Carter administration, the president invited western senators to the White House to inform them that he was canceling several of their pet water projects, which he considered wasteful “political plums.” At the meeting, Carter dispensed with staff and justified the cancellations on his own. If he had meant this to impress the senators with his grasp of the issues, the tactic backfired. He only convinced them that he did not understand the importance of water to the West. Resistance from both western Democrats and Republicans caused Carter to back down and accept a compromise, which made him look weak. After the initial meeting with Carter on the water projects, Senator Paul Laxalt (R-NV) returned to his office and called former California governor Ronald Reagan. Laxalt advised Reagan to keep his options open, because he had just met with a one-term president.49

Ronald Reagan The advantage of following someone perceived to have done everything wrong is that one can look good by doing the opposite. Ronald Reagan had the advantage of not being Jimmy Carter, but he also began his administration with some unexpected legislative successes that altered national economic priorities. Those first few months defined Reagan’s presidency, allowing him to project the image of a determined leader, even after he was



Introduction

unable to sustain that initial record.50 Reagan moved the congressional liaison office out of the Executive Office Building where Carter had relegated it—although he put the liaisons in the East Wing of the White House, which he described as being closer to Congress. They were willing to trade the space for the prestige. Reagan’s well-seasoned congressional liaison team convinced him to make individual contact with members to appeal for their support. Each morning, they provided Reagan with a list of members to call, along with helpful biographical notes, such as this summary card for a conservative Democrat from Georgia: “He never received a call from Carter during his presidency. A presidential phone call would do much to solidify the Congressman’s support of the administration on future votes.”51 During his first hundred days, Reagan met with 467 of the 535 members of the House and Senate. His liaison staff worried that he did the job almost too well, because by the end of his first year, members of Congress had gotten the idea “that if the president doesn’t call them personally or see them, the White House doesn’t care.”52 Reagan’s liaison team found that their job was made a lot easier by working for “a president who wants to get along with the Congress.” Members of Congress found Reagan strong on geniality if short on details. They liked the fact that he listened to the party leadership on Capitol Hill and embraced their proposed tactics. The Republican president also built a working relationship with House Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-MA). The two had an agreement that politics stopped at 6:00 p.m.—when they could have a drink together. If Reagan wanted something from the Speaker, he would call O’Neill and ask, “Tip, is it six o’clock yet?”53 Reagan’s election gave him a mandate and a grateful Republican majority in the Senate—the first in a quarter century. Senate Republicans rewarded Reagan with unprecedented use of the budget reconciliation process, going far beyond what its creators had intended, to grease the passage of his sweeping tax cuts. In the House, where Democrats remained in control, Reagan’s liaison team targeted fifty “boll weevil” Democrats, mostly from the South and West, whose districts Reagan had carried and whose reelections might be jeopardized if they voted against his economic plan. Reagan sweetened the deal by promising not to campaign against any Democrat who supported his proposals. Public sympathy for Reagan after the attempted assassination in March 1981 also won him support in Congress, and at a key juncture, Reagan agreed to a compromise that reduced and delayed some of the tax cuts.54 Having been president of the Screen Actors Guild, an experience that had taught him how to negotiate, Ronald Reagan was the only labor

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union president to become president of the United States. While Jimmy Carter might have gotten most of what he asked for and publicly lamented what he lost, Reagan would take a seemingly unmovable position with Congress, reach a compromise that split the difference, and declare total victory. Reagan scored his most significant legislative victories in his first year with his tax slashing. After that, his legislative record declined. His budgets were usually deemed “dead on arrival,” Congress placed restraints on his foreign policies in Central America, and the Senate rejected his nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.55 Yet, because Reagan had achieved legislative success early in his presidency, that perception stuck. On the C-SPAN poll, he ranked tenth overall and eighth in regard to his congressional relations. Like FDR, Reagan drained the gas tank dry, bequeathing to his vice president a more contentious and less cooperative Congress, which accounts for George H. W. Bush’s standing in the C-SPAN poll of eighteenth among all the presidents and twentieth in his relations with Congress.

George H. W. Bush Republicans scored no gains in Congress when George H. W. Bush was elected president and never held the majority during his single term. The party instead relied on a strategy of blocking veto overrides and cloture votes in support of the president, tactics that produced legislative gridlock. Not much got done legislatively during the senior Bush’s term, although political scientist James Sundquist pointed out that Congress had not blocked Bush’s program “because there really isn’t much of one.” Bush ran a reactive presidency, lacking what he referred to as “the vision thing.”56 Bush inherited soaring budget deficits from his predecessor. He was less conservative than Reagan and also seemed less comfortable calling members of Congress for their votes, preferring to delegate that job to his staff. He prevailed in less than half the congressional votes where he took a position.57 The defining moment for George Bush’s congressional relations took place at the budget summit held at Andrews Air Force Base during the summer of 1990. As a candidate, Bush had promised to increase spending on the environment and education while promising no new taxes. His inaugural address pledged to balance the budget. The Andrews meeting was an effort to resolve these conflicts, and despite a clash between Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WV), chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and White House budget director Richard Darman, whom Byrd accused of acting disrespectfully toward the legislators, the negotiators reached an agreement that would have cut government spending and raised taxes.58 The



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agreement altered the size, shape, and direction of the federal budget. It set caps on discretionary spending and established the pay-as-you-go rules for entitlements and revenues. It was a bipartisan accomplishment and won support from Senate Republicans as well as the Democratic majority in the House. But House Republicans, led by Newt Gingrich (R-GA), rebelled against that first agreement on the grounds that it violated Bush’s pledge of “Read my lips, no new taxes.” They forced a renegotiation of the agreement, making Bush look weak at a time when the economy was entering a recession. Considered unbeatable until then, he lost the election in 1992.59

Bill Clinton Bill Clinton ran for the presidency promising a new partnership with Congress built on a “new bipartisan basis,” but the ongoing revolt among House Republicans forced him to work through his own party in Congress. This started Clinton’s presidency off in a partisan manner and the lines only grew tighter over time.60 The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), advised Clinton that he ought to tackle welfare reform before health care, arguing that everyone agreed the welfare system was broken, while there were more mixed feelings about universal health care. But Clinton regarded welfare as too potentially divisive among Democrats and did not want to antagonize his base. Instead, he took up health care, which at first seemed to have universal appeal. Congressional Republicans worried that if Clinton prevailed on health care he would have run over them for his entire eight years as president, but they soon decided Clinton had overreached. The collapse of the health plan precipitated the Republicans’ triumph in 1994. Losing his Democratic majorities forced Clinton to readjust to an adversarial Congress.61 Peculiarly, the worse Clinton’s congressional relations became, the stronger he grew as president. Clinton poached some of the Republicans’ more popular ideas while standing up to their attempts to repeal programs that remained popular with the voters. He operated by “triangulation,” positioning himself in the center between the Republican right and the Democratic left. It amazed congressional Republicans that Clinton could veto two of their welfare reform bills, sign one, claim credit for it, and swipe the issue from them. Clinton benefited because the House majority, led by Speaker Newt Gingrich, also overreached.62 In 1995, when the federal government shut down due to an impasse between the president and Congress over the budget, public blame fell on Congress. A recent joint biography of Clinton and Gingrich by historian Steve Gillon found evidence that they

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had reached accommodations at the start of Clinton’s second term to defuse some of the polarized politics and attempt to become more productive. The arrangement was short-lived, however. It was ultimately foiled by revelations of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which led to Clinton’s impeachment and Gingrich’s resignation.63 A New York Times poll of historians, taken halfway through Clinton’s presidency, put him among the “below average” presidents. That was where he stood in a 2000 poll conducted by C-SPAN. But by 2009, he had risen to fifteenth overall and nineteenth in his congressional relations, most likely because by then he was being compared to his successor.

George W. Bush In the 2009 C-SPAN poll, George W. Bush ranked thirty-sixth among forty-four presidents, and he left office with a majority of Americans telling Gallup pollsters that history would judge his presidency as “below average” or “poor.”64 But Bush has cautioned us not to “misunderestimate” him. Despite losing the popular vote and facing a Senate that was initially tied at 50-50, he won massive tax cuts even greater than the amount he projected while campaigning, and wrestled from Congress two war resolutions, prescription drug benefits for seniors, “No Child Left Behind” education reform, and energy legislation. “Whatever the substantive merits of this agenda,” a New Republic writer commented, “its passage represented an impressive feat of political leverage, accomplished through near-total partisan discipline.”65 Although the closeness of Bush’s elections and of his party’s margins in Congress might have called for bipartisanship, he preferred to work with his own party in Congress—a majority of the majority, as Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) put it. One sign of the cooperation Bush got from congressional Republicans was the drastically reduced number of congressional oversight hearings they held into his administration as compared with Clinton’s. Democratic leader Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) complained that the previous Republican Congress had spent more time investigating whether President Clinton had misused the White House Christmas card list than it did the Iraq war.66 On the other side of this close relationship, Bush did not veto a single bill during his first six years as president. During those years, earmarks ballooned, culminating in the negative publicity given to the “bridge to nowhere,” which contributed to his party’s loss of the majority in 2006. Bush’s tendency to make decisions independently and close off discussions in advance irritated Democrats and fanned partisan fires. “When



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I came to Congress in 1969, people saw Congress as a separate branch of government,” said Representative David Obey (D-WI). “Now it’s just two parties at war.” But Tom Daschle (D-SD), who served as Senate Democratic leader during Bush’s first term, commented that Bush’s strongest asset was his affable personality. He was good at making members of Congress feel comfortable. He personally lobbied moderate Democrats for his tax cuts and proved himself, in Daschle’s view, “very adept at the personal courtship all presidents use to persuade members of Congress to vote their way.” A personal phone call from the president can have a powerful effect on members of Congress, Daschle noted, because it constitutes “a patriotic invitation to do something for the good of the country, coupled with the implicit fact that there are many things a president can do for you in your home state if he chooses.”67 After he won reelection in 2004, George W. Bush signaled to congressional Republicans that he had earned political capital in the campaign and intended to spend it. What he had in mind was to privatize Social Security, but he found there was not much support on Capitol Hill for tackling such a politically dangerous issue. Congressional Republicans were not willing to suffer the political fallout from pushing such a controversial plan. Voters gave majorities in both houses of Congress back to Democrats in 2006, shelving Bush’s legislative agenda.68

Barack Obama At the start of his presidency, Barack Obama enjoyed strong standing in the polls, solid majorities in Congress, and a national sense of peril that has helped him pull together the executive and legislative branches—although not the two parties in Congress. President Obama, however, was under no illusion of having a “rubber-stamp” legislature. “Congress is a coequal branch of government,” he said at a press conference, acknowledging that all members, whether they agreed with him or not, did what they believed best to represent their constituencies, requiring “give and take on all of these issues.”69 As the first president in a half century to come directly from the legislative to the executive branch, Obama made effective use of his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel—a former House member—and his chief congressional liaison, Phil Schiliro—a former staff member in both the House and Senate. Emanuel’s office at the White House has been likened to a “legislative bazaar,” with Democratic members filing in separately or in groups with concerns about the administration’s fiscal blueprint. The Washington Post noted that all but three of the forty-six members who came to see

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Emanuel about their reservations wound up voting for the president’s budget. During the fight for the president’s economic stimulus bill, Schiliro played “shuttle diplomacy” between the House and Senate, where he won good reviews from the members, one of whom was quoted as saying, “I bet he could tell you the name of every spouse, every child and every dog and cat of nearly every member.”70 Each morning in the East Wing, Obama’s ten legislative liaisons, known as “specials,” meet to compare notes on who they have been talking to, who they plan to talk to next, what they have been saying, and what they have been hearing, before heading up to the Hill. The specials then fan out to act as the president’s sales force, trying to sell the package and find out which votes are flexible and which are fixed. Anyone found to be wavering will get a call from Emanuel or from the president, who tend to accept dissent as “a respectful dialogue,” appreciating that someone who is not with them on this issue may be with them on the next.71 As a former senator, Obama has retained personal friendships with his former colleagues, even with some of the most conservative Republicans. He has entertained a sizeable percent of the members and their spouses at the White House, and has met one-on-one with members whose support he solicited. Arlen Specter (R/D-PA), who had been in the Senate for twenty-eight years, said that his fifteen minutes with Obama in the Oval Office was the first time he had ever met with a president alone.72 Vice President Joseph Biden, having spent thirty-six years in the Senate, has also been active in lobbying for the administration. By nature a synthesizer, President Obama himself went to the House Republican conference to seek bipartisan support for the stimulus package, appealing for national unity in a time of economic crisis. House Republicans, however, voted unanimously against the plan. Unable to reach across party lines, Obama shifted tactics by appealing to the Democratic conferences, seeking to bridge the differences between their liberal and conservative “Blue Dog” wings. He also traveled out of Washington, taking his case to the people, to remind Congress of his substantial public approval. The budget Congress approved—by mostly partyline votes—supported his key priorities. One of the moderate Republicans whom the president courted on the stimulus bill, Representative Michael Castle (R-DE), voted with his conference against it. Castle regretted that the Republican tactic would not help promote bipartisanship, because the administration would take the attitude that “they worked that and they didn’t get anything, so why bother?”73 It takes 218 votes to pass a bill in the House, and while Democrats had 255 members in 2008, fifty-one of them were identified with the conservative



Introduction

“Blue Dog” faction of the party, many representing marginal districts. That reality forced the House Democratic leadership to reach compromises to keep its conference united. By contrast, Republicans lost most of their marginal districts, leaving most of their members in relatively safe seats, feeling less need to compromise. Steve Schmidt, who worked on the presidential campaign of Senator John McCain (R-AZ), doubted that much bipartisanship was possible, “because the truth is there’s very few House Republicans that worry about the middle of the electorate anymore.” As health care moved to the top of the agenda, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA), the Finance Committee’s ranking Republican, told reporters that he left the White House meeting firmly convinced the president wanted a bipartisan agreement, but Grassley and all other Senate Republicans eventually opposed the bill.74 Whereas John Kennedy faced conservative Democratic chairmen, many of the latter congressional chairs regard themselves as more liberal than Barack Obama. They have felt their side won the election and have been anxious to enact programs long stymied by the Bush administration. But as House Democrats pressure the president to move to the left, Senate Democrats need to court moderate Democrats and Republicans to prevent filibusters. President Obama’s success in dealing with Congress will therefore depend on the very different leadership situations of House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The rules of the House enable the Speaker to prevail so long as his caucus remains reasonably united. Senator Reid has often voiced regret that the Senate rules give him much less power than the Speaker. He encouraged centrists in his caucus to work with like-minded Republicans. While Senator Reid publicly objected to any revisions in the president’s budget, the centrists said that behind the scenes he told them to “Get a deal, get a deal, get a deal.”75 Veteran Washington observers have compared Barack Obama’s congressional relations to those of Ronald Reagan. Like Reagan, his initial efforts have resulted in dramatic shifts in budget, spending, and taxing policies, which will influence the agenda for the rest of his presidency. During the presidential campaign, Obama argued that Reagan “changed the trajectory of America” in a way that other presidents had not, adding that Reagan put the country on a fundamentally different path “because the country was ready for it.” This attitude helps explain his balancing act between courting Congress and conducting campaign-style trips outside the capital to sell his policies to the nation.76 During much of Obama’s first year in office, Congress was preoccupied with health care legislation. With Republicans almost unanimous in dissent, passage depended on Democratic unity. The White House encouraged the House and Senate leadership to pass whatever bill they could, and

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then for the president to referee between the two houses to produce the final version. Instead, its passage wound up depending almost entirely on obtaining sixty votes in the Senate to end filibustering, which narrowed the negotiations almost entirely to within the majority party conference.

The Requirements for Presidents Working with Congress Harry Truman came to the White House after spending the “ten happiest years” of his life in the US Senate. Since then, six of his successors had some congressional experience on their vitae and four had none. One lesson that emerges from examining the legislative records of presidents from Truman to Obama is that previous service in Congress has not guaranteed an ability to exert legislative leadership. Eisenhower and Reagan, who never served in Congress, are credited with having better legislative relations than Kennedy and Ford, who did. A working knowledge of Congress and some respect for the legislative process are fundamentally important, but other factors are also at work. The constitutional system of shared powers has fostered perpetual competition between the branches. There will always be tension between the executive and legislative branches, regardless of who is president and who holds the congressional majorities. Except in dire emergencies, the chief executive cannot expect Congress, as a separate branch, to rubberstamp his programs and nominations. Presidents working with Congress need clear objectives, diligence, persistence, and a willingness to listen, to make personal overtures, and to expend political capital. They must balance some deference to the leadership on Capitol Hill with some firmness in wielding their veto power. The presidential success record also depends heavily on the individual personality and persuasiveness of the presidents, particularly their effectiveness as political campaigners. Success in rallying public opinion is the ultimate way of convincing members of Congress that they should have a stake in the enactment of the administration’s programs.77 These criteria are all subject to shifting political fortunes. In surveying the political landscape from Harry Truman to Barack Obama, the most notable difference is the transformation of both the Democratic and Republican parties during those eras. What began with the Dixiecrat revolt of 1948 has resulted in the Solid South, which is now largely Republican rather than Democratic. During Truman’s presidency, there were never more than four Republican House members from southern states. Republicans instead were concentrated in the Northeast, the Midwest, and



Introduction

the far West. The congressional map was still divided along the old Missouri Compromise line, with Republicans above and Democrats below—except for the major northern cities. Today’s congressional map looks more like something Jackson Pollock might have painted, but seventy-two of the current one hundred seventy-eight Republicans in the House represent the South and there are no House Republicans from New England. Both parties were once divided between their liberal and conservative wings, but their party conferences are now internally cohesive. Within each, the ideological spectrum has narrowed and the moderate center, once the common ground for compromise, has shrunk. Party-line votes, once a rarity, have become routine. Presidents have had to revise their strategies to meet such realities. It helps considerably if the president’s party controls Congress, although Eisenhower seemed to have an easier time working with Democratic leaders in Congress than with Republicans, and Jimmy Carter never managed to get in step with a Democratic Congress. When the majority party stands behind the president, the president can serve as chief strategist, while the congressional leaders become the chief tacticians. The president’s agenda will be the majority’s overriding concern. While the strength of a president’s party on Capitol Hill is critical, Truman, Kennedy, and Carter found that having their party in the majority was not tantamount to legislative success. The internal nature of the party and the external political circumstances of the moment will fundamentally influence the president’s ability to work with Congress, and both are often beyond the president’s control. Presidents play the legislative cards the voters have dealt to them. Astute British correspondent Henry Brandon, who covered American presidents from Roosevelt to Reagan, captured this matter of chance and circumstance, concluding that “Some presidents come to power at the right time.” 78 Thrust into the presidency without warning or preparation at a critical juncture in American history, Harry Truman faced considerable obstacles in winning support from Congress. In retrospect, his efforts at trying to work with Congress measure well against his successors. He deserves credit for building bipartisanship in foreign policy and for proposing substantial domestic legislation, even though the political circumstances of his era prevented much of it from passing. Barack Obama came to the presidency under more fortuitous political circumstances, with higher expectations. He will need to convert his campaign promises into substantial legislative accomplishments if he wants to measure up to Harry Truman in the next C-SPAN poll.

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Notes

1. “C-SPAN 2009 Historians Presidential Leadership Survey,” National Cable Satellite Corporation (http://legacy.c-span.org/PresidentialSurvey/presidentialleadership-survey.aspx). See also “C-SPAN’s 2000 Survey of Presidential Leadership,” National Cable Satellite Corporation (http://www.americanpresidents.org/survey/). 2. Hartmann, Truman and the 80th Congress, 211. 3. Johnson, Vantage Point, 438–61. 4. Chamberlain, President, Congress and Legislation, 11–12; and MacNeil, Forge of Democracy, 239. 5. Matthews, U.S. Senators and Their World, 18, 25–26; and Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 711. 6. See Polenberg, Reorganizing Roosevelt’s Government. 7. Drury, Senate Journal, 1943–1945, 87–90, 414–15. See also Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal. 8. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions, 6–7, 481–85; and Gosnell, Truman’s Crises, 264–69. 9. Williams, Johnson, and Barrett, “Cutting the Deck,” 135–53. 10. Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR, 14; and White, Making of a Journalist, 158. 11. Johnson, Managing the White House, 73. 12. Connelly Oral History, 222–23; Feeney Oral History, 7; “Truman Names New Aide,” New York Times, July 13, 1949; “Obituary: Joseph Feeney, 58, Ex-Aide to Truman,” New York Times, October 21, 1968; and Holtzman, Legislative Liaison, 9–10. 13. Feeney Oral History, 9–11, 13–14. 14. Hess, Organizing the Presidency, 40. 15. Holtzman, Legislative Liaison, 233; Feeney Oral History, 114; and Burke and Thompson, Bryce Harlow, 8. 16. Davidson, “Presidency and Three Eras of the Modern Congress,” 67; Bowles, White House and Capitol Hill, 16; and Adams, First Hand Report, 79. 17. Hess, Organizing the Presidency, 66; White, Making of a Journalist, 162– 63; and Bowles, White House and Capitol Hill, 17. 18. de Grazia, “Congressional Liaison,” 305–6. 19. Alexander, Holding the Line, 252–55. 20. Richard L. Strout, “Congress: A Puzzlement,” Christian Science Monitor, March 1, 1963, p. 13. 21. Pederson, Congressional-Presidential Relations, 73. 22. O’Brien, No Final Victories, 308. 23. Elson Oral History, 167–69; and O’Brien, No Final Victories, 101, 103, 109–12. 24. Sorenson, Kennedy, 345; Valeo Oral History, 233; Valeo, Mike Mansfield, Majority Leader, 31–44; and Smathers Oral History, 89–90. 25. Sorenson, Kennedy, 352; Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 712; and Reeves, President Kennedy, 276. 26. Schlesinger, Cycles of American History, 411. 27. Smathers Oral History, 93. 28. O’Brien, No Final Victories, 167, 171; and Hess, Organizing the Presidency, 95. 29. Kearns, Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, 221–37; and Johnson, Vantage Point, 438–61. 30. Johnson, Vantage Point, 438–61; and McPherson, A Political Education, 267–68. 31. Novak, Prince of Darkness, 133.



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32. Brandon, Special Relationships, 232–33. 33. Wayne, Legislative Presidency, 120–21. 34. BeLieu, “Nixon and the Congress,” 226–27. 35. Haldeman, Haldeman Diaries, 66–67; and Hess, Organizing the Presidency,

36. Drury, Courage and Hesitation, 114–17. 37. “A History of Nixon’s Relations With Congress, 1969–73”; and Nixon, RN, 414, 763, 770. 38. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “The Ultimate Approval Rating,” New York Times Magazine, December 1996, 46–51. 39. Burke and Thompson, Bryce Harlow, 285–86. 40. Hildenbrand Oral History, 225–27. 41. Edwards, At the Margins; and Ford, A Time To Heal, 150. 42. Brandon, Special Relationships, 329. 43. Pederson, Congressional-Presidential Relations, 74–75. 44. Edwards, At the Margins, 36; and Carter, Keeping Faith. 45. Davis, “Congressional Liaison,” 65, 90–2; Carter, Keeping Faith, 71; and Yarbrough, “Carter and the Congress,” 167. 46. Wayne, Legislative Presidency, 211. 47. Mondale, “Perspective of the Vice President,” 240–41; Davis, “Congressional Liaison,” 66, 74–77, 86; and Hildenbrand Oral History, 245–47. 48. Pfiffner, “President’s Legislative Agenda,” 29, 499. 49. Laxalt, Nevada’s Paul Laxalt, 307–8. 50. Pfiffner, “President’s Legislative Agenda,” 32–33. 51. Reeves, President Reagan, 52. 52. Edwards, At the Margins, 72. 53. Thompson, Bob Dole, 199; and Hildenbrand Oral History, 298–300. 54. Cannon, Reagan, 331; Mikva and Saris, American Congress, 197; and Meese, With Reagan, 129–32. 55. Pfiffner, “Divided Government and the Problem of Governance,” 42. 56. Thompson, Bob Dole, 177; and Sundquist, “Presidential-Congressional Gridlock,” 16–17. 57. Daschle, Like No Other Time, 58. 58. Naftali, George H. W. Bush, 72–76; and Pfiffner, “President and the Postreform Congress,” 218–21. 59. Hoagland Oral History, 31. 60. Gillon, The Pact, 111–12. 61. Jones, Clinton and Congress, 3–6, 64–93. 62. Ibid. 131–32. 63. Gillon, The Pact. 64. Newport et al., Winning the White House 2008, 6–8, 550–51. 65. Jonathan Chait, “Why the Democrats Can’t Govern,” New Republic 240 (April 15, 2009): 15. 66. Reid with Warren, The Good Fight, 23. 67. Kaiser, So Damn Much Money, 306; and Daschle, Like No Other Time, 45–46, 52, 57. 68. Thomas et al., Election 2004, 192; Keith Koffler, “Obama Promises New Approach to Hill,” Roll Call, January 26, 2009; and Robin Toner, “Bush Pension Plan Faces a Brick Wall in the Senate,” New York Times, February 15, 2005. 69. Transcript of President Obama’s 100 Day Press Conference, WSJ Wire, April 30, 2009. 70. Washington Post, April 13, 2009; and Politico, February 23, 2009. 71. Politico, March 26, 2009.

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72. Washington Post, April 29, 2009. 73. Martis, Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress, 1789–1989, 200–5; Perry Baron Jr., “How it Came Down to This: 244 Democrats, 0 Republicans,” Washington Post, April 29, 2009; and Politico, May 18, 2009. 74. Washington Post, April 24, 2009; and “Obama Cuts Target $465M GE-Rolls Royce Engine,” The Hill, May 7, 2009. 75. Eve Fairbanks, “Tough Reid,” New Republic 240 (April 15, 2009): 14. 76. The Hill, March 10, 2009; and Politico, April 24, 2009. 77. Bond, Fleisher, and Northrup, “Public Opinion and Presidential Support,” 47–63. See also Fisher, Politics of Shared Power. 78. Brandon, Special Relationships, 208.

Works Cited

Adams, Sherman. First Hand Report: The Story of the Eisenhower Administration. New York: Harper, 1961. Alexander, Charles C. Holding the Line: The Eisenhower Era, 1952–1961. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975. BeLieu, Kenneth. “Nixon and the Congress.” In The Nixon Presidency, edited by Kenneth W. Thompson, 221–39. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987. Bond, Jon R., Richard Fleisher, and Michael Northrup. “Public Opinion and Presidential Support.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 499 (September 1988): 47–63. Bowles, Nigel. The White House and Capitol Hill: The Politics of Presidential Persuasion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Brandon, Henry. Special Relationships: A Foreign Correspondent’s Memoirs from Roosevelt to Reagan. New York: Atheneum, 1988. Burke, Bob, and Ralph G. Thompson. Bryce Harlow: Mr. Integrity. Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Heritage Association, 2000. Cannon, Lou. Reagan. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1982. Carter, Jimmy. Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President. New York: Bantam Books, 1982. Chamberlain, Lawrence H. The President, Congress and Legislation. New York: Columbia University Press, 1946. Daschle, Tom. Like No Other Time: The 107th Congress and the Two Years that Changed America Forever. New York: Crown, 2003. Davidson, Roger H. “The Presidency and Three Eras of the Modern Congress.” In Divided Democracy: Cooperation and Conflict Between the President and Congress, edited by James A. Thurber, 61–78. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1991. Davis, Eric L. “Congressional Liaison: The People and the Institutions.” In Both Ends of the Avenue: The Presidency, The Executive Branch, and Congress in the 1980s, edited by Anthony King, 59–94. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1983. de Grazia, Edward. “Congressional Liaison: An Inquiry into its Meaning for Congress.” In Congress, The First Branch of Government: Twelve Studies of the Organization of Congress, edited by Alfred de Grazia, 297–335. Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1966. Drury, Allen. Courage and Hesitation: Notes and Photographs on the Nixon Administration. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971.



Introduction

———. A Senate Journal, 1943–1945. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963. Edwards, George C., III. At the Margins: Presidential Leadership of Congress. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Fisher, Louis. The Politics of Shared Power: Congress and the Executive. College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1998. Ford, Gerald R. A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford. New York: Harper & Row, 1979. Gillon, Steven M. The Pact: Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and the Rivalry that Defined a Generation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. Gosnell, Harold F. Truman’s Crises: A Political Biography of Harry S. Truman. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980. Haldeman, H. R. The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1994. Hartmann, Susan. Truman and the 80th Congress. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971. Hess, Stephen. Organizing the Presidency. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1988. “A History of Nixon’s Relations with Congress, 1969–73.” Congressional Quarterly 31 (Sept. 14, 1973): 2428–30. Holtzman, Abraham. Legislative Liaison: Executive Leadership in Congress. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970. Johnson, Lyndon Baines. The Vantage Point: Perspectives on the Presidency, 1963– 1969. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971. Johnson, Richard Tanner. Managing the White House: An Intimate Study of the Presidency. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Jones, Charles O. Clinton and Congress, 1993–1996: Risk, Restoration, and Reelection. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Kaiser, Robert G. So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Laxalt, Paul. Nevada’s Paul Laxalt: A Memoir. Reno, NV: Jack Bacon, 2000. Leuchtenburg, William E. In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. MacNeil, Neil. Forge of Democracy: The House of Representatives. New York: David McKay, 1963. Martis, Kenneth C. The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress, 1789–1989. New York: Macmillan, 1989. Matthews, Donald R. U.S. Senators and Their World. New York: Random House, 1960. McPherson, Harry. A Political Education: A Washington Memoir. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995 [1972]. Meese, Edwin, III. With Reagan: The Inside Story. Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1992. Mikva, Abner J., and Patti B. Saris. The American Congress, the First Branch. New York: Watts, 1983. Mondale, Walter. “The Perspective of the Vice President.” In The Carter Presidency, edited by Kenneth W. Thompson, 239–47. Lanham, MD: University Press

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of America, 1990. Naftali, Timothy. George H. W. Bush. New York: Times Books, 2007. Newport, Frank, Jeffrey M. Jones, Lydia Saad, Alec M. Gallup, and Fred L. Israel. Winning the White House 2008: The Gallup Poll, Public Opinion, and the Presidency. New York: Facts on File, 2009. Nixon, Richard. RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978. Novak, Robert D. The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years of Reporting in Washington. New York: Crown Forum, 2007. O’Brien, Lawrence F. No Final Victories: A Life in Politics—from John F. Kennedy to Watergate. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1974. Patterson, James T. Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933–1939. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967. Pederson, William D., ed. Congressional-Presidential Relations in the United States: Studies in Governmental Gridlock. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1991. Pfiffner, James P. “Divided Government and the Problem of Governance.” In Divided Democracy: Cooperation and Conflict between the President and Congress, edited by James A. Thurber, 39–60. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 1991. ———. “The President and the Postreform Congress.” In The Postreform Congress, edited by Roger H. Davidson, 211–32. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. ———. “The President’s Legislative Agenda.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 499 (September 1988): 22–35. Polenberg, Richard. Reorganizing Roosevelt’s Government, 1936–1939: The Controversy Over Executive Reorganization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. Reeves, Richard. President Kennedy: Profile of Power. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. ———. President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Reid, Harry, with Mark Warren, The Good Fight: Hard Lessons from Searchlight to Washington. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008. Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. The Cycles of American History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986. ———. A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Sorensen, Theodore. Kennedy. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Sundquist, James. “Presidential-Congressional Gridlock: An Overview.” In Congressional-Presidential Relations in the United States: Studies in Governmental Gridlock, edited by William D. Pederson, 1–22. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1991. Thomas, Evan, Eleanor Clift, Kevin Peraino, Jonathan Darman, Peter Goldman, Holly Bailey, and Suzanne Smalley. Election 2004: How Bush Won and What You Can Expect in the Future. New York: PublicAffairs Press, 2004. Thompson, Jake H. Bob Dole: The Republicans’ Man for All Seasons. New York: Donald I Fine, 1994. Truman, Harry S. Memoirs. Vol. 1, Year of Decisions. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955. Valeo, Francis R. Mike Mansfield, Majority Leader: A Different Kind of Senate,



Introduction

1961–1976. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999. Wayne, Stephen J. The Legislative Presidency. New York: Harper & Row, 1978. White, William S. The Making of a Journalist. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986. Williams, Arthur R., Karl F. Johnson, and Michael P. Barrett. “Cutting the Deck: New Deal, Fair Deal, and the Employment Act of 1946: Problems of Study and Interpretation.” In Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress: The New Deal and Its Aftermath, edited by Thomas P. Wolf, William D. Pederson, and Byron W. Daynes, 135–60. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001. Yarbrough, Tinsley W. “Carter and the Congress.” In The Carter Years: The President and Policy Making, edited by M. Glenn Abernathy, Dilys M. Hill, and Phil Williams, 165–91. New York: St. Martin’s, 1984.

Oral Histories

Matthew J. Connelly Oral History, Truman Library Roy L. Elson Oral History, Senate Historical Office Joseph G. Feeney Oral History, Truman Library William Hildenbrand Oral History, Senate Historical Office G. William Hoagland Oral History, Senate Historical Office George A. Smathers Oral History, Senate Historical Office Frank Valeo Oral History, Senate Historical Office

Newspapers and News Magazines Christian Science Monitor The Hill New Republic New York Times Politico Roll Call The Washington Post

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Congress in the Truman Era

What President Truman Thought of Congress and How He Chose to Deal with It Ken Hechler

Abraham Lincoln saved the Union. Harry Truman saved the world! Truman’s greatest victories in Congress were scored in a series of significant legislation in foreign policy to contain Stalin’s ruthless aggression. Aid to Greece and Turkey, the Truman Doctrine, the multibillion dollar Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Point Four program and the successful bipartisan foreign policy were all achieved through Truman’s presidential leadership.1 In his keynote address at the rededication of the Little White House, George McGovern delivered a brilliant address, with most of which I heartily agree. I was especially struck by his definition of national defense—that it should include not only the billions of dollars the Pentagon spends on military weapons but also funds for health care, education, housing, and those other necessities that constitute America’s strength.2 I categorically disagree with McGovern’s conclusion that Truman’s Cold War measures were motivated by fear instead of a calm, unimpassioned appraisal of Stalin’s real intentions. When Henry Wallace ran for president on the platform of the Progressive Party in 1948, that assessment of Truman’s motives was Wallace’s central theme, but we should recall that Senator McGovern publicly campaigned for Wallace in 1948.3 In addition to gobbling up nations like Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and other satellite countries, Stalin was sending arms, agents, and Communist advisers into Greece, Turkey, Italy, and France to foment Communist 3

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takeovers in those free nations. It was not fear but a calm appraisal of the clear and present dangers to freedom that motivated Truman’s establishment of the containment policy, which proved so successful in the long run.4 A jarring confrontation between Senator Truman and the White House in 1937 had a profound effect on President Truman’s later attitude toward relations with Congress. The death of Senate Democratic leader Joseph Robinson of Arkansas in July 1937 ushered in a bitter, close fight for his position. President Roosevelt publicly endorsed Kentucky Senator Alben Barkley over Mississippi Senator Pat Harrison. Senator Truman liked Harrison and committed to vote for him. A head count revealed that Harrison might win by one vote, so Roosevelt put on a full-court press to change votes. Chicago’s “Boss” Kelly persuaded Illinois Senator William Dieterich to switch by offering to turn over a big amount of Kelly’s patronage to Dieterich.5 Roosevelt’s next step was to ask Kansas City boss Tom Pendergast to call Senator Truman and ask him to switch to Barkley. Truman told Pendergast that he had already committed to Harrison, whereupon Pendergast remarked that “It doesn’t make a helluva lot of difference to me, but President Roosevelt has asked me to call.” Truman was boiling mad. He resented the implication that he was a puppet of Pendergast, especially since he was determined to erase the charge that he was the “senator from Pendergast.”6 Infuriated, Senator Truman called the White House to express his anger directly to the president. Roosevelt’s press secretary, Steve Early, came on the phone to say the president was “unavailable,” whereupon Truman gave Early both barrels, stating that he was “tired of being pushed around” and “treated like an office boy.” 7 This confrontation led to President Truman’s decision to treat United States senators as dignitaries who deserved to be contacted personally by the president, instead of through surrogates. Not until 1949—four years after taking the oath of office—did President Truman finally decide to appoint Joseph Feeney for the Senate and Charles Maylon for the House as liaison representatives to Congress. I knew both Feeney and Maylon, and talked with them many times about their contacts with Congress. Neither of them had a working knowledge of policy, and both of them acted as sounding boards for members of Congress, while giving little attention to important details. When asked to appraise congressional reaction to future votes, they would frequently simply ask the Speaker or Senate majority leader and report their response. Therefore, I believe it is an exaggeration to state that President Truman institutionalized the system of congressional liaison. These two men were not important members of Truman’s White House staff. Their lack of importance is directly traceable to Senator Truman’s experience with President Roosevelt in 1937.8 George Elsey, a senior administrative



What Truman Thought of Congress & How He Dealt With It

5

assistant in the Truman White House, confirmed my appraisal of Feeney and Maylon, adding, “To my knowledge, neither of these two men ever met with President Truman. Essentially, they were glorified errand boys for Appointments Secretary Matt Connelly, who would send them out to buy tickets to sporting events needed by congressmen or to fill minor requests from congressmen for documents or other special favors.”9

Truman’s Fair Deal At the conclusion of the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, Truman sent an urgent message to Judge Samuel I. Rosenman, who had been FDR’s number one speechwriter and was held over to work for Truman. The president asked Rosenman to join him on the return trip to the United States on the destroyer Augusta. Truman advised Rosenman that he did not want to wait for a formal State of the Union address to lay out in detail his domestic agenda in a comprehensive message to Congress. The result was a wide-ranging, sixteen thousand-word message sent to Capitol Hill on September 6, 1945. Rosenman was elated to learn that the message would be a bold, liberal statement that carried forward the aims of the New Deal.10 The message was a liberal smorgasbord that included national health insurance, a boost in unemployment compensation, an increase in the minimum wage from forty to seventy-five cents an hour, housing and slum clearance, crop insurance for farmers, tax reform, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee to replace the wartime FEPC, and a host of industrial reconversion initiatives—more than enough for a reluctant Congress to digest.11 Congress proceeded to oppose most of the recommendations, worthy as they were. During the next year and a half, Truman struggled unsuccessfully to hold the line against runaway inflation. The Office of Price Administration, which had employed seventy-three thousand workers during World War II, was dismantled over Truman’s strenuous objection, as the people, who in the aftermath of World War I had voted Warren Harding into office in 1920 on the ungrammatical platform of “Back to Normalcy,” now wanted to abandon wartime sacrifices and get drunk on freedom from controls. Organized labor, chafing under no-strike wartime pledges, saw corporations reaping record profits while prices were escalating out of reach. Virtually every large industry—steel, railroads, coal mining, transportation—vented their anger with crippling nationwide strikes. At the Gridiron Dinner in December, Truman—only half in jest—proclaimed that Civil War General Sherman was wrong when he said “war is hell.” He

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said, “I’m telling you I find peace is hell.”12 In the fall of 1946, beef-cattle farmers and meatpackers deliberately held meat off the market in hopes of reaping bigger profits from higher prices in the future. An angry populace blamed Truman for the meat shortage. In the midterm elections of 1946, riding the crest of their effective slogan “Had Enough? Vote Republican!” the GOP dealt Truman a stinging defeat. For the first time since 1928, the Republicans captured control of both the House and the Senate.13 Amidst these seemingly intractable problems, facing a skeptical and uncooperative Congress and an economy in shambles, plus greed on the part of both business and labor, you might think President Truman would be completely discouraged. But Truman had two qualities that served him well in these critical times. He was resilient, having survived failures in oil exploration, zinc mining, and his haberdashery business. He also had a healthy sense of humor. In the White House, there was a press news ticker that clacked away with latest developments at home and around the world. One day the staff heard a loud chuckle as the president read an item on the ticker reporting that the Office of Price Administration (OPA) had decided to lift all price controls on Hawaiian sleigh bells and canned octopus. Tearing off the sheet from the ticker, Truman could not resist penning a note at the bottom of the sober announcement; he placed the note in a White House envelope, summoned a special White House messenger, and dispatched his reaction to Paul Porter, the OPA administrator. Porter dutifully opened the envelope and broke into laughter when he read: “Good work, men! It’s decisions like this that will carry us to the top!”14 After voting in the 1946 midterm elections at his home in Independence, Truman boarded a train for his return trip to the nation’s capital. When he arrived at Union Station, no member of his cabinet or member of Congress was there to greet him. The only public official there was Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, a gesture of loyalty that Truman never forgot. He was a lonely loser, but in a sense, this crushing repudiation liberated Truman. He wrote to his wife, Bess, “I’m doing as I damn please for the next two years, and to hell with all of them.”15 Defeat at the 1946 midterm elections helped Truman win the greatest political upset of all time in 1948. The allout Republican control of both the House and Senate in 1947 and 1948 set the stage for Truman’s attack on the “do-nothing, good-for-nothing 80th Congress” by zeroing in on their failure to enact his Fair Deal program,16 a sentiment that resonated with the American people. In still another fashion, Truman’s inability to persuade Congress to act led to my appointment to the White House staff in 1949. Because I was



What Truman Thought of Congress & How He Dealt With It

teaching at Princeton University after 1947, I missed the excitement of participating in the 1948 campaign. In my classes, I frequently referred to the great work Special Counsel Clark Clifford was doing for President Truman. After class one day, a tall football player named Clifford Kurrus said, “You’ve been talking about my uncle, after whom I was named.” I replied, “Hey, let’s get a group of students together and call at the White House to talk with your uncle Clark!” When I wrote to Clifford, I received a cordial, positive response, along with a letter from his deputy, George Elsey, who noted that he was a Princeton alumnus and also wanted to meet with us. After Truman’s upset victory in 1948, Elsey came to Princeton on January 10, 1949, to address my class about how Truman had pulled off his surprise victory.17 Later, Elsey mentioned to me that the president had asked him to do an analysis of how he had managed to win, which he simply did not have the time to undertake. He related that the president had complained, “Every time I try to do something for people, like universal health insurance, increased federal aid to education, tax reform, housing and slum clearance, or strengthening social security, they charge me with ‘creating a welfare state.’ I’ll bet billions of dollars more are spent on subsidies and tax breaks for corporations. Look at all the free land grants to railroads.” I thought that would make an interesting study and readily agreed to take it on gratis. Over the next couple of months, I did research and produced a paper the length of a master’s thesis, which I forwarded to the White House. Clark Clifford was greatly impressed and routed it immediately to Truman with a handwritten cover note to the president observing that it would make good speech material.18 I quit Princeton at the close of the fall term in 1949 and before long was assigned as a special assistant at the White House. I was assigned to administrative assistant George Elsey in his suite on the second floor of what was once the State-War-Navy Building, then termed the Executive Office Building, and now the Eisenhower Building, just across Executive Avenue from the White House. When the Democratic National Convention met in Philadelphia in July 1948, Truman’s relations with Congress were at their lowest point. In his speech accepting the nomination, the president delivered probably the most brilliant political address of his career. Several weeks earlier, the Republican Party had held its national convention in Philadelphia, where they passed an ambitious liberal platform and nominated a dream ticket: the liberal governor of New York, Thomas E. Dewey, with popular California Governor Earl Warren as his running mate. In his acceptance speech, Truman quoted from the recently passed Republican platform, which called for all the measures on health, education, civil rights, housing, and other issues that he himself had advocated and that had been

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rejected by the Republican-controlled Congress. Then, in a masterstroke, he called Congress back in special session on July 26 to enact those platform pledges “which they say they are for.” He stated that this was “Turnip Day in Missouri,” because “on the 26th day of July, sow your turnips wet or dry.” The ploy was a political ten-strike for Truman. Not only did the Republican-controlled Congress, under the leadership of ultraconservative Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft, refuse to pass any of the measures in its platform, it also demonstrated that candidate Dewey had no control over his own party in Congress.19 In July 15, 1948, diary entry, Truman quipped, “My, how the opposition screams. I’m going to attempt to make them meet their platform promises before the election. That is, according to the ‘kept’ press and the opposition leadership ‘cheap politics.’ I wonder what ‘expensive politics’ will be like. We’ll see.”20

The Second Term The 81st Congress, elected with Truman’s 1948 victory, was an improvement over the 80th but still balked at many of Truman’s initiatives. Early on, Elsey won a battle to concentrate the inaugural address of January 20, 1949, on foreign policy, with the State of the Union keyed to domestic policy. Benjamin Hardy, a young idealist in the State Department’s Office of Public Affairs, came up with the concept that technical assistance in modest amounts directed toward underdeveloped countries might prove a more successful adjunct to foreign policy rather than sending billions of dollars in foreign aid to the leaders of larger nations. Higher-ups in the State Department shot down Hardy’s idea as inappropriate without extensive advance planning. Frustrated, Hardy went over their heads and found an enthusiastic supporter in George Elsey. Truman, from his farming experience, enthusiastically endorsed the idea, which became Point Four in the foreign policy goals outlined in the inaugural address. Truman finally persuaded Congress to appropriate the funds for Point Four in 1950 and then had to struggle with a reluctant State Department to implement the program, which became a precursor for the Peace Corps launched by President Kennedy.21 A very odd trio helped Truman achieve his goal of an effective housing and slum clearance bill in 1949. Antilabor Ohio Senator Taft teamed up with militantly prolabor New York Senator Robert Wagner and racist Louisiana Senator Allen Ellender to pass the Taft-Ellender-Wagner Housing Act. Then, in 1950, Truman persuaded Congress to approve a far-reaching expansion, enforcement, and major strengthening of Social Security. But he failed in efforts to achieve universal health insurance or



What Truman Thought of Congress & How He Dealt With It

universal training for all those between ages eighteen and twenty. Two days after the North Koreans crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea, Truman convened a bipartisan group of members of the House and Senate to brief them on the military situation and announced that US naval and air forces would be used to provide “cover and support” for the South Koreans. Senator Taft, who later termed the Korean conflict “Truman’s war,” was initially supportive and even expressed approval of the “general policies outlined in the president’s statement.” This led Press Secretary Charles Ross to proclaim, “By God, Bob Taft has joined the US and the UN.” Foreign Policy Chief Adviser Averell Harriman urged Truman to ask Congress for a joint resolution of support. He later explained Truman’s reluctance to do so: “He said he would not do so because it would make it more difficult for future presidents to deal with emergencies.” It is unfortunate that Truman did not follow Harriman’s advice, which might have blunted the chorus of Republican criticisms that were later unleashed.22 I tried to fill in the gap by forwarding research material to bolster the president’s decisions in Korea to friendly Democratic House and Senate members and their administrative assistants. I also joined with other members of Truman’s staff to persuade the Democratic National Committee to reestablish the research division that had successfully operated during the 1948 campaign. Chairman Bill Boyle was an organizer rather than a policy expert, and he resisted until 1950, when he appointed Charles van Devender as director of publicity and van Devender hired Philip Dreyer, a veteran of the 1948 research division. Phil was both a go-getter and a self-starter, and there was a personality conflict between Phil and careful planner Charlie. When Phil issued a news release without clearing it with Charlie, he was fired. From then on, the White House simply went ahead to transmit needed research materials to Congress.23 The most frustrating aspect of Truman’s relations with Congress involved the drumfire of right-wing legislators who were obsessed with the threat of communism in this country, fueled and encouraged by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The House Un-American Activities Committee took the lead. Even before Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy suddenly “discovered” that the threat of domestic communism might help his 1952 reelection campaign, Richard Nixon, after unseating a competent fourterm liberal named Jerry Voorhis (D-CA) in 1946, played the issue to the hilt through his membership on HUAC. Through a strange twist of logic, President Truman, who masterminded the successful containment program to halt Communist aggression in Europe and was leading American military forces against Communists in Korea, was being charged with being “soft on communism.” After all, they argued, there

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must be Communist sympathizers in the Foreign Service or else Mao Tse-Tung could not have conquered China, or there must be Communist spies in the Truman bureaucracy or why else could the Soviet Union have exploded an atomic bomb in 1949?24 The most dangerous threat to Truman came from Senator McCarthy’s wild charges, which gained credibility with the perjury conviction of Alger Hiss, formerly a high-ranking Department of State official. Truman became involved when his trusted Secretary of State Dean Acheson proclaimed, “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.” Truman’s credibility suffered when he agreed to be quoted by a reporter’s characterization that the HUAC hearings were a “red herring” to cover up their opposition to the Fair Deal.25 Truman hoped that investigative hearings by a Senate subcommittee chaired by Senator Millard Tydings (D-MD) in 1950 would demonstrate the utter falsity of McCarthy’s charges. The Tydings Committee’s report condemned McCarthy, but when McCarthy handpicked John Marshall Butler to oppose Tydings in the 1950 election and Butler won by using a cropped photograph purporting to show Tydings in friendly conversation with Communist Party leader Earl Browder, the election results terrified Congress. Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas (D-IL) also went down in defeat because of his opposition to McCarthy. To calm the fears of Congress, Truman asked me to prepare a study of “Witch-Hunting and Hysteria throughout American History,” starting with the Salem witchcraft trials and covering the anti-Masonic and Know-Nothing movements, the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Communist raids after World War I by A. Mitchell Palmer, and other examples to demonstrate that the good sense of the American people overcame these aberrations, bringing hope that the same fate would eventually kill McCarthyism.26 Truman made frequent distribution of the study to friends, visitors, and others who were concerned with the issue, but he made a decision that later haunted him. In one of the few decisions of his administration that was made because of political pressure, Truman, by executive order, established a Loyalty Review Board. The president appointed Seth Richardson, a conservative Republican, to chair the board. A total of 212 civil servants were dismissed because of questionable loyalty. Truman’s action was intended to head off more draconian measures being considered by Congress, but it satisfied neither hard-liners concerned about the Communist threat nor liberal defenders of freedom.27 Still determined to protect individual rights within the context of weeding out true subversives, Truman persuaded Fleet Admiral Chester



What Truman Thought of Congress & How He Dealt With It

Nimitz to head a Presidential Commission on Internal Security, which included prominent business, university, and religious leaders. Since most individuals who agreed to serve would have to give up valuable investments to qualify under federal rules, Truman obtained a waiver from the House of Representatives. Senator Pat McCarran (D-NV), a longtime opponent of Truman as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, blocked the waiver, so the Nimitz Commission was forced to disband.28 The longer I served at the White House, the more my responsibilities seemed to increase. One day I got a phone call from a friend named Ken Harding of the House Congressional Campaign Committee, stating that Congressman Harry Sheppard (D-CA) wanted me to have lunch with him at the Capitol. “You mean the dean of the California delegation?” I asked. “Is there something I did wrong?” Harding answered that he only wanted to talk. We had a pleasant lunch, after which Congressman Sheppard bent my ear for over an hour with a stream of political problems he and the State of California were experiencing. I only got a few words in edgewise with queries for clarification. Then, as he was saying goodbye to me, he grasped my hand warmly and with a sincere smile he observed, “I’ve met many people down at the White House over the years, but you are one of the smartest.” I began to realize the weakness of the Truman congressional relations staff, and that regular meetings with leaders as part of the Big Four didn’t fully provide a forum for many congressmen to air their views.29 On February 13, 1951, I was handed a memorandum from the president indicating that he wanted Vice President Barkley to deliver an address in Topeka, Kansas, on February 24. He wanted Barkley to have a memorandum detailing chapter and verse of the numerous steps the president had taken to achieve a bipartisan foreign policy through Republican appointments to the United Nations and international conferences. I was given access to the appointment files of Truman’s secretary, Rose Conway, as well as his own notes on his Republican conferences, plus advice as to whom I should turn to at the State and Defense Departments for additional supporting data. I had enough background for Barkley’s address, but the subject was so interesting that I spent a couple of additional weeks expanding my study. My associates at the White House were pleased with the study and immediately decided it should be published. An easy publishing source might have been the Democratic National Committee, but of course they did not want to publish anything that praised GOP cooperation with Truman. I then went to the office of Senator Tom Connally (D-TX), the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They objected because Senator Connally had to run in 1952 and Texas constituents were opposed to Truman’s policies on civil rights. Finally, I got

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my friend John Home, administrative assistant to Senator John Sparkman (D-AL), a moderate southerner, who agreed to publish my study as a Senate document. I was pleased that Truman in his news conference on August 14, 1952, told the reporters, “I would like very much … to have each one of you familiarize yourselves with a Senate document. It is Senate Document 87. It was issued on October the 20th, 1951, by the Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate. It is a unanimous report on the bipartisan foreign policy, and the history of the operations of that policy almost from its beginning. You can get some very good information out of that document.”30 No account of White House relations with Congress would be complete without a discussion of the crucial role of the Bureau of the Budget (now more appropriately named the Office of Management and Budget). Truman inherited Harold Smith as director—a more methodical leader than his successor, James Webb, a politically savvy director who enjoyed a close personal relationship with Truman. The president loved statistics and understood the significance of the budget figures so well that he personally conducted the budget news conferences. But he also had sound concepts of management, which led him to appreciate the central legislative clearance functions of the bureau, headed initially by Elmer Staats and later by Roger W. Jones, both imaginative leaders. Whenever a bill passed Congress, the Bureau of the Budget assembled the comments of affected federal agencies recommending whether it should be signed or vetoed. These recommendations, along with the recommendation of the bureau, were quickly forwarded to the president to exercise his decision. All personnel recruited and trained at the bureau developed into experts in assessing the public interest above any agency or special interest. Truman scrutinized these reports carefully, even when they involved minor relief bills. For example, one statute called for the payment of $75 to one H. Dale Madison, who had rented a black horse to the US Forest Service for use by forest rangers to help the army in aircraft-warning duties. The rented horse had chewed through his tie rope one night and broken free, only to meet an unfortunate end when his right hind hoof caught in the rope. In its recommendation to Truman, the Bureau of the Budget had suggested, “While this is a horse and not a Missouri mule, we are betting that the president will give Mr. Madison his $75 so he can buy another horse to rent to the Forest Rangers and start all over again.” Truman penned a note at the bottom of the recommendation: “The president is in agreement. No Missouri mule would ever so entangle himself. H.S.T.”31 James Webb not only had many direct talks with Truman, but he encouraged all his staff members to go over and talk freely with White



What Truman Thought of Congress & How He Dealt With It

House personnel. It did not take long for Truman to recognize which Bureau of the Budget personnel he would like to see join the White House staff. Director Webb encouraged Truman to recruit anybody he wanted to, and as a result the following alumni of the bureau eventually wound up as full-time White House staff members: David Bell, David Stowe, Milton Kayle, Richard Neustadt, Russell Andrews, Harold Enarson, and Ken Hechler. The bureau also moved in to prepare the president’s annual legislative program and help draft administration bills.32

Notes

1. Hechler, Working with Truman, 25. 2. George McGovern, “Keynote Address at Rededication of the Little White House” (speech, 2009 Truman Legacy Series Symposium, Key West, Florida, May 15, 2009). 3. Wikipedia indicates that in 1948 McGovern “joined the newly-formed Progressive Party. During the campaign he attended the party’s first national convention as a delegate and volunteered for the eventually unsuccessful campaign of the presidential nominee, former Vice President Henry A. Wallace.” 4. Phillips, Truman Presidency, 169–71. 5. McCullough, Truman, 228. 6. Daniels, Man of Independence, 180. 7. Helm, Harry Truman, 55. 8. Hechler, Working with Truman, 154. 9. Telephone conversation with Hon. George M. Elsey, May 21, 2009. 10. Hechler, Working with Truman, 41. 11. Phillips, Truman Presidency, 105–6. 12. McCullough, Truman, 476. 13. Phillips, Truman Presidency, 160. 14. Ibid., 111. 15. McCullough, Truman, 529. 16. Ibid., 627. 17. Congress passed the Taft-Ellender-Wagner housing and slum clearance bill in 1949; Hon. George M. Elsey, five-page tribute to Hechler, copy available in Ken Hechler Papers, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. 18. Copies of Clifford’s covering memorandum and Hechler’s analysis of corporate welfare are available in the Hechler Papers at the Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. 19. Hechler, Working with Truman, 82–85. 20. Truman Diary, 1948, Box 232, President’s Secretary Files, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. 21. Hechler, Working with Truman, 115–18. 22. Hechler, Working with Truman, 151. 23. Ibid., 152. 24. Phillips, Truman Presidency, 374. 25. McCullough, Truman, 759. 26. Hechler, Working with Truman, 185–86. 27. McCullough, Truman, 551–53. 28. Ibid., 382–93. 29. Hechler, Working with Truman, 154–55. 30. The President’s News Conference, August 14, 1952, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1952, 517–20.

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31. Hechler, Working with Truman, 158–60. 32. Ibid., 160–61.

Works Cited

Daniels, Jonathan. The Man of Independence. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1950. Hechler, Ken. Working with Truman: A Personal Memoir of the White House Years. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982. Helm, William P. Harry Truman: A Political Biography. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947. McCullough, David. Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Phillips, Cabell. The Truman Presidency: The History of a Triumphant Succession. New York: Macmillan, 1966. Truman, Harry S. Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1952–53. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966.

Congress and Truman

A Clash of Parties and Personalities Raymond W. Smock

By almost all accounts, President Truman’s relationship with Congress was stormy, contentious, exasperating, and often unproductive. Yet, looking back from a perspective of more than a half century, he accomplished a great deal. Harry Truman’s star in the presidential firmament has risen to new heights, even though he once was among the lowest-rated presidents in history. This volume explores Truman’s relationship with Congress from a number of perspectives. My focus is on Truman’s conflicted relationship with Congress from the perspective of Congress rather than the presidency. I draw my inspiration from an article first published in 1975 by Harold Hyman, the Rice University historian, who wrote about Abraham Lincoln, not Harry Truman. His article was titled: “Lincoln and Congress: Why Not Congress and Lincoln?” He reminded us that since so much of our understanding of American presidents comes from the perspective of the White House, we need to balance this with the view from the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Congress may be a coequal branch of government under the Constitution, but it certainly has not been coequal in presidential studies. To explain how the House and Senate viewed Truman’s relationship with Congress, we need to look at the congressional parties during Truman’s presidency, major internal changes in the House and Senate committee system, shifting House and Senate coalitions, and whether the clashes between Congress and the president were domestic in nature or related to foreign policy. A good part of this tale can be found in the personalities and politics 15

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of individual members and how they interacted with the president’s own strong personality. On July 23, 1947, President Harry Truman broke the rules of the Senate by slipping into the Senate chamber while it was in session and sitting in his old seat. The New York Times reported that he sat there “beaming like a school boy” because it took the Senate by such surprise. It was the first time a president of the United States had entered the Senate chamber during regular business since George Washington did it in 1789. Unlike George Washington, Harry Truman was not there to conduct business; he did it on a dare from some Democratic members of the Senate. The chamber erupted into applause as the Republican-dominated 80th Congress greeted the president with great gusto. The galleries joined in the warm greeting and Senator Arthur Vandenberg, who was presiding, did nothing to stop the applause. Vandenberg then broke a Senate rule of his own when he said, “The ex-senator from Missouri is recognized for five minutes.” President Truman was cordial and gracious in his remarks, saying that he “sometimes got homesick for this seat. I spent what I think were the best ten years of my life in the Senate. I made friendships and had associations which I can never forget.”1 But first, a note on the meaning of the word “Congress.” We use shorthand by calling something “congressional” or calling the legislative branch “Congress,” and have done so since the beginning of our government, but we know that the term “Congress” describes that two-headed beast so many presidents have lambasted. Such shorthand often obscures the significant differences presidents have had working separately with the House and the Senate, and obscures the differences between these two bodies and how they function under the Constitution with differing responsibilities, especially with the Senate’s significant role in foreign relations and its approval of Supreme Court nominations. Further muddying the waters is the balance between the majority and minority parties in each chamber, and the shifting coalitions between the parties that have often acted as a four-party system rather than a two-party system.2 All this is enough for any president to feel beset by yapping dogs—and I have not yet mentioned individual personalities and how they might clash over a particular issue. Harry Truman repeated in his memoir that his years in the Senate were the happiest years of his life. He liked the excitement, the company of his colleagues, and the clubby atmosphere of the Senate. He made a lot of friends there. Franklin Roosevelt was midway through his first term as president when Harry Truman entered the Senate in 1935, and Truman looked forward to pushing the president’s programs with the nation in the throes of the Great Depression. As a student of American history, Truman



Congress and Truman: A Clash of Parties & Personalities

appreciated the Senate in its historical context. He took a keen interest in all senators; he studied their biographies and learned the rules of the Senate, which is still the secret to success in that body.3 Truman thrived in the Senate, making a national reputation for himself as a fair and diligent investigator of wasteful government spending in wartime. His Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program became known as the Truman Committee and put him on the national map. Truman saved the nation billions of dollars in defense spending and saved the lives of members of the armed forces by exposing faulty manufacturing and dangerous equipment rushed into production by a self-serving, war-profiteering element in defense contracting.4 Truman’s attitudes about the Senate and the House were shaped by his personal experience, his own, well-honed views of what a good senator was like, and the friends and enemies he made while serving on Capitol Hill. It should come as no surprise that when Harry Truman thought of the perfect member of Congress, he thought of himself: hard working, honest, willing to find solutions to tough problems, practical, realistic, and always focused on the big picture of what was best for America. What he found instead were too many “ignorant demagogues” to suit him.5 When that famous phone call came on April 12, 1945, requesting that Harry Truman get to the White House as fast as he could, Truman had been vice president for less than four months. He was still a creature of the Senate, serving as the Senate’s president and enjoying a new role that kept him largely in the Senate chamber but with better contact with the White House. He had spent the afternoon of April 12 presiding over the Senate before heading over for a drink with his good friend House Speaker Sam Rayburn and House Parliamentarian Lew Deschler in Rayburn’s private hideaway, known as the Board of Education, down a back stairway below the House chamber, well ensconced inside the comfort and contentment of congressional culture at its finest. Hours later he would be sworn in as Roosevelt’s successor and find himself ripped out of the familiar political culture of the Senate and thrust into another. Three weeks into his presidency, on June 6, 1945, Truman wrote to his wife, Bess, that he was getting better organized and straightening out his cabinet. He thought that when he ironed out a few problems he would be able to sit back, look at the big picture, and tell his departments what to do, and that his job would be no more difficult than running Jackson County, Missouri. He knew he would have “big headaches” in foreign relations, national finance, reconversion, and postwar military policy, but thought they “can all be solved if the Congress decides to help me do a bang up job, and [I] believe they will do that.”6

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His letter may have been merely a way of assuring Bess not to worry about him, but it also revealed his belief that Congress would do the right thing, support his efforts, and avoid the big headaches. As it turned out, there would be plenty of headaches, but also considerable accomplishments. Truman inherited a Congress that was still reeling from more than a dozen years of the most dominant president in American history, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Many of the fights Congress had with Harry Truman were old ones related to New Deal legislation gone awry, echoes of Roosevelt’s 1937 court-packing fiasco, and the dominance of the executive branch during World War II. The stormy part of the Congress-Truman relationship is easy to document. During the 79th Congress (1945–47)—the one Truman inherited upon Roosevelt’s death—the new president vetoed seventy-nine measures. Most of these involved minor matters, but nonetheless were indicative of Truman’s attempt to control Congress. Despite all these little-remembered vetoes, the House and Senate, which each had Democratic majorities, gave Truman major victories. The Senate approved the United Nations Charter, fulfilling the dream of Franklin Roosevelt, and easily confirmed two new Supreme Court justices. Both the Senate and House passed and sent to the president for his signature a Full Employment Act, the Atomic Energy Act, a major loan to Great Britain, the Fulbright Scholars Program, and the Bretton Woods Agreement on the international financial structure. By any historical or political analysis, this was a highly productive Congress.7 Looking deeper inside Congress, it is significant to note that when Harry Truman became president, Congress was in the midst of reorganizing itself to try to regain some of its constitutional power that had been eroded by Franklin Roosevelt’s executive leadership in dealing with the Great Depression and World War II. The need for congressional reform became critical during World War II, when a cumbersome and antiquated congressional committee system made for great inefficiency and duplication of effort. While Congress held the power of the purse, the executive branch held a mastery over the details of the budget, which left Congress wondering how the money was being spent. The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946 was the most sweeping change in the history of Congress. It reduced House committees from forty-eight to nineteen, and Senate standing committees from thirty-three to fifteen. The legislation expanded the Legislative Reference Service (now the Congressional Research Service) in part to wean Congress from dependence on the executive branch to conduct research on policy issues. The law permitted committees and individual members to hire more staff, further beefing up its challenge to the executive branch. All this was underway at



Congress and Truman: A Clash of Parties & Personalities

the very moment that Harry Truman moved into the White House. The body in which he had spent ten happy years was changing before his eyes.8 Congress’s internal reorganization began under the Democrats, four months after Harry Truman became president, but the first Congress to function under the reform act was the 80th Congress. The chairmen of this new, streamlined, and more efficient committee system were all Republicans. The GOP gained thirteen seats in the Senate to take the majority by fifty-one to forty-five. In the House, Republicans gained fifty-five seats and a majority of two hundred forty-five, with one hundred eighty-eight seats for the Democrats. Republicans who had held the minority throughout the New Deal returned to power determined to reduce the size of the national government, restrain the presidency, and check the power of labor unions. Epitomizing these changes was Ohio Senator Robert Taft, chairman of the newly created Republican Policy Committee and de facto leader of the Senate. Taft intended to roll back the New Deal and had no intention of enacting Truman’s Fair Deal proposals into law. Supporting conservative Republicans like Taft were the conservative Southern Democrats who blocked Truman’s civil rights legislation. It was a coalition that would hold together against the president not only during the Republican 80th Congress (1947–49) but also during the narrowly Democratic 81st (1949–51) and 82nd Congresses (1951–53).9 Harry Truman made the 80th Congress his whipping boy in his presidential campaign of 1948. It is easy to see why Truman expended so much energy attacking it. It was a different institution, not only in its political makeup but also in its organization. The reduction in the number of committees gave the new Republican chairmen enhanced power. Truman became the first president to face a Congress whose very reorganization had been designed to make it more effective in challenging the president. When future historians look at Truman’s relationship with Congress, they should spend more time looking at how the dynamics of that reorganization of Congress added to Truman’s frustration with the House and Senate. It was a new game for Republican committee chairmen, flexing their political muscle under new rules and a new committee structure. The fact that Harry Truman did as well as he did with Congress is a testament to his ability to adapt to the new realities on Capitol Hill.

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Notes

1. C. P. Trussell, “Truman Takes His Old Seat and Gets Ovation,” New York Times, July 24, 1947. 2. See Burns, Deadlock of Democracy. 3. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions, 142–63. 4. Riddle, Truman Committee. 5. Harry Truman to Mary Jane Truman, March 28, 1947, in Ferrell, Off the Record, 110. 6. Harry Truman to Bess Truman, June 6, 1945, Papers of Harry S. Truman: Family, Business, and Personal Affairs File, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. 7. See Riddick, “American Government and Politics: The First Session of the Eightieth Congress”; and Riddick, “The Second Session of the Eightieth Congress.” 8. Byrd, Senate, 1:537–50. 9. See Patterson, Mr. Republican; and Hartman, Truman and the 80th Congress.

Works Cited

Burns, James MacGregor. The Deadlock of Democracy: Four-Party Politics in America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963. Byrd, Robert C. The Senate, 1789–1989: Addresses on the History of the United States Senate. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1989. Ferrell, Robert H., ed. Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. Hartmann, Susan M. Truman and the 80th Congress. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971. Hyman, Harold. “Lincoln and Congress: Why Not Congress and Lincoln?” Journal of Illinois State History (February 1975): 57–73. Patterson, James T. Mr. Republican: A Biography of Robert A. Taft. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972. Riddick, Floyd M. “American Government and Politics: The First Session of the Eightieth Congress.” American Political Science Review 42, no. 4 (August 1948): 677–93. ———. “The Second Session of the Eightieth Congress.” American Political Science Review 43, no. 3 (June 1949): 483–92. Riddle, Donald H. The Truman Committee: A Study in Congressional Responsibility. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1964. Truman, Harry S. Memoirs of Harry S. Truman. Vol. 1, Year of Decisions. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955.

Triumphs, Tribulations, and Turnip Day Sessions in the 80th Congress Harry Truman Copes with Divided Government

Richard S. Conley

Harry Truman’s bout with the Republican-controlled 80th Congress was notable for surprising legislative victories, crushing defeats, and a successful rhetorical vilification of the GOP majority that enabled him to capture the presidency in his own right in the 1948 election. On the foreign policy front, the passage of aid to Greece and Turkey by wide margins represented the acme of his legislative success and a considerable legacy in the rebuilding of postwar Europe. In the domestic policy sphere, his leadership of Congress reached a nadir with overrides of his vetoes of the Taft-Hartley Act, tax cuts, and antitrust and Social Security legislation. Paradoxically, the GOP’s legislative accomplishments were all but overshadowed by the president’s political acumen during the 1948 presidential campaign. By calling Congress into special session in fall 1948—dubbed the Turnip Day Session—Truman bombarded the Republican majority with a host of proposals upon which he knew it did not have time to act.1 The effect was to distract voters from significant rollbacks of New Deal policies. Labeling the 80th a “Do-Nothing” Congress for turning a blind eye to his proposals, Truman transformed the context of divided government into a decided advantage and mounted one of the greatest political comebacks in modern electoral history. Anecdotal accounts of Truman’s legislative presidency have dominated the scholarly literature. Prior studies provide only a limited assessment of 21

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Richard S. Conley

presidential success and support in the 80th Congress in light of the president’s choice to seek policy conflict with the Republican majority. With few exceptions, scholars who have employed quantitative measures to trace presidential-congressional relations in the post–World War II era have routinely omitted Truman’s presidency from comparative consideration.2 The reason is straightforward: scholars have been unable to locate presidential position votes in Congress from 1947 to 1952. Congressional Quarterly only began record keeping of presidential position votes in 1953. Congressional Quarterly also compiled a “box score” of congressional action on presidential requests beginning in 1953 but ended the practice in 1975.3 Political scientist Aaron Wildavsky constructed his own box scores using Congressional Quarterly’s rules for the period 1948 to 1964, thereby including at least part of the Truman era in his test of the “two presidencies” thesis—that a president is typically more successful in Congress with foreign policy votes than with domestic policy votes.4 Yet even Wildavsky’s metric has been criticized as imperfect for allegedly including too many trivial issues in his data set.5 Such obstacles have clearly impeded efforts to use quantitative methods to place Truman’s legislative presidency within the larger sweep of modern presidential history. Truman’s relative success and support in the 80th Congress can be clarified by analyzing votes on which the White House took a position from 1947 to 1948. Position votes do indeed exist for the Truman presidency. Archival research undertaken at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, in March 2009 revealed lists of position votes and legislative outcomes compiled by the White House staff. Detailed analyses of position votes for the 80th, 81st, and 82nd Congresses were uncovered in the papers of George Elsey, Richard Neustadt, and Joseph H. Short and Beth Campbell Short. This research is the first to employ quantitative approaches to examine legislative success rates and sources of congressional support for Truman in the House and Senate using the White House’s own benchmark of issues in Congress on which the president took a clear stand. This chapter begins with a brief overview of the elections of 1946 and the political-institutional context of the 80th Congress. Subsequent sections detail the methodology utilized in the study in the analysis of Truman’s overall level of legislative success by policy area, and presidential support scores for individual members of Congress calculated from the position vote lists for the House and Senate. The analysis then takes a sharp focus on the president’s support in the Senate by juxtaposing support scores in the 80th Congress with senators’ predicted support scores based on Truman’s positions as a senator in the 75th and 76th Congresses. This section details levels of “under” and “over” support for Truman among



Triumphs, Tribulations, & Turnip Day Sessions in Congress

23

individual senators in the 80th Congress. All told, the analyses elucidate the unique context of the 80th Congress and paint an intricate portrait of the constraints and opportunities that defined Truman’s legislative presidency during an extraordinary period of divided government.

The Congressional Elections of 1946: A Reversal of Democratic Fortunes If Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign mantra was “It’s the economy, stupid,” Republican candidates for Congress in 1946 had sung the same hymn five decades earlier. As the economy worsened and governmental decontrol of industry proceeded sluggishly following World War II, Republicans charged that shortages of goods were due to Truman’s inept handling of the national economy. The combined effects of apathetic Democratic voters who abstained from voting on election day and Republican voters who eagerly cast their ballots as a rejection of Truman’s economic reconversion policies resulted in the Republicans’ first majority in Congress in two decades. Congressional Republican leaders considered the election a referendum on Truman’s leadership and a mandate to rescind New Deal policies. If Truman’s legislative program in the preceding 79th Congress had stalled, prospects for progress with a Republican majority were dim. Low morale pervaded the administration. Truman’s key advisers became persuaded “if not that all was over, at least that the postwar reaffirmation of the liberal cause had been a crashing failure at the polls—out of fashion with the public, out of date for officeholders.”6 The modern presidency had reached a pivotal crossroads never traversed before: a divided government with a Democratic president facing a Republican majority on Capitol Hill. Truman had to contend not only with a GOP majority that was eager to legislate, but also a growing contingent of anti–New Deal Southern Democrats who had united with Republicans in a de facto conservative coalition majority to frustrate Roosevelt’s plans to expand social programs after 1936.7 In the 80th Congress, the head count was particularly ominous. These indomitable Democrats had no electoral connection to Truman. They not only stood poised to aid the Republicans in passing bills objectionable to the president, but also threatened to undermine Democratic unity necessary to uphold his weapon of last resort—the veto power. The president’s dilemma was immediate: Should he cooperate with the new majority to make potential incremental advances for his legislative program and find common ground with Republicans, or should he eschew cooperation in the hope of reestablishing a Democratic majority in

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the 1948 elections? Truman came to heed the advice of his assistant James Rowe, who believed that the primary goal of Republicans was to prepare for victory in the next election. Rowe opined that the GOP majority would “pass with great fanfare any popular policies that they foresaw causing difficulties for the president, thereby daring him to veto.”8 Rowe advised Truman to distance himself as much as he could from Congress and “select the issues upon which there will be conflict with the majority in Congress” as a means of persuading voters that poor public policies were the fault of the Republican majority.9 It is within this context that the 80th Congress got underway in early 1947, all but assuring spectacular interbranch battles for the hearts and minds of voters in the upcoming presidential election.

Data and Methodology President Truman requested that White House staff undertake an analysis of congressional support for his positions on August 15, 1951. The detailed analysis was uncovered in the George Elsey Papers at the Harry Truman Presidential Library.10 For the 80th Congress, the list includes twenty-five votes each for the House and Senate. The position votes span the most critical issues confronting the president and Congress from 1947 to 1948, as judged by Truman’s advisers. The White House staff divided the issues by policy area, including foreign policy, agriculture, labor, inflation, housing, and other domestic policy matters. The position vote list includes challenges to and the eventual passage of aid to Greece and Turkey, reciprocal trade, price controls, and overrides of the Taft-Hartley Act, and taxation, Social Security, and antitrust bills. The list of votes for each chamber is in tables 6 and 7 (pp. 48–51). The compendium of votes marks a significant numerical improvement over prior efforts to gauge position votes in the 80th Congress by analyzing Truman’s public comments and bill histories.11 Truman’s success rate was divided by chamber and classified into foreign and domestic policy per the White House’s categorization. This classification scheme enables a straightforward test of the “two presidencies” thesis in the 80th Congress. The categorization also allows for a general bicameral comparison. In order to grasp the sources of support in each chamber for Truman, presidential support scores were generated from the vote list for members of the House and Senate. The presidential support scores are the percentage of times individual legislators voted in favor of the president’s stands. The divisor (twenty-five votes in each chamber) was adjusted to correct for votes for which members were not present. As a result, the support scores do not penalize members for being absent for a Truman position vote in



Triumphs, Tribulations, & Turnip Day Sessions in Congress

the 80th Congress. The support scores constitute the dependent variable in a regression analysis. The model closely follows the approach utilized by Bond and Fleisher with an emphasis on party and ideology, but with several exceptions.12 The model for Truman deviates from their approach inasmuch as the president’s yearly public opinion is excluded in light of measurement difficulties in the 1940s. Moreover, a dummy variable for party is excluded from the model due to extreme colinearity with the ideological variables. Finally, the model includes dummy variables for committee chairs, ranking minority members, freshman Democratic and Republican members of Congress, and US Census data on the percent of a senator’s state or a representative’s district that is rural. These variables are included in order to capture both institutional dynamics (i.e., leadership position and seniority) and constituency factors (i.e., urban/rural divide). The simplified model may be expressed as follows: Presidential support score (%) = a + B1(Democrats x ideology) + B2(Republicans x ideology) + B3(committee chairs) + B4(ranking minority members) + B5(% rural) + B6(Democratic freshmen) + B7(Republican freshmen) + e

Ideology is measured as an interaction term by party. The variable represents the distance between Truman and the individual member along a single dimension using Poole and Rosenthal’s Common Space NOMINATE data. The scale runs from -1.00 for the most liberal member to +1.00 for the most conservative member. The Common Space data is comparable across chambers. Truman’s score is -.364, which placed him well to the left of the scale. In the 80th Senate, the most liberal member was Glen Taylor (D-ID) with a score of -.999. The most conservative senator was Edward Moore (R-OK) with a score of +.663. Several examples suffice to demonstrate how the ideological distance scores were obtained. Taylor’s ideological score was calculated as the distance to the left of Truman, or -.999 + .364

for a score of -.635. Moore’s score was calculated as the distance to the right of Truman, or .663 + .364

for a score of 1.03. This measure allows each member to be placed to the right or left of Truman’s ideology, as appropriate, in order to ascertain the relative conflict between the president and individual members of Congress. The 80th was typical of the “textbook Congress” in which policy leadership was lodged primarily in powerful committee chairs. To test whether these key leaders supported Truman more or less compared

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Richard S. Conley

to other members, dummy variables for committee chairs (Republicans) and ranking committee members (Democrats) are included in the model. Census data on the percent of each member’s state or district that was rural was brought to bear in the model. A continuous variable, the measure of the urban/rural divide of the member’s constituency focuses on several important elements of Truman’s potential support. Southern Democrats were at the core of the New Deal Coalition that supported Roosevelt after 1932. However, support among some Southern Democrats, notably on economic affairs and civil rights, eroded significantly in Roosevelt’s second term. Thus, the variable acts as a comparative proxy between Southern Democrats and their northern colleagues while avoiding the colinearity problems of including a dummy variable for region. In the House, fortynine of one hundred eighty-eight Democrats were from districts whose populations were greater than 50 percent rural. In the Senate, thirty-two of forty-five Democrats were from rural states (all but six were from states of the old Confederacy). Republicans in the House and Senate were much more likely to come from urban districts. Only ten of two hundred fortysix House Republicans and twenty-six of fifty-one GOP Senators were from rural districts. On trade bills and price supports proffered by the Republican majority, members from rural districts and states may well have had the most to gain or lose—and Southern Democrats from rural districts may have had a far easier time voting in favor of antilabor laws than their northern colleagues. Data for the Senate was taken from the 1940 Census. For the House, the percent of rural farms was divided by the total district population from the 1940 Census, as reported by Scott Adler.13 Dummy variables for Democratic and Republican freshmen are also included in the model. The inclusion of the dummy variable for Democrats enables a test of whether freshmen elected in 1946 were more or less supportive of Truman’s stances, particularly since the president had no electoral base of his own, having become president upon Roosevelt’s death eighty-nine days into his fourth term. Republican freshmen, on the other hand, might be expected to fall under greater pressure to follow party leaders as compared to senior members of either the House or Senate, running as they did against Truman’s record on the economy.

Predicting Support for Truman in the 80th Congress: A Baseline Model A closer analysis of Senate support for Truman’s positions in the 80th Congress was undertaken by establishing a baseline model of support in



Triumphs, Tribulations, & Turnip Day Sessions in Congress

the upper chamber based on historical voting. The baseline model includes the same variables as the presidential support score model; however, the dependent variable in the baseline model is the percentage of times senators in the 75th and 76th Congresses (1937–40) concurred with Truman’s position votes when he served in the upper chamber.14 Support scores for the two Congresses were pooled, yielding one hundred ninety-four cases. Missed votes were subtracted from the divisor so that senators were not penalized for failing to cast a ballot when Truman had voted. The model forecasts past support for Truman, as well as explains 57 percent of the variance. The baseline model parameters are, as follows: Support for Truman’s Positions (%) = .689 – .395(Democrats x ideology) – .465(Republicans x ideology) – .034(committee chairs) – .039(ranking minority members) + .001(% rural) – .065(Republican freshmen) + .025(Democratic freshmen) + e.

The rationale for the baseline model is straightforward. Roosevelt chose Truman as his vice-presidential running mate in 1944 precisely because of his party loyalty and record of support for the New Deal while in the Senate.15 Grasping the factors that influenced senators’ relative concurrence with Truman’s voting record in the 75th and 76th Congresses can tell us much about the level of support Truman could anticipate in the 80th Congress. Notwithstanding nominal party control in the two periods, the political context was similar in light of the relative strength of conservative forces in Congress. As Gary M. Fink and James W. Hilty note in their study of Truman’s voting record in the Senate, the 75th Congress (1937–38) heralded a “defensive phase” of the New Deal as conservatives mounted increased opposition.16 It was in 1937 that North Carolina Democratic Senator Josiah Bailey spearheaded the effort to articulate a “Conservative Manifesto” in Congress, “a formal declaration of principles upon which all conservative members of Congress might unite in order to give direction and purpose to legislative efforts to bring about business recovery” as the economy sunk into recession. Most of the southern Democrats, and a few Republicans who signed the Manifesto, had opposed Roosevelt’s courtpacking plan, were antilabor, and feared “radical” domestic programs and massive spending if the economy continued to slump.17 Republicans gained six midwestern seats in the Senate and won back seventy-two seats from the Democrats in the House in the midterm elections of 1938.18 The defeat of New Deal Democrats and the reelection of anti–New Deal Southern Democrats combined with GOP gains to strengthen the bipartisan “conservative coalition” of Southern Democrats and Republicans that

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would subsequently mount significant challenges to Roosevelt’s policy program.19Truman essentially confronted this same ideological configuration—only with a Republican majority—in the 80th Congress. The question the baseline model seeks to answer is whether Truman received more or less support than anticipated from pro– and anti–New Deal forces in the Senate. Expected support scores were generated based on the parameter estimates for the 75th and 76th Congresses. These predicted scores were then compared with actual support scores for Truman in the 80th Congress to identify Democratic senators with significant under- or oversupport. One important benefit of the baseline model is that it permits a test of the impact of personal loyalty between Truman and senators with whom he had previously served.

Assessing Truman’s Success and Support in the 80th Congress



Truman’s success rate is reported by chamber in table 1. Overall, Truman’s stands prevailed with 32 percent and 44 percent in the House and Senate, respectively. Closer analysis reveals a strong “two presidencies” effect. Truman prevailed more frequently on foreign policy votes in both chambers. His domestic policy success rate was particularly paltry in the House, as he won only an eighth of position votes. In the Senate, his domestic policy victory percentage is approximately half of that for foreign policy. Table 1: Truman’s Position Vote Success Rate, 80th Congress House of Representatives Win Loss

Senate Win

Loss

Domestic policy

2 (12.5%)

14 (87.5%)

5 (33.3%)

10 (66.7%)

Foreign policy

6 (66.7%)

3 (33.3%)

6 (60.0%)

4 (40.0%)

Overall

8 (32.0%)

17 (68.0%)

11 (44.0%)

14 (56.0%)

Note: Data includes four override votes in the House and Senate, and two nomination votes in the Senate. All override and nomination votes are classified in domestic policy.

In foreign policy, Truman’s most significant victories included passage of aid to Greece and Turkey, which laid the groundwork for the Marshall Plan. In addition, he successfully fought off a Senate amendment regarding the Economic Cooperation Administration and prevailed on the bill’s ultimate passage. He also prevailed on the bill creating the Voice of America program,



Triumphs, Tribulations, & Turnip Day Sessions in Congress

as well as on displaced persons and foreign aid in 1948. If there was a fair amount of bipartisanship in Truman’s foreign policy position votes in Congress, the same was scarcely true of the president’s domestic stands. The data underscore two important dynamics. The first is Truman’s strategic position taking. In keeping with the advice of the Rowe memo, the president carefully selected the most contentious issues on which to take a stand—including rent controls on housing, school lunch programs, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and a number of motions by New Deal Democrats to recommit Republican bills in both the House and Senate. Truman lost these votes, but many of these very issues formed the basis for his proposals in the special Turnip Day session of Congress in 1948. Second, Republicans remained solidly unified on their agenda. Party unity regularly trumped Democratic alternatives, and Truman’s stands seemingly had little effect on the GOP majority’s impetus to legislate its anti–New Deal agenda. Assuming party unity, Republicans were thirteen votes shy of a twothirds majority in the Senate and forty-five votes away from a two-thirds threshold in the House. They had little difficulty locating enough conservative Southern Democrats to trump Truman’s vetoes. Three of five veto overrides included in the success rate data for Truman’s position votes in one or the other chamber also reveal another component of the president’s strategic position taking. According to the White House vote lists, Truman did not take positions on the Taft-Hartley Act or the Social Security and railroad antitrust bills when they were first passed. Instead, he waited to announce his opposition to the bills when he returned them to Congress with his objections. And in the case of income taxes (1948), he vetoed the measure without apparent attention to the passage margins that pointed to a likely override. The strategy may have proven useful in posturing for the 1948 election, but it stripped the president of the power to say “no.” Regarding Taft-Hartley, Truman hesitated for days about whether to sign or to veto the bill. Away in Canada when the bill was passed by wide margins, the president gave no indication of his course of action as labor increasingly clamored for a veto.20 Senator Carl Hatch (D-NM), a close friend of Truman, sought out the president and confirmed that “the House would brush aside a veto in the most decisive terms, and that the Senate would do likewise.”21 A few days later, a survey of key senators by the United Press reported that an override was all but a foregone conclusion should the president veto the bill.22 Regardless, Truman vetoed it in light of strong pressure from labor organizations, then he launched an all-out campaign to halt an override, including an address to the nation. Many critics charged that the veto and subsequent override had

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damaged Truman’s most precious asset: the spirit of cooperation he had previously displayed by graciously accepting the 1946 midterm defeat of congressional Democrats. Furthermore, the veto appeared disingenuous. The Republican committees that drafted the bill had asked for suggestions and were eager to consider advice. Not only had the Truman White House offered none, but it appeared the veto was a transparent play to the Congress of Industrial Organizations as Truman jockeyed for labor’s support over Wallace in the 1948 presidential election.23 On June 20, 1947, Congress overrode the veto of the Taft-Hartley Act by wide margins. A year later, in the second session of the 80th Congress, the veto showdown was arguably more dramatic. Congress overrode three important Truman vetoes, including Social Security, antitrust, and income tax reduction legislation. Consistent with his strategy on Taft-Hartley, the president criticized the bills despite passage margins that suggested probable overrides. But the policy outcome was not Truman’s main focus. Rather, he chanced overrides to provide fodder on the campaign trail. On the Social Security bill, Truman vetoed the measure to give Congress “adequate time” to change the bill to his satisfaction. The president wanted increased benefits and had “capitalized on expansion of the present system as a major political issue on his cross country tour.”24 The veto of the railroad antitrust bill (Bullwinkle Bill) was ostensibly another play for labor sympathy. The bill permitted railroads to negotiate some freight prices with Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) approval without threat of antitrust lawsuits. Truman contended that the bill violated the public interest by exempting railroads from antitrust laws. Critics charged that the bill Truman vetoed did not “impair safeguards against abuse” by railroads in negotiating rates—and that the practice traditionally had been supported by the ICC itself.25 Finally, Truman had vetoed one income tax reduction bill in 1947 and his veto was upheld. House Republicans had been tipped off that Truman might call a special session of Congress and offer his own tax cut bill, so they did not make a concerted effort to override the 1947 bill in order to trap Truman into vetoing the same bill later.26 Truman got the chance in March 1948. The bill had passed both chambers with the two-thirds majority needed to trump a presidential veto, and on the eve of the override vote, “even Administration stalwarts conceded they [had] no chance of mustering enough votes to sustain a veto.”27 Truman launched a last-minute appeal to Congress, positing that the tax cut would add to the federal deficit, increase inflation, and weaken the US economy, thereby threatening world peace. The New York Times called the override—which was completed in both chambers just four hours after receipt of the veto message, and without a word of debate in the House—“one of the worst defeats” Truman suffered at



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the hands of the GOP majority.28 Truman chose conflict over cooperation with the GOP majority as a means of campaigning as an “outsider” or “challenger” to win the presidency in his own right in 1948. On his whistle-stop tour, he enjoyed mocking the 80th as the “Do-Nothing” Congress. He assailed the GOP majority as the “second worst” legislature—second only to the Reconstruction Republicans who impeached Andrew Johnson.29 And he reveled in telling crowds outside the capital that he would return to Washington to “veto some more bills.”30 But the Republican majority in the 80th Congress did deliver on its campaign promises and many of them were enacted just halfway through 1947.31 Truman’s frequent criticism of the Taft-Hartley Act and the income tax reduction under the mantra of the Do-Nothing Congress diverted public attention away from the real fact that such putatively repugnant measures had been adopted with ample support from Democrats.32 The strategy may have temporarily papered over growing splits among Democrats in Congress and the electorate, but one may ponder whether the president might well have been able to improve bills like Taft-Hartley or to take some amount of credit for popular policies like tax relief had he been more positively engaged in the legislative process.

A Comparative Assessment of Truman’s Roll Call Success Rate How does Truman’s success rate compare with other postwar presidents who faced divided government? Figures 1 and 2 juxtapose Truman’s position votes in the 80th Congress with Congressional Quarterly position votes for presidents under divided government in the House and Senate, respectively. The

Figure 1: Comparative Success Rate, House of Representatives

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Richard S. Conley

Figure 2: Comparative Success Rate, Senate

unit of analysis is each two-year congressional term. One caveat is that there were comparatively fewer presidential position votes in the 80th Congress as compared to later decades. The congressional workload was far less in the 1940s. By the 1980s, presidents routinely began taking positions on hundreds of bills. Moreover, one must naturally take into consideration the particular nature of Truman’s legislative strategy in the time up to the 1948 election, as noted in the previous section. Still, the data provide an important basis to evaluate comparatively Truman’s place in history, if the reference point is his success percentage in Congress. Truman’s overall success rate in the House and Senate is among the lowest of any president in the postwar era. Presidents typically fare better in the Senate, but Truman is the exception. His is the lowest score on record. He also had the second lowest comparative score in the House. Eisenhower found a good bit of common ground with Democrats from 1955 to 1960 to push his success rate in both chambers consistently above 50 percent. Nixon engaged in a fair amount of strategic position taking during his presidency, often agreeing with the Democratic majority in Congress to claim at least partial credit for popular policies.33 Reagan’s first year victories in the House were particularly stunning, followed by a steady decrease in his success rate, which reached a nadir in the 100th Congress (1987–88). With the advent of stronger party-unity voting in the House, the success rates of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton hovered around the 50 percent mark. George W. Bush’s victory rate in the House in the 110th Congress, at just over 20 percent, is the only figure lower than Truman’s in that chamber.



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Truman’s success rate—particularly in the House—appears very similar to lame duck presidents in the final two years of their second term (Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush). This dynamic is not happenstance. As Paul C. Light has documented, presidents’ political capital in Congress wanes with time.34 The problem is that Truman had little—if any—political capital when he came to the Oval Office as somewhat of an accident due to Roosevelt’s untimely death in 1945. Political pundits frequently painted Truman as a lame duck in the 80th Congress—a caretaker, a lightweight, or a political expedient who would be supplanted forthwith. He was regarded as the “man who didn’t want to be President,”35 and as unsure of his mandate as either commander in chief or New Deal figurehead.36 Senator William Fulbright (D-AR) called on him to resign and allow a Republican to take over the Oval Office, and introduced legislation to enable Congress to force such lame duck presidents out of office.37 Further, as Marquis Childs of the Washington Post noted after the midterm elections in November 1946, “a great many ambitious men in the [Democratic] party are behaving as though the President were already eliminated.”38 In 1948, only three of thirteen incumbent Democratic senators running for reelection were willing to publicly endorse Truman.39 Truman’s calls for anti-lynching and anti–poll tax measures in advance of the 1948 Democratic platform may well have alienated many Southern Democrats.40 Nonetheless, the prevailing wisdom—not only in the GOP majority in Congress but also among many Democrats—was that Truman could not possibly win his party’s nomination or defeat Thomas Dewey (R-NY) in 1948. From this perspective, the rationale for Truman’s decision to opt for public conflict, rather than for cooperation with the GOP majority in Congress, can be vindicated. But the strategy had a palpable effect on his success rate, at least in domestic affairs.

Presidential Support Scores Analysis Closer analysis of presidential support scores reveals more precisely the locus of support and opposition to Truman’s stands under divided government. Tables 2 and 3 show the regression analysis for the House and Senate, respectively. The explained variance in both models, as noted by the R 2 statistic, is very high. Analysis of support scores in both chambers points to high levels of polarization around Truman’s policy positions with ideology driving congressional support and opposition. In the House analysis, three of the seven independent variables are statistically and substantively significant. The coefficient for Republican ideology underscores that as a member’s opposition to Truman’s stands

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Table 2: Regression Analysis of Presidential Support Scores in the House of Representatives, 80th Congress Coefficient

Standard error

t score

Democrats x ideology

.0003

.0003

.09

Republicans x ideology

-.738

.019

-38.85*

% district rural

-.198

.029

-6.90*

Committee Chair

.006

.030

.19

Ranking committee members

.006

.031

.19

Republican freshmen

-.026

-.017

-1.53**

Democratic freshmen

-.004

.024

-.17

Constant

.817

.012

66.71**

Variable

* p < .001   ** p < .10 (one-tailed) Adjusted R2 = .82 N= 443

Table 3: Regression Analysis of Presidential Support Scores in the Senate, 80th Congress Coefficient

Standard error

t score

Democrats x ideology

-.685

.096

-7.15*

Republicans x ideology

-.845

.058

-14.66*

% state rural

-.002

.0008

-1.86**

Committee chair

.022

.042

0.53

Ranking committee members

-.001

.045

-.21

Republican freshmen

-.000

.038

-.00

Democratic freshmen

-.049

.045

-1.09

Constant

.943

.053

17.94*

Variable

* p < .001   ** p < .05 (one tailed) Adjusted R 2 = .77 N = 96

mounted, the further that member of the GOP was to Truman’s right. Presidential support decreased by a full percentage point for every .14 points a Republican was situated to the right of Truman. The mean distance for the average GOP House member was .66 points to the right of the president. Not a single Republican was located to the left of Truman,



Triumphs, Tribulations, & Turnip Day Sessions in Congress

which complicated his efforts to locate any potentially strong sources of opposition support in the House. As expected, Republican freshmen were slightly more inclined to oppose Truman. Controlling for ideology, firstterm GOP members had support scores about 3 percent lower. These freshmen were elected to pursue their party’s pledges, and Truman’s stances mattered little as they toed the party line. Interestingly, ideology is not significant for House Democrats. The lack of an effect is not due to colinearity in the model.41 Nor are the variables for committee chairs or Democratic freshmen significant. Ceteris paribus, the constant in the model, suggests a mean presidential support score among Democrats of approximately 82 percent, underscoring the degree to which the Republican agenda polarized the two parties in the House—and accentuating that, on the whole, Truman did receive strong backing from his Democratic colleagues. Instead, the variable for a district’s rural percentage better captures the source of some Democratic variation in support of Truman’s stands. For every 5 percent increase of the rural population in a district, support for the president drops by a full percentage point. Herein lay the source of the greatest number of defections on Truman’s vetoes among Democrats, and general opposition on roll calls. The model predicts that the forty-nine House Democrats from predominantly rural districts—all from the South—had support scores between 10 and 16 percent lower compared to their northern colleagues. As noted earlier, the votes in which this handful of conservatives was most important involved overrides. The data for the Senate model in table 3 parallels the analysis of support scores in the House, but with one important distinction—ideology is significant for both Democrats and Republicans, with a slightly stronger effect for the latter as compared to the House. The model of Senate support scores reinforces the degree to which the GOP agenda, combined with the high profile issues on which Truman took a stand, polarized patterns of presidential support, but the model also underscores a far greater diversity in support among Democrats for the president’s stands. Truman drew his strongest level of support from Democrats to the left of his ideological score. His major problem was that thirty-seven of the forty-five Democratic senators in the 80th Congress were to the right of him. Twenty-nine of the thirty-seven were from states of the old Confederacy and could be expected to support Truman, on average, 17 percent less than Northern Democrats. The variable for the rural population percentage captures the additional divide among Democrats in the upper chamber. All of the Southern Democrats were from states where the rural population percentage was between 58 and 80 percent. The model

35

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Richard S. Conley

forecasts an additional drop in presidential support of between 11 and 16 percent. All told, the model predicts that Truman drew anywhere from 30 to 50 percent less support from Southern Democrats in the Senate compared to their northern colleagues. The effect was not trivial, as Republicans found ample support to trump Truman’s vetoes with relative ease.

The Trustworthy and the Turncoats: A Baseline Analysis of Senate Support for Truman The analyses of Truman’s success rate and presidential support scores paint an intricate picture of executive-legislative relations in the 80th Congress. High levels of partisanship among the GOP majority are understandable, given the party’s anti–New Deal platform in 1946. Truman added to the polarized nature of the patterns by selecting issues of conflict, and fissures in the New Deal Coalition, particularly on overrides, are clearly visible relative to the Southern Democrats’ alliance with the Republicans. In light of this latter dynamic, the question is whether Truman’s support levels in the Senate were actually worse than might have been predicted in light of the conservative coalition’s seeming stranglehold on the upper chamber. Table 4 shows Democratic senators in the 80th Congress whose presidential support scores were 10 percent or more below the expected level, according to the parameters of the baseline model of support for Truman’s positions as a senator in the 75th and 76th Congresses. Eight of the thirteen “under-supporters” were from southern states. One might presume that opposition to civil rights guided these southerners’ voting records on Truman’s stances; however, this was not the case in terms of the legislation the 80th Congress voted upon in the upper chamber, according to the White House position votes list. Not a single Truman position vote in the Senate concerned civil rights (table 7, pp. 50–51). Rather, the issue votes overwhelmingly centered on economics. And Truman’s most staunch Democratic critics in the Senate had a long record of hostility to the New Deal that predated his presidency. Three senators’ support scores immediately stand out: Harry Flood Byrd (D-VA), Kenneth D. McKellar (D-TN), and W. Lee “Pass the Biscuits Pappy” O’Daniel (D-TX). These legislators supported Truman’s positions between 29 to 51 percent less than expected in the 80th Congress. McKellar and Byrd had served with Truman in the Senate. McKellar’s actual support score was 39 percent, and Byrd’s was a paltry 13 percent. O’Daniel, elected in 1941, cast not a single vote in favor of Truman’s stands. Republican control of Congress gave these disgruntled Democrats, and some of their other colleagues noted in table 4, an opportunity to register frustration with New



Triumphs, Tribulations, & Turnip Day Sessions in Congress

Table 4: Democrats in the 80th Senate with Expected Support Scores ≤ 10% Support difference (%) [predicted from 75th/76th Congress model – actual support, 80th Congress]

Name

State

McFarland

Arizona

-.14

McClellan

Arkansas

-.11

Johnson*

Colorado

-.10

Taylor

Idaho

-.29

Feazel

Louisiana

-.13

Stennis

Mississippi

-.21

McKellar*

Tennessee

-.31

Stewart

Tennessee

-.19

O’Daniel

Texas

-.51

Byrd*

Virginia

-.44

Robertson

Virginia

-.13

Support difference (%) [predicted – actual 75th/76th Congress]

.03

-.10

-.01

* Served with Truman in the 75th and/or 76th Congresses

Deal spending. They were often joined by the junior senators from their state in opposing Truman more than expected. Byrd’s abhorrence to debt was legendary. As governor of Virginia, he implemented a “pay as you go” program to manage state expenditures. As a senator, he saw himself as the “monetary conscience of the Federal Government.”42 He began taking exception to Roosevelt’s domestic policies upon his appointment to the Senate in 1933 and he broke with FDR most critically over a Virginia judgeship in 1939.43 In the 80th Congress, he found common cause with Republicans in trimming the federal budget, although he remained a steady internationalist in foreign affairs. Nonetheless, he refused to endorse Truman’s candidacy on the Democratic ticket in 1948— no doubt partly due to Truman’s insistence on a civil rights platform. Kenneth D. McKellar (D-TN) was first elected to the Senate in 1916. His views of the New Deal became more conservative over time, but his enmity toward the Roosevelt administration was rooted in patronage issues. McKellar’s quest for patronage was insatiable, and in the late 1930s he used his position as chairman of the Post Office Committee to “pressure the various government agencies into appointing McKellar men to all Tennessee positions.”44 He encountered resistance from the Roosevelt

37

38

Richard S. Conley

administration regarding the TVA and bitterly opposed the president’s nomination of David Lilienthal to head the TVA. McKellar and Lilienthal disagreed over the location of the Douglas Dam, and Roosevelt publicly backed Lilienthal. As John A. Salmond notes, the dispute brought to the fore “something which had been eating away at McKellar for years—his conviction, partially correct, that no one had appreciated the role he had played in getting TVA established, that all the glory had gone elsewhere. This grievance was like a cancer and in time warped him completely.”45 McKellar continued his vendetta in the 80th Congress and soon turned his ire toward Truman. In 1947, he launched an unprecedented, if ultimately failed, effort to block Lilienthal’s appointment at the Atomic Energy Commission and engaged in mean-spirited character assassination of Lilienthal, a Jew.46 That same year, McKellar led the fight against Gordon Clapp to head the TVA. He felt “insulted” that Truman had not consulted him about the appointment and used Clapp’s confirmation hearings as a soapbox to claim Communists had infiltrated the agency.47 Despite McKellar’s Manichean rhetoric that his Senate colleagues were “not to take up with my enemies,” Clapp was confirmed.48 In the 1948 election, McKellar refused to back Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond’s bid for the presidency, but would say nothing of Truman’s nomination except that he intended to vote a straight Democratic ticket.49 W. Lee O’Daniel did not vote with Truman once in the 80th Congress. The only other senator to so vehemently oppose Truman’s stands was Hugh Butler (R-NE). O’Daniel—a flour magnate, radio personality, and lead singer in his Hillbilly Boys band—was ardently antilabor. As Texas governor, he ran a campaign based on the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments, all the while promising to “get those wild-eyed labor racketeers.”50 He was elected to the Senate in a special election in 1941, defeating Lyndon Johnson in a contest with allegedly widespread electoral fraud. No sooner did O’Daniel take up his seat on Capitol Hill than he opposed the Roosevelt administration’s labor policies and wartime domestic economic measures.51 In 1944, O’Daniel launched his own newspaper, which he used to articulate his view that the Roosevelt administration was a “‘dynasty’ that was being perpetuated by Federal bureaus.”52 In the 80th Congress, O’Daniel was a Republican ally on rent control, testified on behalf of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s (R-WI) committee in the bid to outlaw portal-to-portal pay, and joined Kenneth McKellar in the fight against Gordon Clapp’s nomination to head the TVA.53 He found little common ground with the White House on foreign affairs in the position votes in this study and beyond. He voted against aid for Greece and Turkey, and was one of just a handful of senators to vote against treaties



Triumphs, Tribulations, & Turnip Day Sessions in Congress

with former World War II enemies, including Italy.54 As adamantly opposed as some Southern Democrats were to Truman’s stands, there actually were more Democrats in the Senate who supported the president more than expected. Table 5 details these senators, again with close attention to those who had served with Truman in the 75th and 76th Congresses. Five of the fifteen were from southern or midsouthern states. Of the ten senators who had served with Truman from 1937 to 1940, nine had voted with him in the 75th and 76th Congresses—1 to 15 percent less than expected by the baseline model. What is remarkable is that for each of these senators, presidential support exceeded the expected score in the 80th Congress by anywhere from 10 to 28 percent. Both party and personal loyalty apparently played key roles in these trustworthy Democrats’ Table 5: Democrats in the 80th Senate with Expected Support Scores ≥ 10% Support difference (%)

Support difference (%)

[predicted from 75th/76th Congress model – actual support, 80th Congress]

[predicted 75th/76th – actual 75th/76th Congresses]

-.15

Name

State

Hill*

Alabama

.19

Sparkman

Alabama

.19

Hayden*

Arizona

.28

-12

Downey*

California

.16

.08

McMahon

Connecticut

.14

Pepper*

Florida

.11

Lucas

Illinois

.24

Barkley*

Kentucky

.21

-.09

Hatch*

New Mexico

.22

-.01

Thomas*

Oklahoma

.10

-.13

Myers

Pennsylvania

.10

Green*

Rhode Island

.31

McGrath

Rhode Island

.26

Thomas*

Utah

.24

-.15

O’Mahoney*

Wyoming

.21

-.13

* Served with Truman in the 75th and/or 76th Congresses

-.06

-.11

39

40

Richard S. Conley

support—despite some frustration with the president on occasion. From 1937 to ’40, Truman cultivated important relationships with many of the senators in the 80th Congress who “over-supported” him. With Carl Hayden (D-AZ), Truman had jointly proposed highway safety legislation in 1939.55 Theodore Green (D-RI) ran as a staunch “New Dealer” in 1936 and was appointed to the Democratic Party’s steering committee in the Senate in 1939.56 An internationalist, Green was known as a presidential “yes man” who ardently defended Roosevelt’s “courtpacking” plan, supported civil rights, and was at the forefront of Truman’s election bid in 1948.57 Carl Hatch (D-NM) was a close, personal friend of Truman. He publicly supported Lilienthal’s nomination and consulted with the president frequently in advance of the 1948 election, even as erstwhile supporters of Truman’s policy positions in the 80th Congress, including Lister Hill and John Sparkman (D-AL), withdrew their backing of his candidacy.58 Claude Pepper (D-FL) was one of the key Democrats who had filibustered the Taft-Hartley Act for some twenty-eight hours.59 Perhaps most important in the “over-support” group was Alben Barkley (D-KY). Barkley tied with Democrats Green and McGrath (RI) in supporting every Truman position vote in the 80th Congress. His unwavering loyalty to Truman’s defense of the New Deal figured prominently in the president’s decision to place him on the Democratic ticket as vice president in 1948. Barkley, known for his affability and humor, took his own swipes at the GOP majority, noting that Republicans “do a lot of talking about getting rid of the Roosevelt reforms, but except for the Taft-Hartley labor law, which modifies our Wagner bill, they’ve done little to change them.”60 Regardless, Barkley experienced his own frustration with Truman’s campaign against the GOP with respect to several nominations and an alternative tax cut plan, to the point that one commentator noted that he and House leader Sam Rayburn “are just as sore at their old pal, Harry Truman, as they were at Roosevelt” and that what they “say about their chief in the White House can’t be printed in a family newspaper.”61 Truman did not regularly consult legislative leaders in Congress on his stands, preferring instead to rely on advice from his cabinet or White House staff.62 That Barkley remained as loyal as he did to Truman’s positions underscores the degree to which the Kentuckian was among the president’s greatest assets in the upper chamber.

Truman’s Unique Strategy There is no universal prescription for the strategy presidents should follow in attempting to cope with an opposition majority in Congress. The most



Triumphs, Tribulations, & Turnip Day Sessions in Congress

historians and political scientists can suggest is that presidents attempt to maneuver through the minefields of divided government contingent upon the resources they possess and the constellation of institutional and electoral forces they confront. They must weigh whether policy outcomes, reelection, or some combination of the two are their major objective. And ultimately, they must decide upon a balance between conflict, cooperation, claiming credit, and veto politics. Truman’s experience in the 80th Congress was a truly unique case of divided government in the postwar era. Notwithstanding Gerald Ford in the 94th Congress (1975–76), the circumstances Truman faced were singularly inauspicious. As an unelected president who lost party control of Congress at a midterm election, faced disunity in the ranks of his own partisans on Capitol Hill, confronted resentment over his predecessor’s style and policies, and was widely unpopular in the public and derided in the press, he had few options. A progressive, Truman could not manipulate voting coalitions in Congress to his advantage the way his moderate-conservative successor Dwight Eisenhower could under divided government from 1955 to 1960. Nor could he rely on strong partisan unity to wage a successful veto strategy to halt objectionable legislation in the ways George H. W. Bush or Bill Clinton did in the 1980s and 1990s. And he lacked the precious resource of electoral popularity that gave Ronald Reagan a decided advantage over an opposition majority in the House, at least temporarily, from 1981 to 1982. Truman’s only bright spot in legislative affairs was in foreign policy, where partisanship largely stopped at the water’s edge—the realm in which he accomplished much. Truman therefore settled on a unique strategy in domestic affairs. He combined a constitutional “hat trick,” the special session of Congress in 1948, with high profile vetoes that were overturned and buttressed his protracted public campaign, in which he vilified the policies of the GOP majority. To a lesser degree, he could rely on the close friendships and personal loyalty he had cultivated while in the Senate to bolster his legislative and, most particularly, electoral support in 1948. Truman’s handling of divided government accentuates the difficulties in reconciling policy outcomes with electoral strategy. Forsaking policy compromise in favor of conflict yielded a host of policies, including Taft-Hartley, that were difficult to overturn in the future. Still, Truman’s political acumen in using divided government as a primary resource to win reelection highlights the resilience of the modern presidency to surmount even the most difficult environmental and institutional constraints on the American chief executive. He was the first modern president to trump an overconfident opposition majority and defy the political pundits with a

41

42

Richard S. Conley

stunning comeback. The unique contextual configuration of divided government Truman tackled has yet to reemerge, and is unlikely to in this age of party unity and polarization in Congress and the electorate. But if it does, Truman’s relations with the 80th Congress provide a quintessential lesson for future inhabitants of the Oval Office. As another famous Missourian, Mark Twain, noted: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

Notes

1. Lee, “Turnip Session of the Do-Nothing Congress.” 2. See Conley, “Divided Government and Democratic Presidents”; and McCormick and Wittkopf, “Bipartisanship, Partisanship, and Ideology in Congressional-Executive Foreign Policy Relations, 1947–1988.” 3. Edwards, “Measuring Presidential Success in Congress.” 4. Wildavsky, “Two Presidencies.” 5. Sigelman, “Reassessment of the Two Presidencies Thesis,” 1195–205. 6. Neustadt, “Congress and the Fair Deal.” 7. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal; and Plesur, “Republican Comeback of 1938.” 8. Kernell, “Facing an Opposition Congress,” 91. 9. Rowe Memo, quoted in Donaldson, “Who Wrote the Clifford Memo?” 751. 10. “Legislation—Voting Records 80th–82nd Congresses,” Box 81, 2 folders, George Elsey Papers, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. 11. See Conley, “Divided Government and Democratic Presidents.” Six of the nineteen House votes and four of the thirteen Senate votes Conley identifies for the 80th Congress figured on the White House position vote list. The discrepancy in the 2000 study is not necessarily indicative of Truman’s failing to take a stand on the votes, but rather that the president’s closest White House advisers did not judge these votes as the most important issues. 12. Fleisher and Bond, “Assessing Presidential Support in the House II.” 13. Data are available from Adler’s website (http://socsci.colorado.edu/~esadler /districtdatawebsite/CongressionalDistrictDatasetwebpage.htm). 14. The baseline model excludes Truman’s votes in the 74th Congress (1934–35), the first Congress to which he was elected. Inclusion of the 74th Congress in the pooled model reduces the explained variance by over 20 percent. In the Senate, Democrats held sixty-nine seats (with one Farmer-Labor and one Progressive) compared to the Republicans’ twentyfive seats. Closer examination of support for Truman’s positions in the 74th Congress suggests far less variation than in the subsequent two Congresses, when anti–New Deal sentiment increased significantly, particularly among Republicans and some Democrats. Thus, the baseline model for the 75th and 76th Congresses taps into the precise dynamics that have explanatory power relative to Truman’s expected support in the 80th Congress as Republicans mounted an offensive against consolidation of that agenda. 15. See Phillips, Truman Presidency. 16. Fink and Hilty, “Senate Voting Record of Harry S. Truman,” 211–12. 17. Moore, “Josiah W. Bailey and the ‘Conservative Manifesto’ of 1937,” 31. 18. Plesur, “Republican Congressional Comeback of 1938.” 19. Patterson, Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal. 20. Drew Pearson, “Truman Gives No Hint of Labor Bill Action,” Washington Post, June 10, 1947. 21. William S. White, “Congress Would Override Labor Veto, Truman is Told,” New York Times, June 4, 1947.



Triumphs, Tribulations, & Turnip Day Sessions in Congress

22. United Press International, “Labor Bill Veto Futile, Survey Indicates,” Washington Post, June 8, 1947. 23. Mark Sullivan, “The Price of Veto: What Has It Cost Mr. Truman?” Washington Post, June 24, 1947. 24. Mary Spargo, “Security Bill Veto Killed by Congress,” Washington Post, June 15, 1948. 25. Robert C. Albright, “Security Bill Is Beaten by Congress,” Washington Post, June 17, 1948; “Rate-Making,” Washington Post, June 16, 1948. 26. Drew Pearson, “Republican Strategists Setting Tax Trap for Truman,” Washington Post, June 11, 1947. 27. United Press International, “Overriding of Tax Slash Veto Conceded,” Washington Post, March 28, 1948. 28. John D. Morris, “The Tax Reduction Bill Becomes a Law,” New York Times, April 3, 1948. 29. Edward T. Folliard, “Truman Says Congress Is ‘2nd Worst’ in History,” Washington Post, June 10, 1948. 30. Associated Press, “Third Veto Is Overridden by Congress,” Washington Post, June 18, 1948. 31. Robert C. Albright, “The ‘Do-Nothing’ Congress—Did!” Washington Post, June 15, 1947. 32. Editorial, “Truman’s Tactics,” Washington Post, September 21, 1948. 33. For details, see Conley, “Legislative Presidency in Political Time.” See also Conley, Presidency, Congress, and Divided Government. 34. Light, President’s Agenda. 35. Drew Pearson, “Merry-Go-Round,” Washington Post, April 16, 1945. 36. Walter Lippmann, “Today and Tomorrow: Truman as Roosevelt Successor,” Washington Post, March 4, 1948. 37. John D. Morris, “Truman Rejects Resignation Idea, Plans ‘National Welfare’ Policy,” New York Times, November 8, 1946. 38. Marquis Childs, “Washington Calling,” Washington Post, November 19, 1946. 39. Clayton Knowles, “Only 3 Seek Senate as Truman Backers,” New York Times, March 17, 1948. 40. “Mr. Truman’s Troubles,” Washington Post, February 9, 1948. 41. The variance inflation factors in the model do not indicate colinearity. 42. Michie and Ryhlick, Dixie Demagogues, 181. 43. See Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia. 44. Michie and Ryhlick, Dixie Demagogues, 260. 45. Salmond, “Postscript to the New Deal,” 422. 46. Marquis Childs, “Washington Calling: Dishonorable Performance,” Washington Post, February 8, 1947. 47. John D. Morris, “22 of TVA Are Communists, McKellar Tells Senate Group,” New York Times, January 26, 1947. 48. “Senate Confirms Clapp as TVA Head,” New York Times, April 25, 1947. 49. United Press International, “McKellar Says He Will Stay in Party Fold,” Washington Post, August 24, 1948. 50. Bernstein, “Antilabor Front.” For more on O’Daniel’s gubernatorial campaign, Douglas and Miller, W. Lee O’Daniel. 51. “Senate Blocks Move to Place Wartime Curbs on Labor,” Atlanta Constitution, April 1, 1942; “F.D.R. Appeals for Unrestricted Draft Bill for 18-Year-Olds,” Atlanta Constitution, October 24, 1942; “O’Daniel Calls Gasoline Shortage Bogus,” Washington Post, October 4, 1941; and “Moffet Sees Plot to Nationalize Industry,” Washington Post, October 4, 1941. 52. Associated Press, “Anti–New Deal Paper Assured, O’Daniel Says,” Washington

43

44

Richard S. Conley

Post, July 6, 1944. 53. Associated Press, “Rent Control Act Readied,” Washington Post, January 15, 1947; Associated Press, “New Bill Asks 2-3 Vote on Closed Shop,” Washington Post, January 25, 1947; and Dillard Stokes, “President Backs Clapp Despite Vote of Senators,” Washington Post, March 1, 1947. 54. C. P. Trussell, “Party Lines Merge,” New York Times, April 23, 1947; and C. P. Trussell, “Senate Approves 4 Peace Treaties, Rejecting Delay,” New York Times, June 6, 1947. 55. Rice, Carl Hayden, 161–66. 56. “Barkley Fortifies New Deal Rule Over Senate Order of Business,” New York Times, January 7, 1939. 57. Russell Smith, “Roosevelt’s Court Plan is Useless, Nye Declares,” Washington Post, February 22, 1937; and “R.I. Delegates Pledged As Truman Backers,” Washington Post, June 22, 1948. 58. Alfred Friendly, “Floor Fight On Lilienthal Viewed as Inevitable; Truman Vows He’ll Back Atomic Post Appointee to End; GOP Foes Multiply,” Washington Post, February 14, 1947; and Robert C. Albright, “More Party Leaders Turn on Truman,” Washington Post, March 24, 1948. 59. Jay Walz, “Labor Bill Is Held Sure of Passage over Truman Veto,” New York Times, June 23, 1947. 60. Virginia Van der Veer, “Barkley Still Party’s Champion,” Washington Post, July 27, 1947. 61. Drew Pearson, “‘Senator’ Truman Irks Old Pals,” Washington Post, February 8, 1948. 62. Hartmann, Truman and the 80th Congress, 16–18.

Works Cited

Bernstein, Victor H. “The Antilabor Front.” Antioch Review 3 (1943): 334. Conley, Richard S. “Divided Government and Democratic Presidents: Truman and Clinton Compared.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 30 (2000): 222–44. ———. “The Legislative Presidency in Political Time: Unified Government, Divided Government, and Presidential Leverage in Congress.” In Rivals for Power, 4th ed., edited by James Thurber, 151–82. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009. ———. The Presidency, Congress, and Divided Government: A Postwar Assessment. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002. Donaldson, Gary A. “Who Wrote the Clifford Memo? The Origins of Campaign Strategy in the Truman Administration.” Presidential Studies Quarterly 23 (1993): 751. Douglas, C. L., and Francis Miller. W. Lee O’Daniel. Dallas, TX: Regional Press, 1938. Edwards, George C. “Measuring Presidential Success in Congress: Alternative Approaches.” Journal of Politics 47 (1985): 667–85. Fink, Gary M., and James W. Hilty. “The Senate Voting Record of Harry S. Truman.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 4 (1973): 211–12. Fleisher, Richard, and Jon R. Bond. “Assessing Presidential Support in the House II: Lessons from George Bush.” American Journal of Political Science 36 (1992): 525–41. Hartmann, Susan. Truman and the 80th Congress. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971. Heinemann, Ronald L. Harry Byrd of Virginia. Charlottesville: University Press



Triumphs, Tribulations, & Turnip Day Sessions in Congress

of Virginia, 1996. Kernell, Samuel. “Facing an Opposition Congress: The President’s Strategic Circumstance.” In The Politics of Divided Government, edited by Gary W. Cox and Samuel Kernell, 87–112. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991. Lee, R. Alton. “The Turnip Session of the Do-Nothing Congress: Presidential Campaign Strategy.” Southwestern Social Science Quarterly 44 (1963): 256–67. Light, Paul C. The President’s Agenda: Domestic Policy Choice from Kennedy to Clinton. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. McCormick, James M., and Eugene Wittkopf. “Bipartisanship, Partisanship, and Ideology in Congressional-Executive Foreign Policy Relations, 1947–1988.” Journal of Politics 52 (1990): 1077–1100. Michie, Allan A. and Frank Ryhlick. Dixie Demagogues. New York: Vanguard Press, 1939. Moore, John Robert. “Josiah W. Bailey and the ‘Conservative Manifesto’ of 1937.” Journal of Southern History 31 (1965): 31. Neustadt, Richard. “Congress and the Fair Deal: A Legislative Balance Sheet.” In Harry S. Truman and the Fair Deal, edited by Alonzo L. Hamby, 15–41. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1974. Patterson, James T. Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal: The Growth of the Conservative Coalition in Congress, 1933–1939. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967. Phillips, Cabell. The Truman Presidency: The History of Triumphant Succession. New York City: Macmillan, 1966. Plesur, Milton. “The Republican Congressional Comeback of 1938.” Review of Politics 24 (1962): 525–62. Rice, Ross R. Carl Hayden: Builder of the American West. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994. Salmond, John A. “Postscript to the New Deal: The Defeat of the Nomination of Aubrey W. Williams as Rural Electrification Administrator in 1945.” Journal of American History 61 (1974): 422. Sigelman, Lee. “A Reassessment of the Two Presidencies Thesis.” Journal of Politics 41 (1979): 1195–205. Wildavsky, Aaron. “The Two Presidencies.” In Perspectives on the Presidency, edited by Aaron Wildavsky, 448–61. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975.

Newspapers and News Magazines Atlanta Constitution New York Times Washington Post

45

Description

Jonkman amend/relief assistance reduction

Aid to Greece & Turkey/passage

Rayburn motion/recommit wool bill

Voice of America

Aid to Europe/conference report passage

Economic Cooperation Administration

Doughton motion/recommit trade bill

Selective Service/conference report

Foreign aid appropriations/conference report

Taft-Hartley/override

Kirwin motion/recommit

Elliott motion/recommit

Tennessee Valley Authority plant/recommit

Issue area

Foreign policy

Foreign policy

Foreign policy

Foreign policy

Foreign policy

Foreign policy

Foreign policy

Foreign policy

Foreign policy

Labor

Power

Power

Power

Table 6: Position Votes in the House of Representatives, 80th Congress

HR6481

HR2873

HR2123

HR2030

HR6801

S2655

HR6656

S2202

S1774

HR3342

S814

HR3203

HJRES153

Bill #

5/11/48

1/22/48

4/25/47

6/20/47

6/20/48

6/19/48

3/26/48

3/31/48

12/15/47

6/24/47

6/16/47

5/9/47

4/30/47

Date

152-192

210-152

140-197

331-83

318-62

259-136

168-211

329-74

313-82

272-97

166-191

287-107

225-165

Outcome (Y/N)

Yea

Nay

Yea

Nay

Yea

Yea

Yea

Yea

Yea

Yea

Yea

Yea

Nay

Truman’s position

46 Richard S. Conley

Description

Wolcott Bill/rent increases

Suspend rules/inflation bill

Rent controls

Cannon motion/recommit appropriations bill

Recommit appropriations bill

School lunches

Override

Anti–poll tax bill

Mundt-Nixon bill/HUAC

Rayburn/recommit reducing individual taxes

Override/reduce individual taxes

Override/railroads

Issue area

Housing

Housing

Housing

Agriculture

Agriculture

Agriculture

Social security

Civil rights

Civil rights

Taxes

Taxes

Antitrust

Table 6 (continued)

S110

HR4790

HR4790

HR5852

HR29

HJRES296

HR3601

HR5525

HR3601

S2182

HJRES237

HR3203

Bill #

6/17/48

4/2/48

2/2/48

5/19/48

7/21/47

6/14/48

5/28/47

2/24/48

5/28/47

3/16/48

12/15/47

5/1/47

Date

297-102

311-88

159-258

319-58

290-112

298-75

174-180

151-181

174-180

228-155

202-188

205-182

Outcome (Y/N)

Nay

Nay

Yea

Nay

Yea

Nay

Yea

Yea

Yea

Nay

Nay

Nay

Truman’s position

Triumphs, Tribulations, & Turnip Day Sessions in Congress 47

Description

Johnson amend/Aid to Greece & Turkey

Aid to Greece & Turkey/passage

Kem amend/relief assistance reduction

Conference report/wool bill

Malone amend/Aid to Europe

Smith motion to recommit/St. Lawrence Seaway

Taft amend/Economic Cooperation Admin. (ECA)

ECA passage

Ferguson amend/displaced persons

Barkley amend/reciprocal trade

Umstead amend/soil conservation/appropriations

Taft-Hartley Bill/override

Disapproval of Reorganization Plan #1

Issue area

Foreign policy

Foreign policy

Foreign policy

Foreign policy

Foreign policy

Foreign policy

Foreign policy

Foreign policy

Foreign policy

Foreign policy

Agriculture

Labor

Labor

Table 7: Position Votes of Senate, 80th Congress

HCONRES131

HR3020

HR5883

HR6556

S2242

S2202

S2202

SJRES111

S1774

S814

HJRES153

S938

S938

Bill #

3/16/48

6/23/47

5/21/48

6/14/48

6/2/48

3/13/48

3/12/48

2/27/48

11/26/47

6/19/47

5/14/47

4/22/47

4/22/47

Date

58-25

68-25

28-34

42-47

29-49

69-17

31-56

57-30

30-56

48-38

19-64

67-23

22-68

Outcome (Y/N)

Nay

Nay

Yea

Yea

Nay

Yea

Nay

Nay

Nay

Nay

Nay

Yea

Nay

Truman’s position

48 Richard S. Conley

Description

Barkley amend/inventory control

Barkley amend/price controls substitute bill

Hawkes amend/rent control

McClellan amend/rent control

Cain amend/low income housing

Passage/elementary & secondary education

Individual income tax reduction/override

Employment taxes/Social Security/override

Tennessee Valley Authority steam plant

Appropriations/Federal Security Agency/override

David Lilienthal/AEC/Bricker amend to recommit

Gordon Clapp/Tennessee Valley Authority

Issue area

Inflation

Inflation

Housing

Housing

Housing

Education

Taxation

Social Security

Power

Antitrust

Nominations

Nominations

Table 7 (continued)

HR6355

HR6481

HJRES296

HR4790

S472

S866

S2182

S1017

SJRES157

SJRES167

Bill #

4/24/47

4/3/47

6/16/48

6/15/48

6/14/48

4/2/48

4/1/48

4/21/48

2/24/48

5/29/47

8/7/48

12/18/47

Date

36-31

38-52

63-25

45-37

65-12

77-10

58-22

35-49

25-43

48-26

33-53

35-48

Outcome (Y/N)

Yea

Nay

Nay

Yea

Nay

Nay

Yea

Nay

Nay

Nay

Yea

Yea

Truman’s position

Triumphs, Tribulations, & Turnip Day Sessions in Congress 49

Harry S. Truman and Congress

A Graphic Essay Based on the Holdings of the Harry S. Truman Library Raymond H. Geselbracht



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Letter, Truman to Bess Wallace, n.d. [postmarked May 28, 1917], excerpt. Truman Papers: Papers Relating to Family, Business, and Personal Affairs. When Harry Truman was a young man, he learned to turn to Mark Twain for wisdom about the world, and one of the things that great sage enlightened him about was Congress. “I was very, very impressionable when I was a kid,” he wrote in 1917 to his fiancée, Bess Wallace, “and I believed all the Sunday school books and idealist dope we were taught and it’s taken me twenty-odd years to find that Mark [Twain] is right when he says that the boy who stole the jam and lied about it and killed the cat and sassed his ma, grew up and became a highly honored citizen and was sent to Congress… .”

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Photograph 96-344: President Harry S. Truman in the early days of his presidency, inscribed to Assistant Press Secretary Eban Ayers, May 7, 1945. On June 6, 1945, when Truman was still learning the job of being president, he wrote to Bess Truman about some of his expectations concerning his new job. He was a natural optimist and was willing, in the heady early weeks of his presidency, to think that Congress would be good to him. “Well I’m getting better organized now …,” he wrote. “It won’t be long until I can sit back and study the whole picture and tell ’em what is to be done in each department… . Foreign relations, national finances, reconversion, and a postwar military policy will be the big headaches— and they can all be solved if the Congress decides to help me do a bang-up job, and I believe they will do that.”*

* Harry S. Truman to Bess Truman, June 6, 1945, Truman Papers: Papers Relating to Family, Business, and Personal Affairs.



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Photograph 2002-59: Matthew J. Connelly, ca. 1945. If there was any activity in the Truman White House before the spring or summer of 1949 that could be called congressional liaison, it was probably centered on Matthew J. Connelly, Truman’s appointments secretary. Connelly occupied a prime spot right outside the president’s office and he probably had more frequent contact with Truman than anyone else in the administration. He was the person people went to if they wanted to meet with or talk by telephone with the president, including members of Congress. He was the coordinator of Truman’s own liaison with Congress, informing him which members wanted to meet and talk with him, advising him to call this or that senator or congressman about some matter or other, arranging with Truman his meetings with senators and congressmen.

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Photograph 77-2034: President Truman and members of the White House staff, Key West, Florida, March 13, 1951. Joseph Feeney, who is seated in the front row center position in this photograph, was appointed White House liaison to the Senate by President Truman in mid-1949. Since this photograph was taken at Key West, Congress was almost certainly not in session at the time. “The President never liked to be away from Washington when Congress was in session,” Feeney said. He had served as the Navy’s liaison officer to the US Senate from 1944 until he retired in the spring of 1949. Shortly afterward, he was asked by President Truman to become the White House’s liaison to the Senate. Truman, Feeney later said, “made it especially clear that he would be the quarterback as far as the Senate was concerned and I would be the ball carrier.” He discovered that Truman was himself a strong liaison to the members of the Senate, one who “knew how they thought …, knew how they reacted to things, and … had a deep insight into almost every single one of them….” Feeney had an outgoing personality and made friends easily both on Capitol Hill and among the White House staff. He believed his liaison operation was successful, but he would have liked more help. “We were very definitely understaffed,” he concluded in later years.*

* Joseph G. Feeney Oral History Interview, September 20, 1966. See also the oral history interviews of Charles S. Murphy, 1973; George M. Elsey, July 9, 1970; and Robert G. Nixon, November 4, 1970.



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Memorandum, Charles Maylon to President Truman, April 26, 1951. Truman Papers: President’s Secretary’s File: General File. The liaison function in the House of Representatives was carried out somewhat differently than in the Senate. Charles Maylon, a retired general who had served as the army’s liaison with the House, became Truman’s liaison with the House at about the time that Joseph Feeney became Senate liaison. Maylon, a reserved person who apparently did not make friends as readily as did Feeney, perhaps also had less to do than Feeney, since the House was sternly ruled by Speaker Sam Rayburn. “So for legislative purposes,” according to Feeney, “Mr. Truman would send for Mr. Rayburn … and they’d go over the bills that were to go through and those that would be sidetracked … .” Truman’s liaison staff consulted with House leaders and kept them informed of what the White House thought and wanted, but much of the liaison work could be focused on Rayburn. In the memorandum above, Maylon asks Truman to nudge Speaker Rayburn to fill two places on a House committee, in order that a key piece of legislation might be voted out of committee. Shortly after Maylon wrote this memorandum, he became ill and resigned from the White House staff. He was replaced by John Carroll, whose tenure as White House liaison to the House was very brief.* * Joseph G. Feeney Oral History Interview, September 20, 1966. See also the oral history interviews of Charles S. Murphy, 1973; George M. Elsey, July 9, 1970; and Robert G. Nixon, November 4, 1970.

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Photograph 58-10: President Truman meeting with the “Big Four”—Vice President (and President of the Senate) Alben Barkley, Senate Majority Leader Ernest McFarland, House Majority Leader John W. McCormack, and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, January 14, 1952. Truman usually met on the first Monday morning of each month, in the Cabinet Room, with the “Big Four”—the President of the Senate (the vice president) or, during Truman’s first term, the president pro tempore of the Senate, the Speaker of the House, and the majority leaders of both Senate and House. He would tell the congressional leaders during these meetings which pieces of legislation he considered essential and believed required early action, and which measures currently before Congress had some special importance to the administration.*

Joseph G. Feeney oral history interview, September 20, 1966.

*



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Memorandum, Charles F. Murphy and Stephen J. Spingarn to the President, September 12 [sic, perhaps September 1 or 2], 1950. Truman Papers: President’s Secretary’s Files: Daily Sheets. When Charles S. Murphy joined Truman’s staff in 1947, he noticed that “there was no organized effort anywhere on the White House staff to keep up with the progress of the legislative program in Congress.” He began to keep his own record of legislative activity in Congress and to become involved in advising Truman regarding his meetings and telephone conversations with members of Congress. In 1949 he began sending Truman memorandums to prepare him for his meetings with the Big Four. One of these memorandums is pictured here. It was intended to help prepare Truman for his meeting with the Big Four on September 5, 1950, by pointing out the foreign policy and political consequences of several measures then before Congress.* * Francis H. Heller, editor, The Truman White House: The Administration of the Presidency, 1945– 1953 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1980), 229.

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Photograph 73-3264: President Truman delivering the State of the Union Address before a joint session of Congress, January 4, 1950. Truman appeared before joint sessions of Congress seventeen times. Six of these appearances were to deliver the State of the Union message (1947 through 1952). In other appearances, Truman assured the country that he would continue the policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt (April 16, 1945); presented the Medal of Honor to Jake W. Lindsey, the one hundredth infantryman to receive this award during World War II (May 21, 1945); urged Congress to pass legislation which would create Universal Military Training (October 23, 1945); requested interim aid for Europe in advance of expected Marshall Plan assistance, and also requested legislation to fight inflation (November 17, 1947, the first day of a special session); stressed the threat from communism to the free nations of Europe (March 17, 1948); commemorated Cuban independence on its fiftieth anniversary (April 19, 1948); asked the recalcitrant



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eightieth Congress, assembled in the so-called Turnip Day special session, to pass a long list of legislative measures relating to inflation and housing (July 27, 1948); introduced British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill (January 17, 1952); and requested legislation to allow the government to take over and operate steel factories until the strike that had closed them was settled (June 10, 1952). Two of Truman’s appearances before Congress were especially dramatic. During his appearance on May 25, 1946, as a railroad strike endangered the nation’s economy, Truman was in the midst of his speech requesting legislation that would give the president authority to draft striking workers into the Armed Forces when he was handed a note by the secretary of the Senate. Truman read the note while the members of Congress waited. “Word has just been received,” he said in as restrained a manner as the moment allowed, “that the railroad strike has been settled, on terms proposed by the president!” In another especially notable appearance before Congress, on March 12, 1947, Truman requested aid for Greece and Turkey. This was perhaps the most important of Truman’s addresses to Congress, in which he spoke one of his most famous lines: “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Truman appeared twice before a single body of Congress, the Senate. The first time, on July 2, 1945, he urged the Senate to ratify the United Nations Charter. The second time, on July 23, 1947, while at the Capitol to lunch with some Senators, he broke Senate rules by entering the chamber while the Senate was in session and sat in his old seat, “beaming like a school boy” according to the account of the surprise event in the New York Times. Senator Arthur Vandenberg, the presiding officer at the time, himself broke Senate rules by recognizing “the ex-Senator from Missouri” for five minutes. Truman said he had spent “the best ten years of my life” in the Senate. Two days after this, apparently still feeling the allure of his days in the Senate, he met in his office with General Dwight D. Eisenhower and offered to give him the 1948 Democratic nomination for president. “I like the Senate anyway,” Truman wrote in his diary after the meeting, thinking of all the time he would spend as president of the Senate if he were to become vice president.*

* Raymond W. Smock, “Congress and Truman,” in the present volume; and Truman’s 1947 diary, Truman Papers: Diaries.

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Draft of President Truman’s radio address on his veto of the Taft-Hartley Act, September 20, 1947. Truman Papers: President’s Secretary’s Files: Speech File. The draft has running down the right margin, in Truman’s handwriting, “It [the Taft-Hartley Act] is bad for labor, bad for management, bad for the country.” President Truman found it necessary to exercise his veto power often and vigorously. He vetoed 250 bills in his eight years in office. “I never hesitated to veto any bill presented to me when I was convinced that it failed to serve the best interests of the



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majority of the people in all parts of the country,” Truman said in his memoirs. “I found it necessary to veto more major bills than any other President, with the possible exception of Grover Cleveland.”* Truman’s best-known vetoes are probably those of the Taft-Hartley Act (the Labor-Management Relations Act, 1947), the McCarran Act (the Internal Security Act, 1950), and the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act (the Immigration and Nationality Act, 1952). Truman felt no doubt concerning his veto of the TaftHartley Act, which, he wrote in his veto message, “would contribute neither to industrial peace nor to economic stability and progress. It would be a dangerous stride in the direction of a totally managed economy. It contains seeds of discord which would plague this Nation for years to come.” In a radio address given shortly after he sent his veto message to Congress, the first page of a draft of which is pictured here, he said the Taft-Hartley Act was “bad for labor, bad for management, bad for the country.” It was similarly easy for him to veto the McCarran Act, as his veto message made clear. “No considerations of expediency can justify the enactment of such a bill as this, a bill which would so greatly weaken our liberties and give aid and comfort to those who would destroy us.” The McCarran-Walter Immigration Act was more difficult to judge. It had some good provisions. It removed, for example, the racial bars that had prohibited the naturalization of Asians from all but a few countries, but it kept from existing law a system of quotas based on national origins, which discriminated against many of the peoples of the world, and Truman decided he must veto it. “This bill would not provide us with an immigration policy adequate for the present world situation,” he said in his veto message. “Indeed, the bill … would be a step backward and not a step forward. In view of the crying need for reform in the field of immigration, I deeply regret that I am unable to approve [it].”† Congress overrode Truman’s vetoes of all three of these bills:

Harry S. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956),

*

479–80.

Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1947, 289; 1950, 653; and 1952–53, 441.

†

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Truman personal writing, not dated (probably ca. March 21, 1947), first two pages (of five). Truman Papers: President’s Secretary’s Files: Longhand Notes. Congress—a Republican Congress, acting in the wake of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s twelve year long presidency—passed a resolution on March 21, 1947, for a constitutional amendment that would limit a president to two terms. Truman was willing to consider this idea—at least during the moments when he was writing the note pictured here to himself—but he wanted the term limits to apply to members of Congress too. Term limits for members of Congress might, he thought, prevent the



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“focilization” [sic] of the key committees, some of which, he wrote, were living in the days before World War I, and others were even more backward in their thinking. “There are old time Senators who even make Louis XIV of France and George I of England look like shining liberals,” he lamented. Term limits for members of Congress—Truman proposed twelve years—would remedy this problem. “We’d help to cure senility and seniority—both terrible legislative diseases nationally.”

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Charles S. Murphy, Memorandum for the President, February 17, 1949. Truman Papers: Official File. At about the time the 81st Congress was convening and Truman was looking forward, with some optimism, to passage into law of his Fair Deal domestic policy program, he asked his assistant Charles S. Murphy to rate the members of the Senate. Murphy explains in the memorandum pictured here his rating method, and eight pages of ratings follow. A maximum 100 percent rating was given the following senators, all Democrats: Carl Hayden of Arizona, Scott W. Lucas of Illinois, Robert F. Wagner of New York, Francis J. Myers of Pennsylvania, Theodore Francis Green of Rhode Island, J. Howard McGrath of Rhode Island, and Joseph C. O’Mahoney of Wyoming. The lowest possible rating of 15 percent was given the following senators, all Republicans: John J. Williams of Delaware, Homer E. Capehart of Indiana, William E. Jenner of Indiana, James P. Kem of Missouri, Zales N. Ecton of Montana, Kenneth S. Wherry of Nebraska, and John W. Bricker of Ohio. The Democratic Senator with the lowest rating—only 20 percent—was Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia. The Republican with the highest rating was Charles W. Tobey of New Hampshire.



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Truman Diary, November 1, 1949. Truman Papers: President’s Secretary’s Files: Diaries. “Trying to make the 81st Congress perform is and has been worse than cussing the 80th,” Truman confided to his diary on November 1, 1949. The congressional session had ended almost two weeks earlier, but still Truman was meeting with members of Congress and he had signed about seventy-five bills since the session’s end. He had hoped this Congress, with its sizeable Democratic majorities, would enact his Fair Deal program into law. This for the most part did not happen, but still Truman, always an optimist, concluded that “things have come out fairly well.”

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Truman Personal Writing, November 30, 1950. Truman Papers: President’s Secretary’s Files: Longhand Notes. President Truman called Congress into special session on November 27, 1950, to pass an appropriations bill for Korean War expenditures and to consider a tax bill and measures for rent control and statehood for Alaska and Hawaii. When the special session had been underway for a few days, Truman fretted in a private note about the frustrations of working with a putatively Democratic Congress that was in



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fact dominated by a coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats that would not support the administration’s program. He laments the activities of several senators and House members and notes the presence in the Congress of “morons” and “liars, trimmers and pussyfooters.” He concludes, “I wish I had straight out opposition and loyal support. I guess it is too much to ask for!”

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Memorandum, Sam Rayburn to Harry S. Truman, November 10, 1946. Truman Papers: President’s Secretary’s Files: General File. (Reproduced with permission from the Sam Rayburn Library and Museum.) Sam Rayburn was speaker of the House of Representatives for six of the eight years of Truman’s presidency, and, despite what he says in the letter pictured here, he served as minority leader in the two years following the devastating, for the Democrats, midterm elections of 1946. The letter expresses well Rayburn’s closeness to Truman. There are no complex meanings in it. Rayburn, as it says, is Truman’s



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sincere friend and he wants to serve his president in the best ways he can. He supported Truman’s program almost without exception—the major exception being Truman’s civil rights initiatives—and employed his great legislative skills and his influence over the House of Representatives and especially its Democratic members in the interests of the Truman administration’s legislative goals.

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Photograph 73-2542: President Truman offering farewell wishes to Secretary of State George Marshall, Senator Arthur Vandenberg, and United Nations Ambassador Warren Austin, Washington National Airport, August 13, 1947. George Marshall, Arthur Vandenberg, and Warren Austin represented the United States at the Rio De Janeiro Conference for the Maintenance of Continental Peace and Security, August 15 through September 2, 1947. Senator Vandenberg, a Republican, had also been a delegate to United Nations Conference in 1945 and to the first and second UN General Assemblies in 1946. At the time this picture was taken he was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Although once an isolationist, he was during Truman’s presidency a leading Republican internationalist. He believed the Soviet Union was a serious threat to American security and advocated a bipartisan foreign policy focused on containing Soviet expansionism. The success in the Senate of Truman’s most important foreign policy initiatives—the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, NATO—was due in great measure to Senator Vandenberg’s skillful and determined efforts on their behalf.*

* David L. Porter, “Vandenberg, Arthur Hendrick,” in Richard S. Kirkendall, editor, The Harry S. Truman Encyclopedia (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989), 374–75.



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Photograph 67-2630: President Truman giving a press conference, Key West, Florida, March 30, 1950. When President Truman spoke to reporters at Key West on March 30, 1950, he was worried about the increasing partisanship of some Republican senators. They were trying to find a campaign issue for the coming elections, Truman thought. He believed some of them had decided to try to revive what he called “that old malodorous dead horse called ‘isolationism.’” And in doing this, these senators were willing to sabotage the bipartisan foreign policy that Senator Vandenberg and other internationalist Republican senators had helped create. Truman included Senators Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska, and Styles Bridges of New Hampshire in this group of saboteurs, and he judged their activities harshly. “The greatest asset that the Kremlin has,” he told the somewhat shocked newsmen gathered at Key West, “is the partisan attempt in the Senate to sabotage the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States.”*

Public Papers of the President: Truman, 1950, 235–36.

*

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Photograph, Senators William E. Jenner, Robert A. Taft and Homer E. Capehart talking prior to a Republican caucus, January 1, 1952 (Hank Walker, photographer, Life; reproduced with permission from Getty Images). Truman might have added the names of these three Senators—William E. Jenner of Indiana, Robert A. Taft of Ohio, and Homer E. Capehart of Indiana—to his list of saboteurs of a bipartisan foreign policy. In a private memorandum of June 21, 1951, Truman called Jenner the Republicans’ “official mud slinger and Goebbels liar,” at least partly because of his vicious assault on George C. Marshall on the floor of the Senate in 1950.* “General Marshall,” Jenner had said, “is not only willing, he is eager to play the role of a front man for traitors … General George C. Marshall is a living lie.”† Truman probably admired Marshall more than any living American, and one doubts he ever forgave Jenner for uttering these words. According to Senate liaison Joseph Feeney, Jenner “was violently opposed to Mr. Truman and usually Truman Papers: President’s Secretary’s Files: Longhand Notes. Mark Perry, Partners in Command: George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower in War and Peace (New York: Penguin, 2007), 394. *

†



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went against any kind of a piece of legislation that was sent up to the Hill, particularly in foreign affairs.”* Taft was a more complex figure. He usually opposed Truman’s foreign policy initiatives, and even those he grudgingly supported he criticized. When Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur, Taft called for his impeachment. By the time of the 1952 presidential campaign, Truman had come to dislike Taft and considered him intellectually dishonest.† In later years, though, Truman recognized that Taft was, as he said in his memoirs, “a highly ethical, straightforward and honorable man.”‡ Capehart, who one historian has lumped together with some of his Republican colleagues in the Senate as one of “a number of undistinguished rightwing partisans,”§ was an ardent anti-Communist who voiced support for Senator Joseph McCarthy and criticized Truman, and especially Dean Acheson, for not seeming to take the threat of spies in the government seriously. He said there would continue to be spies in the government “as long as we have a president who refers to such matters as ‘red herrings’ and a secretary of state who refuses to turn his back on the Alger Hisses.”¶ Not pictured here but certainly deserving of being included in such an, to Truman, unsavory grouping was Senator John Bricker of Ohio. Truman once, during a congressional reception, made his wife Bess a proposition involving Senator Bricker. He was shaking hands by the hundreds and he saw Bricker coming up the line. “Most of the Senators and Congressmen I was glad to see, but there were half a dozen I’d rather have punched in the nose,” he later wrote to his sister. “I told Bess if she’d trip Bricker up so he’d sprawl on the floor in front of us I’d give her the big diamond out of the scimitar the Crown Prince of Arabia gave me. It is about 5 carats. But she didn’t have the nerve to do it. If she had he’d been out sure enough.”**

Joseph G. Feeney oral history interview, September 20, 1966, Truman Library. Truman to Ethel Noland, July 11, 1952, Mary Ethel Noland Papers. ‡ Truman, Memoirs of Harry S. Truman, vol. 1, Year of Decisions (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 58. § Alonzo Hamby, Man of the People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 420. ¶ Robert J. Donovan, Tumultuous Years: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1949–1953 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 163. ** Truman to Mary Jane Truman, February 19, 1947, Truman Papers: Post Presidential Papers: Memoirs File. *

†

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Photograph 59-1218: President Truman signs H.R. 4590, which authorizes the government to sell some of its silver for use in private industry, July 31, 1946. Not all of President Truman’s nemeses in the Senate were Republicans. Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada, a Democrat (standing on the far right in the photograph above), was one of the administration’s most formidable foes. Truman and McCarran had fallen out over the drafting in the Senate of the Civil Aeronautics Act in the late 1930s and apparently detested one another forever after. McCarran had little respect for Truman and once said “I never considered him a Senator.” Truman thought McCarran was a small-minded man from a backwater state. When Truman became president, he and McCarran had almost no contact with one another. As Truman’s liaison with the Senate later recalled, “Mr. Truman didn’t talk to Mr. McCarran, Mr. McCarran didn’t talk to Mr. Truman.”



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Despite this mutual animosity, McCarran supported Truman’s major foreign policy initiatives in 1947 and 1948, including Truman Doctrine aid for Greece and Turkey and the Marshall Plan. After this, though, as the fear of Communist subversion swept through the country and the Congress, McCarran became increasingly suspicious that the Truman administration was soft on communism. As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, he led investigations into immigration law, Communist propaganda, the activities of United Nations employees, the Voice of America, Communist influence in corporations and labor unions, and, most spectacular of all, into the activities of alleged traitors in the State Department who he believed were complicit in the fall of China to communism. President Truman looked on with dismay and disgust, but by and large helplessly, as McCarran waged his obsessive war against internal Communist threats.*

Robert David Johnson, “Truman, Anticommunism, and Congress,” in the present volume; Alonzo Hamby, Man of the People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 218, 565–66; David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 214; Jerome E. Edwards, “McCarran, Patrick Anthony,” in Richard S. Kirkendall, The Harry S. Truman Encyclopedia (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989), 225–26; and Joseph G. Feeney oral history interview, September 20, 1966. *

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Draft memorandum by George M. Elsey, n.d., ca. June 27, 1950. George M. Elsey Papers: Subject File. Within fifteen hours of his hurried return to Washington on the evening of June 25, 1950, from his home in Independence, Missouri, Truman instructed his staff to summon a group of senators and congressmen to the White House to discuss the crisis in Korea. The document pictured here records that instruction. It is the first page of a memorandum, based on notes taken by Truman’s assistant George Elsey, that records what took place during the meeting. Elsey has written in the names of the attendees. The majority leaders from the Senate and House were present, as were the Speaker of the House and members from both parties of the Senate and House foreign relations committees and armed services committees. The meeting took place in the Cabinet Room on Tuesday morning, June 27. Remarkably, none of the members of Congress suggested that the president should seek approval from



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Congress for the actions he was taking in Korea. Most of the questions the members asked, when taken together with Truman’s responses, emphasized that Truman’s actions in Korea were being taken pursuant to a United Nations Security Council resolution calling on North Korea to stop fighting and withdraw its forces north of the 38th parallel, and calling on member states to provide assistance to the United Nations in its efforts to restore the peace. Whatever the United States did to resist North Korea’s aggression would be done in the name of the United Nations. Truman met again with a congressional delegation—eight senators and seven members from the House, from both parties—on June 30. The members of Congress were actually joining a regularly scheduled cabinet meeting, and Truman also invited delegations from the State and Defense Departments. The meeting opened much in the spirit of the June 27 meeting, with talk about the need for other nations besides the United States to join in helping South Korea, in order to create a clear appearance that the action in Korea was a United Nations, not a United States, action. The conversation took a different turn when Senator Kenneth S. Wherry of Nebraska stood up and, according to George Elsey’s notes, “addressed the president as though he were on the Senate floor.” Wherry, who was one of a group of Republican senators who opposed almost everything the Truman administration was doing in the area of foreign affairs, asked if Truman was going to advise Congress before sending ground troops to Korea. Truman said there were already some American troops in Korea, but that he would advise Congress if there were “a real emergency.” Wherry insisted the president should consult with Congress before taking any serious action. Truman responded that this had been an emergency, that there wasn’t time for a lot of talk. “I just had to act as commander in chief, and I did.” Wherry was not mollified. “I understand the action all right,” he said. “I do feel the Congress ought to be consulted before any large scale actions are taken again.” Truman resorted to some optimistic daydreaming to try to satisfy the importunate senator. “If there is any necessity for congressional action, I will come to you,” he promised. “But I hope we can get those bandits in Korea suppressed without that.” Wherry let the matter go for the moment, but twice again before the meeting ended rose up and called on Truman to consult with Congress before taking further serious action. Some officials in the State Department believed Truman should consider sending a draft resolution to Congress by which it would approve Truman’s actions, and such a draft was actually drawn up by State and Defense Department officials. Truman, though, never sent the resolution to Congress. He was worried about doing so for several reasons. He didn’t want to panic the American people by taking the country into war with too much noisy commitment, and he didn’t want to Americanize actions that were taken under the aegis of the United Nations. He was worried too, as were the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that Congress might—probably would—engage in a protracted and perhaps contentious debate before approving

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a resolution at a time when quick action and national unity were needed. He also knew that Congress would very quickly, without a formal resolution in favor of his actions in Korea, have to commit itself by passing the legislation required to carry on and pay for the war. Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, no friend of the Truman administration, argued that if Truman did not seek congressional approval for his actions in Korea, if he relied on the United Nations Security Council for authorization of the American response to the Korean crisis, he would be violating the UN Participation Act of 1945. Truman was not accustomed to following Taft’s advice and did not do so on this occasion.* Truman never sought formal approval from Congress for taking the country into war in Korea. George Elsey, the assistant who had taken notes during Truman’s meetings with members of Congress during the early days of the Korean War, soon became aware of the mistake that had been made. “We of the [president’s] staff had served him poorly,” he wrote in his memoirs, over fifty years later, “by not pressing for a full discussion of the pros and cons of seeking congressional involvement in the opening days of the conflict. It was soon too late. We had ‘Truman’s War’ to deal with.”†

Steven Casey, Selling the Korean War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 34; Allan R. Millett, The War for Korea, 1950–1951: They Came from the North (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 121; and Louis Fisher, “Truman’s National Security Policy: Constitutional Issues,” in the present volume. † George M. Elsey, An Unplanned Life: A Memoir by George McKee Elsey (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 195. *



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“The ‘Fair Deal’: A Legislative Scorecard,” graphic from the Truman Library exhibition, Harry S. Truman: The Presidential Years. The proposals marked in the boxes on the far right of this “Fair Deal Legislative Scorecard” (pictured in red on the graphic) failed to pass in Congress. These proposals included arguably the most important elements of Truman’s Fair Deal—his civil rights program, national health insurance, and his price support program for farmers. Congress did approve a few measures—the Housing Act of 1949 and a substantial expansion of the Social Security program, for example. But the rest of Truman’s domestic policy proposals remained unrealized and became inspirations for future Democratic administrations. His civil rights proposals, apart from those he was able to achieve through executive action, were realized during subsequent administrations, particularly that of Lyndon Johnson. His health insurance proposals have only partly been realized, most importantly when President Johnson signed legislation creating Medicare at the Truman Library, in the presence of former President Truman, on July 30, 1965.

Domestic Policy

Harry S. Truman and Congress Presidential Effectiveness and the Liberal Scorecard Alonzo L. Hamby

Not long after Harry Truman left the presidency, the noted radio commentator Elmer Davis summed up a widespread impression of the former chief executive’s efforts to extend Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal: All in all, in domestic affairs, Mr. Truman was an unsuccessful President. [He] presented …   a liberal program which was coherent and logical as the New Deal had never been. Congress, not being liberal, refused to take it; yet every year he persisted in offering it all to them again and they still wouldn’t take it. … Truman kept asking for all of it and getting none of it.1

Davis was among the most perceptive observers of post–World War II American politics, but it is debatable whether a “liberal scorecard” analysis is the best method of evaluating Truman’s congressional relations on domestic issues. Reflecting the aspirations of a non-Communist left inspired by Roosevelt’s promise of a postwar “economic bill of rights” and by the sweeping reforms of the Labour Party in Britain, the Davis evaluation rather uncritically assumes that a host of initiatives that could be labeled “liberal” were both feasible and in the public interest. Nonetheless, these assumptions remain generally accepted. Because Davis’s description possessed a surface accuracy, his conclusion that Truman was unsuccessful in domestic affairs has stuck. What has not stuck is the context that Truman inherited. Nor have historians given adequate attention to a record of incremental change and agenda setting that, all things considered, was substantial. 85

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Harry Truman succeeded a president who had become an instant legend, endowed with powers not available to real historical figures. In the liberal imagination, Roosevelt had tumbled down walls of resistance with a single speech. Truman, by contrast, seemed an inept little man incapable of rallying the nation behind a virtuous progressive program.2 Who will deny that Truman lacked Roosevelt’s charisma or that he could not make nearly as good a speech? But are charisma and speech making the primary tools of legislative achievement? Was the liberal fixation on these qualities an implicit admission of their program’s relative lack of popular appeal? Truman, like his predecessor, faced not simply “Congress,” but a different Congress every two years, each with its own context of different possibilities and expectations. Consider the following comparisons of Roosevelt’s first four Congresses with Truman’s:

Roosevelt I (1933–34) Party divisions: Senate: 60 Democrats, 35 Republicans, 1 Other; House: 310 Democrats, 117 Republicans, 5 Others.3 Franklin Roosevelt took office near the end of the Great Depression. Mass unemployment, collapsing agricultural prices, ebbing industrial output, and a nationwide banking shutdown captured the nation’s attention; there was little public interest in foreign policy issues. Sweeping New Deal reform legislation was passed, and Democrats made significant gains in midterm elections.

Truman I (1945–46 [elected with Roosevelt at the head of the Democratic ticket in 1944]) Party divisions: Senate: 56 Democrats, 38 Republicans, 1 Other; House: 242 Democrats, 190 Republicans, 2 Others. Truman became president in the closing months of World War II, when there was great concern about foreign policy but equal concern with the possibility of a returning Great Depression. A turbulent conversion of the economy from war to peace was disrupted by labor strikes, inflation, and shortages of consumer goods. The administration had nominal majorities in both houses of Congress, but lost control of both in midterm elections.

Roosevelt II (1935–36) Party divisions: Senate: 69 Democrats, 25 Republicans, 2 Others; House: 319 Democrats, 103 Republicans, 10 Others.



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The public and the administration continued a near-exclusive focus on the Depression and pursuit of controversial domestic reforms, including the Wagner and Social Security Acts. Massive relief programs for the unemployed fueled an apparent returning prosperity in 1936. In the fall elections, Democrats won even greater majorities in both houses of Congress.

Truman II (1947–48) Party divisions: Senate: 45 Democrats, 51 Republicans; House: 188 Democrats, 246 Republicans, 1 Other. Public and administration attention was divided about equally between domestic and foreign concerns. A generally prosperous full-employment economy was marred by a high rate of inflation. Truman’s veto of the TaftHartley Act was overridden. His pathbreaking civil rights program got nowhere on Capitol Hill. The Cold War emerged and became the focus of public attention; with significant Republican support, the administration secured passage of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Truman won reelection and the Democrats regained control of Congress.

Roosevelt III (1937–38) Party divisions: Senate: 76 Democrats, 16 Republicans, 4 Others; House: 331 Democrats, 89 Republicans, 13 Others. Although Democratic majorities seemed overwhelming, President Roosevelt suffered stunning defeats in attempts to pack the Supreme Court and to secure an ambitious executive reorganization plan that would have drastically increased the power of the presidency. A serious recession aborted economic recovery. Foreign policy became increasingly salient with the Panay and Munich crises. A “conservative coalition” began to emerge in Congress. In 1938, Roosevelt was largely unsuccessful in an effort to purge hostile members of his party. Republicans made strong gains in midterm elections.

Truman III (1949–50) Party divisions: Senate: 54 Democrats, 42 Republicans; House: 263 Democrats, 171 Republicans. Elected in his own right, the president proposed an ambitious “Fair Deal” domestic program that included large-scale housing assistance, federal aid to education, civil rights, repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, and a major new agricultural program designed to support farm income rather than

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commodity prices. Only the Housing Act clears Congress. Foreign policy continues to occupy center stage. The establishment of NATO successfully caps US policy in Europe, but the fall of China, the Soviet atomic bomb, and the invasion of South Korea appear as serious setbacks. Senator Joseph McCarthy begins his allegations of Communist influence in the administration. The Republicans make significant gains in the fall elections.

Roosevelt IV (1939–40) Party divisions: Senate: 69 Democrats, 23 Republicans, 4 Others; House: 261 Democrats, 164 Republicans, 4 Others. With the arrival of World War II in Europe, politics was increasingly taken over by debates between internationalists and isolationists, and Roosevelt’s domestic reform agenda was effectively shelved. Quantum increases in military spending fueled a steady economic recovery. In November 1940, Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term and the Democrats maintained their majorities in Congress with little change.

Truman IV (1951–52) Party divisions: Senate: 49 Democrats, 47 Republicans; House: 235 Democrats, 199 Republicans, 1 Other. Foreign policy was all-consuming as the administration tried to balance stalemate in the Korean War with the need to provide for the defense of Western Europe. The dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur touched off a “great debate.” Wartime economic controls created an undercurrent of domestic discontent. Truman decided against running for reelection. The Republicans, behind Dwight D. Eisenhower, took the presidency and won narrow control of Congress.

What one makes of these contrasting eight-year narratives in presidential-congressional relations is, of course, in the eyes of various beholders. Most observers, however, might agree with the following thoughts: (1) Presidential charisma is, at best, a wasted asset in dealing with Congress. Roosevelt managed to get most of his domestic program in his first term, but ran into a brick wall in his second term. If not for foreign policy challenges, he almost certainly could not have run for a third term; instead, he likely would have gone down in presidential history as an interesting and attractive chief executive of no more than modest accomplish-



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ment. By 1939, the New Deal was dead, so far as a majority of congressmen were concerned. Roosevelt’s rhetorical attempts to revive it toward the end of World War II stirred little enthusiasm on Capitol Hill. The general election of 1944 yielded a Congress that was ideologically hostile to big government and anything but amenable to presidential leadership. Roosevelt exuded charisma and authority; congressional leaders did not. But, then as now, they had healthy egos and strong senses of institutional independence. Truman inherited them and their attitudes. (2) Domestic agendas and foreign policy urgencies vie with each other for the attention of president and Congress. It is extremely difficult for either the White House or Capitol Hill to give high degrees of attention to both at the same time—and all but impossible for the general public to do so. Increasingly, during his second term, Franklin Roosevelt had to devote large amounts of time and effort to national security. This did not mean that he lost interest in or consciously traded off his domestic program, simply that he could not give the latter nearly all of his resources. This situation still largely existed when Harry Truman became president in 1945 and continued throughout Truman’s presidency. (3) Roosevelt’s presidency created a situation in which the primary fault line between the parties was New Deal liberalism. It was easier for both him and his successor to develop a cross-party coalition on foreign policy rather than on domestic reform issues. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox were the two most prominent of numerous Republicans Roosevelt brought into his administration with foreign policy and national security responsibilities during his third term; this situation was also a bequest to Truman. He would make the most of it, notably in the administration alliance with Senator Arthur Vandenberg and the internationalist Republicans who followed his lead.

A Creature of Congress Unlike the two Democratic presidents of the twentieth century who had preceded him, Harry Truman was a creature of Congress. In some ways, this was clearly an asset. He had been widely recognized as an important senator, knew the leaders in both houses of Congress well, and could talk to them from a personal relationship lubricated during his Senate years on leisurely late afternoons with tall glasses of bourbon and branch water. Some might argue that Congress knew him too well. Many senators and representatives had feared Roosevelt and felt his blessing vital to their reelections. Harry Truman inspired no fear, nor was he a lapel-grabbing persuader in the manner of Lyndon Johnson. Having had his arm twisted

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on occasion by the White House and having eagerly (and futilely) sought Roosevelt’s support for his renomination in 1940, he understood all too well the feelings of his former colleagues. In early 1939, at the urgent request of the White House, he had flown back to Washington from Kansas City through a harrowing thunderstorm to cast the deciding Senate vote for a considerably watered-down version of Roosevelt’s executive reorganization bill. He pretty clearly believed in the legislation, and would make good use of its provisions as president, but he bitterly resented the way in which he had been summoned back to the Capitol. After casting his vote, he called the White House and poured out his anger to presidential aide Steve Early: Senator Truman: Well, I’m here, at your request, and I damn near got killed getting here by plane in time to vote, as I did on another occasion. I don’t think the bill amounts to a tinker’s dam, and I expect to get kicked in the [deleted] just as I always have in the past in return for my services. Mr. Early: Well, Senator, what is it you want? Senator Truman: I don’t want a God-damned thing. My vote is not for sale. I vote my convictions, just as I always have, but I think the president ought to have the decency and respect to treat me like the senator from Missouri and not like a God-damned office boy, and you can tell him what I said. If he wants me to, I’ll come down and tell him myself. Mr. Early: All right, Senator, I’ll tell the president.4

This colloquy illustrates not only Truman’s temperament and sense of self as a legislator, but also Roosevelt’s tenuous relationship with Congress by 1939. By then, the magic of his leadership and the political sex appeal of his program were largely gone. They had been replaced by a resentment that was nearly unanimous among Republicans and penetrated deeply into the congressional Democratic Party. This legacy was also passed along to President Truman. When Harry Truman was sworn in on April 12, 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt had been at loggerheads with Congress on domestic reform issues for more than six years, alternating between strategic retreat and periodic pushes for a revival and extension of the New Deal. During that period, his primary concerns had been diplomacy and war. Democrats were badly divided on domestic issues with northerners and westerners mostly supportive of New Deal liberalism, and very strong anti–New Deal sentiment among the seniority-heavy southern contingent. Roosevelt had pulled almost all of his party behind him on foreign policy and added a substantial number of internationalist Republicans. His struggles on



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domestic policy exemplified an emerging disjunction between the national electoral politics of the presidency and the localism of congressional voting. In all four of his elections, he could have won without a single electoral vote from the states of the old Confederacy, but the senators and representatives of those states were a powerful force on Capitol Hill, ideologically at odds with him and able to wield a substantial veto power over presidential initiatives. All these configurations displayed staying power under his successor. President Truman nurtured the foreign policy party coalition with great success and was able to win a narrow election in 1948 despite relatively minimal southern defections. It is, however, often overlooked that he built a record of significant incremental accomplishment as a liberal battler, not moving beyond the New Deal, but adding in important ways to its already established programs. His failures loomed large in the eyes of liberals, in part because he was simply not as outwardly impressive nor as gifted a speaker as his predecessor. His triumphs were easy to overlook because his proclaimed ambitions were large. At times, however, those triumphs displayed liberalism’s shortcomings as much as its grandeur. The reasons for the failures of Truman’s “breakthrough” domestic proposals never lay primarily with Truman, who by experience and temperament was well equipped to negotiate with Capitol Hill. Nor can they be found in the techniques of his dealings with Congress. It is true that these were relatively informal and much less elaborate than President Eisenhower’s approach of a formal Office of Congressional Relations, but it is a stretch to assume that a comparable organization during the Truman presidency would have trumped well-established patterns of party factionalism and ideology. (Eisenhower, of course, never asked for pathbreaking liberal legislation.) President Truman dealt with Congress much like President Roosevelt, dealing primarily with the party leadership and other senior leaders. Given the situations he faced, he was at least as effective as Roosevelt had been after 1938. Truman was realistic enough to know that he could not inspire fear on Capitol Hill. He also realized that the patronage power of the presidency, then as well as now, was widely overrated. The Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill could usually prevent important appointments from being filled by someone deemed personally or ideologically unfriendly. At the local level, party bosses could often shuffle their supporters into lowlevel non–civil-service federal positions. Truman’s personal power, such as it was, was the power to persuade the public and Congress. When one considers that his predecessor had run into stiff limits by the end of the 1930s, this was not much. Between 1945 and

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1953, the power to persuade of any Democratic president ran up against formidable limits. The party’s ideological contradictions and sectional hostilities were deeply felt and frequently irreconcilable. The party’s declining relative strength in American politics had been in a relatively steady fall since its high-water mark of 1936. The American people as a whole were more interested in readjusting their lives to a welcome postwar prosperity than an ideological reform. Foreign policy competed with domestic issues for presidential time and attention—and presented far more promising possibilities for a bipartisan coalition. This is not to say that the Cold War blocked a major era of neo–New Deal reform. It is far from likely that in the end Truman or any other liberal Democratic chief executive would have achieved landmark reform in a world without the Cold War, the China debacle, and the Korean conflict. Roosevelt had faced the same sort of situation. The foreign policy distractions of 1937–38 pretty clearly did not contribute to the congressional revolt against the New Deal during those years. In the end then, Truman faced the same basic restraints on domestic policy innovation as had Roosevelt. Big, important, “breakthrough” initiatives in social policy were possible only when one had overwhelming majorities in Congress. Incremental gains to established social programs required significant majorities.

Democratic Strength in Congress It is vital to look again at the two clusters of numbers that tally Democratic Party strength in the House of Representatives for Roosevelt’s first four Congresses and for Truman’s—FDR: 310, 319, 331, 261; HST: 242, 188, 263, 235. With 310 Democrats in the 73rd Congress (1933–34) and 319 in the 74th (1935–36) and with a widespread sense of domestic crisis at his back, Roosevelt was able to push through a sweeping legislative agenda that enacted the relief and reform packages that we think of today as the New Deal. Historically, these measures may have been mixed in their effectiveness; at the time of passage, they enjoyed widespread support among his fellow partisans and did not place great strains on party cohesion. In the 75th Congress (1937–38), with a party delegation 331 strong, Roosevelt got some significant legislation, including the reestablishment of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, establishment of the Farm Security Administration, and passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act. All the same, it was this Congress that revolted against his plans to pack the Supreme Court and his sweeping executive reorganization proposals. Its



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most lasting legacy was the establishment of a set of mutual understandings and informal alliances between most Republicans and the right wing (mostly southern) of the Democratic Party. These loose ties became known by the somewhat misleading name of the “conservative coalition,” a term that implies a far more formal and less fluid structure than actually existed. The conservative coalition nonetheless effectively blocked New Deal-style programs for the remainder of the Roosevelt presidency. After the 1938 midterm election returned only 261 Democrats to the House, the conservative coalition was in control on domestic issues. FDR himself would never again see a Congress in which the House Democratic representation exceeded 268. The second cluster of numbers (242, 188, 263, 235) summarizes House Democratic strength in the four Congresses President Truman faced. We need only note that Truman’s biggest Democratic delegation was about the same as Roosevelt’s smallest from the 1930s. In all these cases, the Senate representation was roughly proportional. Mention of the Senate requires another number—sixty-four, the number of senators necessary to break a filibuster in the ninety-six-member Senate. Truman’s peak Democratic number was fifty-six in his first Congress. In those days, the twenty-two Democratic senators who represented the states of the old Confederacy simply could not afford politically to vote for cloture. In his most promising Democratic Congress then, Truman could count at most on only thirty-two Democratic senators voting to break a filibuster. Politics is of course more than numbers, but vote-counting is a big part of politics. The numbers that had blocked Roosevelt’s neo–New Deal program were marginally more favorable than the numbers Truman faced. These seem more telling than FDR’s presence and rhetorical skills. There is another dimension to the problem of presidential-congressional relations. Discussions of presidential leadership of Congress often seem to assume an executive single-mindedly pressing Capitol Hill for legislation to be enacted and signed into law before the end of a session. That is the ultimate goal, but not necessarily the proximate one. Presidential jousting with Congress can also be about party ideological definition. It may also be an exercise in political tactics, pointed as much toward winning the next election as toward immediate legislative gratification. Most fundamentally, it can be an exercise in agenda setting. In these areas, Truman was more successful than generally understood. The four Congresses that Harry Truman faced each had its own distinct identity and political environment. Each grappled with emblematic issues that exemplified the difficulties of liberalism in a postwar age of conservative restoration. A closer look at the major controversies with which each dealt gets us beyond generalizations and abstract numbers.

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The 79th Congress (1945–46): The Political Pitfalls of Reconversion After being preoccupied with foreign policy and the end of World War II for the first five months of his presidency, Truman sent a message to Congress with a comprehensive domestic program addressing immediate problems of economic reconversion and longer-range reform goals. Put together primarily by Franklin Roosevelt’s trusted aide and speechwriter, Samuel Rosenman, the message backed a kitchen sink full of short-range transitional measures and longer-range neo–New Deal objectives, covering topics from wartime economic controls and surplus property disposal to full-employment legislation and a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC).5 Too large and unwieldy to be delivered as a speech, the document was a faithful representation of the aspirations of party liberals. It was at least partly designed as a way for Truman to stake out a political identity as a president squarely in the tradition of Roosevelt and the New Deal. The results were tepid at best. Truman was undoubtedly savvy enough to know Congress would never give him a permanent FEPC or much of anything else in the way of civil rights legislation. His main victory would be the Employment Act of 1946 with its establishment of an institutional mechanism for economic policy formulation—the Council of Economic Advisers—but although the act endorsed “maximum employment” as an objective, it stated no firm mandate. Most liberals, ignoring the way in which the legislation gave the president a valuable means of developing economic policy, found it disappointing. The 79th Congress is most vividly remembered for two executive-legislative collisions that left the president wounded—Truman’s request for authority to draft striking railway workers into the army, and his unsuccessful defense of price controls. The first request ended a crippling railway strike (thereby making legislation unnecessary), but alienated much of the labor movement, then even more than now the organizational spearhead of American liberalism. The fight over price controls led directly into the “beefsteak election” of 1946, in which the Republicans won control of Congress. It is easy in both cases to blame the president for ineffective leadership and inept policy, but equally easy to imagine Franklin Roosevelt doing much the same. The 79th Congress highlighted the shortcomings and limited support of Democratic Party liberalism at least as much as it did Truman’s shortcomings as a presidential leader.



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The 80th Congress (1947–48): Rebuilding the Roosevelt Coalition However disastrous the 1946 election defeat seemed at the time, it was ultimately beneficial for Truman. Relieving the president of the need to attempt to lead an all but unleadable Democratic majority on Capitol Hill, it gave Truman a freedom of action he had not previously possessed. In his dealings with the 80th Congress, Truman performed with a dexterity that is rarely appreciated, constructing a bipartisan coalition for his foreign policy while more or less happily conceding ownership of the nation’s domestic problems to the Republicans and blaming them for failing to provide solutions. Two pervasive issues that affected a majority of Americans then were inflation and housing shortages. In truth, only time could solve these issues—and time was now on the president’s side. Truman would use both effectively in the 1948 campaign. Two other legislative confrontations, not really about legislation but about ideological positioning and party building, were also played astutely by the president. The first of these was the veto of the Taft-Hartley Act. With the stroke of a pen, Truman brought most of the labor movement behind him and the Democratic Party. There were exceptions. The railway brotherhoods remained at best just mild about Harry, and the Communist-controlled unions would support Henry Wallace in 1948. But Truman’s stinging veto, which asserted that the bill was “a clear threat to the successful working of our democratic society,” won over most unions.6 The congressional override of the veto demonstrated the way in which organized labor had forfeited a lot of good will in the postwar era, but also showed it had a firm friend in the White House. Truman’s veto was futile, but nonetheless reestablished labor as a key component in the post–New Deal Democratic Party and transformed his own image from that of a potential persecutor to that of a staunch defender of worker rights. The second move was the comprehensive civil rights program of 1948. Under Roosevelt, African Americans had become an important component of the northern liberal wing of the party. After FDR’s death, some of their leaders advocated a more independent course, arguing that the leverage of the black vote in the big cities could sway elections at the state and national levels. Truman’s personal attitudes on racial issues were complex, and might be summed up as believing in equality of opportunity but not social mixing. (He and Bess would not have been happy if Margaret had brought Sidney Poitier home for dinner!) His views nevertheless were advanced for the time, all the more so given his own Upper South personal history.

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Responding to outbreaks of postwar racial violence, Truman had appointed a special committee on civil rights in September 1946. Stacked with principled adherents of racial equality, it delivered (as he surely had expected) a report with recommendations for major legislation to ensure equal rights for all. When the president sent basically the entire report to the Hill in legislative form, he convinced most black leaders that he was about as good as they could get. When the Republicans failed to deliver anything, the concept of a free-floating Negro vote moving decisively between parties pretty much evaporated. After the political conventions, Truman would bypass Congress by issuing executive orders establishing equal opportunity in the federal civil service and the armed forces. With the negative use of presidential power, the veto of Taft-Hartley, and with an affirmative stroke, an ambitious civil rights program, Truman had brought back to his side organized labor, the African American vote in the North, and a broad aggregation of liberal-minded Americans who supported both objectives. Embracing key elements of the agenda of American liberalism, he also had laid the groundwork for election in his own right.

The 81st Congress (1949–50): The Fight for the Fair Deal and the Return to Stalemate Truman’s skill in using the Republican Congress as a punching bag had served him well and had brought the Democrats back to power. Alas, it also returned to him and his party ownership of the nation’s problems. The next two years would demonstrate how little an election mandate meant. In the 81st Congress, Truman enjoyed the best Democratic numbers he ever would get, but 263 Democrats in the House could deliver little more than marginal success. The president proclaimed his goal of a Fair Deal for Americans and put forth a multifaceted liberal program. In fact, however, he could obtain at most enhancements of existing legislation. Here perhaps the most significant accomplishment was a generous enlargement of the Social Security program that some historians have considered nearly as significant as the original program itself. A housing act that funded a large number of public housing units for the underprivileged seemed impressive at the time. Alas! High-rise public housing projects not only failed to meet the initial expectations of the liberals but wound up being dynamited a quarter century or so later. Here also the Fair Deal tracked not simply the aspirations but the failures of American liberalism. Civil rights legislation ran once again into the stone wall of southern resistance and northern white indifference. With employers providing affordable medical benefits to most workers, a national health insurance program got nowhere.



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It is instructive to look at two Fair Deal programs that sought to stretch American liberalism beyond the New Deal—federal aid to education and the Brannan Plan for agriculture. Aid to education broke up on the shoals of race and religion. White Southern Democrats feared it would either enhance black education or, worse yet in their eyes, require desegregation. Secular northern liberals adamantly opposed federal aid to private parochial schools. No issue so dramatically illustrated the fissures within the Democratic Party. America’s most revered liberal, Eleanor Roosevelt, found herself at one with southern segregationists in her opposition to federal aid for church schools. The controversy laid bare the deep fissures within the Democratic congressional delegation and outraged northern Catholics, whose votes the Democrats badly needed. The proposal itself stalled irreversibly on Capitol Hill. The Brannan Plan, named for Truman’s Secretary of Agriculture, Charles F. Brannan, proposed to reform an increasingly expensive agricultural policy by discarding acreage allotments and providing direct income support (“production payments”) to farmers while letting market prices find their own (relatively low) levels. With the objective of benefiting only small to midsized operations, it set an upper limit to payments. More than an adjustment to New Deal policy, it was the hinge of a political strategy that would provide support for the family farm while achieving low food prices for urban consumers. In pursuit of a venerable fantasy of indigenous American liberalism, it sought to make the Democratic Party a farmer-labor movement. Leaving aside the question of whether it would really save any money—most economists doubted it would—the plan foundered on long-standing cultural differences between farmers and urban workers. Whatever might have seemed possible in the age of Jackson was not a live reality in the afterglow of the age of Roosevelt. The plan generated little enthusiasm among organized agricultural groups, seemed to give working farmers little or no discernible benefits beyond the existing subsidy system, and stirred the ire of larger agriculturalists. Meetings held between farm and labor leaders in an attempt to gin up support for the plan and for the larger objective of a farm-labor coalition revealed mutual incomprehension. Farmers, who were essentially working entrepreneurs producing commodities for the market, had little in common with industrial workers paid by the hour. The Brannan Plan simply withered away, a victim of apathy on both sides of the farm-labor divide.

The 82nd Congress (1951–52): The End of Fair Deal Liberalism By the time of the 1950 midterm elections, the United States had been at war in Korea for more than four months with American forces at first

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pushed to the southeastern corner of the peninsula, then breaking out after the Inchon landing, and moving rapidly across the thirty-eighth parallel. On the first Tuesday in November, they were beginning to encounter Chinese troops who had crossed the Yalu River. The Democratic loss of twenty-eight seats in the House and five in the Senate ended any realistic hopes for a new age of reform. As the Chinese incursion drove American troops back into South Korea, Truman had little choice but to shelve the Fair Deal and establish a national security presidency that would rebuild US military capabilities while balancing the need to hold off the Chinese onslaught in Asia against the preservation of American vital interests in Western Europe. Truman himself said at a press conference, “First things come first, and our defense programs must have top priority.” 7 The domestic program that ensued from these imperatives included a Defense Production Act, a plethora of unpopular economic controls, and the administration’s abortive seizure of the steel industry in the spring of 1952. Less than six years after the end of World War II, the nation was in a state of quasiwar that many Americans found uncomfortably reminiscent of their recent past. Truman’s dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur, although necessary, put him in an untenable political situation. His profile as a national leader collapsed. During most of the last two years of his administration, his public approval ratings, as measured by professional pollsters, hovered well below 50 percent.

What Truman Accomplished In retrospect, Truman deserved better. His complex relationship with Congress on domestic issues cannot be adequately measured by the legislative scorecard. Although it is beyond the scope of this inquiry to discuss foreign policy in detail, it does need to be pointed out that Harry Truman’s leadership in that area established a model for the post–World War II presidency. Are we to conclude that he was masterful in foreign policy and incompetent in domestic matters? Or might we assume that he intelligently took advantages of opportunities that existed in one area but not in the other? Is it possible that Truman would have accomplished more if he had ignored foreign policy issues and concentrated all the resources he could muster on domestic policy? Many critical revisionists seem to assume so, but none have delivered a credible analysis of just how he might have produced the votes for an extension of the New Deal by conceding Soviet hegemony in Western Europe.



Truman’s Presidential Effectiveness & the Liberal Scorecard

Whatever his relationship with Congress, Truman presided over a thriving and relatively placid domestic scene that can be envied in retrospect by those who have lived through more “interesting times.” Postwar reconversion in the United States was tumultuous and inflationary, as it was in other advanced economies around the world, but it effected a transition to prosperity, full employment, and mass affluence unprecedented in American history, interrupted only by a minor recession that lasted for about a year. One may dispute whether the administration’s agenda had much to do with this. Its attempt to defend price controls in 1946 was counterproductive; so was its addiction to an easy monetary policy that was finally successfully challenged by the Federal Reserve. On these occasions, at least, Truman knew when to throw in the towel. The economic controls introduced during the Korean War were relatively mild and likely constructive in cooling an overheated economy. During the last three years of the Truman presidency, America was already enjoying the happy 1950s that we more often connect to the Eisenhower presidency. Comfort and prosperity rarely produce mandates for change. What then did Truman achieve in his struggle for what came to be called the Fair Deal? If it seemed little was accomplished, much more was involved than a choreographed political sword fight. From the beginning, Truman placed himself front and center in a struggle to define both the future of American liberalism and the soul of the Democratic Party. At first glance, it may seem simple enough to write him off as a get-along-goalong machine politician engaged in an amiable charade, but those who make themselves familiar with his privately expressed sentiments and preferred mode of rhetoric find an authentic liberal of the populistic variety at his most authentic when denouncing Wall Street as “gluttons of privilege.”8 A genuine ideological heir to Franklin Roosevelt, it fell to him to pick up the torch of an American liberalism that had flourished during the Great Depression and adapt it to an era of postwar prosperity. The Fair Deal, attuned to an era of economic growth rather than to the Depression, pursued the economic promise of American abundance and added to it the goal of equal rights for all. This was an ambitious project that Truman passed along to Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson. That he did not achieve a largely unattainable checklist of legislation is less important than that he set the agenda for the next generation of American liberalism.

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Notes

This essay draws on years of engagement with Harry Truman, most fully expressed in my two books: Beyond the New Deal: Harry S. Truman and American Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973); and Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). The endnotes below primarily document quotations. 1. Quoted in Neustadt, “Congress and the Fair Deal,” 351. 2. Hamby, “Truman, the Liberals, and F.D.R. as Symbol and Myth.” Hamby discusses the often fanciful liberal estimates of Roosevelt’s powers and disdain for Truman. 3. These and subsequent numbers taken from Morris, Encyclopedia of American History, 427. 4. Statement of Senator Truman to Secretary Early at the White House regarding the Reorganization Bill, after flying from Missouri with deciding vote for the Administration, March 22, 1939. Harry S. Truman Papers, Senatorial and Vice Presidential File, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. 5. “Special Message to the Congress Presenting a 21-Point Program for the Reconversion Period,” September 6, 1945, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1945, 263–309. 6. “Veto of the Taft-Hartley Labor Bill,” June 20, 1947, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1947, 288–97, quote at 297. 7. “The President’s News Conference, January 11, 1951,” in Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1951, 18. 8. “Address at Dexter, Iowa, on the Occasion of the National Plowing Match,” September 18, 1948, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1948, 504.

Works Cited

Hamby, Alonzo L. “Truman, the Liberals, and F.D.R. as Symbol and Myth.” Journal of American History 56 (March 1970): 859–67. Morris, Richard B., ed., Encyclopedia of American History. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. Neustadt, Richard E. “Congress and the Fair Deal: A Legislative Balance Sheet.” In Public Policy: A Yearbook of the Graduate School of Public Administration, Harvard University, edited by Carl Friedrich and John Kenneth Galbraith, 351–81. Cambridge, MA: Graduate School of Public Administration, 1954. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1945. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1961. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1947. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1963. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1948. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1964. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1951. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1966.

Truman the Bipartisan?

Reassessing the Record of the “Do-Nothing” Congress Robert P. Watson

“One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one.” —James Madison in Federalist 98, warning about tyrants not just in executive office but in the legislature as well

Harry S. Truman’s reputation has been transformed in recent years. By the end of his presidency, the thirty-third president was depicted as a hamfisted, stubborn, failed haberdasher from rural Missouri whose approval rating was in the low twenties. Now, however, he is remembered as a beloved icon of political honesty, a champion of the common man, and one of the nation’s greatest presidents.1 Of course, Truman is not without his detractors, even today. Aside from his decision to deploy the atomic bomb in Japan, probably the most common criticism of Truman pertains to his poor relations with Congress. Conventional wisdom holds that Truman had one of the worst relationships with Congress of any president and that he was chiefly to blame for it. Even mindful that struggles between the president and Congress are natural, Truman’s relations are remembered as especially bitter and counterproductive. Truman’s poor political standing suffered from his inability to work with Congress and, in turn, the antipathy between Truman and his Congress drove down the chief executive’s disastrous approval ratings. When it came to the important subtleties and nuances of the legislative process and executive-legislative relations, Truman is believed to have been, in short, no Franklin D. Roosevelt. In fact, just days before his 101

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selection as Truman’s vice president, Senator Alben Barkley (D-KY) was quoted as saying that there was a lack of cooperation between the president and Congress. The relationship should be president AND Congress, not president VERSUS Congress, and Barkley placed the blame squarely on Truman for not having a “friendly” approach with Congress.2 Gallup polls placed Truman’s approval at a whopping 87 percent when he ascended to the presidency on the death of President Roosevelt in April of 1945. But exactly one year later, Truman had dropped to 50 percent approval, and Gallup polls showed Truman at a paltry 32 percent by the time of the 1946 elections. Rarely has there been such a precipitous drop in public support for a president and Truman has been blamed for his party’s loss of the Congress in 1946. As journalist Cabell Phillips observed of Truman after those elections, “Probably no president since Andrew Johnson had run out of prestige and leadership more thoroughly than had Harry Truman when he returned almost unnoticed to Washington.”3 The Chicago Tribune irresponsibly and a bit prematurely labeled the GOP’s victory in 1946 as the “greatest since Appomattox” and even referred to Truman as the “accidental president.” Members of his own Democratic Party distanced themselves from Truman on the campaign stump and even campaigned on their opposition to him leading one of his aides, Bob Hannegan, to counsel the president in 1946 to stop making public appearances and speeches altogether. Congressman William J. Fulbright (D-AR) was half serious when he suggested that Truman appoint the revered Republican senator, Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI), as Secretary of State, then resign from office in order to make Vandenberg the president. Truman declined, of course, and took to calling Fulbright “Half Bright.”4 Truman’s standing was so low that his friend Senator Harley Kilgore (D-WV) used to joke that the very mention of Truman’s name in public brought a chorus of boos. All that could be done on behalf of Truman, said Kilgore, was “to defend him in a humorous fashion by using the old western saloon refrain: Don’t shoot our piano player. He’s doing the best he can.”5 Truman rarely even received such backhanded compliments. It did not take the public or Truman’s fellow Democrats long to miss the reassuring presence of their former president. It was apparent that Truman lacked Roosevelt’s charm, charisma, and eloquence, and Roosevelt’s greatest speeches were frequently played on the radio and at Democratic Party events. Of course, it is never advisable to follow the headliner and Truman had that misfortune. Truman’s simple background and public misstatements were only highlighted by comparisons to Roosevelt and became fodder for the press and his critics. Stories were exaggerated to the point of caricature. Truman was depicted as an uncouth hick, ridiculed



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as the “Senator from Pendergast” because of his former friendship with Tom Pendergast, head of the Kansas City political machine, or ignored as “Harry who?” Much of Truman’s difficulties with the public and press were owed to his constant battles with and opposition from Congress. At the time, it was said that “to err is Truman.”6 The problem with conventional wisdom, of course, is that it is not always accurate. Three main arguments will be forwarded in this paper to reassess the criticisms of Truman’s relations with Congress: 1) Part of the strained relationship with Congress was largely beyond Truman’s control and not of his doing; indeed, it was Congress who refused to work with Truman on issues ranging from civil rights to health care to federal aid to education to Truman’s Fair Deal program; 2) although Truman made mistakes in dealing with Congress, it is less the case that Truman was a contrary Missouri mule than it was that the Republican Congress was isolationist, politically misguided, and excessively partisan; and 3) when one considers the “bad policy” pushed by Congress and the fearmongering tactics of Republicans, Truman’s unwavering opposition was less a political error than a blessing to the country.

Truman Versus Congress It is hard to ignore the numbers and support the case against Truman. President Truman lost many key fights with Congress. His national health care initiative and much of his Fair Deal legislative package failed to become law, and Truman botched the steel strike and was wrong to stubbornly resist congressional efforts to establish watchdog agencies to oversee the administration’s ambitious programs. Truman suffered defeats at the hand of Congress in his appointments and vetoes, both important measures of executive-legislative relations (see table 1). Truman had fewer judicial appointments confirmed than most presidents and fewer than any president in the modern era. Even Jimmy Carter, a president who lacked a productive relationship with Congress, nevertheless enjoyed a 92 percent confirmation rate for his judicial posts during the 95th Congress. Ronald Reagan maintained confirmation rates in the high 80s to high 90s despite the fact that the opposition party controlled the Senate for part of his presidency, and the 103rd Congress during 1993 and 1994 confirmed 90 percent of Bill Clinton’s judicial appointments. When Newt Gingrich and the Republicans gained control of Congress after the 1994 elections (and after decades of Democratic majorities), relations between the executive and legislature collapsed and remained strained through the controversial attempt to impeach Clinton. Consequently, in

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Table 1: Comparison of Federal Judicial Appointments Confirmed by the Senate Years/Congress

Confirmed

President

1947–48 (80th)

78%

Truman

1951–52 (82nd)

85%

Truman

1955–56 (84th)

100%

Eisenhower

1959–60 (86th)

88%

Eisenhower

1963–64 (88th)

97%

Johnson

1967–68 (90th)

93%

Johnson

1971–72 (92nd )

100%

Nixon

a. Source: Office of the Senate Historian, US Senate.

1997 and 1998, the 104th Congress rejected President Clinton’s judicial and administrative appointments in numbers resembling the Truman years. According to numerous measures, Truman’s relations with Congress were possibly the worst in the postwar era. Perhaps the only parallels would be the total and aggressive opposition faced by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to their appointments and policies from Republicans in Congress.7 President Truman vetoed a large number of bills, as is evident in table 2. The average number of bills vetoed by presidents per year during the three decades after World War II was 26.19. If one removes the extraordinarily large number of vetoes cast by FDR, the postwar average drops to 17.7 vetoes per year. Truman averaged a whopping 32.77 vetoes per year, a number well above that for other presidents. In fact, Truman, with 250 vetoes (in fewer than eight years in office) had the third highest number of vetoes of any president, behind only FDR’s 635 (in twelve years) and Grover Cleveland’s 584 (in eight years). Truman also vetoed several important and historic bills; however, using Richard A. Watson’s model for major or “significant bills,” Truman’s use of the veto is neither high nor unusual.8 This data thus refutes the arguments that Truman was veto-happy and obstructionist, and shows that he did not veto more important bills than his peers (see table 3). Where Truman’s poor relations with Congress are perhaps most apparent are in the number of times his vetoes were overridden. Truman vetoed several important and historic bills, such as the Labor-Management Relations Act (Taft-Hartley), the McCarran Internal Security Act, and the Immigration and Nationality Act (McCarran-Walter), and he was often overridden on those major vetoes. He did not, however, lose all of his veto battles. Truman was able to sustain his veto with Congress on an impor-



Reassessing the Record of the “Do-Nothing” Congress

Table 2: Comparison of Presidential Vetoes President

Bills vetoed Private Public

Total

Years in office

Vetoes per year

Roosevelt

497

138

635

12.37

51.33

Truman

169

81

250

7.63

32.77

Eisenhower

103

78

181

8.00

22.62

Kennedy

12

9

21

2.90

7.24

Johnson

16

14

30

5.10

5.88

Nixon

3

40

43

5.69

7.56

Ford

5

61

66

2.31

28.57

Carter

2

29

31

4.00

7.75

Sources: Presidential Vetoes, 1789–1976, compiled by Senate Library (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1978); and Presidential Vetoes, 1977–1984, compiled by Senate Library (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1985).

Table 3: Comparison of “Significant Bills” (Public) Vetoed President

Vetoes

Vetoes per year

Roosevelt

60

4.85

Truman

37

4.85

Eisenhower

34

4.25

Kennedy

4

1.38

Johnson

9

1.76

Nixon

38

6.68

Ford

55

23.81

Carter

22

5.50

Sources: Presidential Vetoes, 1789–1976, compiled by Senate Library (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1978); and Presidential Vetoes, 1977–1984, compiled by Senate Library (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1985).

tant offshore oil bill and on an exemption for oil industries that would have been a congressional gift. Truman also won two of the three tax bills he vetoed. In addition to Professor Watson’s data, the Senate Library has compiled lists of “significant vetoes.” Their list differs slightly from Watson’s because of varying definitions of major or historic bills. Table 4 indicates that Congress attempted to override nearly three-fourths of the “nationally significant legislation” Truman vetoed, but, more importantly, Congress

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Table 4: Outcome of Major Presidential Vetoes President

Major vetoes

Override attempts

Successful overrides

Total vetoes overridden (percent)

Roosevelt

38

19 (50.0%)

9 (47.4%)

23.7

Truman

30

22 (73.3%)

11 (50.0%)

36.7

Eisenhower

20

10 (50.0%)

2 (20.0%)

10.0

Kennedy

0

0

0

0

Johnson

4

0

0

0

Nixon

24

21 (87.5%)

5 (23.8%)

20.8

Ford

42

28 (66.7%)

12 (42.9%)

28.6

Carter

11

4 (36.4%)

2 (50.0%)

18.2

Source: Presidential Vetoes, 1789–1976, compiled by Senate Library (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1978); and Presidential Vetoes, 1977–1984, compiled by Senate Library (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1985).

Table 5: Outcome of Presidential Vetoes of Significant Bills President

Victory for president

Victory for Congress

Compromise

Total significant bills

Truman

12 (32.4%)

21 (56.8%)

4 (10.8%)

37

Eisenhower

14 (41.2%)

9 (26.5%)

11 (32.3%)

34

Kennedy

1 (25.0%)

1 (25.0%)

2 (50.0%)

4

Johnson

4 (44.4%)

0 (0%)

5 (55.6%)

9

Nixon

5 (13.2%)

12 (31.6%)

21 (55.2%)

38

Ford

18 (32.7%)

20 (36.4%)

17 (30.9%)

55

Carter

10 (45.5%)

4 (18.2%)

8 (36.3%)

22

Source: Watson, Presidential Vetoes and Public Policy, 148.

was successful in overriding fully half of those vetoes. Again, Congress asserted itself—and won—with Truman more often than with other presidents in the modern era. Presidents typically try to compromise with Congress rather than face the possibility of having their vetoes overridden. Unfortunately for Truman, he won fewer than one-third of his veto showdowns with Congress, whereas Congress won at a higher rate (56.8 percent of the time) against Truman than with any other president in the postwar era (see table



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5). Moreover, Truman and Congress were able to come to a compromise on the veto confrontation less often (only 10.8 percent of the time) than any other president and Congress serving after World War II.9 These numbers, taken without context, are quite damning of Truman’s legislative programs.

Digging Deeper: The Causes of Conflict The problem with examining rates of successful presidential appointments and vetoes is that they lack context and do not reveal the full story. While Truman did make mistakes in his approach to dealing with Congress, a good degree of the strained relationship was due to circumstances beyond Truman’s control and a strong case can be made that the lion’s share of the blame rests squarely with the Republican Congress. Five challenges stand out among the many reasons why Truman’s efforts to work with Congress failed.

1. Republican Frustration

After being the party out of power for twelve years under Roosevelt, and after too often being bested and treated as second-class citizens by him, the Republican Party was determined to change the relationship and even the score with Democrats. Truman took the brunt of their collective frustrations. Moreover, Congress felt they had given up far too much under Roosevelt in terms of both ideology and policy. They wanted to balance the power base, if not swing it to the side of Congress. Likewise, elements of the GOP and Southern Democrats were upset by the extensiveness (and successes) of the liberal New Deal programs and expansion of federal powers and were boiling over Truman’s creation of the first Civil Rights Commission in 1946. Such harsh feelings were only heightened when, after they defeated Truman’s bid for civil rights legislation, Congress watched powerlessly as Truman responded by crafting an innovative executive order to desegregate the armed forces in 1948.10 Having lost the presidency since 1932, by the time of the 1948 campaign the GOP was not only confident they would win at the polls, but had been doing everything in their power to humiliate and defeat Truman. After losing perhaps the biggest upset election in presidential history in 1948, the Republican Party was in no mood for conciliation, cooperation, or compromise. Truman again suffered their frustration and antipathy.11 Thus, Truman faced knee-jerk opposition and ideological forces beyond his influence and irrespective of any approach he undertook.

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2. New Deal Bureaucracy and Reform

The New Deal bureaucracy—the “alphabet soup” agencies—was established in response to the crisis of the Great Depression. The agencies, their missions, and their organizational structures were developed without careful planning or consideration of many larger issues. They were developed hurriedly during a crisis. This immediacy and haste produced a bureaucracy that was, in the words of one scholar, “unwieldy and sprawling.”12 Truman found it difficult to manage the bureaucracy he inherited and, while many of the agencies were accomplishing their stated goals, it was apparent that, after twelve years, reorganization of the new agencies was badly needed. Trying to govern the bureaucracy was challenge enough for Truman but the Republicans in Congress were angered by the agencies and wanted some of them eliminated while opposing most of the reforms Truman offered. This further strained executive-legislative relations. Another problem with the bureaucracy was the White House appointment process. Although it is much longer and more involved today than it was when Truman was president—but still intensely politicized—the political parties today do not dictate to the new president a “spoils” list of partisans to be hired to the same extent they did when Truman was president. The process was so contentious and unworkable by the time of Truman’s presidency that it needed a complete overhaul.13 For example, no longer could political rewards simply be handed out without consultation with the president, without consideration of the president’s goals for staffing his White House, or, given the increasing complexity of government, the ability or merit of the appointee to perform the job. Truman tried to reform the system but encountered intense opposition from within his party, within his own administration, and even from Republicans in Congress. Moreover, Truman inherited his administration from FDR, and because of the momentous issues of the times, he had to “hit the ground running.” But Truman was the first president to have one person in charge of appointments and staffing and he began the process of reform by advocating coordination with the party and by balancing patronage with competence. This marked “the first significant step toward the development of presidential independence.”14 Truman understood patronage, having come from the Pendergast machine in Missouri, but he was a reformer at heart. The system was so untenable that President Dwight Eisenhower was forced to continue the reforms and chose to build on Truman’s efforts to institute the first major overhaul of the process in 1957, appointing the same person who tried to help Truman, Donald Dawson, to manage the process.



Reassessing the Record of the “Do-Nothing” Congress

In the final analysis, Truman surrounded himself with some impressive advisors but he was also ill served by some of his own staff, including Secretary of Labor Lewis B. Schwellenbach, White House aide John R. Steelman, and Fred Vinson and John W. Snyder (both of whom headed the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion and later served as Secretary of Treasury).15 The staffing process also further strained relations with both parties in Congress. Truman did succeed in reorganizing the federal government and White House in historic ways, and did so by reaching out to Congress, Republicans, and former President Herbert Hoover. Hoover’s poor reputation was partially redeemed when Truman appointed him to lead his namesake commission to streamline and strengthen the structure of the executive branch.

3. Congressional Micromanagement

For the duration of Truman’s presidency, Congress tried to intervene in executive branch functions and micromanage Truman’s initiatives, even more than what typically occurs during divided government. Truman’s opponents in Congress also tried to strengthen their institutional role in confirmations and ratification. Even though this power dates to the Constitution, the system of hearings to confirm a presidential appointment was a new process when Truman was president. The key event in shaping the process as we know it today was arguably the controversial nomination to the Supreme Court of Senator Hugo Black (D-AL). After Black had been confirmed, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette broke a story about his involvement earlier in his life with the Ku Klux Klan. Black made his case on the radio, admitting he had been a member of the KKK, but stating that he had resigned long before joining the US Senate and had nothing more to do with the organization. Critics of the appointment labeled August 4, 1937, the day the new justice was sworn in, as “Black Day.” Ironically, Black’s quarter century of service on the US Supreme Court was marked by many noble fights against bigotry. In order to avoid additional shockers, the American Bar Association recommended that the Senate Judiciary Committee fulfill a more formalized notion of the “advice and consent” role by conducting hearings on court nominees. Thus, in 1939 the next justice to be nominated, Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter, was the first nomination to be referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Although most of Truman’s judicial appointments were confirmed and his appointment process in general was “relatively tranquil,” the Senate was eager to assert its new role and powers and did manage to oppose Truman on many of his appointments, vetoes, and treaties.16

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Congress also asserted itself on internal matters of the Civil Service such as when Truman attempted in 1952 to move the US Marshal’s Service into the merit system. Whether the effort was wise is open to debate, but Congress aggressively refused to go along, jealously guarding their confirmation powers in this matter and so many others, and punished Truman for the attempt.17 Congress showed such contempt for the president that they bristled when he did not take their “advice” on matters. In 1950, for example, Senator Harley Kilgore (D-WV) wrote to Truman with five items he wanted added to a veto message for the McCarran Internal Security Act. Kilgore told the president to accommodate his points because they “would not only be extremely helpful in securing the votes required to uphold a veto, but it would provide a new and strong basis for the consideration of this type of legislation in the next Congress.”18 It is common for members of Congress to offer presidents advice, but rare for them to try to dictate presidential statements. It is also rare for Congress to try to play such a forward-leaning role in foreign policy. But, as noted by Theodore Tannenwald, a consultant with the Secretary of Defense under Truman and later counsel to Averell Harriman, Truman encountered near-constant pressure from Congress to insert their priorities into his foreign policy and aid programs. While recognizing Congress’s role, Truman nonetheless remained adamant about resisting congressional supremacy in foreign affairs.19

4. Trying Times

The stakes were high when Truman became president and the issues and challenges were many and serious. As an “accidental president,” Truman walked into a firefight with war in the European and Pacific theaters and the critical questions, both at home and abroad, of the postwar order looming, questions that included decolonization, the reconstruction of Europe, worldwide financial ruin and inflation, budget deficits, conversion from a wartime economy, and more. Truman had little in the way of a honeymoon, given the many pressing issues he faced. Indeed, the Truman years would ultimately witness some of the most critical foreign policy challenges in world history and some of the most historic US foreign policy initiatives and triumphs. Many major strikes disrupted the conversion to a peacetime economy. In Truman’s first year in office and within weeks of the end of the war, there were hundreds of strikes. Many were ongoing during the 1946 midterm elections, with upwards of five thousand actual strikes or threatened strikes during Truman’s first two years in office and over 4.6 million workers on the



Reassessing the Record of the “Do-Nothing” Congress

picket lines. Key industries were in turmoil, including agriculture, automobiles, electricity, food processing and packaging, meatpacking, railways, and steel.20 Negations between labor and business leaders were volatile at best. Although Truman did not cause the problems, he was blamed for everything and was forced to deal with the matter. In addition to the momentous issues facing Truman, many politicians and businesses had been benefiting from the war, the economic crisis, and the New Deal. Truman’s bold new initiatives, reform-mindedness, and honesty naturally threatened these powerful interests. Not surprisingly, Truman “had to cope … with tremendous, often conflicting, pressure from the most powerful organized interests in the country.”21 Take, for instance, the work of the Office of Price Administration. With the war and Great Depression over, some members of Congress wanted it closed; however, Truman recognized that the agency fought for consumers and that tough and critical economic challenges remained. He thus fought against its elimination, and in doing so, did the right thing, but earned enemies from big business and Republicans.22 Truman’s efforts to expand health care coverage and his interest in national health care earned him further enemies from physicians, insurers, and Republicans who labeled his proposals “socialized medicine” and spent millions attacking both the president and the policies. Likewise, Truman’s proposals for public housing and affordable housing were met with jeers of “communism.” In addition to big business, Truman’s opponents in Congress along with conservative groups and the housing industry lined up against the president. Additionally, a few of Truman’s aides disagreed with their boss on key issues.23

5. Congressional Dysfunction

Truman’s categorization of the 80th Congress as the “Do-Nothing” Congress was not far off the mark. In fact, not just the 80th Congress, but each of the Congresses from 1947 to 1953 opposed nearly every program Truman proposed, offered very little in terms of proactive solutions, and most Republicans and a few Democrats seemed interested in only three items, all of them divisive, counterproductive, and politically taxing: Communist witch hunts, fearmongering, and isolationism.24 Any criticism of Truman’s relations with Congress and any thorough assessment of his legislative record must be understood from the perspective of the efforts and behavior of Congress. The Republican Congresses Truman dealt with were frustrated by being locked out of the White House for so long, bound and determined to defeat Truman, overwhelmed by the momentous issues of the day, intent on reducing the power of and micro-

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managing the executive branch, and obsessed with communism. By 1948, the terms “New Deal” and “communism” had become synonymous in the minds of many conservatives. So too did the Ku Klux Klan and southern segregationists find a new angle to promote their hate—the fact that Communists favored both racial integration and atheism. The collapse of China in 1949, the rise of the Soviet Union, and other issues played into public fears and were shamelessly exploited by Wisconsin’s Republican Senator Joe McCarthy, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and many congressional Republicans. The high-profile charges against Alger Hiss, artists, intellectuals, Hollywood actors, diplomats, and unions were premised on the corrupting effect of liberal, Democratic rule. More specifically, these “threats” were “the symbol and living proof” that Truman was soft on communism.25 The blacklists, fearmongering, and kangaroo courts of Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Affairs Committee constitute a low point in American democracy and ruined many lives. Although Truman did not like Hiss and deeply opposed communism, he detested McCarthy and did not hesitate to defend justice by opposing McCarthy. While campaigning in 1948, Truman proclaimed HUAC “was more un-American than the activities it is investigating.”26 It is also telling that when Secretary of State Dean Acheson helped publicly defend Hiss against HUAC in 1950, Acheson felt the need to apologize to Truman for the public ridicule heaped on the president. But Truman, who had earlier been criticized for attending the funeral of his former friend and jailed political machine boss Tom Pendergast, dismissed Acheson’s apology: “God-damnit, Dean, if you think a man who followed an old criminal to his grave because he was his friend would have you do anything different than you, then you don’t know me!”27 The irony is that Truman was a cold warrior who was tough on communism and who instituted the foreign policy regime that ended up driving America’s Cold War efforts for decades. Furthermore, Truman had mistakenly promoted an anti-Communist loyalty program himself.28 Through an executive order, Truman authorized a loyalty probe of government employees and ended up getting criticized for it on all fronts. Liberals felt Truman went too far and Red-hunting conservatives wanted even more. This decision has been described as “regrettable but necessary” and reveals the irony in someone like Truman being labeled as soft on communism.29 Although Truman’s loyalty program was a blemish, his record in general on protecting civil liberties while fighting communism was admirable. For instance, in 1948 Truman refused to release confidential files of government employees to Congress, whose members attempted through House Resolution 522 to force Truman to hand them over. Congress



Reassessing the Record of the “Do-Nothing” Congress

wanted to exploit the files as part of the Red scare. Truman vetoed the measure, which held by a narrow four-vote margin. Later, however, the State Department caved to pressures and turned over some of their files, which “infuriated” the president.30 Similarly, only twenty days after Whittaker Chambers offered the public sensational stories of disloyalty, Truman issued a bold and politically unpopular statement on the congressional witch hunt, saying, “The public hearings now underway are serving no useful purpose. On the contrary, they are doing irreparable harm to certain persons, seriously impairing the morale of federal employees, and undermining public confidence in the government.”31 The records of the 79th, 80th, and 81st Congresses include support for one of the worst pieces of legislation of the twentieth century—the Taft-Hartley Management-Labor Relations Act—while opposing assistance with public power and electricity, extending healthcare, reforms for small farmers, and most of Truman’s programs targeting Americans suffering after the long Depression and war. The squeaky wheels in Congress included “Red” hunters, isolationists, and southern racists, who controlled the agenda and debate in both chambers. As Truman explained of the fear and division tactics employed by the McCarthyists in Congress, “They are creating scare headlines and hysteria because they want you to overlook their own indifference to the country’s real welfare.”32 Truman opposed the ugly tactics of McCarthyism, as embodied by such popular yet alarming bills as Mundt-Nixon and Mundt-Ferguson. The president promised he “would veto any legislation … which adopted police-state tactics and unduly encroached on individual rights, and he would do so regardless of how politically unpopular it was … election year or no election year.”33 Truman also vetoed the restrictive McCarran Internal Security Act (sponsored by Senator Pat McCarran, D-NV), which called for the registration of individuals deemed to be Communists and the authorization to detain such individuals. The bill was opposed by several of the more prudent and responsible members of the Senate such as Herbert Lehman (D-NY), James Murray (D-MT), and Estes Kefauver (D-TN). One of the last major efforts of Truman during his presidency was to oppose the Immigration and Nationality Act (cosponsored by Senator McCarran and Representative Francis Walter, D-PA), which sought to limit immigration and deport “subversive” immigrants and Communists. According to the president, the bill “would perpetuate injustices of long standing against many other nations of the world … the price is too high, and in good conscience I cannot agree to pay it.” Truman vetoed it in 1952 but lost his last major battle with Congress, which overrode him 278 to 113 in the House and 57 to 26 in the Senate.34

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Truman said of the misguided policies recommended by Congress that “it is the duty of the president to say firmly and flatly ‘no.’”35 And say “no” he did. According to Watson, in the period from 1931 on, Truman was the president who vetoed the most “historic” bills, defined as bills that are “highly controversial and/or of long-term importance.”36 By his own admission, Truman admitted that he “found it necessary to veto more major bills than any other president with the possible exception of Grover Cleveland.”37 Among the historic bills Truman vetoed were: three tax bills that he believed to be unfair to average Americans; a bill that infringed on civil liberties; the Kerr bill (named for Senator Robert Kerr, D-OK) that would have exempted certain gas producers from federal regulation; a bill that would have given title to federal holdings to offshore drilling interests; eleven bills that would have cut social programs; eighteen bills that dealt with the management of federal programs; and four international security bills that impeded presidential powers. These security bills also attempted to wrest control of security from the presidency and would have jeopardized healthy, trusting alliances abroad. Truman gave a variety of reasons for vetoing bills, including that they encroached on executive powers, they were unconstitutional, fiscally unsound, or “just plain wrong” or bad public policy.38 As such, Truman opposed Congress not on partisan grounds or because he was an obstructionist. Consider the “main” reason given for vetoes of major bills by other presidents in table 6. Table 6. Presidential Rationale Behind Vetoes (as percentage of total vetoes) Unwise Fiscally Administratively Unconstitu- Encroach President policy unsound unworkable tional powers Roosevelt

76.3

15.8

2.6

5.3

0

Truman

76.3

3.3

20

3.3

0

Eisenhower

65

30

5

0

0

Kennedy

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

Johnson

0

50

0

0

50

45.8

41.7

0

12.5

0

69

16.7

2.4

7.1

4.8

63.6

9.1

0

9.1

18.2

Nixon Ford Carter

Source: Watson, Presidential Vetoes and Public Policy, 141.



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115

Truman’s Approach with Congress Truman tried to work with Congress more than is remembered and wanted to “establish good relations” with Congress and “heal splits within his own party.”39 The day after Roosevelt’s death, Truman lunched with colleagues in Congress. Of the lunch, Senator Vandenberg noted in his diary that this gesture “shattered all tradition. But it was both wise and smart. It means that the days of executive contempt for Congress are ended; that we are returning to a government in which Congress will take its rightful place.” Truman’s initial overtures to Congress proved effective, and later, his personal friendship with Vandenberg would help to pass some of the most important measures of his presidency.40 After two tumultuous years of fighting with Congress, the Democratic Party’s success in the 1948 election buoyed Truman’s confidence and hope for cooperation, tranquility, and bipartisanship with Congress. He entered 1949 upbeat, but heated fights over the Fair Deal program soon dashed his hopes. Nevertheless, Truman still managed to work closely with several members of Congress, such as Robert F. Wagner (D-NY), Allen J. Ellender (D-LA), and Robert Taft (R-OH), to pass his historic American Housing Act in 1949.41 Truman instituted a process for dealing with Congress, and as a former US senator, he both understood and valued a healthy relationship with the legislative branch. In fact, after the embarrassing defeat for Truman and his party in the 1946 midterm election, Truman directed his Bureau of the Budget staff to liaison with all committees in both houses of Congress and with the new GOP leadership.42 Truman organized many committees to advise him on nearly every issue, and was actively involved in all facets of both the policy process and relations with Congress.43 According to a senior Truman aide, the president sought out expert advisors on issues ranging from higher education to the military, civil rights, airports, health care, immigration, and water and natural resources.44 He also consulted with a wide array of individuals—not all of whom shared his views—both in and outside of his administration and from both the cabinet and executive offices such as that of the special counsel.45 Truman also developed a process for determining which bills would be supported or vetoed and for sending legislative initiatives to and receiving them from Congress. The administration shared information with Congress and among the departments, established a legislative liaison office, coordinated agency reports to Congress on pending initiatives, and held regular meetings with the Democratic Party leadership. Specifically, several individuals were instructed to work with Congress on legislation,

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including James Webb (Director of the Bureau of the Budget), Frank Pace (Secretary of the Army), and staffers Frederick Lawton and Roger W. Jones. The president also sought out the best advice on matters of legislation, which often ended up coming from the Bureau of the Budget, which screened legislation and offered formal advice on all bills. The Bureau of the Budget was staffed with professional policy analysts and under Truman, benefited from the services of an especially impressive array of professionals including Roger W. Jones, Richard Neustadt, Elmer Staats, and others. Unlike the caricature of him by his critics, Truman was insistent about not having the process for bills corrupted by ideological perspectives or advice filtered through the lens of party politics. Truman aide Roger W. Jones recalled that Truman “wanted institutional advice; he wanted someone to give him the pros and cons, to stand aloof from the normal departmental attitudes towards pieces of legislation, which heavily tended to reflect the department’s constituency, and to do objective analyses of the issues for the president.”46 Another of Truman’s aides, who would go on to become one of the country’s foremost scholars of the American presidency, Richard Neustadt, echoed this approach, saying of the president, “I’ve heard him say many times, ‘I will worry about the politics, you let me have it just as you see it from the policy, programmatic, the substantive, point of view.’”47 Even President Eisenhower liked Truman’s legislative and policy processes and continued the practice of having professionals in the budget office assume the lead role in reviewing all bills. This pleased Truman, as one of his objectives was to institutionalize the process, a point he prioritized during the transition to the Eisenhower administration.48 In Truman’s words, he wanted to “batten down the institution” in order to avoid politicization and corruption of the process by Congress and ideological presidents. As he informed his aides, “The bureau’s reputation for ‘non-political’ expertise, its institutional respectability, were to be guarded at all costs, thereby preserving its utility to the next president.”49 Recognizing Truman’s strained relationship with Congress and numerous defeats at the hands of Congress, it is nonetheless the case that Truman proved to be very skilled at preparing for Congress the passage of historic foreign policy initiatives like the Marshall Plan and US aid programs. As secretary of commerce and senior advisor, Averell Harriman remembered Truman assured both the passage of the Marshall Plan and its success by organizing three expert committees—one to examine the finances and economics of the plan, another to assess available resources, and the third to determine Europe’s needs—and by sending the esteemed General George C. Marshall to testify before Congress.50



Reassessing the Record of the “Do-Nothing” Congress

There are numerous examples of Truman attempting to work with Congress on crafting bills, compromising on bills, preventing vetoes, and attempting to sustain vetoes, even reaching across the political aisle. For instance, Truman enjoyed a very positive and productive relationship with Senator Vandenberg, the powerful chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Truman worked closely with Representative John Sparkman (D-AL) on the veto of the Case Labor Dispute Act, with Senator William Langer (R-ND) in opposition to the Tidelands leasing oil bill, and with Speaker Sam Rayburn (D-TX) and Senator J. Howard McGrath (D-RI) on tax bills, giving them advance notice of his veto and schedule so they could be present to sustain it. Truman gave advance notice of his intent to sign a bill to Senator Robert Kerr (D-OK) and Speaker Rayburn on occasion. On one such instance, regarding the Kerr Bill, Truman changed his mind and felt he had a moral obligation to veto the bill; however, he was deeply upset that he had to break his promise to these two men and did so with much anguish, revealing the extent of Truman’s commitment to a personal relationship with Congress.51 Truman aide Eben Ayers stated that Truman was more troubled over that matter than nearly anything else.52 In another instance, Vandenberg and Republicans wanted Truman to pick Republican businessmen to administer components of the Marshall Plan, something Truman adamantly opposed. Ultimately, however, he compromised with Congress. Still, the postwar tensions and momentous issues of the day prevented a more collegial and productive relationship between Congress and Truman from developing. Truman was often damned if he supported and damned if he opposed his Congress, and there was no satisfying a Congress bound and determined to embarrass and oppose him. A case in point was the controversial Case bill (An Act To Provide Additional Facilities For the Mediation of Labor Disputes). Fully 135 members of Congress signed a petition urging Truman to sign the bill, but a similar number petitioned him to veto it. Likewise, Truman was criticized around the country for his veto of a Tidelands bill in 1946, which would have exempted certain oil industries from regulations and permitted drilling on sensitive lands. Even the influential Earl Warren, then Republican governor of California and eventual chief justice of the United States, sent Truman a scathing telegram stating, “the California legislature in special session again expressed its intense interest in this legislation …,” arguing it was a private property issue, California’s right, a legal matter, and one “settled in our state for almost one hundred years.”53

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A Fuller Appreciation of Truman’s Legislative Record



Irrespective of Truman’s relations with Congress, his policy achievements as president were extraordinary both in array and importance. Truman’s record includes such domestic accomplishments as public housing, slum redevelopment, desegregating the military (EO 9981), establishing the first civil rights commission, infrastructure investments, reorganizing the Department of Labor, streamlining the federal bureaucracy (Hoover Commission), and conversion of the war economy. His foreign policy and security record was even more impressive and included the successful ending of World War II, reconstructing German and Japanese societies after the war, the Berlin Airlift, the Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, recognition of Israel, immigration of displaced people to the United States, the establishment of NATO, overseeing the creation of the United Nations, the food aid and foreign aid programs, establishing the National Security Council and CIA, and reorganizing the Department of Defense and improving its chain of command. Indeed, Truman’s legacy is one of the most impressive of any president. Truman needed support in Congress for many of these historic initiatives, and contrary to conventional wisdom, enjoyed bipartisan support for several of his foreign policy initiatives such as aid for Greece and Turkey. He received the backing of key Republicans for his Truman Doctrine in 1947, and in general, for his efforts to enlarge the role of the United States in world affairs. What is remarkable is that not only did Truman accomplish all this without his own party in control of Congress, but several of these issues were realized during an election year and amidst budget and economic hardships. The magnitude of accomplishment points to Truman’s political skills, strength, and knack for leadership. There is no better example of this than Truman’s leadership on the explosive issue of a homeland for Jews. Secretary of State Dean Acheson termed it “the puzzle of Palestine” because of the complexities, varied interests, and high stakes involved.54 Everyone from the British to his own State Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and southern political leaders like South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond weighed in against most of what Truman wanted, which included statehood for Israel, Jewish immigration to the United States, and massive loan guarantees to the new state.55 It was also a bitter political fight due to concerns about oil, foreign policy, Russia, and security in the Middle East. Yet, in the words of political scientist Michael T. Benson, Truman decided the issue “primarily on humanitarian, moral, and sentimental grounds” rather than “mere politics and personal



Reassessing the Record of the “Do-Nothing” Congress

gain.” In doing so, Truman cut through the opposition and interest groups to embrace what he deemed first and foremost to be a “basic human problem.”56 United Nations Secretary General Trygve Lie summed it up simply when he said, “I think we can safely say that if there had been no Harry S. Truman, there would be no Israel today.”57 What is revealed is a president of enormous moral courage and strength of character. During times of extraordinary challenges, Truman acted on principle. As former Truman aide Stephen Spingarn remembered, when the fate of a bill was before the president, Truman would always ask, “Is there more good than bad in it?” When Truman opposed Congress, he did so on principle not because of politics; when he impounded funds it was to prevent Congress from spending money on excessive pork projects. For better or for worse, Truman routinely put policy over politics.58 These traits drove Truman to oppose the Republican Congress’s misguided policies and fearmongering regardless of the political consequences. As such, Truman’s character and style proved to be good for the nation, but produced mixed results politically. Truman’s integrity and honesty were both virtue and vice in that he was honest to a fault. Dean Acheson, in his memoirs, admitted that the White House staff remained on constant alert because of the hasty and honest “shoot from the hip” way Truman answered questions from the press and public.59 Truman’s openness and honesty were misconstrued and his verbal shortcomings at press conferences became a liability in that, while refreshing at first, “were no longer dismissed as pleasantly amusing examples of a peppery ex-farmer doing his damnedest as president.”60 If Truman was at fault for his poor relations with Congress, it was largely on account of his courageous opposition to their reckless policies, his candor, and an “aversion” and “unwillingness” to formal lobbying by and of his administration.61 Truman’s moral courage and leadership on these tough issues produced bitter fights with Congress that took a toll on his approval rating and popularity, leading one influential news magazine to describe him at the end of his presidency as “a spent force politically.”62 Truman would “give ’em hell,” but he was also on the receiving end of it. An exhausted, unpopular Truman announced his decision not to run for reelection in 1952. At his last Jefferson-Jackson Day event as president, Truman defended his actions against the Republican attacks: “That’s the record, and how do the Republicans propose to get around it? Here’s what they will try to do. They will go to the voters and say, ‘Did you know the government was full of Communists?’ And then the Republicans will explain that somebody named Joe Doakes works for the government, and he has a cousin who sells shoelaces, or a ribbon clerk in a department store, and this cousin has

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a wife who wrote an article, before Joe married her, that was printed in a magazine that also printed an article in favor of Chinese Communists. …” Peppery to the end, Truman described the Republican Congresses that bedeviled him as having “more morons than patriots in it.”63 Dean Acheson was a bit more eloquent than his boss, remembering him as always choosing what was right above what was politically expedient: “Mr. Truman will stand with the few who in the midst of great difficulty managed their offices with eminent benefit to the public interest. … In the last analysis, Mr. Truman’s methods reflected the basic integrity of his own character. He could have said of them what Mr. Lincoln said of his: ‘I desire to so conduct the affairs of this administration that if, at the end … I have lost every other friend on earth, I shall have at least one friend left, and that friend shall be down inside of me.’”64 Indeed, Truman addressed the myriad of momentous challenges of his presidency by rising to extraordinary heights and by relying on his courage and integrity, including when he addressed the challenge of governing with a misguided Congress.

Notes

1. Most scholarly polls rating the presidents in recent years have listed Truman as one of the greatest presidents; he is ranked fifth in several of the recent polls. 2. Alben W. Barkley, “The President And—Not vs.—Congress; Senator BarkleySays the Liaison between White House and Congress Must Be Close If the Government Is to Run Smoothly,” New York Times, June 20, 1948. 3. Phillips, Truman Presidency, 161. 4. McCullough, Truman, 522–23, 534. 5. Quoted in Steinberg, Man from Missouri, 288. 6. See Giglio, Truman in Cartoon and Caricature, 1–2. 7. Binder, “Senate as Black Hole.” 8. Watson, Presidential Vetoes and Public Policy, 35. 9. Ibid., 35–37. 10. Pemberton, Harry S. Truman, 62. 11. Reinhard, Republican Right since 1945, 12. 12. Lewis, Politics of Presidential Appointments, 11. 13. Mackenzie, Innocent Until Nominated, viii. 14. Ibid., 16. 15. Watson and Lansford, “Rating the President’s Cabinet and Cabinet Officers.” 16. Mackenzie and Shogun, Obstacle Course, 104. 17. John D. Morris, “New Battle Ahead on Reorganization,” New York Times, June 5, 1952, 36. 18. Senator Harley Kilgore to President Harry Truman, September 14, 1950, Official File 2750C, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. 19. Heller, Truman White House, 125. 20. Pemberton, Harry S. Truman, 55–65. 21. Ibid., 57–58. 22. Bernstein, “Truman Administration and Its Reconversion Wage Policy,” 231. 23. Pemberton, Harry S. Truman, 61–62.



Reassessing the Record of the “Do-Nothing” Congress

24. Lewis, Politics of Presidential Appointments, 11. 25. Phillips, Truman Presidency, 372. 26. Quoted in “Truman Assails Committee on Un-American Activities,” New York Times, September 23, 1948. 27. Pemberton, Harry S. Truman, 153–54. 28. Executive Order 9835: Prescribing Procedures for the Administration of an Employees Loyalty Program in the Executive Branch of the Federal Government, 12 Fed. Reg. 1935 (March 25, 1947). 29. Thompson, Frustration of Politics, 8. 30. Ibid., 72. 31. The President’s News Conference, August 5, 1948, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1948, 431–35. 32. Address in Oklahoma City, September 28, 1948, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1948, 609–14. On Taft-Hartley, see Lee, Truman and Taft-Hartley. 33. Washington Post, August 1, 1950; and Spingarn Papers, July 22, 1950, National Defense Folder, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. 34. Nash Papers, June 25, 1952, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. 35. Barth, Government by Investigation, 219. 36. Watson, Presidential Vetoes and Public Policy, 37. 37. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope, 479. 38. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions, 137–39. 39. Pemberton, Harry S. Truman, 22, 62. 40. Vandenberg, Private Papers, 167. 41. Thompson, Frustration of Politics, 103. 42. Heller, Truman White House, 175. 43. Roger W. Jones quoted in ibid., 174. 44. See Heller, Truman White House, 127. Charles S. Murphy was administrative assistant to the president and later special counsel to the president. 45. See Watson, Presidential Vetoes and Public Policy, 76–77. The Office of Special Counsel included Clark Clifford and Charles S. Murphy. 46. Roger W. Jones Oral History Interview, August 14, 1969, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. 47. Richard Neustadt quoted in Watson, Presidential Vetoes and Public Policy, 75–76. See also Heller, Truman White House, 225–26, for a discussion on the processes Truman established to work with Congress from a panel discussion with senior federal officers who served the Truman White House, including Richard Neustadt, David Bell, Harold Enarson, Russ Andrews, David Stowe, Elmer Staats, and Roger W. Jones. 48. Watson, Presidential Vetoes and Public Policy, 76–78. 49. Neustadt, “Presidency and Legislation,” 664. 50. W. Averell Harriman Papers and Oral History Interview, May 1977, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. 51. Watson, Presidential Vetoes and Public Policy, 107. 52. Eben A. Ayers Papers, Folder, 1950, p. 52, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. 53. Telegram from Governor Earl Warren to Harry S. Truman, July 26, 1946, Official File 56F, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. See also Watson, Presidential Vetoes and Public Policy, 114–15. 54. Benson, Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel, ix. 55. Ibid., ix, 6. 56. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions, 139. 57. “Credit for a New Nation,” Kansas City Times, October 21, 1954, in Palestine File, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. 58. Stephen Spingarn Oral History Interview, August 9, 1971, Harry S. Truman

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Library, Independence, MO. 59. Acheson, Present at the Creation, 192. 60. Pemberton, Harry S. Truman, 56. 61. Neustadt quoted in Heller, Truman White House, 228. 62. “For the Sake of His Program and His Party... President Truman Should Withdraw,” The New Republic, February 4, 1952, 5. 63. “Jefferson-Jackson County Day Dinner,” New York Times, March 30, 1952. 64. Acheson, Present at the Creation, 729–30.

Works Cited

Acheson, Dean. Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966. Barth, Alan. Government by Investigation. New York: Viking Press, 1955. Benson, Michael T. Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. Bernstein, Barton J. “The Truman Administration and Its Reconversion Wage Policy.” Labor History 6 (Fall 1965): 214–31. Binder, Sarah A. “The Senate as Black Hole: Lessons Learned from the Judicial Appointments Experience.” In Mackenzie, Innocent Until Nominated, 173–95. Giglio, James N. Truman in Cartoon and Caricature. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2001. Heller, Francis H. The Truman White House: The Administration of the Presidency, 1945–1953. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1980. Lee, R. Alton. Truman and Taft-Hartley: A Question of Mandate. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1966. Lewis, David E. The Politics of Presidential Appointments: Political Control and Bureaucratic Performance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. Mackenzie, G. Calvin, ed. Innocent Until Nominated: The Breakdown of the Presidential Appointment Process. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2001. ———, and Robert Shogan. Obstacle Course: The Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Presidential Appointment Process. New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1996. McCullough, David. Truman. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992. Neustadt, Richard. “Presidency and Legislation: The Growth of Central Clearance.” American Political Science Review 48, no. 3 (1954): 641–71. Pemberton, William E. Harry S. Truman: Fair Dealer and Cold Warrior. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989. Phillips, Cabell B. H. The Truman Presidency: The History of a Triumphant Succession. New York: Macmillan, 1966. Reinhard, David W. The Republican Right since 1945. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983. Steinberg, Alfred. The Man from Missouri: The Life and Times of Harry S. Truman. New York: Putman, 1962. Thompson, Francis H. The Frustration of Politics: Truman, Congress, and the Loyalty Issue, 1945–1953. Cranbury, NY: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1979. Truman, Harry S. Memoirs. Vol. 1, Year of Decisions. Garden City, NY: Doubleday,



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1955. ———. Memoirs. Vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956. ———. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1948. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964. Vandenberg, Arthur H. The Private Papers of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952. Watson, Richard A. Presidential Vetoes and Public Policy. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993. Watson, Robert P., and Tom Lansford. “Rating the President’s Cabinet and Cabinet Officers.” PRG Report 27, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 2–11.

Newspapers and News Magazines Kansas City Times New Republic New York Times Washington Post

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Truman, Anticommunism, and Congress Robert David Johnson

In C-SPAN’s 2009 Presidential Leadership Survey, Harry Truman ranked fifth among the roster of the nation’s presidents, the same position he occupied in the original C-SPAN poll nine years before.1 Of the ten categories rated by C-SPAN’s panelists, however, Truman scored the worst in relations with Congress (sixteenth). That result repeated his lowest ranking from the 2000 poll.2 As several of the essays in this volume attest, this ranking is somewhat unfair. In many respects, historians have penalized Truman for proposing an ambitious domestic and international agenda to Congress—as opposed to the more limited programs of presidents such as Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, or Ronald Reagan, each of whom received higher evaluations on relations with Congress in the C-SPAN survey. But Truman’s own record of mishandling of congressional anti-Communist hysteria undoubtedly contributed to his poor ranking. McCarthyism, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and the McCarran Internal Security Act were decidedly low points in the history of Congress, and Truman’s administration was ineffective, at best, in resisting these legislative assaults on civil liberties. That said, Truman was operating from a position of weakness in addressing any legislative inquiry focused on the real or imagined threats posed by domestic communism. The Republican Party’s assuming control of both houses of Congress in 1947 coincided with major crises throughout non-Communist Europe. The president responded by requesting from Congress massive US assistance first to Greece and Turkey, and then to Western Europe. Without reliable support from members of his own party, 124



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especially in the Senate, Truman had little choice but to rationalize the request for aid as part of a worldwide anti-Communist crusade. In a famous White House meeting with congressional leaders, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson delivered an impassioned, dire prediction of Europe’s fate should the United States refuse to act.3 Framing foreign policy in starkly ideological terms ensured congressional approval for the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, but it left the administration ill-equipped to confront members of Congress determined to prosecute the Cold War at home as vigorously as Truman wished to do abroad. When Republicans regained control of Congress in the 1946 midterm elections, the likelihood of bipartisan cooperation on national security matters seemed slim. Indeed, based on the most recent past precedents, Congress, not the executive, appeared more likely to shape foreign policy in 1947 and 1948. After the 1918 midterm elections, the newly installed GOP majority leader and Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Henry Cabot Lodge Sr. (R-MA), used parliamentary maneuvers to ensure a lengthy delay before considering Woodrow Wilson’s work in Paris. By the time the president’s peace plan reached the Senate in autumn 1919, the Treaty of Versailles failed to manage even majority support.4 The next president to confront divided government, Herbert Hoover, likewise lost initiative on national security matters to Congress. With a coalition of Democrats and progressive Republicans exercising de facto control of the Senate, upper chamber opposition forced the administration to dramatically curtail US military ventures in the Caribbean Basin.5 In two respects Truman occupied an even worse position than Wilson or Hoover. First, like Wilson but unlike Hoover, the loss of congressional control by Truman’s political party was accompanied almost immediately by a major foreign policy crisis. On February 21, 1947, the British government announced that it no longer could provide assistance to the rightof-center Greek government. The Truman administration immediately offered financial aid for Greece and also for Turkey, which had recently refused a Soviet demand to cede territory on the nations’ joint border and allow Soviet bases on Turkish soil. But the State Department anticipated “grave difficulties in obtaining support from the economy-minded Congress,” especially since the administration wanted $150 million in military aid, $50 million in reconstruction assistance, and $100 million in economic aid to Greece; and $100 million in arms for Turkey.6 Unlike both Wilson and Hoover, Truman lacked reliable support from his own party—on national security matters, at least. Dean Acheson tartly observed that the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations

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Committee, Tom Connally (D-TX), “often does not understand what he is told.”7 (Once, when asked his opinion about Europe, Connally replied, “The plantations over there are very small”; on another occasion, the Texas senator claimed that the United States had fought Poland during World War II.8) Acheson entertained a similarly low opinion of the committee’s next ranking Democrat, Walter George (D-GA), and he dismissed another committee Democrat, Brien McMahon (D-CT), as the senator “who wants to fight a preventive war.”9 The committee Democrats’ most creative thinker, Claude Pepper (D-FL), was no administration ally: he would attempt a liberal coup against Truman in the run-up to the 1948 convention, and in any case hardly shared the president’s worldview. Newsweek dubbed the Florida senator “Red Pepper,” since “when Russia called, he rallied—and rallies again.”10 While Truman might have lacked the same level of party support as Wilson and Hoover, a key element of the opposition was more willing to cooperate with him than had occurred with his predecessors. Though most Republicans had embraced an isolationist foreign policy before World War II, some powerful Senate Republicans—led by Arthur Vandenberg (R-MI), who became Foreign Relations Committee chairman in 1947— now championed the idea of a bipartisan approach to international affairs. Truman welcomed the concept, though he privately defined it much differently than Vandenberg, as “simply saying that the president can repose confidence in the members of the other party and that in turn the leaders of the party have confidence in the President’s conduct of foreign affairs.”11 This Republican support, however, came with a price: to frame the European aid request in starkly ideological terms. Senator H. Alexander Smith (R-NJ), a key Vandenberg ally and a self-described “strong internationalist,” envisioned the Cold War as a contest of ideas between the United States and the USSR, since resisting Communist expansionism could not occur through an approach dominated by “balancing of power.”12 Another Vandenberg confidante, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. (R-MA), likewise pointed to traditional US internationalist and anticolonialist tenets as a way to distinguish the United States from the Soviets. (In this respect, the Massachusetts senator was as much an ideological heir of Woodrow Wilson as of his namesake.) Lodge maintained that pressure from Congress and especially the legislative opposition could force “the President to raise his sights” away from the particulars of party politics.13 Justifying Cold War foreign policy in a manner more consistent with promoting democracy, human rights, and self-determination distinguished Vandenberg, Lodge, and Smith not only from many Truman advisors but also from committee Democrats who backed the administration’s



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aid request. Brien McMahon typified the latter group; for the Connecticut senator, it made no “particular difference whether Turkey is a democracy, so long as she is resisting aggression.”14 With a specific type of pressure from the senators who controlled the fate of the Greek-Turkish aid bill, administration rhetoric unsurprisingly focused on portraying the decision to supply aid in starkly ideological terms hardly confined to the eastern Mediterranean. “One of the primary objectives of the foreign policy of the United States,” Truman explained in his request to Congress, “is the creation of conditions in which we and other nations will be able to work out a way of life free from coercion. This was a fundamental issue in the war with Germany and Japan … We shall not realize our objectives, however, unless we are willing to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggressive movements that seek to impose upon them totalitarian regimes. This is no more than a frank recognition that totalitarian regimes imposed on free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States.”15 Nor could the United States afford to wait. “At the present moment in world history,” the president declared, “nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.” And although Truman conceded the imperfections of Greek democracy, in his comparisons of the American and Soviet systems he offered no nuance: “One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.”16 The basic message was clear: “It must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” As “the free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms, if we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of this nation.”17 This rhetoric satisfied the demands of the Vandenberg group and politically outmaneuvered antispending, but fiercely anti-Communist, GOP conservatives. When both chambers easily approved the aid request, Carl Vinson (D-GA), the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, gloated that Truman’s legislative strategy had placed his right-wing critics in an untenable position: “They don’t like Russia, they don’t like communism,

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but they don’t want to do anything to stop it.”18 Vinson was right, but that same connection could work to the president’s detriment in his relations with Congress as well. With the Truman Doctrine positioning the crusade against communism as a vital national interest, it was hard to see cracking down against domestic Communists (and fellow travelers) was not as important as funneling aid to countries threatened by international communism. Alonzo Hamby has written that the president hoped to distinguish between the two concepts, since “Truman genuinely appreciated the civil libertarian tradition.” But, Hamby further noted, “he never came close to imposing his sentiments on key branches of his administration.”19 In the short term, the administration’s rhetoric minimized the chances that Truman (or anyone in Congress, for that matter) could effectively raise civil liberties concerns in response to even the most radical of schemes to combat the threat posed by domestic communism. The need for a more forceful response against domestic communism already had emerged as an issue before the Truman Doctrine was announced. In September 1945, the high-profile defection of Soviet diplomat Igor Gouzenko exposed a massive Soviet spy ring in Canada. During the 1946 campaign, Republicans had recognized the potency of the issue as a way to discredit liberalism and Truman’s domestic agenda. Representative Clare Hoffmann (R-MI) charged that “the New Deal, and more recently, the Truman Administration, has been coddling Communists who, in federal positions, thrive on taxpayers’ dollars.”20 Former President Hoover, equally bombastic, declared, “during the past five years, American Communists have made their deepest inroads upon our national life.”21 In 1947 and 1948, Republicans implemented their promises of a more vigorous response to the domestic Communist threat primarily through the efforts of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). At first, Truman not incorrectly criticized HUAC from a civil liberties angle, dismissing the committee as “more un-American than the activities it is investigating.”22 But Republicans on the committee demonstrated a keen ability to attract public attention. Benefiting from behind-the-scenes assistance from FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Chairman J. Parnell Thomas (R-NJ) oversaw a high-profile inquiry into Communist influence in the film industry, which featured such well-known, and cooperative, witnesses as Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan and Walt Disney.23 In a more direct attack on the administration’s foreign policy, HUAC freshman Richard Nixon (R-CA) drew upon the testimony of a former Communist, Whittaker Chambers, to level spectacular allegations that Alger Hiss, a former State Department and UN official, had spied for the Soviet Union.



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In a comment that reflected the Capitol’s pro-Hiss conventional wisdom, Mary Spargo, a reporter for the Washington Post, told Nixon, “This case is going to kill the Committee unless you can prove Chambers’ story.”24 Truman badly misjudged both the political and the substantive effects of the Hiss inquiry. The president initially (and publicly) dismissed the Hiss hearings as a “red herring,” characteristic of how the GOP “Do-Nothing Congress” operated in general. But as the hearings proceeded, Hiss’s credibility took a hit: his initial denial about knowing Chambers gave way, in a televised hearing, to an admission that he actually knew Chambers under an assumed name. A Gallup poll taken shortly after Hiss’s concession showed that four in five Americans approved of the HUAC’s inquiry into the Hiss/Chambers affair. Truman’s interpretation was rejected even by most members of his own party: 71 percent of Democrats believed that there was “something to these spy investigations,” not a “case of playing politics.”25 Nixon used the momentum from the Hiss hearings to join Senator Karl Mundt (R-SD) in cosponsoring a bill requiring the registration of Communists in the United States and barring them from holding office. Mundt-Nixon, ironically, was a moderate alternative to a bill declaring belonging to the Communist Party a treasonable act. A few senators aggressively countered the bill: William Langer (R-ND) termed MundtNixon “the greatest threat to American civil liberties since the Alien and Sedition laws of 1798.”26 But Truman, perhaps chastened by the failure of his initial line of attack against HUAC, chose a more moderate response, promising to veto the bill on grounds of expediency. The president contended that the measure’s registration requirement would only hamper the effort to detect and crack down on Communist influence in American life. The bill stalled as the 1948 election season intensified, although it would reemerge, in more intense form, two years later. Truman’s upset victory in 1948 did nothing to temper growing antiCommunist fervor in Congress. Republicans, surprised and embittered by the result, increasingly employed Red-baiting as a way to regain power. Moreover, HUAC’s record proved, if nothing else, that ambitious members of Congress could exploit anti-Communist sentiment to advance their own careers. For instance, in spring 1949, Senator Brien McMahon (D-CT) saw the issue as a way to revive flagging public attention for his Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), which had launched to great fanfare but whose role had atrophied under the previous two years of Republican control. McMahon took advantage when the committee’s ranking Republican, Bourke Hickenlooper (R-IA), charged Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)

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chairman David Lilienthal with “incredible mismanagement,” “misplaced emphasis,” and “maladministration.”27 The chair promptly convened hearings on allegations that virtually everyone in Washington considered spurious. Hickenlooper’s subsequent performance was an embarrassment—he claimed not to have known the date when the hearings were supposed to start, demanded freedom to ask all of his questions before any other committee member could speak, and pressed Lilienthal to address spurious allegations of disloyalty from AEC employees whom the Iowa senator identified by their initials.28 Despite the Iowan’s behavior, McMahon ignored pleas to shut down the hearings—the JCAE was once again frontpage news—and the administration declined to frontally challenge the Connecticut senator. Lilienthal was left to fume privately about the joint committee’s “angry, scared, ugly” atmosphere, distorted by McMahon’s efforts to “increase the prestige and power of his committee and of himself.”29 While Truman and his advisors did their best to pacify McMahon, they pursued a policy of clear-cut opposition to the loudest of the antiCommunist demagogues, Joseph McCarthy (R-WI). Yet this opposition failed to stop McCarthy’s rise—even though, ironically, McCarthy’s actions provided the administration’s best chance for creating a bipartisan coalition to beat back congressional anti-Communist extremism. More than three years after his election, the Wisconsin senator had registered almost no impact in the upper chamber—until, in a Wheeling, West Virginia, address on February 9, 1950, he claimed to possess a list of 205 known Communists working for the State Department. By the time of a Reno, Nevada, speech two days later, the number had been narrowed to 57 card-carrying Communists, with 205 “bad risks.” On February 20, McCarthy repeated many of these charges on the Senate floor, mostly using discredited material from earlier HUAC investigations.30 McCarthy’s emergence could not have come at a worse time for the administration. On January 25, 1950, a New York federal jury convicted Alger Hiss on two counts of perjury, for having lied about spying for the Soviet Union. Asked for comment, Dean Acheson, a longtime friend of Hiss, famously affirmed, “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.” Republicans pounced on the remark. Nixon fumed, “This conspiracy would have come to light long since had there not been a definite … effort on the part of certain high officials in two Administrations to keep the public from knowing the facts.” Mundt called for an inquiry into what he termed Hiss’s “profound” influence at the 1945 Yalta conference, and joined Nixon in demanding that Acheson submit his resignation.31 A few days later, news broke that a German émigré scientist, Klaus Fuchs, had



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confessed to passing along atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Hoping to defuse McCarthy’s explosive allegations, Senate majority leader Scott Lucas (D-IL) referred the matter to the Foreign Relations Committee. But the committee struggled to determine how to proceed. Connally delegated the problem to a special subcommittee, with McMahon, Millard Tydings (D-MD), and Theodore Francis Green (D-RI) to represent the majority, Lodge and Hickenlooper the minority. The full committee failed to draw up a specific charge, and the first subcommittee meeting fared little better.32 McCarthy declined to supply the subcommittee with the names of the alleged Communists in the State Department’s ranks, claiming that the administration should instead release to Congress its federal loyalty files, which Truman refused to do.33 Since most anticipated that the ultraconservative Hickenlooper would sustain McCarthy’s allegations and the three Democrats would deny them, the panel’s fate rested in the hands of Lodge. If the Massachusetts senator joined Hickenlooper in dissent, the inquiry could be dismissed as a partisan Democratic effort to silence McCarthy. If, on the other hand, Lodge sided with committee Democrats and signed a report condemning McCarthy, it was possible that the inquiry could emerge as an institutional check on the Wisconsin senator’s recklessness. Good reason existed to believe that Lodge might be open to appeal for bipartisanship. In the months before and during the Foreign Relations Committee investigation of McCarthy, Lodge had been the subject of aggressive courting from the administration. In a series of confidential, personal meetings with Lodge that Acheson—by this point secretary of state—himself requested, Acheson offered to take Lodge into his confidence and have him function as the administration’s de facto Senate leader on foreign policy issues.34 The Massachusetts senator seemed interested, despite the political risks: as he later admitted, his goal in politics was “to take sides on the big questions of the day and try to be effective with regard to them.”35 Throughout early and mid-1950, the two men met regularly, cognizant that Senate Democrats’ nominal leader on foreign policy issues, Connally, “would probably have a fit if he discovered.”36 In the end, Lodge went with his party. Two days before Hickenlooper attributed the outbreak of the Korean conflict to State Department Communists, the Tydings subcommittee issued a report accusing McCarthy of perpetrating a “fraud and a hoax” and dismissing his allegations as deliberate falsehoods. Hickenlooper, as expected, dissented. But Lodge, despite rumors that he would sign with the majority, instead issued “individual views,” criticizing the investigation’s “superficial and inconclusive” nature.37 Perhaps a bipartisan report would not have restrained

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McCarthy in any meaningful way. But such a document might have provided an impetus for more aggressive action, such as censure—which was, after all, the mechanism that eventually deflated McCarthy’s power.38 While the administration’s ability to constrain McCarthyism at an early stage was caused primarily by Lodge’s political cowardice, the president missed another opportunity to strike a blow against anti-Communist congressional demagoguery. And in this instance, Truman could not deflect blame. Indeed, he placed the politics of personal pique ahead of his distaste for political Red-baiting. The occasion was the 1950 Senate race in Florida. In the Sunshine State, Representative George Smathers challenged incumbent Claude Pepper’s renomination. Smathers did not attempt to hide his anti-Communist demagoguery: he charged that “the leader of the radicals and extremists is now on trial in Florida,” and he ruthlessly exploited Pepper’s 1946 remark that Americans should pray for Joseph Stalin’s good health.39 Support from business interests hostile to Pepper’s New Deal philosophy and covert backing from the president, who privately called Pepper a “publicity hound” and recalled the senator’s flirtation with the dump-Truman effort in 1948, gave Smathers a ten-to-one financial advantage.40 These funds paid for a campaign that asked voters to retire “Red Pepper,” so that “Florida will not allow herself to become entangled in the spiraling web of the Red network.”41 Smathers won easily. The historian Allen Weinstein has observed that by 1950, “Truman had become a hostage to the internal-security monster.”42 No figure was better poised to exploit the development than Senator Pat McCarran (D-NV). Though McCarthyism and the HUAC remain the best-known instruments of this effort, the most important legislative player was McCarran, who returned to the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee after Democrats reclaimed Senate control in 1948. The committee, to which 40 percent of the bills in the 81st Congress were referred and which longtime Lyndon Johnson aide George Reedy described as “an independent empire under McCarran’s jurisdiction,” provided a perfect forum for a crusade to stifle internal dissent.43 In 1950, Time labeled “the silver-haired spokesman of the silver bloc” one of the worst members of the Senate.44 With a visceral dislike for the president from their time together as senators (McCarran termed his former colleague “not a senator” at all, citing Truman’s ties to the Pendergast machine in Missouri) and a reactionary worldview, McCarran occupied the right-wing fringe of Democratic thought during the late 1940s.45 By far the most conservative Senate Democrat from outside the South, McCarran built his influence by placing supporters in various executive agencies and



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through the operations of his staff, described by one writer as “the finest intelligence service on Capitol Hill.”46 McCarran detected Communist threats in virtually every issue that appeared on his committee’s docket. For instance, he opposed loosening immigration restrictions to allow more refugees into the United States lest doing so threaten to “have every Communist and undesirable from every country in the world swarming to these shores.”47 (One Judiciary Committee hearing on the matter turned so stormy that the Capitol Police had to be summoned to restore order.) When all else failed, McCarran beseeched divine intervention, concluding that on immigration policy, the United States needed “God’s help to guide us and show us the right way to win over the dark and sinister planning of our enemies.”48 Majority Leader Lucas complained that McCarran “has tried to take over foreign relations, the judiciary, and a large field of domestic policy.”49 The Nevada senator responded that he could not be blamed for the fact that internal subversion was “the most dangerous thing we have to deal with.”50 Armed with this conviction, McCarran set to work on passing comprehensive internal security legislation. Combining the provisions of the thirty-two internal security bills already before the Congress, the McCarran Internal Security Act required that all Communists within the United States register, after which they could not work in defense or military-related jobs; that groups listed as “Communist front” organizations reveal all sources of their funds and the names of their members; and that all literature published by such groups be labeled “Communist in origin.” Its sponsor described the bill as “possibly more important to the future of this country than any other single action this Congress can take at this time.”51 With the wily McCarran assuming management of internal security legislation from the less skilled parliamentarians Mundt and Nixon, chances of passage dramatically increased. The chairman encountered little resistance within his committee. Outdoing his Nevada colleague in Red-baiting, James Eastland (D-MI) attributed the growth in postwar Soviet power to the following: “There is in the city of Washington somebody high in this Government with great power that is aligned with the Communist movement.”52 The Mississippi senator concentrated on exposing the “tremendous Red influence in the city of New York,” mostly by badgering witnesses who invoked due process protections and accusing the American Civil Liberties Union of advocating the violent overthrow of the US government.53 On the committee, only maverick William Langer unequivocally opposed what he termed “the product of hysteria and frantic, unthinking fear.”54 Surveying the Senate situation in the summer of 1950, White House aides concluded that the administration could not “beat something with

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nothing.”55 If Truman wanted to rebuff the McCarran Act, however, he received little practical assistance from Senate liberals, who developed a bizarre scheme to block the legislation by proposing a more extreme alternative. Senators Paul Douglas (D-IL) and Harley Kilgore (D-WV) cosponsored a measure to authorize the president to make emergency detentions in the name of “internal security,” which Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) boasted made the McCarran bill a “cream-puff special” in comparison. Humphrey justified the Douglas-Kilgore proposal on the grounds that “we are not living in a perfect world, and … when there is a real menace to our internal security, we must be able to act with speed and certainty.”56 With Douglas-Kilgore as the chief alternative, it came as little surprise that both the House and Senate overwhelmingly passed the McCarran Act. Langer, fighting the bill to the end, collapsed on the Senate floor in a last-minute address; but most Senate liberals—including Humphrey, Douglas, and William Benton (D-CT) voted for the bill. (Benton recalled, “my vote for the McCarran bill troubled me more than any vote I made during my entire period in the Senate.”57) Yet cynicism about the measure’s intent existed even among McCarran’s like-minded colleagues. Time’s John Steele noted that he “was amazed in talking privately to a number of conservative senators—both Republicans and Democrats—that they voted with tongue-in-cheek for it and with a lot of reluctance.”58 One White House aide counseled that signing the measure “would represent an action of moral appeasement on a matter of highest principle,” and the president fully agreed.59 Truman’s veto message made pragmatic arguments against the bill, contending that it “would actually weaken our existing internal security measures” and even “help the Communists to create dissension and confusion within our borders.” Truman dismissed McCarran’s requirement that Communists register with the government as “about as practical as requiring thieves to register with the sheriff.” And what, the president wondered, would occur if Communists failed to register? Hearings to compel registration would require disclosure of confidential law enforcement information, and could distract government personnel and resources from meeting the more immediate Communist threat.60 Truman added to these practical concerns his most vociferous statement to date about “clear and present danger to our institutions” posted by congressional anti-Communist witch hunts. He conceded that he had no intellectual problem with requiring Communists to register. But— echoing the argument offered by Langer against both Mundt-Nixon and the McCarran Act—the “application of the registration requirement to so-called Communist front organizations can be the greatest danger to freedom of speech, press, and assembly, since the Alien and Sedition



Truman, Anticommunism, & Congress

Laws of 1798.” The bill, Truman contended, was far too broad—in theory, an organization advocating “low-cost housing” could be classified a Communist front group because its position overlapped with that of the CPUSA on that one issue. “It is not enough,” Truman maintained, “to say this probably would not be done”—the measure needed to be rewritten or withdrawn. In general, the president believed that “the basic error of these sections is that they move in the direction of suppressing thought and belief,” which posed a long-term threat to the US position in the Cold War, since “any government stifling of the free expression of ideas is a long step toward totalitarianism.” Truman concluded with a ringing admonition: “We will destroy all that we seek to preserve if we sacrifice the liberties of our citizens in a misguided attempt to achieve national security.”61 In the House, Speaker Sam Rayburn (D-TX) had to plead for quiet amidst the tumult that greeted the president’s veto, which the lower chamber overrode within one hour, by a two hundred-vote margin. (Only fortyeight members voted to sustain the veto.) Liberals in the Senate launched a thirty-hour filibuster, but the final outcome was never in doubt, as the Senate overrode the veto fifty-seven to ten.62 Margaret Truman recalled the vote as “one of the most distressing political defeats my father ever suffered.” The London Times more sharply termed the measure “one of the most stupid and unworkable laws ever passed by a democratic legislature.”63 Regardless of its intellectual merit, the McCarran Act captured the popular mood as the 1950 midterm elections approached. Republicans gained five seats in the Senate, reducing the Democratic edge in the upper chamber to two seats. The three highest-profile contests confirmed the potency of the anti-Communist message. Majority Leader Scott Lucas lost by eight points to former congressman Everett Dirksen. In Maryland, Millard Tydings, who had chaired the inquiry into McCarthy’s behavior, was bitterly attacked as soft on communism, and lost his seat to a nondescript Republican, John Butler. California, where Sheridan Downey, a conservative Democrat, had retired, featured the starkest ideological divide of any Senate election in the country. Democrats nominated Helen Gahagan Douglas, a former actress who as a member of the House of Representatives had cast one of the few votes against the McCarran Act. Republicans chose the lower chamber’s highest-profile anti-Communists, Richard Nixon. In an unusually dirty campaign, Republicans portrayed Douglas as “pink down to her underwear,” and Nixon triumphed by nearly 20 percentage points.64 The new political climate all but eliminated any chance of the administration constraining Senate extremism. The upper chamber’s most aggressive anti-Communists dominated legislative affairs as a result. Throughout

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the 82nd Congress, McCarran focused his efforts on the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS)—a newly created subcommittee endowed with what the Nevada senator, who named himself chair, “candidly” termed “very broad” authority.65 (FBI director J. Edgar Hoover helped out: by the end of 1951, Hoover assigned twenty agents to work on the subcommittee’s behalf.66) Functioning as a Senate counterpart to HUAC, McCarran’s SISS conducted hearings on immigration law, Communist propaganda, the activities of UN employees, the Voice of America, and alleged Communist influence in various industries and unions. The highest profile of these investigations, which lasted almost eight months, involved the Institute for Pacific Relations (IPR); the New York Times described the inquiry as undermining “the traditional American belief in freedom of thought.”67 McCarran’s equating communism with “this thing of ‘liberalism’ and ‘liberals’” reinforced his thesis that the IPR was “used as a façade for Communists operating shrewdly behind the scenes.”68 But “for the machinations of the small group that controlled and activated the Institute of Pacific Relations,” the Nevada senator concluded, “China today would be free and a bulwark against a further advance of the Red Hordes into the Far East.”69 The Truman administration and its Senate supporters had no real response to McCarran. In summer 1952, the Washington Post conceded the obvious: “It sums up the character of this Congress to state an unquestionable fact: that its most important member was Patrick A. McCarran.” 70 McCarran’s power also serves as a fitting testimony to Truman’s weak record on dealing with congressional efforts to purge domestic Communists.

Notes

1. C-SPAN 2009 Historians Presidential Leadership Survey (http://legacy.c-span .org/PresidentialSurvey/presidential-leadership-survey.aspx). 2. C-SPAN 2009 Historians Presidential Leadership Survey: Historian Survey Results, Harry S. Truman (http://legacy.c-span.org/PresidentialSurvey/president/Harry_S_Truman .aspx). 3. Hartmann, Truman and the 80th Congress, 57. 4. Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition; and Widenor, Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy. 5. Johnson, Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations, 163–80. 6. Loy Henderson to Dean Acheson, n.d., copy in FRUS 1947, 5:52; and “Truman Acts to Save Nations from Red Rule,” New York Times, March 13, 1947. 7. Henry Cabot Lodge Confidential Journal, entry for January 18, 1950, Reel 17, Lodge Papers. 8. ESSFRC 3.2.87 (August 20, 1951); and “U.S. Senate Losing a Character,” The Times (London), April 16, 1952. 9. Acheson, Sketches from Life of Men I Have Known, 141–42; and Lodge Confidential Journal, entry for January 18, 1950, Reel 17, Lodge Papers. 10. “National Affairs,” Newsweek, April 7, 1947.



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11. Berger, “Bipartisanship, Senator Taft, and the Truman Administration,” 225. 12. H. Alexander Smith to Arthur Vandenberg Jr., December 14, 1951, Box 104, and Smith diary entry, March 3, 1947, Box 281, both in Smith Papers. 13. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., “Lodge Defines Minority Role,” New York Times Magazine, September 17, 1950. 14. US Senate, Foreign Relations Committee, Hearings, Assistance to Greece and Turkey, 80th Cong., 1st sess., p. 22 (March 24, 1947); and 93 Cong, Rec. 3763 (April 22, 1947). 15. “Special Message to the Congress on Greece and Turkey,” March 12, 1947, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1947, 178. 16. Ibid., 178. 17. Ibid., 180. 18. Pach, Arming the Free World, 115. 19. Hamby, Man of the People, 569. 20. Tanner and Griffith, “Legislative Politics and ‘McCarthyism,’” 175. 21. Ibid., 178. 22. Hogan, Cross of Iron, 256. 23. US House of Representatives, Un-American Activities Committee, Hearings, Regarding the Communist Infiltration of the Motion Picture Industry, 80th Cong., 1st sess., pp. 283–84 (October 24, 1947). 24. Nixon, Six Crises, 9–10. 25. Weinstein, Perjury, 51. 26. 96 Cong. Rec. 14320 (September 7, 1950). 27. Bourke Hickenlooper to Charles Coryell, August 16, 1949, Box 16, JCAE Series, Hickenlooper Papers; and Washington Post, June 3, 1949. 28. US Congress, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Hearings, Investigation into the United States Atomic Energy Project, 81st Cong., 1st sess., p. 33 (June 1, 1949), p. 109 (June 3, 1949). 29. Lilienthal, Journals, vol. 2, Atomic Energy Years, entries for June 4, 1949 (p. 539) and July 18, 1949 (p. 545). 30. 96 Cong. Rec., 81st Cong., 2nd sess., pp. 1953–80 (February 20, 1950). 31. Weinstein, Perjury, 450–53. 32. ESSFRC, 2:218 (February 27, 1950). 33. Ibid., 2:238. 34. Lodge Confidential Journal, entry for January 18, 1950, Reel 17, Lodge Papers. 35. Lodge to George Cabot Lodge, December 31, 1963, Box 32, Lodge Papers. 36. Lodge Confidential Journal, entry for January 18, 1950, Reel 17, Lodge Papers. 37. “Red Charges by McCarthy Ruled False,” New York Times, July 18, 1950. 38. Griffith, Politics of Fear, 116. 39. Crispell, Testing the Limits, 39, 49. 40. Ibid., 40; and Pepper and Gorey, Pepper, 196. 41. Pepper and Gorey, Pepper, 198. 42. Weinstein, Perjury, 450. 43. Steinberg, “McCarran: Lone Wolf of the Senate”; and Reedy, U.S. Senate, 135. 44. “National Affairs: The Senate’s Most Expendable,” Time, March 20, 1950; and Edwards, Pat McCarran. 45. McCullough, Truman, 214; and Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy, 370–72. 46. Steinberg, “McCarran: Lone Wolf of the Senate.” 47. Pat McCarran to William Byrne, February 16, 1950, Series IV, Box 51, McCarran Papers; and Washington Post, March 17, 1950. 48. Pat McCarran to J. C. Rice, February 22, 1950, Series IV, Box 51, McCarran Papers. 49. Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy, 433. 50. Pat McCarran to Philip Harper, July 11, 1950, and Pat McCarran to Stephen

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Chess, July 31, 1950, both in Series IV, Box 51, McCarran Papers. 51. Pat McCarran to Tom Miller, September 13, 1950, Series IV, Box 51, McCarran Papers; and “Red Control Bill Fought,” New York Times, August 29, 1950. 52. US Senate, Subcommittee on S. 1194 and S. 1196, Hearings, Control of Subversive Activities, 81st Cong., 1st sess., p. 53 (May 4, 1949). 53. Ibid., pp. 54, 69 (May 4, 1949), p. 104 (May 6, 1949). 54. 96 Cong. Rec. 14319–20 (September 7, 1950). 55. Tanner and Griffith, “Legislative Politics and McCarthyism,” 182. 56. 96 Cong. Rec. 14472 (September 11, 1950). 57. William Benton to Francis Biddle, November 7, 1950, Box 34, Legislative Files, Americans for Democratic Action Papers. 58. John Steele to Arthur Vandenberg, September 27, 1950, Roll 5, Correspondence Series, Vandenberg Papers. 59. Stephen Spingarn, “Memorandum for the Files,” July 22, 1950, and Spingarn memorandum, September 20, 1950, both in Box 1, National Defense, Spingarn Papers. 60. Truman, “Veto of the Internal Security Bill,” September 22, 1950, quoted in Schrecker, Age of McCarthyism, 218–20. 61. Ibid. 62. Tanner and Griffith, “Legislative Politics and McCarthyism,” 187. 63. Hunter and Bainbridge, American Gunfight, 11; and The Times (London), September 23, 1950. 64. Mitchell, Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady, 170. 65. US Senate, Internal Security Subcommittee, Hearings, Communist Domination of Union Officials in Vital Defense Industry, 82nd Cong., 2nd sess., p. 1 (October 6, 1952). 66. Ybarra, Washington Gone Crazy, 547; and Gerard, “On the Road to Vietnam,” 251. 67. New York Times, March 15, 1952. 68. Pat McCarran to L. E. McCoy, July 29, 1950, Series IV, Box 51, McCarran Papers; and US Senate, Internal Security Subcommittee, Hearings, Institute of Pacific Relations, 82nd Cong., 2nd sess., p. 5 (July 25, 1951). 69. New York Times, July 3, 1952. 70. Washington Post, July 10, 1952.

Works Cited

Acheson, Dean. Sketches from Life of Men I Have Known. New York: Harper, 1961. Ambrosius, Lloyd. Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Berger, Henry. “Bipartisanship, Senator Taft, and the Truman Administration.” Political Science Quarterly 90 (Summer 1975). Crispell, Brian. Testing the Limits: George Armistead Smathers and Cold War America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. Edwards, Jerome. Pat McCarran: Political Boss of Nevada. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1982. Gerard, Christopher. “On the Road to Vietnam: ‘The Loss of China Syndrome’: Pat McCarran and J. Edgar Hoover.” Nevada Historical Society Quarterly 37 (1994): 187–204. Griffith, Robert. The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate, 2nd ed. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Hamby, Alonzo. Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.



Truman, Anticommunism, & Congress

Hartmann, Susan. Truman and the 80th Congress. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971. Hogan, Michael A. Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Hunter, Stephen and John Bainbridge, Jr., American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill President Truman—And the Shoot-Out that Stopped It. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005. Johnson, Robert David. The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Lilienthal, David. Journals of David Lilienthal. Vol. 2, The Atomic Energy Years. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. McCullough, David. Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Mitchell, Greg. Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas: Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950. New York: Random House, 1998. Nixon, Richard. Six Crises. New York: Doubleday, 1962. Pach, Chester. Arming the Free World: The Origins of the United States Military Assistance Program, 1945–1950. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Pepper, Claude, and Hays Gorey. Pepper: Eyewitness to a Century. New York: Harcourt, 1987. Reedy, George. The U.S. Senate: Paralysis or a Search for Consensus? New York: Crown, 1986. Schrecker, Ellen ed. The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Steinberg, Alfred. “McCarran: Lone Wolf of the Senate.” Harper’s Magazine, November 1950. Tanner, William and Robert Griffith. “Legislative Politics and ‘McCarthyism’: The Internal Security Act of 1950.” In The Specter: Original Essays on the Cold War and the Origins of McCarthyism, edited by Griffith and Athan Theoharis, 172–89. New York: Franklin Watts, 1974. Truman, Harry S. Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S. Truman, 1947. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1963. Weinstein, Allen. Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, 2nd ed. New York: Random House, 1997. Widenor, William. Henry Cabot Lodge and the Search for an American Foreign Policy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Ybarra, Michael. Washington Gone Crazy: Senator Pat McCarran and the Great American Communist Hunt. Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2004.

Abbreviations

Cong. Rec. Congressional Record, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. ESSFRC Executive Sessions of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (Historical Series). Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office. FRUS US State Department. Foreign Relations of the United States. Washington, DC: US Department of State.

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Newspapers and News Magazines Harper’s New York Times New York Times Magazine Newsweek Time Times (London) Washington Post

Archival Collections

Americans for Democratic Action Papers. Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. Hickenlooper Papers Bourke Hickenlooper Papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, IA. Lodge Papers Henry Cabot Lodge II Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. McCarran Papers Pat McCarran Papers. Nevada Historical Society, Reno. Smith Papers Alexander Smith Papers, Mudd Library, Princeton University. Spingarn Papers Stephen Spingarn Papers, Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. Vandenberg Papers Arthur Vandenberg Papers. W. L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Foreign and Military Policy

Winning Bipartisan Support for a New Approach to the World Truman, Foreign Policy, and the Eightieth Congress Susan M. Hartmann

“I always kept in mind the lesson of Wilson’s failure in 1920,” Harry Truman wrote in his memoirs, referring to the Senate’s rejection of the Treaty of Versailles and refusal to join the League of Nations. Truman believed that if Woodrow Wilson had taken Senate leaders into his confidence and been sensitive “to the feelings on Capitol Hill,” he might have won congressional support for his foreign policy. For his part, Truman approached post–World War II foreign policy with the determination “to work in close co-operation with Congress and … to avoid the mistakes which had led to the disillusionment of the American people” after World War I. A great believer in the lessons that one could learn from history, Truman studied Wilson’s writings and speeches and examined the Senate debate on the Versailles Treaty: “I meant to have legislative co-operation,” he averred.1 In these accounts of his determination to avoid Wilson’s failure, Truman referred principally to the creation of the United Nations. He had agreed with Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to include ranking Republicans on the House and Senate Foreign Relations Committees in the delegation to the UN conference in San Francisco in 1945, and as president he met with them to discuss plans for the new international body. In addition, Truman appointed key Republicans to the delegations that negotiated peace treaties with Italy and Japan and created the Organization of 143

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American States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Their presence at the negotiating table not only gave these Republican leaders a voice while the policy was being made, it also gave them a huge investment in gaining ratification by the Senate. Moreover, Republican participation in negotiating the treaties lent credibility to the documents in the eyes of the Republicans who would vote on them. Treaty making was just one element in the transformation of US foreign policy during the Truman years. The president also sought approval for the very first legislation of the Cold War, establishing the instruments of a containment policy that would define US foreign policy for the next forty years. The decisions that Congress ratified in extending aid to Greece and Turkey and in authorizing and funding the Marshall Plan represented a sharp break with the past, marking the beginning of a permanent global involvement that required vast and continuous military commitments unimaginable before the 1940s. While he armed himself with the lessons from history, Truman knew that he faced stiff obstacles as he took the steps toward a fundamental reorientation of the relationship between the United States and the world. As World War II ended, the general public, as well as servicemen themselves, clamored for rapid demobilization and an end to wartime controls. In public opinion polls, Americans placed international issues far down on their list of pressing concerns. The war left an enormous debt along with severe domestic problems of inflation, shortages, and labor strife. Much of the public was either indifferent to foreign affairs or wary about their nation continuing to invest human and material resources far from its shores.2 Above all, persuading Congress became much more difficult after the 1946 elections. Republican campaign slogans asked “Had Enough?” and jeered “To Err is Truman.” Their capture of a majority of seats in Congress suggested a tremendous repudiation of Truman and his party. Gaining a 245 to 188 margin in the House and outnumbering Senate democrats by 51 to 45, Republicans looked on the election as the first step to regaining the White House in 1948.3 Reflecting voters’ priorities, the election campaigns focused on domestic issues—inflation, shortages of food, housing and other goods, remaining wartime controls, and strikes and other labor problems.4 When Republicans did appeal to anxieties about national security, they spotlighted internal subversion—in the words of the Republican National Committee, the “infiltration of alien-minded radicals” into high positions in the federal government.5 Moreover, two Republican themes, prominent in the 1946 campaigns and rooted in conservative ideology, posed major problems for the Truman administration in selling a new foreign policy.

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First, Republicans were horrified at the expansion of executive powers under Roosevelt. They wanted to preserve representative government and individual freedom by reasserting Congress’s authority. Second, to bolster free enterprise and the private sector, Republicans demanded tax cuts and drastic reductions in federal spending.6 Funding for any foreign initiatives would require support from the House Appropriations Committee chaired by John Taber (R-NY)—nicknamed “Meat Axe”—who promised to use a “sledge hammer” to the administration’s budget.7 Truman also had to worry about potential defections from his own party. Conservative Southern Democrats, such as Harry Byrd of Virginia and Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, agreed with Republicans on the need to slash federal spending. On the left, legislators such as Claude Pepper of Florida and Glen Taylor of Idaho, believed with Henry Wallace (the secretary of commerce whom Truman had pushed out of the cabinet because of his foreign policy views) that the hardening of US policy in 1946 and its insensitivity to the Soviet Union’s genuine security needs were poisoning superpower relations. Leftists were also concerned about the potential of US actions to undermine the United Nations and to violate American values by shoring up European empires and supporting undemocratic and repressive regimes abroad.8 A public largely apathetic about America’s relations with the world; a recent repudiation by the electorate; a Congress dominated by Republicans who had been chafing to shrink government and taxes and regain the presidency for more than a decade; and an incohesive Democratic party—these formed the setting in which Truman engineered the greatest change in the history of US foreign policy.

Gaining Congressional Support The new Republican majority in Congress was sworn in just as the administration was reaching near consensus on the need to take the decisive step of replacing Britain as the guarantor of Greek and Turkish security. In 1946 the Soviet expert and diplomat George Kennan had circulated his famous Long Telegram calling for a policy of “containment” and Winston Churchill had delivered his Iron Curtain Speech calling for an Anglo-American effort to stop Soviet expansion. The United States had exercised its diplomatic power and a show of military force to deflect Soviet pressures on Iran and Turkey, but these actions did not require congressional approval. Then in February 1947 Britain formally announced that it could no longer provide military and economic support to the governments in Turkey and Greece. Turkey was striving to strengthen its military as well as resisting pressures

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from the Soviet Union for control over the Dardanelles Strait, the crucial link between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Greece was struggling to recover from the harsh Nazi occupation, and its repressive monarchist government faced an insurgency that contained a strong Communist contingent. The strategic importance of the Turkish strait and the threat of a leftist takeover in Greece, in the context of Soviet expansion since the end of the war, pushed the administration to act quickly to the British announcement. Officials decided to ask Congress for $400 million of aid ($3.8 billion in 2009 dollars) for the two countries, accompanied by US military and economic missions to oversee the assistance. Three principal strategies characterized the administration’s efforts to gain congressional support for aid to Greece and Turkey: they talked about the issue in ways that evoked a crisis, an ideological war for the very soul of America; they stressed the need for bipartisanship in foreign policy; and they adapted legislation to congressional concerns when such concessions did not threaten the administration’s overall goal. In framing the Greek-Turkish situation in alarming terms, administration officials emphasized the Communist threat both to the physical security of the United States and to American values. While evidence is lacking for the oft-told story that Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg (R-MI) warned Truman that he would have to “scare hell” out of the public to obtain support, State Department officials had already begun to talk about the situations in Greece and Turkey in crisis terms.9 Moreover, Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, who played a key role in obtaining congressional approval while his boss, George C. Marshall, was attending a conference of foreign ministers in Moscow, remembered his efforts to win congressional approval for a large British loan in 1946. Acheson believed his case for the loan on the grounds of American economic self-interest had fallen on deaf ears; much more persuasive was his argument that the loan would help Britain withstand a Communist takeover.10 That experience reinforced Acheson’s own inclination to view the situation in the Mediterranean in crisis terms necessitating US action to save not only Greece, but ultimately itself, from the Communist threat. The administration’s stark portrayal of an emergency, then, played to the theme of anticommunism already raised by the Republicans. To be sure, Republican anticommunism focused on the need to counter domestic subversion. Nonetheless, by stressing the threat of communism to the nation’s security, Republicans found it much more difficult to oppose a foreign policy based on containing the Soviet Union. The State Department devoted enormous energy in drafting the speech Truman would personally deliver to Congress, an action that in itself

Winning Bipartisan Support for a New Approach to the World

heightened the sense of crisis. Simultaneously, officials held background briefings for the press, which gave the administration the opportunity to frame the issue before opposition could arise and before alternative readings of the situation could emerge.11 As his speech progressed through the drafting process, Truman overruled objections from Secretary of State George Marshall and George Kennan who wanted the administration to tone down what they considered an overemphasis on communism and to narrow the sweeping nature of the policy he proposed. “I wanted no hedging in this speech,” the president later recalled. “This was America’s answer to the surge of expansion of Communist tyranny.”12 Consequently, Truman’s speech framed the issue in terms of a battle between two ways of life, communism and totalitarianism on the one hand and freedom and representative government on the other. Failure of Congress to act, he warned, would spread totalitarianism and instability throughout the Middle East and into Western Europe and “endanger the welfare” of the United States. And, in what would be termed the Truman Doctrine, the president insisted that the United States should “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”13 A second administration strategy to sell Greek-Turkish aid—and other Cold War measures—was to cloak them in the spirit of bipartisanship, but it was not the kind of bipartisanship that characterized the establishment of the United Nations, the negotiation of peace treaties, or the creation of the Organization of American States, where Republicans served in the delegations negotiating the treaties. In the case of Greek-Turkish aid, bipartisanship in practice meant Congress ratifying what the president had already decided. Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican senator from Michigan who embodied the bipartisan support that Truman won from Republicans, put it this way: “The trouble is that these ‘crises’ never reach Congress until they have developed to a point where Congressional discretion is pathetically restricted.”14 Senator Robert Taft (R-OH), who initially opposed Greek-Turkish aid, explained that he ultimately felt he had no choice but to vote for the measure. Truman’s statements, Taft said, had “committed the United States to this policy in the eyes of the world, and to repudiate it now would destroy his prestige in the negotiations with the Russian Government.”15 In his memoirs, Truman frequently praised men he called “enlightened Republicans,” those like Vandenberg and Representative Charles Eaton (R-NJ), for their bipartisanship, but he was in fact congratulating them for supporting decisions he had already made without their participation.16 If Truman did not define bipartisanship as consultation before decisions were made, he did insist that foreign policy should be kept out of

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political campaigns.17 And for the most part, he honored that principle. Yet, as Henry Berger has shown, at times Democrats skillfully used the ideal of bipartisanship to discredit critics and cast opponents of Truman’s foreign policy as unpatriotic and abettors of the enemy.18 Moreover, in Truman’s famous 1948 presidential campaign against what he called the “Do-Nothing 80th Congress,” “the worst in history,” he tended to save his fire for domestic issues. Yet his negative portrayal of the 80th Congress ignored crucial Republican support for key foreign policy measures.19 Dean Acheson, the administration official who spent the most time seeking congressional support for Truman’s policies, said that bipartisanship “was a magnificent fraud.” He went on to explain that an administration could gain support for its foreign policy by saying that “politics stops at the seaboard, and anybody who denies that postulate is ‘a son of a bitch and a crook and not a true patriot.’”20 Acheson’s after-the-fact cynicism about bipartisanship, however, neglected the importance of the considerable efforts he and other officials made with sympathetic Republican legislators such as Senators Vandenberg, H. Alexander Smith (R-NJ), and Henry Cabot Lodge, II (R-MA).21 If Greek-Turkish aid did not represent genuinely bipartisan policy making, it did illustrate the meticulous attention the administration gave to Vandenberg and its willingness to bow to congressional will when it could do so without sacrificing a central objective. Acheson’s biographers all point to his painstaking cultivation of the Republican foreign policy leader who famously shed his isolationism in 1945. Vandenberg himself said that even if he phoned Acheson at 10:00 a.m. and asked him “to deliver the Washington Monument to my office by noon, he would somehow manage to treat this as a proper request and deliver it.”22 While Vandenberg never asked for the monument, the State Department did satisfy his reservations about Greek-Turkish aid. For example, to address concerns that a unilateral program of US aid to Greece and Turkey would undermine the United Nations, the administration accepted an amendment drafted by Vandenberg providing that the UN could terminate the aid whenever it undertook action that would make aid from the United States unnecessary.23 This amendment not only assuaged concerns about the UN, which were stronger on the left than on the right, but it also allowed Vandenberg to leave his own mark on the measure and bolstered the façade of bipartisanship.24 In addition, Acheson spent hours in one-onone meetings with Republicans and alleviated the concerns of Vandenberg and others about the sweeping nature of the Truman Doctrine by limiting its application specifically to Greece and Turkey.25 Although Truman faced a revolt from some Democrats, notably Florida

Winning Bipartisan Support for a New Approach to the World

Senator Claude Pepper, who feared that Greek-Turkish aid would “destroy any hope of reconciliation with Russia” and who objected to allying the United States with “reactionary and corrupt regimes,” opposition to the measure was stronger from the right than from the left.26 In the end, GreekTurkish aid passed with large majorities, 67 to 23 in the Senate (with 7 Democrats and 16 Republicans opposed) and 287 to 107 in the House (with 93 Republicans, 13 Democrats, and 1 American Laborite voting no).27 Congress enacted aid to Greece and Turkey in early June 1947 while Truman was still on pretty good terms with Congress. Shortly thereafter he delivered sharp veto messages. One was his unsuccessful attempt to block the Taft-Hartley Act, which Truman viewed as an attack on organized labor. The second was his successful veto of a tax-cut measure, which the president insisted would intensify inflation and disproportionately reward the rich. Beginning in summer 1947, Truman began to criticize Congress, stress his differences with Republicans, and build his case against the 80th Congress in preparation for the 1948 presidential campaign. Consequently, the administration sought approval for its second great initiative of the early Cold War, the Marshall Plan, when executive-legislative relations had significantly soured. The conditions that prompted the call for the Marshall Plan were perhaps best described by Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson when he described war-ravaged Europe in a speech he gave in Cleveland, Mississippi in May 1947: “factories destroyed, fields impoverished and without fertilizer or machinery to get them back in shape, transportation systems wrecked, populations scattered and on the borderline of starvation.”28 The housing capacity of Germany had been reduced by 40 percent; Britain had lost nearly one-third of its housing to bombs. The war had created more than thirteen million displaced persons, and most Europeans lived on diets of 1,500 calories or less. This was a desperate humanitarian crisis, but it also left European countries vulnerable to internal Communists who enjoyed significant success at the ballot box and the ability to make the economic situation even worse by calling strikes. To Truman and his advisers, large-scale economic aid to Europe was essential to keeping the iron curtain from moving westward. Yet Truman had a huge task to get Congress to approve a staggering $17 billion-dollar aid program ($150 billion in 2009 dollars) that would extend over four years. Truman asked for $6.8 billion for the first fifteen months at a time when the total annual federal budget was around $40 billion. And he asked it from a Republican-controlled Congress that was determined to reduce government spending. In addition to their resistance to more federal spending, many Republicans, especially those from the Midwest, wanted to limit US involvement in Europe and resisted sending taxpayers’ dollars to the

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left-leaning governments of many European countries. Many thought that the billions of postwar aid the United States had already sent was enough.

Concessions for Bipartisanship While much of the administration’s strategy for securing approval of the Marshall Plan paralleled its campaign for Greek-Turkish aid—framing the issue in crisis terms, calling for bipartisanship, cultivating Republicans and making concessions to their demands—there were also some new elements. Much more than it had with Greek-Turkish aid, the administration conducted a massive public relations campaign to win support for the Marshall Plan. And, while aid to Greece and Turkey were associated with the president himself through what quickly became called the Truman Doctrine, the European Recovery Program promptly became the Marshall Plan. Whereas Truman had issued the first formal call for Greek-Turkish aid in his address before Congress, Secretary of State George Marshall launched the idea of large-scale aid to Europe with his Harvard commencement address in June 1947. Truman approved the linking of the European Recovery Program with Marshall because of the secretary of state’s “brilliant contributions to the measure which he helped formulate,” and because of the enormous stature that the architect of victory in World War II held at home and abroad.29 Perhaps even more important—though unacknowledged by Truman—was that Marshall was far removed from the partisan battles over domestic issues between Truman and Congress that began in summer 1947 and intensified throughout 1948. In addition to positioning the nonpartisan Marshall as the public face of the European Recovery Program, the administration accommodated congressmen on the measure in several ways. While Truman called for immediate action on Greek-Turkish aid, a measure that it had unilaterally drafted, development of the Marshall Plan stretched out over months, allowing time for administration officials to consult extensively with legislators. Marshall himself called Vandenberg “a full partner in the adventure,” insisting that the two could not “have gotten much closer together unless I sat in Van’s lap or he sat in mine.”30 The administration made four significant concessions to gain Republican support. First it acceded to Vandenberg’s request for information about the domestic impact of massive European aid by appointing three special study groups to investigate the relationship between the air program and US resources and capabilities.31 Second, Truman accepted Vandenberg’s demand that the program be operated by a new agency that would be independent of the State Department.32 Third,

Winning Bipartisan Support for a New Approach to the World

Vandenberg convinced the administration to delete the specific figure of $17 billion from its draft bill and to limit the initial authorization—and thus its cost—to a single year. And finally, the administration bowed to demands from the Republican Asia-Firsters who wanted an aid program for China. Although by then the administration had lost faith in the ability of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government to quell the Communist revolution and establish stability, Marshall agreed to send Congress a plan for $570 million of economic aid to China. With help from Senate Republicans, the administration held firm on its refusal to extend any more military aid.33 The administration also took up Vandenberg’s suggestion that it line up leading corporate leaders to testify on behalf of the Marshall Plan and turned it into a full-scale public relations campaign. Headed by a bipartisan committee of leading citizens called the Committee for the Marshall Plan, the effort included the elite of almost every segment of the American public—business, labor, education, agriculture, religion, women’s organizations, and others. So massive was its work that a Dutch diplomat called it “a Marshall Plan to sell the Marshall Plan.” The committee broadcast ads, distributed brochures, and enlisted speakers to cross the country rallying support for the Marshall Plan. Dean Acheson, who was then temporarily a private citizen, stumped for the Marshall Plan in New York; San Francisco; Spokane, Washington; and Duluth, Minnesota, all in the space of a few days. Hundreds of less-famous speakers made similar efforts to explain the program to the people. And Marshall himself undertook such a strenuous speaking tour that he later recalled, “I worked on that as hard as though I was running for the Senate or the presidency.”34 In March 1948, as the Marshall Plan bill worked through the last stages of congressional deliberations, Truman stepped up the crisis rhetoric that had accompanied the call for Greek-Turkish aid. In February, Soviet-backed Communists staged a coup and took over the government of Czechoslovakia, giving material reality to the sense of danger. Truman disregarded Marshall’s plea to avoid belligerent language when he addressed Congress on March 17 and followed up with a St. Patrick’s Day speech in New York that evening. He singled out the Soviet Union as the “one nation” seeking to prevent world peace in a “ruthless course of action.”35 Even Marshall, who saw the Czech coup more as a defensive reaction by the Soviets than as the beginning of a drive to take over Europe, ramped up his rhetoric in the final days of congressional deliberation. “This is a world-wide struggle between freedom and tyranny between the self-rule of the many as opposed to the dictatorship of the ruthless few,” he warned.36 The Marshall Plan has been much heralded, and rightly so, as a great

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humanitarian project that helped bring security and unity to Europe and at the same time benefited American industry and commerce. Yet, there is little doubt that paramount in the minds of Congressional supporters was the need to, as Representative Clifford Hope (R-KS) put it, “resist the march of Communism.”37 Democratic Senator Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma echoed that theme, explaining that he had supported European Recovery because it would “enable the free countries of Europe to prepare themselves to resist the aggression of Russia over their territories.”38 Acheson maintained that the paramount goal of Marshall Plan aid was to combat “hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos,” but he readily acknowledged that Congress and the public were much more interested in how the program would operate to check the expansion of Soviet power.39 On April 2, Congress approved the Marshall Plan by even wider majorities than it had Greek-Turkish aid. Supporters of European aid fended off limiting amendments with comfortable majorities, and on the final vote, the House approved it 329 to 74, and the Senate 69 to 17. Upon signing the bill the very next day, Truman set aside partisan politics. Even though the legislature had just overridden his veto of a tax-cut bill, Truman praised Congress “for the cooperation it has evidenced in the prompt passage of this measure.”40 Against what seemed like insurmountable odds, the Truman administration won support from sizeable majorities in Congress for economic and military commitments abroad that would have been unthinkable before World War II. Truman gained support for these initiatives by stressing bipartisanship and by encouraging State Department officials to work closely with Vandenberg and other leading Republicans. With regard to the Marshall Plan, Truman was willing to step back and let that initiative be associated with the war hero who, unlike Truman, carried no political baggage. Furthermore, the administration launched an enormous campaign using the media and leaders from every element of civil society to win public support for the European Recovery Program and convey that popular mandate to Congress. Most of all, however, Truman and his associates insisted that the nation faced a grave crisis, created by a ruthless enemy bent on spreading its power throughout the world and dedicated to the destruction of the very values and practices that defined the United States.41 In gaining support for these measures, Truman silenced critics who complained that the administration was drifting from crisis to crisis without a coherent foreign policy and came into his own as president and commander in chief. Whether Truman could have moved Congress and the public behind Greek-Turkish aid and the Marshall Plan without such sweeping, alarmist rhetoric, of course, cannot be known. What is clear, however,

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is that fueling the fear of communism came back to haunt Truman: if communism posed such a threat, asked Republicans, why wasn’t the administration doing more to get rid of radicals in its midst? Moreover, the way in which the administration sold its new policy helped to shape popular attitudes and foreign policy making throughout the Cold War and beyond. How Truman and his associates and Congress framed these new policies encouraged a tendency to see the world along lines of good versus evil, to demonize adversaries, and to think in terms of universal, global solutions rather than those designed for a particular place and set of circumstances. Such ways of thinking shaped American foreign policy into the twenty-first century—for good and for ill.

Notes

1. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 1, Year of Decisions, 272, 323; and Truman, Memoirs, vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope, 243. 2. Paterson, “Presidential Foreign Policy, Public Opinion, and Congress,” 2–6. 3. Hartmann, Truman and the 80th Congress, 9, 26. In addition there was one American Laborite in the House. 4. Bean, “The Republican ‘Mandate’ and 1948”; and Roseboom, History of Presidential Elections, 494. 5. Republican National Committee, “The Chairman’s Letter,” August 15, 1946, Political File, Butler Papers. 6. Woods, “Congress and the Roots of Postwar American Foreign Policy,” 168–70. 7. Hartmann, Truman and the 80th Congress, 11, 14. 8. Johnson, Congress and the Cold War, 3–4, 15. 9. Bostdorff, Proclaiming the Truman Doctrine, 51–58, 68–72. 10. Beisner, Dean Acheson, 22, 56. 11. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 71; and Bostdorff, Proclaiming the Truman Doctrine, 78. 12. Bohlen, Transformation of American Foreign Policy, 87; Beisner, Dean Acheson, 59; and Truman, Memoirs, vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope, 105. 13. Special Message to the Congress on Greece and Turkey: The Truman Doctrine, March 12, 1947, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1947, 178–80. 14. Vandenberg quoted in Paterson, “Presidential Foreign Policy, Public Opinion, and Congress,” 14–15. 15. Taft quoted in Berger, “Bipartisanship,” 232. 16. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope, 103, 172. 17. Ibid., 211, 511. 18. Berger, “Bipartisanship,” 223–24. 19. Ibid., 228–29. 20. Dean Acheson Oral History, Truman Library. 21. Johnson, Congress and the Cold War, 15–18, 20–21. 22. Beisner, Dean Acheson, 79. 23. Vandenberg, Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg, 340–41, 345–46. 24. Beisner, Dean Acheson, 63. 25. Jones, Fifteen Weeks, 190–93; and Beisner, Dean Acheson, 60–62. 26. 93 Cong. Rec. 3281, 3468, 3737–38, 3774 (1947). 27. 93 Cong. Rec. 3793, 4975 (1947). 28. Acheson, “Requirements of Reconstruction, May 8, 1947.”

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29. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope, 114–15. 30. Marshall quoted in Behrman, Most Noble Adventure, 125. 31. Hartmann, Truman and the 80th Congress, 108. 32. Hogan, Marshall Plan, 101–9. 33. New York Times, January 22, 1948; “Special Message to the Congress on the Need for Assistance to China, February 18, 1948,” in Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1948, 144–46. 34. Behrman, Most Noble Adventure, 122–24, 151–53. 35. George Elsey to Clark Clifford, March 5, 1948, Speech File, Clifford Papers; Elsey handwritten notes, March 8, March 15, March 16, 1948, Speech File, Elsey Papers; Special Message to the Congress on the Threat to the Freedom of Europe, March 17, 1948, in Truman, Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1948, 182–86; and Saint Patrick’s Day Address in New York City, in ibid, 198. 36. Marshall quoted in Behrman, Most Noble Adventure, 162. 37. Clifford Hope to David C. White, February 14, 1948, Hope Papers. 38. Elmer Thomas to Mrs. A. D. Bace, March 12, 1948, Thomas Papers. 39. Acheson, Present at the Creation, 233. 40. Statement by the President upon Signing of the Foreign Assistance Act, April 3, 1948, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1948, 203. 41. For a discussion of Truman’s initiatives within a larger framework of foreign policy and politics, see Zelizer, Arsenal of Democracy.

Works Cited

Acheson, Dean. “The Requirements of Reconstruction, May 8, 1947.” Department of State Bulletin 16, no. 411 (May 18, 1947): 991. ———. Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department. New York: Norton, 1969. Bean, Louis H. “The Republican ‘Mandate’ and 1948.” New York Times Magazine, January 19, 1946, 52. Behrman, Greg. The Most Noble Adventure: The Marshall Plan and the Time When America Helped Save Europe. New York: Free Press, 2007. Beisner, Robert L. Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Berger, Henry W. “Bipartisanship, Senator Taft, and the Truman Administration.” Political Science Quarterly 90 (Summer 1975): 221–37. Bohlen, Charles E. The Transformation of American Foreign Policy. New York: W. W. Norton, 1969. Bostdorff, Denise M. Proclaiming the Truman Doctrine: The Cold War Call to Arms. College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2008. Hartmann, Susan M. Truman and the 80th Congress. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971. Hogan, Michael J. The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe 1947–1952. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Johnson, Robert David. Congress and the Cold War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Jones, Joseph M. The Fifteen Weeks (February 21–June 5, 1947). New York: Viking Press, 1955. Leffler, Melvyn P. For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War. New York: Hill & Wang, 2007.

Winning Bipartisan Support for a New Approach to the World

Paterson, Thomas G. “Presidential Foreign Policy, Public Opinion, and Congress: The Truman Years.” Diplomatic History 3 (1979): 1–21. Roseboom, Eugene H. A History of Presidential Elections. New York: Macmillan, 1957. Truman, Harry S. Memoirs. Vol. 1, Year of Decisions. New York: Doubleday, 1955. ———. Memoirs. Vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope. New York: Doubleday, 1956. ———. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1947. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1963. ———. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1948. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1964. Vandenberg, Arthur H., Jr., ed. The Private Papers of Senator Vandenberg. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952. Woods, Randall. “Congress and the Roots of Postwar American Foreign Policy.” In Victory in Europe 1945: From World War to Cold War, edited by Arnold A. Offner and Theodore A. Wilson, 167–83. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. Zelizer, Julian E. Arsenal of Democracy: The Politics of National Security—from World War II to the War on Terrorism. New York: Basic Books, 2010.

Archival Sources Butler Papers

Hugh A. Butler Papers, Nebraska Historical Society, Lincoln, Nebraska. Clifford Papers Clark Clifford Papers, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Missouri. Elsey Papers George M. Elsey Papers, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Missouri. Hope Papers Clifford R. Hope Papers, Kansas Historical Society, Topeka, Kansas. Thomas Papers Elmer Thomas Papers, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma.

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Truman’s National Security Policy Constitutional Issues Louis Fisher

The presidency of Harry Truman receives deservedly good marks for actions it took after World War II to rescue Europe and surrounding countries from economic and political turmoil. In early 1947, learning that England lacked the resources to protect Greece and Turkey from Soviet influence, Truman asked Congress to provide $250 million in aid to Greece and $150 million to Turkey, all part of what came to be known as the Truman Doctrine.1 Truman’s message to Congress on March 12 of that year urged the United States to adopt the policy of supporting “free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”2 The Greek-Turkish aid program passed Congress with significant bipartisan support.3 Truman followed this plan with an ambitious effort in 1948 to help with European reconstruction. The goal was to avoid a repeat of the harsh economic conditions that existed after World War I when the level of suffering and despair did much to build support for the Nazi Party and other totalitarian regimes. Truman’s program committed $12 billion in economic aid to sixteen countries in Western Europe. The Economic Recovery Program, popularly called the Marshall Plan, provided financial assistance over a four-year period to stabilize those countries and prevent Communist or Fascist control. Yet, in deciding to take a strong stand against Soviet and Communist expansionism, several of Truman’s initiatives did great damage to individual rights and constitutional principles in the United States. The first was 156



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his executive order in 1947 that created loyalty review boards in the federal government. Thousands of innocent employees were fired from their jobs on the basis of information they had no right to see or challenge. Long before Senator Joe McCarthy (R-WI) began his campaign against “enemies from within,” Truman used the fear of communism and subversion to divide the country and strip individuals of basic procedural safeguards. A second damaging policy was the treatment of aliens who came to the United States, even those who had married American husbands. Similar to the treatment of federal employees, they were designated “security risks” on the basis of information they had no right to see. At times they were expelled from the country. On other occasions they were held on Ellis Island for years on the basis of uncorroborated hearsay evidence, with that evidence withheld from them and the courts. The experience of Ellen Knauff, who was kept on Ellis Island from 1948 to 1951, is recounted later in this chapter. Third, President Truman took the country to war against North Korea in 1950 without ever going to Congress for authorization. It was the first time in more than 160 years that a president unilaterally took the nation from a state of peace to a state of war without seeking and obtaining congressional approval. Truman sought “authority” not from Congress but from the United Nations Security Council. Nothing in the Constitution, practice, or the UN Charter anticipated that the UN Security Council would function as a substitute for Congress. Other presidents, including George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, relied on Truman’s initiative to circumvent the elected officials of Congress.

Loyalty Review Board Efforts to suppress communism and subversion had been a prominent theme in US politics from World War I throughout the 1930s. In 1930, US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer gave a House committee a list of six organizations that the Justice Department had determined to be of “revolutionary character.” What criteria merited inclusion on the list was never explained, other than “anarchist” beliefs, even if unrelated to criminal or violent activities. In 1939 and 1940, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover instructed his agency to develop a secret list of organizations considered to be Communist or Communist-front. The organizations were not given notice of why they were put on the list or an opportunity to offer rejections at a hearing.4 Fears of communism and fascism during World War II created pressures within the United States for some type of loyalty pledge that citizens

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and aliens would have to sign. In 1942, a group called Bundles for America drafted the text of “A Pledge for Americans.” It expressed pride in being an American and supported “loyally and in friendship” all the countries in the world that were joined in the fight against the Axis powers. The pledge ended with “So help me God!” Those who drafted the language appeared to be aware of the harm that can come from superpatriotism. Individuals signing the pledge were directed not to listen to “idle rumors” or repeat “destructive gossip.”5 In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9300 creating an interdepartmental committee to review allegations that federal employees were engaged in “subversive activity.”6 He acted shortly after Representative Martin Dies (D-TX), chairman of the Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities (the Dies Committee), claimed that hundreds of federal employees were affiliated with Communist groups or causes. The executive order directed departments and agencies to refer suspect employees to the FBI for investigation. The previous year, Attorney General Francis Biddle had released a report stating that thirty-six federal employees had been discharged for activities associated with alleged subversive organizations. Of those discharged, only two were on the list of 1,100 names assembled by the Dies Committee.7 Looking back on his lengthy career with the federal government, Clark Clifford said his “greatest regret” was that he did not “make more an an effort to try to kill the loyalty program at its inception in 1947–48.” Truman and his advisors may have calculated that their initiative would deter Congress from acting in ways even more damaging to civil liberties. However, the loyalty program invited abuse by heightening the belief that communism threatened the operations of government and the private sector. On March 25, 1947, President Harry Truman issued procedures for determining the loyalty of federal employees.8 His executive order claimed that the presence within the government “of any disloyal or subversive person” constituted a threat to democratic processes, but the order did not include a clear definition or understanding of either loyalty or subversion. In an effort to guard against abusive and irresponsible charges, Truman insisted on safeguards to protect individuals “from unfounded accusations of disloyalty.”9 Yet the safeguards were minimal. The executive order permitted federal agencies to rely on secret informants whose identities and credibility could be withheld from the accused. The loyalty program covered two categories: individuals seeking jobs with the federal government and those already employed. Applicants for a civilian position needed to undergo a loyalty investigation conducted by the Civil Service Commission (CSC), and existing federal employees



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would be investigated by their department or agency. The executive branch relied on FBI files, CSC files, military and naval intelligence files, the files of any other “appropriate government investigative or intelligence agency,” and other sources, without knowing the credibility of information presented against an employee. If “derogatory information” appeared to exist regarding the “loyalty” of an applicant or employee, a full field investigation would be conducted.10 Prejudicial information could come from anywhere: unreliable or malicious sources, former spouses, employers, associates, and neighbors. The individual being investigated had no right to know who said they were subversive or a security risk, nor could the individual explore the basis for accusations. In a loyalty case decided in 1955, Justice William O. Douglas noted that informers “may bear old grudges. Under cross-examination their stories might disappear like bubbles. Their whispered confidences might turn out to be yarns conceived by twisted minds or by people who, though sincere, have poor faculties of observation and memory.”11 Truman’s executive order offered no protection for those risks. Agency loyalty boards, usually consisting of three employees, heard complaints and wrote regulations. Employees charged with disloyalty had a right to a hearing and could appear before the board personally. They had access to counsel and could present evidence, call witnesses, submit affidavits, and challenge any effort to remove them. During this period, agency heads were authorized to suspend the employee. To defend themselves, employees were supposed to be informed of the nature of the charges in sufficient detail to make a reasoned defense possible. However, charges were stated “as specifically and completely as, in the discretion of the employing department or agency, security considerations permit,”12 and agencies were authorized to withhold the names of confidential informants “provided it furnishes sufficient information about such informants on the basis of which the requesting department or agency can make an adequate evaluation of the information furnished by them.” There was no assurance that the loyalty boards had either the time or competence to determine the reliability or motivation of informers. A few agencies, through their regulations, allowed access to the names of confidential informants.13 The agency loyalty boards received from the Justice Department the name of each foreign or domestic organization that the attorney general designated as “totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive, or as having adopted a policy of advocating or approving the commission of acts of force or violence to deny others their rights under the Constitution of the United States, or as seeking to alter the form of government of the United States by unconstitutional means.”14 No one knew how the attorney general or the Justice Department

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prepared this list, and the terms “Fascist,” “Communist,” or “subversive” were never defined. Organizations placed on the list were not notified and had no opportunity to contest their designation. The loyalty security program came to depend on secret investigations, confidential information, and secret deliberations.15 In 1951, the Supreme Court reviewed three “Communist” organizations that had been added to the attorney general’s list and found the designations “patently arbitrary.” The Justice Department had not relied on “either disclosed or undisclosed facts supplying a reasonable basis for the determination.”16 Putting names on the list without any basis would “cripple the functioning and damage the reputation of those organizations in their respective communities and in the nation.”17 The court insisted that the Justice Department either substantiate its judgments and conclusions or delete organizations from the list. In a concurrence, Justice Felix Frankfurter said that due process was violated whenever the executive branch felt at liberty to “maim or decapitate” an organization “on the mere say-so of the Attorney General.”18 Critics of the list objected that it discouraged individuals from joining organizations, promoted “conformity and standardization,” and unconstitutionally limited the freedoms of thought and association.19 According to Truman’s executive order, disloyalty would be determined by actions to commit sabotage, espionage, treason, or sedition. Those categories were already covered by existing criminal laws. Individuals subject to prosecution under those laws had full access to procedural safeguards, unlike those swept up in the loyalty review program. The section on standards listed “activities and associations” that “may be considered in the determination of disloyalty.” One item covered intentional, unauthorized disclosure to any person, “under circumstances which may indicate disloyalty to the United States,” of documents or information of a confidential or non-public character obtained through a federal job. A second item covered performing or attempting to perform duties in such a way as “to serve the interests of another government in preference to the interests of the United States.” Another item covered “membership in, affiliation with or sympathetic association with any foreign or domestic organization … designated by the Attorney General as totalitarian, fascist, communist, or subversive,” or advocating “the commission of acts of force or violence to deny other persons their rights under the Constitution of the United States, or as seeking to alter the form of government of the United States by unconstitutional means.”20 Truman’s executive order brought within its reach prominent names and inconspicuous agency employees. In the first category is O. Edmund



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Clubb. After a career of more than two decades with the US Foreign Service, he became director of the State Department’s Office of Chinese Affairs in 1950. The climate was ripe for looking for scapegoats. Mao’s Communist Party had won the civil war in China the previous year. In June 1950 the Korean War broke out. Members of Congress and agency officials, seeking to discover who was responsible for “losing” China, were on the lookout for suspect political beliefs and associations. In January 1951, Clubb learned that he was being investigated by the department’s Loyalty Security Board. An unnamed informant told the State Department that he had delivered “a sealed envelope” to the office of the left-wing New Masses magazine in 1932. It was charged that Clubb, at least at that time, had engaged in “political unorthodoxy,” kept “dangerous associations,” and visited that magazine nineteen years earlier. The informer claimed that Clubb, from 1934 to 1935, had “distinct pink tendencies.”21 The experience before the loyalty board led Clubb to conclude that it functioned as “accuser, prosecutor, judge, and jury in a matter where the accused was not enabled to know what it was all about.” Information was given to the board but not to the accused. Clubb had no right to confront or cross-examine his accusers and was denied access even to the full text of the accusation. He discovered that the board at times changed the meaning of an accusation to his disadvantage.22 After the State Department brought formal charges against him, it suspended Clubb from his official duties. Later it determined he must be discharged as a security risk. Through an appeals process he was eventually cleared and restored to active duty, but Clubb understood that no one who undergoes this type of investigation is ever “cleared.” Inevitably, a shadow of disloyalty remains over the individual. As someone permanently scarred he had no future in government, or certainly not at the same or comparable level. On February 12, 1952, Clubb retired from federal service. The Truman loyalty security process did not discriminate. It hit everyone, high and low, big and small. One case involved a proofreader at the Government Printing Office. He had worked there for seven years and had no access to classified materials. Previously, in a loyalty investigation, he had been cleared. In 1954, without being informed of possible charges, he was asked to appear before a loyalty review board. Because it was called a “preliminary” hearing, he had no right to bring counsel. He was advised that his retention in the federal government was not consistent with the interests of national security. The sole charge: “you continued sympathetic association with a known Communist, read Communist literature and made pro-Communist statements.”23 With no opportunity to determine the identity of his informers or their reliability, the proofreader was immediately suspended.

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His counsel later learned that the agency did not use the attorney general’s list but rather a list produced by the House Un-American Activities Committee. The employee denied that he had any continued sympathetic association with a known Communist. He could recall only one person that might fit that description, someone he knew two decades earlier, from 1933 to 1935. He remembered having “strong disagreement” with that person.24 For a short period he was active with the People’s Party, but neither the attorney general nor a congressional committee ever cited it as a Communist organization. The individual he knew from 1933 to 1935 had copies of a Communist publication, the Daily Worker, but he scanned it out of curiosity, not sympathy. The loyalty board inquired why he would subscribe to Consumer Reports. He said he read it to learn about the best products at the least price and had no reason to believe it was subversive. At a formal hearing, the agency produced no witnesses and expressed no interest in hearing from four character witnesses brought to testify on the employee’s behalf. His counsel nevertheless had the witnesses speak and made a concluding argument. The loyalty board, expressing surprise that the counsel had no access to the transcript from the preliminary hearing, made it available to him. Among the questions put to the employee were these: (1) “How do you distinguish between the Russian system of government and ours? (2) What was your reaction upon receiving these charges? Didn’t you feel remorseful for some of the things you did in your life? (3) Don’t you think that any person is a security risk who at one time or another associated with a Communist—even though it was not a sympathetic association and even though he may not have known at the time that the person was a Communist and even though the association terminated many years ago?” Three weeks later the agency fired the employee as a security risk. No reasons were given.25 Truman’s model of loyalty review boards spread to state and local governments and to private organizations. Writers, actors, singers, musicians, and other professionals were blacklisted and driven from their field of work.26 During this period, there was little effort to think about the meaning of loyalty. Was it total conformity to what the government wanted? Such a political system would be totalitarian. Did loyalty mean being devoted to the best interests of the country? In that case, a citizen would feel an obligation to speak out against a government program or policy that was doing injury to the nation. In his years of retirement, Truman included in his memoirs a description of the federal loyalty program. He wrote, “if a man cannot be prosecuted in the courts, then he should not be persecuted by a Senate or House committee.”27 A good principle, but Truman did not seem to understand



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that those people should not have been persecuted in the executive branch either. He spoke against “taking hearsay charges against any person, especially against anyone who has the background to qualify as a government servant.”28 He appeared to be unaware that his executive order allowed precisely that. As president, Truman had taken steps to deny congressional access to confidential files on agency employees. At the same time, he failed to acknowledge that agency loyalty review boards could use those identical files to wreck federal careers and individual reputations. Truman understood that the files of the CSC, the FBI, and other agencies “contain many unsupported, uninvestigated, and unevaluated charges … [and may] contain items based on suspicion, rumor, prejudice, and malice, and therefore, if released, may do great harm to the reputation and careers of many innocent people.”29 Why did Truman allow loyalty review boards to rely on such material without assuring procedural safeguards for government employees? During this period, other branches of government showed similar insensitivity to individual rights and constitutional values. Congressional committees did much damage to personal reputations. Federal courts generally failed to place limits on the power of government to charge public employees with disloyalty. Clear-cut challenges to loyalty boards typically came from dissenting judges in the lower courts, not from the Supreme Court.30 Dissenting in one case, Judge Harry Edgerton spoke out for individual rights and procedural due process. A finding of disloyalty, he said, “is closely akin to a finding of treason. The public hardly distinguishes between the two.”31 The procedures followed by Truman’s loyalty boards put any American “at the mercy not only of an innocently mistaken informer but also of a malicious or demented one unless his defect is apparent to the agent who interviews him.” Dismissal for disloyalty, Edgerton said, was punitive in nature and required the safeguards of a judicial trial. Punishment “is infliction of harm,” usually for wrong conduct but in the case before Edgerton’s court “for wrong views.” He objected that the term “disloyal” was so indefinite that neither Truman’s executive order nor loyalty review boards attempted to define it. Edgerton closed with this admonition: “We cannot preserve our liberties by sacrificing them.”32

Excluding “Security Risks” Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the George W. Bush administration detained US citizens and aliens without recognizing any procedural rights. They were not charged with crimes, given access to counsel, or granted a

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hearing. The government relied on confidential sources without sharing that information with the detainee or the detainee’s counsel. That same denial of fundamental rights is evident in the case of Ellen Knauff, held on Ellis Island from 1948 to 1951 and threatened with exclusion from the country. The Truman administration justified its action on the basis of “confidential information” that it need not show her, her attorney, or even the federal courts. Ellen Knauff was born in Germany and lived in Prague. Her mother, father, and other Jewish relatives perished in the Nazi camps. To escape the incoming German army, she obtained a permit to work in England, where she served as a Red Cross nurse and joined the Women’s Voluntary Air Force, an arm of the Royal Air Force. After World War II she returned to Germany to work with the American military government. In all of these positions, she received commentations for her service. On February 28, 1948, she married Kurt Knauff, a US citizen and veteran who had been honorably discharged. Intent on becoming a US citizen, Ellen Knauff booked a ship to America and arrived in New York Harbor on August 14, 1948.33 Instead of being allowed to land and meet her husband’s family, she was taken to Ellis Island. Over a period of weeks and months, she was questioned without being able to receive visitors or obtain any legal assistance. On October 6, 1948, an immigration official recommended that she be permanently excluded from America. There was no hearing. The justification for exclusion was that her admission would be “prejudicial” to the United States. No other reasons were given. On that same day, Attorney General Tom Clark entered a final order of exclusion. With legal assistance, Knauff filed a habeas petition to demand the legal basis for her detention and threatened exclusion. A district court dismissed the petition and the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed. The Second Circuit said that the power of Congress “to deny admission to aliens is absolute.” That is correct. No alien has a right to enter the United States. However, exclusion is one thing; exclusion as a security risk is another, especially when the exclusion is based on confidential information that the alien, the alien’s attorney, and the reviewing court cannot see. The Second Circuit said the “obvious purpose” in deciding a case on the basis of confidential information “was to enable this country to be protected from the entry of aliens who were within the excludable categories without having to make public the proof of that status when in the judgment of responsible officials the disclosure of such information or the source of it would be detrimental to the public safety.”34 No one in this type of case would argue that the confidential informa-



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tion be given to newspapers to be published the next day. However, why not give that information (at a minimum) to federal judges so they can affirm that “proof” exists to reasonably exclude someone? Yet the Second Circuit was willing to defer wholly to unsupported and uncorroborated executive judgments. The “discretionary action of the Attorney General was based on confidential information neither the appellant, nor we, can know the excludable class into which that put her.” The court was satisfied that a reading of agency regulations and a presidential proclamation issued in 1941 “leaves no doubt” that the actions of the Truman administration “fall within the scope of the delegated power to promulgate rules and regulations which are reasonably drawn to accomplish the evident purpose of Congress.”35 Denied information on why Knauff was being excluded, the court had no basis for regarding the administration’s action as reasonable. What of the judgments of Attorney General Clark (who Truman was elevating to a justice of the Supreme Court)? The Second Circuit remarked: “Nor do the reasons for exclusion stated by the Attorney General indicate affirmatively an arbitrary action on his part or an unreasonable basis for determining that appellant’s entry would be prejudicial to the interests of the United States.” An attorney general would hardly admit to arbitrary conduct. Moreover, if the court agreed it lacked authority to look at confidential information, it had no grounds for making any comments about arbitrariness or reasonableness. The court put itself in the dark and saw no need to have light enter. The case continued to the Supreme Court. On January 16, 1950, the court decided four to three in favor of the Truman administration. Justice Sherman Minton held that Knauff’s exclusion was authorized by law and various proclamations and regulations issued by executive officials. As with the lower courts, Minton agreed to decide the case without knowing anything as to why Knauff was being excluded.36 Justice Felix Frankfurter penned one dissent. He said the administration (and the court) were suggesting that the “deepest tie” her husband could form “may be secretly severed on the mere say-so of an official, however well-intentioned.” Frankfurter continued: “Although five minutes of cross-examination could enable the soldier-husband to dissipate seemingly convincing information affecting the security danger of his wife, that opportunity need not be accorded.”37 Justice Robert Jackson, joined by Frankfurter and Hugo Black, wrote a separate dissent. Jackson found no evidence that Congress had authorized “an abrupt and brutal exclusion of the wife of an American citizen without a hearing.” In Jackson’s words, the Truman administration told the judiciary “that not even a court can find out why the girl is excluded.” To Jackson, the claim that evidence of guilt “must be secret is abhorrent to free men, because

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it provides a cloak for the malevolent, the misinformed, the meddlesome, and the corrupt to play the role of informer undetected and uncorrected.” Jackson added: “Security is like liberty in that many are the crimes committed in its name.” He would have directed the attorney general “either to produce his evidence justifying exclusion or to admit Mrs. Knauff to the country.”38 Returned to Ellis Island, Knauff was threatened several times with deportation. On one occasion, immigration officials in the Truman administration suggested to her attorney that he travel to Washington, DC, to block deportation, even though the agency had already decided to immediately deport her on the morning of May 17, 1950. Agency officials had driven her to Idlewild airport and had a plane ready. In his capacity as circuit justice, Jackson learned of the ploy and issued an emergency stay. His order reached the airport about twenty minutes before her scheduled departure.39 Fortunately, constitutional rights are not left solely to presidents or the Supreme Court. A number of newspapers came to Knauff’s defense. An editorial in the New York Times protested the “remarkably un-American aspect of our immigration procedures,” insisting that individuals are entitled to be informed of charges against them and to have an opportunity to answer them.40 In response to the administration’s plan to fly Knauff out of Idlewild, an editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch condemned the administration for acting contemptuously toward Congress and the courts. Whatever security charges might be mounted against “this little survivor of Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, it cannot possibly justify the star-chamber record of the Department of Justice. It cannot justify vindictiveness. It cannot justify stealth.” To the newspaper, the department had tried to get away with a “Fascistlike scheme.”41 Representative Francis Walter (D-PA) introduced a private bill in January 1950 to permit Knauff to enter the country. The House Judiciary Committee unanimously supported his bill. The committee report included a letter from a Justice Department official, stating that the president and the attorney general had sole authority to deny entry “for security reasons.” Knauff had “to stand the test of security” and “she failed to meet” that test.42 Since confidentiality prevented anyone, including the courts, from knowing on what ground she was being excluded, no one knew what the test was or whether she failed to meet it. The bill reached the House floor on May 2, 1950 and passed unanimously. Legislation was introduced in the Senate but no further action was taken there. On March 26, 1951, after the Supreme Court had ruled in the case, the Immigration Service finally held a hearing. Three witnesses of the administration testified that Ellen Knauff was a security risk. Although



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their statements relied entirely on hearsay, the immigration board found the information sufficient. When Knauff’s attorney objected to the hearsay testimony the board said it would make its own determination as to what facts are permissible. It advised the attorney: “You must know that the Board is not bound by the rules of evidence.”43 It meant that an administrative agency is not bound by the same rules of evidence followed by federal courts. Two questions were taken to an immigration appeals board: (1) was there evidence before the Immigration Service to justify its findings? and (2) was Knauff accorded a fair and impartial hearing? On August 29, 1951, the appeals board held there was not adequate evidence to justify her exclusion. Having answered the first question, it was unnecessary to consider the second. The appeals board ordered Ellen Knauff admitted for permanent residence. Much of the debate after 9/11 centered on the reliability and admissibility of information against detainees in Guantánamo and other military camps. The careful reasoning of the Board of Immigration Appeals in 1951 merits close attention. It referred to “several kinds of hearsay.” One consists of statements “purporting to be based on the declarant’s own knowledge, but is unsworn.” The second is a sworn statement regarding matters known to the declarant through hearsay. To the appeals board, the statements of the three witnesses fell in the second category. As to anything dealing with espionage or subversive activities by Ellen Knauff, they had no personal knowledge. “The sum total then of all the testimony is hearsay.” Hearsay in an administrative hearing might be admissible if corroborated by direct evidence, but “all we have in this case is hearsay.”44 The immigration board had told Knauff’s attorney it was not bound by the rules of evidence, a position the appeals board rejected. Whatever discretion an administrative agency possesses does not eliminate the need for evidence: “hearsay is still hearsay whether it is introduced into a court or before an administrative agency.” On November 2, 1951, Attorney General J. Howard McGrath approved the decision of the appeals board and Ellen Knauff left Ellis Island to begin her life in America.45 She prevailed not simply because of the appeals board but because her case left the world of shadows and secrets and entered the public arena. Statements by the three witnesses could be examined by those who knew them, including those following the case in Europe. Institutions outside the Truman administration and the judiciary, including a free press and Congress, intervened to make the difference. Citizens and aliens should not be condemned by informers who rely on speculation and secondhand conjectures, and lack evidence.

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The Korean War In June 1950, President Truman ordered US troops to Korea without first requesting congressional authority. To defend the legality of his action he cited resolutions passed by the UN Security Council, but UN machinery is not a constitutional substitute for Congress. If it were possible, the president and the Senate, acting through the treaty process, could strip from the House of Representatives its fundamental constitutional authority to take the country from a state of peace to a state of war. The history of the United States is clear that all parties in the legislative and executive branches understood that the president had no independent authority to go to war and needed approval from both houses of Congress. For all major wars from 1789 to 1950, that constitutional framework was respected and adhered to. President Truman ruptured that pattern and established a precedent that some other chief executives have followed: circumventing Congress by going to the UN Security Council. The impermissibility of seeking authority from an international body rather than from Congress is underscored by the experience of the United States with the Treaty of Versailles. President Woodrow Wilson submitted the treaty to the Senate on July 10, 1919, attaching it to the Covenant of the League of Nations. Under the Covenant, members pledged to submit to the League all disputes threatening war and to use military and economic sanctions against nations that acted aggressively. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA) favored US participation in the League but proposed a number of reservations to protect American interests and preserve constitutional principles. The second of fourteen reservations focused on the question of war, stating that any use of US military or naval forces in a League action required prior congressional approval.46 Wilson strongly opposed the Lodge reservations, claiming that they “cut the heart of this Covenant” and represented “nullification” of the treaty.47 That was hyperbole. Wilson’s principal advisers, including Secretary of State Robert Lansing, Bernard Baruch, Herbert Hoover, and Colonel Edward M. House, found nothing objectionable to the Lodge reservations. They urged Wilson to accept them.48 Yet Wilson, out of personal spite and stubbornness, decided to oppose Lodge. He pursued that political strategy even though he had no principled or substantive objections to the reservations, including the one on the war power. On March 8, 1920, Wilson wrote to Senator Gilbert M. Hitchcock (D-NE) explaining why he objected to the reservations. Whatever obligations the United States undertook in a League military action “would of course have to be fulfilled by its usual and established constitutional meth-



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ods of action,” and there “can be no objection to explaining again what our constitutional method is and that our Congress alone can declare war or authorize the causes or occasions for war, and that it alone can authorize the use of the armed forces of the United States on land or on the sea.” To accept the Lodge reservations, Wilson reasoned, “would certainly be a work of supererogation,” by which Wilson meant it was superfluous.49 He did not deny the substance of the reservation, only its necessity. Wilson took a chance with the Treaty of Versailles. After excluding the Senate from the negotiating sessions, he now tried to force it down the throats of senators and would tolerate no amendments or reservations. It was his treaty, take it or leave it. The Senate decided to leave it, rejecting it in November 1919 and again in March 1920. This image of an obstinate president determined to “go it alone” was fixed in the minds of those who later, during World War II, decided to create an international organization, this time to be called the United Nations. The predominant view of those who helped draft the UN Charter was that the president needed prior authorization of both houses of Congress before committing US forces to a UN military action.50 When the Senate debated the UN Charter, it gave close attention to a section requiring member nations to make military troops and equipment available to the Security Council. Under chapter 7 of the charter, the UN had an obligation to respond to threats to peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression, and procedures were drawn up to permit the UN to employ military force to deal with those threats. All UN members would make available to the Security Council “on its call and in accordance with a special agreement or agreements,” armed forces and other assistance for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security. Agreements concluded between the Security Council and member states “shall be subject to ratification by the signatory states in accordance with their respective constitutional processes.” Each nation had to determine its own “constitutional processes.” Which government officials would make that decision? President Truman was in Potsdam during this stage of the Senate debate. He wired a note to Senator Kenneth McKellar (D-TN) on July 27, 1945, making this pledge: “When any such agreement or agreements are negotiated it will be my purpose to ask the Congress for appropriate legislation to approve them.”51 By Congress, of course, he meant seeking the support of both houses. With the understanding that President Truman would come to Congress for authorizing legislation, rather than attempt to act unilaterally through the Security Council, the Senate approved the UN Charter by a vote of 89 to 2.52

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Congress did not simply trust in Truman’s word. It drafted a bill to explain precisely how the United States would implement its “constitutional processes.” The bill led to enactment of the UN Participation Act of 1945. The meaning of US constitutional processes is defined in section 6. Without the slightest ambiguity, the statute requires that the agreements entered into with the Security Council “shall be subject to the approval of the Congress by appropriate Act or joint resolution.”53 Statutory language could not be clearer. Before making any such agreement, the president would be required to seek congressional approval in advance. There are two qualifications in section 6, but they do not weaken the need for congressional approval for the initial, implementing agreement. The legislative history of the UN Participation Act underscores the need for advance congressional approval.54 It is extraordinary that with these statutory safeguards in place to protect congressional powers under the Constitution, President Truman would go to war on his own in 1950—using UN machinery—without coming to Congress for advance authority. On June 26, 1950, he announced to the American public that he had conferred with his senior advisers “about the situation in the Far East created by unprovoked aggression against the Republic of Korea.”55 The UN Security Council had adopted a resolution ordering a withdrawal of North Korean forces to positions north of the 38th parallel. The United States, he said, would support the efforts of the Security Council to terminate this breach of the peace. No commitments of US military forces were made at that point. On the following day, Truman announced that North Korea had failed to cease hostilities and to withdraw to the 38th parallel. That boundary formed an artificial separation between North and South Korea. Steps taken over the years, both inside Korea and outside, created an unstable situation that eventually led to military action.56 He stated that the Security Council “called upon all members of the United Nations to render every assistance to the United Nations in the execution of this resolution. In these circumstances I have ordered United States air and sea forces to give the [South] Korean Government troops cover and support.”57 He closed by saying that the United States “will continue to uphold the rule of law.” Far from honoring the rule of law, President Truman violated the Constitution, the UN Charter, the UN Participation Act, and his own pledge from Potsdam. What legal arguments could justify his actions? On June 29, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson claimed that all US actions taken in Korea “have been under the aegis of the United Nations.”58 Aegis is a fudge word, meaning “shield” or “protection.” Describing Truman’s initiative as acting under the umbrella of the UN may have been intended



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to give a patina of legality to the operation, as though Truman was not acting unilaterally but through an international organization. But nothing in the UN Charter or the UN Participation Act, much less the Constitution, authorized Truman to act as he did. Truman met with congressional leaders at 11:30 a.m. on June 27, after the administration’s policy had been established and implementing orders issued.59 He later met with congressional leaders to give them briefings on developments in Korea, but never asked for authority.60 There had been some consideration of asking Congress for approval. A draft resolution was prepared for that purpose but it never left the administration.61 It is quite true that some congressional leaders, such as Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas (D-IL), suggested there was no need for congressional approval. Lucas said that Truman “had very properly done what he had to do without consulting Congress.”62 The Constitution, treaties, and statutes, however, are not amended or altered whenever one lawmaker (or a number of them) decides to defer to presidential initiatives that violate the law. Members of Congress take an oath to defend the Constitution, not the president or his party. A case might be made that the emergency facing Truman in June 1950 required him to act instantly without seeking and obtaining authority from Congress. Yet nothing prevented him from returning to Congress within a few days to request supportive legislation with retroactive effect. John Norton Moore made this point: “As to the suddenness of Korea, I would argue that the President should have the authority to meet the attack as necessary but should immediately seek congressional authorization.”63 At the start of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln took several unilateral actions but then went to Congress seeking retroactive authority, after conceding that some of his actions had gone beyond his constitutional powers.64 The administration resorted to word games to mask constitutional and statutory violations. On June 29, 1950, at a news conference, Truman was asked whether the country was at war. His response: “We are not at war.” A reporter inquired whether it would be more correct to call the conflict “a police action under the United Nations.” Truman quickly agreed: “That is exactly what it amounts to.”65 At a news conference on July 13, he again called the Korean War a “police action.”66 The Constitution, the UN Charter, and the UN Participation Act do not sanction presidential violations if they are labeled “police actions” rather than “wars.” During Senate hearings in June 1951, Acheson ceased the obfuscation by admitting the obvious: “in the usual sense of the word there is a war.”67 Federal and state judges had no difficulty in defining the hostilities in Korea as war.68

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It was deceptive to call the war in Korea a UN action. The United Nations or the Security Council exercised no real authority over the conduct of the war. Other than token support from a few nations, it was an American war. The UN Security Council requested that the United States designate the commander of the forces and authorized the “unified command at its discretion to use the United Nations flag.” Truman selected General Douglas MacArthur to take charge of this so-called unified command.69 Measured by troops, money, casualties, and deaths, it remained from start to finish an American war. Some members of Congress defended Truman with this argument: “history will show that on more than one hundred occasions in the life of this Republic the president as commander in chief has ordered the fleet or the troops to do certain things which involved the risk of war” without seeking congressional approval.70 Nothing in this list of presidential initiatives comes anywhere close to the magnitude of the Korean War. As political scientist Edward S. Corwin noted at the time, the list consists largely of “fights with pirates, landings of small naval contingents on barbarous or semi-barbarous coasts, the dispatch of small bodies of troops to chase bandits or cattle rustlers across the Mexican border, and the like.” 71 Few lawmakers exercised independent judgment to challenge the illegality of the Korean War. An attack on Truman would have been interpreted as support for communism. In deciding whether to salute the Constitution or Truman, they chose the latter. One exception is a statement from Representative Vito Marcantonio (American Labor Party-NY): “When we agreed to the United Nations Charter we never agreed to supplant our Constitution with the United Nations Charter. The power to declare and make war is vested in the representatives of the people, in the Congress of the United States.” 72 Similarly, Senator Robert Taft (R-OH) warned that if Truman could intervene in Korea without congressional approval, “he can go to war in Malaya or Indochina or Iran or South America.” Taft reminded his colleagues of section 6 of the UN Participation Act. No special agreement had been negotiated by the Truman administration and submitted to Congress for its consideration and approval.73 In 1951, almost a year into the Korean War, a number of senators participated in a lengthy debate that thoroughly shredded the multiple legal justifications presented by the Truman administration. Truman’s action violated the UN Charter, the UN Participation Act, and the assurances that Truman, Acheson, and other executive officials had given to Congress and the American people. It was a war, not a police action. It was an American effort, not a UN operation.74 If legal arguments could not shake the Truman administration, politics did. The principal focus of the 1952



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presidential campaign proved to be “Korea, not crooks or Communists.” 75 As explained in one study, public dissatisfaction with the Korean War “destroyed Truman’s popularity and had much to do with Eisenhower’s emphatic victory in the election of 1952.” 76 Truman’s initiative with the Korean War has done much damage to constitutional government. Using 1950 as a precedent, President George H. W. Bush went to the UN Security Council in November 1990 to obtain “authority” to take military action against Iraq. He received statutory authority in January 1991 but claimed that UN action was sufficient and he needed from Congress only “support,” not authority.77 President Bill Clinton twice turned to the UN Security Council when he wanted to use military force against Haiti and in Bosnia. When Clinton planned to use military force against Kosovo and could not obtain support from the Security Council, he turned to NATO countries for “authority.” The constitutional weakness of this position is the same as for the UN. The president and the Senate, through the treaty process, cannot create mutual security pacts that have the effect of circumventing Congress when deciding on going to war.78 It makes no sense to argue that the president does not need authority from Congress but must seek approval from Belgium, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and other NATO allies.

Constitutional Values in Times of Crisis It is a conspicuous pattern in the history of America that constitutional values are often given subordinate status in periods of crisis. That is regrettable. The Constitution is meant to protect citizens in time of peace and war, especially the latter. The framers had just come through a bloody war against England. They knew the temptation to vest power in an executive and give short shrift to other institutions. They resisted that temptation and decided that the best protection is how government is structured, putting their faith in separation of powers and checks and balances. John Jay, whose expertise was in foreign affairs, sharply warned against placing war decisions with the executive. In “Federalist No. 4,” he reviewed the history of other countries that had allowed single executives to go to war. “It is too true,” he said, “however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting any thing by it.” Absolute monarchs “will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for purposes and objects merely personal, such as a thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans.” These and other motives “which affect only

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the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people.” 79 President Truman and the top officials in his administration inherited an America that had just come through World War II and immediately faced a threat from the Soviet Union and worldwide communism. European nations, battered by years of military combat, had few resources to protect themselves and restore democratic institutions. The Truman administration did much to assist them. At the same time, Truman presided over a national security state that gave scant protection to government employees and private individuals. Although every government has a right to defend itself, it has no right to use unverified and uncorroborated confidential information to fire employees and exclude aliens as security risks. At no time did Truman seem to understand the extent to which his administration violated civil liberties and damaged individual reputations. In veto messages in 1950 and 1952, Truman eloquently defended constitutional principles he had ignored in his early years in the White House. In his veto of the Internal Security bill on September 22, 1950, he pointed to language “so broad and vague that it might well result in penalizing the legitimate activities of people who are no Communists at all, but loyal citizens.” Such was the result of his loyalty review boards. He said “to detain a man not charged with a crime would raise serious constitutional questions unless the writ of habeas corpus was suspended.” Ellen Knauff did not enjoy those constitutional safeguards. To Truman, the Internal Security Bill moved “in the direction of suppressing opinion and belief.” Any governmental “stifling of the free expression of public opinion is a long step towards totalitarianism.” The loyalty review boards took a long step in that direction, sacrificing individual opinions and beliefs to conformity and compliance.80 Vetoing an immigration bill on June 25, 1952, Truman objected to the provisions that would “empower the Attorney General to deport any alien who has engaged or has had a purpose to engage in activities ‘prejudicial to the public interest’ or ‘subversive to the national security.’” He pointed out that Congress had provided no standards or definitions “to guide discretion in the exercise of powers so sweeping.” Of course those standards and definitions were missing with the treatment of Knauff and other individuals suspected of being a security risk. He said that previous deportations and exclusion orders “have rested upon findings of fact made upon evidence.” Not with Knauff and many others.81 Truman did not understand that government is strongest in resisting external enemies when the two political branches act jointly through the regular legal process. It was both a political and constitutional error to act



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unilaterally in going to war against North Korea. Circumventing Congress by obtaining “authority” from the UN Security Council violated the Constitution, the UN Charter, the UN Participation Act, and Truman’s own pledge to the Senate that he would seek congressional approval. He paid a heavy price, as did his party and the country. Initially, Dwight D. Eisenhower thought that Truman’s decision to intervene in Korea was “wise and necessary.”82 He came to appreciate that Truman made a mistake, politically and constitutionally. By the time he reached the White House, Eisenhower understood that making a national commitment, especially a military commitment, is strongest when entered into jointly by the two political branches. He was determined to ask Congress for specific authority when dealing with national security crises. He underscored the importance of taking collective action when confronting emergencies: “I deem it necessary to seek the cooperation of the Congress. Only with that cooperation can we give the reassurance needed to deter aggression.”83 The two branches acting jointly send the strongest possible message to both allies and enemies. Eisenhower was well aware that a president will always be surrounded by advisers eager to champion the propriety (and legality) of unilateral action. They will offer vague but confident references to the commander in chief clause, in article II of the Constitution, and certain authorities said to be “inherent” in the presidency. Often implied in these arguments is the belief that to be a great president one needs to be a war president. Truman in Korea, Lyndon Johnson in Vietnam, and George W. Bush in Iraq decided to go down that road at great cost to themselves and their nation. Future presidents should not follow the same uninformed, misguided path.

Notes

1. Congressional Quarterly Almanac 3 (1947): 35–37. 2. Langston, Cold War Presidency, 68. 3. Ibid., 48. 4. Heale, McCarthy’s Americans; and Goldstein, American Blacklist, 18–20. 5. “Loyalty Pledge to be Circulated,” New York Times, May 28, 1942. 6. Executive Order 9300: Subversive Activities by Federal Employees, February 5, 1943, reprinted in Bontecou, Federal Loyalty-Security Program, 272–73. 7. “Names Committee on Subversion,” New York Times, February 7, 1943. 8. Clifford, Counsel to the President, 175–76. See also Hogan, Cross of Iron. 9. Executive Order 9835: Prescribing Procedures for the Administration of an Employees Loyalty Program in the Executive Branch of the Government, published in 12 Fed. Reg. 1935 (March 25, 1947). For the political context of Truman’s order, see Harper, Politics of Loyalty; Griffith and Theoharis, The Specter; Steinberg, Great “Red Menace”; Freeland, Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism; and Theoharis, Seeds of Repression. 10. EO 9835 pt. IV.1, in 12 Fed. Reg. 1935 (March 25, 1947).

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11. Peters v. Hobby, 349 US 331, 351 (1955) (Douglas, J., concurring). 12. EO 9835 pt. II.2.b, in 12 Fed. Reg. 1937 (March 25, 1947). 13. Bontecou, Federal Loyalty-Security Program, 60–64. 14. EO 9835 pt. III.3, in 12 Fed. Reg. 1938 (March 25, 1947). 15. For details on the list prepared by the attorney general, see Bontecou, Federal Loyalty-Security Program, 157–204. 16. Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee v. McGrath, 341 US 123, 126 (1951). 17. Ibid., 139. 18. Ibid., 161. 19. O’Brian, National Security and Individual Freedom, 25–26. For other contemporary critiques of Truman’s order and loyalty tests, see O’Brian, “Loyalty Tests and Guilt by Association”; and Durr, “Loyalty Order’s Challenge to the Constitution.” 20. EO 9835 pt. V.2, in 12 FR 1938 (March 25, 1947). 21. Clubb, The Witness and I, 149, 161. 22. Ibid., 147–48. 23. Fried, McCarthyism, 34. 24. Ibid., 35. 25. Ibid., 37. 26. See Fried, McCarthyism, for special examples. Other good sources are Caute, Great Fear; Schrecker, No Ivory Tower; Griffith, Politics of Fear; Navasky, Naming Names; Ceplair and Englund, Inquisition in Hollywood; and Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense. 27. Truman, Memoirs, vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope, 270. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 281. 30. Fisher, Constitution and 9/11, 158–67. 31. Bailey v. Richardson, 182 F.2d 46, 66 (DC Cir. 1950) (Edgerton, J., dissenting). 32. Ibid., 67, 71, 74. 33. For her history, see Knauff, Ellen Knauff Story. 34. United States ex rel. Knauff v. Watkins, 173 F.2d 599, 603 (2d Cir. 1949). 35. Ibid. 36. Knauff v. Shaughnessy, 338 US 537 (1950). 37. Ibid., 548. 38. Ibid., 550, 551, 552. 39. Jackson’s order is reprinted in 96 Cong. Rec. A3750–51 (1950). 40. Ibid., A1704–5. 41. Ibid., A3990–91. 42. “Mrs. Ellen Knauff,” H. Rept. No. 1940, at 4 (1950). The author of the Justice Department letter was Peyton Ford, assistant to the attorney general. 43. Knauff, Ellen Knauff Story, 198. 44. 45. 46. 58 Cong. Rec. 8777 (1919). Under Lodge’s second reservation, the United States assumed no obligation to use its military or naval forces under any article of the treaty “for any purpose, unless in any particular case the Congress, which, under the Constitution, has the sole power to declare war or authorize the employment of the military or naval forces of the United States, shall by act or joint resolution so provide.” 47. Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 63:451, 64:47, 51. 48. Hoopes and Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the U.N., 6. 49. Link, Papers of Woodrow Wilson, 65:68. 50. For negotiations over the UN Charter, see Fisher, Presidential War Power, 84–90. 51. 91 Cong. Rec. 8185 (1945). 52. Ibid., 8190. 53. United Nations Participation Act, Pub. L. No. 79-264. 59 Stat. 621, sec. 6 (1945).



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54. Fisher, Presidential War Power, 92–95. 55. Statement by the President on the Violation of the 38th Parallel in Korea, June 26, 1950, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1950, 491. 56. See Stueck, Rethinking the Korean War; and Pierpaoli, Truman and Korea. 57. Statement by the President on the Violation of the 38th Parallel in Korea, June 26, 1950, in Public Papers of the Presidents, Truman, 1950, 492. 58. Department of State Bulletin 23 (1950): 43. 59. Korea, FRUS 1950, 7:200–202. 60. Ibid., 257. 61. Ibid., 282–83, 287–91nn1–2. 62. Ibid., 287. 63. Moore, “National Executive and the Use of Armed Forces Abroad,” 28, 32. 64. Fisher, Presidential War Power, 47–48. 65. The President’s News Conference, June 29, 1950, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1950, 504. 66. The President’s News Conference, July 13, 1950, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1950, 522. 67. Military Situation in the Far East (part 3), Hearings Before the Senate Committees on Armed Services and Foreign Relations, 82nd Cong., 2014 (1951). 68. Weissman v. Metropolitan Life Ins. Co., 112 F.Supp. 420, 425 (S.D. Cal. 1953); Gagliomella v. Metropolitan Life Ins. Co., 122 F.Supp. 246 (D. Mass. 1954); Carius v. New York Life Insurance Co., 124 F.Supp. 388 (D. Ill. 1954); and Western Reserve Life Ins. Co. v. Meadows, 261 S.W.2d 554 (Tex. 1953). 69. “White House Statement Following a Meeting Between the President and Top Congressional and Military Leaders To Review the Situation in Korea,” June 30, 1950, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1950, 520. 70. Statement of Senator Scott Lucas, 96 Cong. Rec. 9229 (1950). 71. Corwin, “The President’s Power,” 16. 72. 96 Cong. Rec. 9268 (1951). 73. Ibid., 9323. 74. 97 Cong. Rec. 5078–103 (1951). 75. Ambrose, Eisenhower, 569. 76. Pach and Richardson, Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, 46. 77. Fisher, Presidential War Power, 169–73, 180–86, 198–201. 78. Ibid., 105–15. 79. Wright, The Federalist, 101. 80. “Veto of the Internal Security Bill,” in Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1950, 646–47, 649. 81. “Veto of Bill To Revise the Laws Relating to Immigration, Naturalization, and Nationality,” in Public Papers of the Presidents: Truman, 1952–52, 445. 82. Eisenhower, White House Years, 82. 83. Special Message to the Congress on the Situation in the Middle East, January 5, 1957, in Public Papers of the Presidents: Eisenhower, 1957, 11.

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Works Cited

Ambrose, Stephen E. Eisenhower: Soldier, General of the Army, President-Elect. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983. Bontecou, Eleanor. The Federal Loyalty-Security Program. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1953. Caute, David. The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower. New York: Touchstone Book, 1978. Ceplair, Larry, and Steven Englund. The Inquisition in Hollywood. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Clifford, Clark. Counsel to the President: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 1991. Clubb, O. Edmund. The Witness and I. New York: Columbia University Press, 1974. Corwin, Edward S. “The President’s Power.” New Republic (January 29, 1951), 16. Durr, Clifford J. “The Loyalty Order’s Challenge to the Constitution.” University of Chicago Law Review 16, no. 2 (Winter 1949): 298–306. Eisenhower, Dwight D. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1958. ———. The White House Years: Mandate for Change. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963. Fisher, Louis. The Constitution and 9/11: Recurring Threats to America’s Freedoms. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. ———. Presidential War Power. 2nd ed. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004. Freeland, Richard M. The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and Internal Security, 1946–1948. New York: New York University Press, 1985. Fried, Albert. McCarthyism: The Great American Scare. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Goldstein, Robert Justin. American Blacklist: The Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008. Griffith, Robert. The Politics of Fear: Joseph R. McCarthy and the Senate. 2nd ed. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. ———, and Athan Theoharis, eds. The Specter: Original Essays on the Cold War and the Origins of McCarthyism. New York: New Viewpoints, 1974. Hamby, Alonzo L. “Harry S. Truman.” In Encyclopedia of the American Presidency, edited by Leonard W. Levy and Louis Fisher, PAGES?. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. Harper, Alan D. The Politics of Loyalty: The White House and the Communist Issue, 1946–1952. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1969. Heale, M. J. McCarthy’s Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation, 1935– 1965. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. Hogan, Michael J. A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Hoopes, Townsend, and Douglas Brinkley. FDR and the Creation of the U.N. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Knauff, Ellen Raphael. The Ellen Knauff Story. New York: W. W. Norton, 1952. Langston, Thomas S. The Cold War Presidency: A Documentary History. Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2007.



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Link, Arthur S., ed., The Papers of Woodrow Wilson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990–91. Moore, John N. “The National Executive and the Use of Armed Forces Abroad.” Naval War College Review 21, no. 5 (January 1969): 28–38. Navasky, Victor S. Naming Names. New York: Hill & Wang, 2003. O’Brian, John Lord. “Loyalty Tests and Guilt by Association.” Harvard Law Review 61, no. 4 (April 1948): 592–611. ———. National Security and Individual Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955. Oshinsky, David M. A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pach, Chester J., Jr. and Elmo Richardson. The Presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991. Pierpaoli, Paul G., Jr. Truman and Korea: The Political Culture of the Early Cold Qar. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Schrecker, Ellen W. No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Steinberg, Peter L. The Great ‘Red Menace’: United States Prosecution of American Communists, 1947–1952. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984. Steuck, William. Rethinking the Korean War: A New Diplomatic and Strategic History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. Theoharis, Athan. Seeds of Repression: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of McCarthyism. New York; Quadrangle Books, 1977. Truman, Harry S. Memoirs. Vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956. ———. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1950. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1965. ———. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1952– 1953. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1966. Wright, Benjamin F., ed. The Federalist. New York: MetroBooks, 2002.

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In The American Commonwealth, James Bryce wrote, “Europeans often ask and Americans do not always explain, how it happens that this great office, the greatest in the world, unless we accept the Papacy, which anyone can rise by his own merits, is not more frequently filled by great and striking men. In America, which is beyond all other countries the country of a ‘career open to talents,’ … it might be expected that the highest place would always be won by a man of brilliant gifts. But from the time when the heroes of the Revolution died out with Jefferson and Adams and Madison, no person except General Grant … reached the chair, whose name would have been remembered had he not been president, and no president except Abraham Lincoln had displayed rare or striking qualities in the chair.”1 When Bryce wrote in 1888, Truman was only four years old, but surely few would argue today that Bryce would not have included Truman among those who displayed rare or striking qualities as president. Indeed, the most recent C-SPAN poll of presidential leadership places Truman fifth among America’s great or near-great presidents, behind only Lincoln, Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt, the same position he held in 2000 when C-SPAN conducted a similar poll.2 So much stands out about Truman, from his common sense folksiness (a recent book deals with Truman’s attempt to take a car trip with Bess to the East, believing, and hoping, that he could simply slip back into normality and discovering he could not)3 to his famous remark, “The buck stops here,” which every one of his successors has mentioned at one time or another. Most important is the fact that he actually followed what he 180



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said, which not every one of his successors can claim. Truman had to make not one, but a score of the most fateful and important decisions that any president had to make, ranging from his decision to drop the atomic bomb in 1945 to the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the recognition of Israel, and the decision to send US forces into Korea in 1950. Another less frequently mentioned decision that occurred under his watch was the National Security Act of 1947, which established the Office of Secretary of Defense (the Department of Defense was not effectively established until 1949), the CIA, the National Resources Board, and the National Security Council. In Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, historian Michael Beschloss claims that Truman’s most difficult—and bravest—decision was to recognize the state of Israel. This statement is surprising; without suggesting he made the wrong decision in recognizing Israel, it can be argued that the decision would have been just as brave if he had done the opposite. But this is not the topic, thankfully, that this article needs to address.4 Rather, the topic here is Truman, Congress, and the military, which required what can be argued was really the bravest decision Truman (or any other twentieth-century president) has made. That was his decision to fire General Douglas MacArthur in April 1951 for disobeying his order not to speak out publicly about expanding the war in Korea into China. Although it became clear within a rather short time, even among some of Truman’s harshest critics, that he had acted appropriately, given the reverence in which MacArthur was held throughout the country and the president’s unpopularity not only with the American public but with Congress, it took a truly brave, if not heroic, leader to do what Truman did. For someone who had not completely discounted the possibility of seeking the Democratic nomination in 1952, that decision was an act of political suicide, but one he correctly realized he had to make. If, however, Truman’s decision to fire MacArthur was a singularly brave and daring act, the response to MacArthur’s dismissal, which included effigy burnings of Truman in scores of towns across the country and calls for his impeachment in the halls of Congress, must be seen in a wider context. Among the public, the response was influenced by the climate of fear and conspiracy that went back to at least 1947 and was exacerbated in 1949 when almost simultaneously the Soviet Union successfully tested an atomic bomb years before anticipated and the Chinese Communists won a civil war against the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. In Congress, it was influenced by the years-long struggle over the direction and cost of US foreign and military policy. Should the primary theater of operations against the Soviet Union be in Asia or Europe? How should

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the “war” be waged? And how much should Washington commit to the struggle?5 Ironically, the response of the military to Truman’s decision to fire MacArthur was supportive. This was due, in part, to the fact that most high military commanders did not particularly care for the egotistical and vainglorious general, and because they thought that any ground extension of the Korean War into China would be foolish. It also reflected the military tradition of not publicly questioning or challenging the commander in chief.6 By the time of the Korean War, most of the major quarrels between the military and President Truman had already been fought at the Pentagon within the newly established Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD) and with the first two Secretaries of Defense, James Forrestal and Louis Johnson. The major issues that concerned the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the three services after the war were largely institutional and budgetary as the two traditional services, the army and the navy, and the third new service, the air force, jockeyed for position and funding among themselves and for control relative to the newly established OSD. The question of where the Cold War would be waged was still largely a civilian matter and secondary to how and with what resources it would be fought. By the time of MacArthur’s firing, these two issues had been resolved. Truman’s difficulties with the so-called Do-Nothing 80th Congress, both houses controlled by Republicans, are legendary and provided the basis for his successful 1948 presidential campaign. In his study of the Truman presidency, Donald R. McCoy made the point that Truman purposely picked fights with the Republicans by calling for measures he knew Congress would not pass and vetoed measures they did pass even though he knew his vetoes would be overridden in order to bait the 80th Congress in his 1948 presidential campaign. His differences with the Congress, however, were on domestic policy. As a result of the onset of the Cold War and the growing perception of a worldwide Soviet threat, such prominent Republican leaders as the former isolationist Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan and Christian Herter of Massachusetts promoted bipartisanship in Congress that lasted until the Korean War. Despite early talk in Congress about the Democrats being “soft” on communism and an internal Communist conspiracy in high government circles, Truman generally got the funding he requested for his foreign policy initiatives, the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and the Berlin Airlift.7 With the exception of Truman’s request for universal military training, which Congress did not approve, the same bipartisanship applied to military policy. Truman and the Congress were on the same wavelength,



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although the president wanted greater executive control and a more centralized defense establishment than Capitol Hill. Congress sought to maintain the close ties that existed between it and the separate service departments. The president was disappointed, therefore, that the National Security Act of 1947 maintained the autonomy of the services and their ties with Congress much as they had been during World War II.8 Both Congress and Truman were economizers. The National Security Act aimed to save money by limiting the size of the armed forces while enhancing their effectiveness. The military was at odds with the administration because of the funding limits already placed upon them. Navy Secretary James Forrestal, who later became Truman’s first Secretary of Defense, disagreed with Truman on a number of issues, such as the role of the cabinet and the partitioning of Palestine, but Truman fired him primarily because he complained about his intentions to seek fiscal economy. The president also worried about the secretary’s growing mental instability.9 Forrestal, who committed suicide in 1949, was a fascinating figure. At Princeton University he had established an outstanding record: he was appointed editor of the Daily Princetonian and voted by his class “the most likely to succeed.” He left Princeton before his graduation in order to work for the New York World, and a year later he accepted a position with William A. Read and Co. (later Dillon, Read and Co.). Except for his service in the Navy during World War I, he remained there until 1940. In 1937 he became head of the company at a reported salary of $190,000 (the equivalent of about $2.8 million in 2009). In 1940, his neighbor from Duchess County, New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, appointed him undersecretary of the navy. During World War II, Forrestal was responsible for mobilizing domestic industrial production for the war effort. After Navy Secretary Frank Knox died suddenly of a heart attack in 1944, Forrestal was promoted to that position, where he was responsible for naval demobilization after the war.10 In 1947, President Truman appointed Forrestal the first secretary of defense. A brilliant, but cold, demanding, and pugnacious individual, Forrestal soon battled with liberals in Congress and in his own party. An ardent foe of communism, he took issue with those who still believed it was possible to develop good relations with the Soviet Union. In 1946, Forrestal joined with Secretary of State James Byrnes to get Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace fired for a speech he made calling for an end to the Cold War. On March 7, 1947, after the cabinet met to discuss providing military assistance to Greece and Turkey against a perceived threat from the Soviet Union—leading to what became known as the Truman Doctrine—Forrestal wrote in his diary “that what was occurring was simply the manifestation of

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what had been in process of development in the last four years; that if we were going to have a chance of winning [the Cold War], we should have to recognize it as a fundamental struggle between our kind of society and the Russians’ and that the Russians would not respond to anything except power.” Forrestal also argued against the proposed partitioning of Palestine on the basis that it would infuriate Arab countries, whose oil would be essential for European recovery and for national defense purposes. Instead, he favored a federalization plan for Palestine.11 Forrestal’s past association with Dillon, Read led to claims that he owned shares with companies having ties to Nazi Germany. Similar assertions that he had used his influence during the war to prevent the United States from bombing German cities, as well as his alleged ties to big oil, his known enmity toward the Soviet Union, and his opposition to the establishment of Israel, all led to bitter attacks against him among friends of Israel in Congress and in the press. The influential columnist Drew Pearson led the attack, calling Forrestal “the most dangerous man in America.”12 Initially, Forrestal had Truman’s strong support. The National Security Act of 1947 unifying the armed services under a single secretary of defense came only after bitter struggle between the army and the navy. The navy was most resistant to unification, seeking to expand its size and believing that any future war would require the mobility of forces that only a strong navy with its own air force and an expanded US Marine Corps could provide. This was the position that Forrestal, as secretary of the US Navy, had defended in talks with Secretary of War Robert Patterson. Forrestal was the Pentagon official most responsible for building a coalition that successfully fought the type of military unification and defense centralization in the executive branch that the president had desired. After he became secretary of defense, however, he took on the punishing job of bringing about greater unification and centralization of the military services.13 Among the military services, the navy remained the most recalcitrant. Forrestal, who had a reputation for being a workaholic, applied all his industry to get the navy to commit itself to real unification under his authority. While he worked on behalf of unification, he was sensitive to the traditions and loyalties of the navy and the army. Despite his well-earned reputation as a demanding, cold, and effective administrator, Forrestal tried to win accord by compromise and persuasion instead of cracking a few heads together. He largely failed to achieve the objectives Truman had in mind when he sent the National Security Act to Congress. In particular, he could not get the services to agree on their respective roles and missions. Could the navy keep the Marine Corps and provide close air support for its operations? Or should the Marine Corps be merged into the army? With



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the establishment of the air force, under the NASA legislation, was there a future role for naval aviation? Should the navy continue to build aircraft carriers, something the air force opposed, wanting to use the savings to increase its peacetime size to seventy air groups? If the navy kept the aircraft carriers, should it participate in strategic nuclear bomb operations? Forrestal brought the leaders of the three services to Key West to resolve their differences, but they disagreed with each other and with the defense secretary on what had been agreed to at their summit.14 Other than his failure to bring about effective unification of the military service, two matters cost Forrestal his job. The most important of these was his unwillingness to go along with Truman’s insistence on economizing. When Forrestal became secretary of defense, he tried to impose a budgetary system on the Pentagon based on the military threats posed to the United States by its enemies. He was amazed that Truman made his defense allocations by subtracting from total receipts domestic needs and recurrent operating costs with any surplus going to the defense budget that year.15 Not only did Forrestal think the budgetary system was foolish, he was concerned about the need for new military equipment for all branches of the military after millions of dollars of equipment had been scrapped or abandoned after the war. He believed the Soviet Union represented an enemy as dangerous as Nazi Germany and Japan, and resisted the president’s efforts to substantially reduce the defense budget. He found himself, therefore, in the middle of a dispute between the president and the armed services, which were urging increases in the defense budget. Forrestal took the military’s side. In his diary on March 16, 1948, he remarked, “this country and its government are desperately anxious to avoid war. It is simply a question of how best to do it. If all Europe lies flat while the Russian mob tramps over it, we will then be faced with a war under difficult circumstances, and with a very good chance of losing it.” By 1948, Forrestal’s relations with the Truman administration had reached the point where he talked privately with Republican presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey about becoming his secretary of defense after Dewey defeated Truman. Forrestal also failed to contribute to Truman’s reelection campaign.16 Making matters worse for Forrestal were attacks on him by newspaper columnist and radio commentator Drew Pearson. Forrestal’s health was declining and there were rumors that he had become mentally unstable under the pressure of the Cold War, the conflicts among the armed services for a larger share of the defense budget, and his growing disagreements with Truman. Pearson raised questions about Forrestal’s mental state and called for his resignation. Pearson also got wind of Forrestal’s talks with the

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Republican candidate and published an account of them in his syndicated column.17 Meanwhile, the Secret Service conducted an investigation into Forrestal’s mental health and strongly suggested that he was suffering from paranoia. “Mr. Forrestal had become so overly suspicious that whenever the front door was opened or the bell rang, he would go to the area and peer out secretly to see who was there,” one report indicated. General Dwight Eisenhower recorded in his diary on January 8, 1949, “Jim is looking badly. He has a conscience and a sense of duty. These, coupled with his feeling of urgency and his terrific, almost tragic disappointment in the failures of professional men to ‘get together’ leads him to certain errors. Among these none is worse than the way he treats himself. He gives his mind no recess, and he works hours that would kill a horse.”18 Frustrated at his differences with Forrestal over the budget, angry about his talks with Dewey and his failure to contribute to his campaign, and worried about his state of mind, Truman decided to fire the defense secretary in March 1949. After he was removed from office, Forrestal’s mental state deteriorated further and he was admitted to Bethesda Naval Hospital for treatment. On May 22, 1949, he fell from a sixteenth floor hospital window, almost certainly a suicide (although some have tried to claim he was thrown from the window by his Zionist enemies).19 Insofar as Truman, Congress, and the military were concerned, between 1945 and 1949 the major issues involved not so much Truman and Congress, but Truman and the military. Those issues were over unification and the budget. Forrestal had made some progress toward the unification of the services, but overall his term as secretary of defense has to be regarded as a failure that led ultimately to his tragic death. Louis Johnson succeeded Forrestal in the Office of Defense. “It would be hard to imagine a greater contrast between two men,” Time magazine wrote about the change in leadership at the Pentagon on June 6, 1949. “When big, bald, Louis Johnson … stepped into James Forrestal’s place, control of the nation’s second biggest office passed from a wiry, introverted, unpolitical public servant to a 202 lb., hearty, hail-fellow man of action who had been a politician for most of his adult life.” A graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, Johnson had practiced law in Clarksburg, West Virginia, and built his firm, Steptoe and Johnson, into one of the nation’s most influential. He served in the West Virginia House of Delegates, in due course becoming majority leader. During World War I, Johnson was an army officer in France with responsibility for developing an extensive report to the War Department on army management and requisition practices. After the war, Johnson helped found the American Legion and became its national commander in 1932. Active in Democratic politics, he was appointed in 1937 as



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assistant secretary of war by Franklin Roosevelt. Worried about the deteriorating world condition, especially in Europe, he advocated universal military education, rearmament, and expansion of military aviation. He was bitterly disappointed when, as an effort at bipartisanship, Roosevelt bypassed him and chose Republican Henry Stimson as Secretary of War.20 Returning to his law practice, Johnson remained at the periphery of the military effort during World War II, although Roosevelt was anxious to find something for him to do. In 1942, he served briefly as the president’s personal representative to India. Without carefully defined responsibilities, Johnson got caught up in a British effort led by Sir Stafford Cripps to get India more involved in the war effort without ceding independence to India. The big issue with the Indian Congress led by Mohandas Gandhi was over control of India’s Defense Ministry. Johnson worked out a formula whereby the British would cede control of the ministry to India in return for India’s agreement to take no action that would be contrary to imperial war policy. This formula infuriated British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and led to Johnson’s eventual resignation. During the war he was also given the position of president, general manager, and chairman of the board of the General Aniline and Film Company (GAF) a subsidiary of the German chemical giant I.G. Farben, which had been seized during the war. He remained in that very lucrative position for the next five years. In addition, Johnson served on the board of the Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation (known as Convair), one of the largest makers of US airplanes during the war. His relationship with Convair would later come back to haunt him.21 Johnson predicted a postwar economic boom for the United States and he positioned his law firm to compete with the big New York law firms being assembled by such prominent lawyers and wartime leaders as Henry Stimson, Robert Patterson, and John McCloy. Johnson’s firm opened an office in Washington, DC, where he spent much of his time. To assure the success of his plan for growth by gaining political clout and prominence (and to further his ambitions for a cabinet position) Johnson also became involved in Democratic politics. Then in April 1945, Roosevelt died suddenly and was replaced by Vice President Truman.22 Louis Johnson knew Harry Truman, but their relationship was not close. He had first met the junior senator from Missouri in 1937 at an American Legion convention. After that, they had relatively little contact. But Truman, who was head of the Special Senate Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, had come to respect Johnson’s work on war production as head of GAF and an active board member of Convair. Truman also appreciated his efforts on behalf of the Democratic Party. During the

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1948 campaign, at a time when virtually no one gave the president a chance of winning, Johnson agreed to serve as chief fundraiser for his campaign after the financier, Bernard Baruch refused the position. According to his biographers, Keith D. McFarland and David L. Roll, Johnson was a gambler who may have been taking a chance that Truman would win and reward him with a high position in his new administration.23 If he had been thinking in these terms, Johnson won his gamble. An able campaign finance chairman, he raised $2 million (the modern equivalent of $17.6 million) in two months. This was considered a sizeable amount for a campaign in 1947. Johnson also loaned the campaign $100,000 of his own money to pay off campaign debts and meet other pressing needs. He strong-armed every cabinet member, high-ranking administration official, and Democratic member of Congress. He even visited those who had contributed to Dewey’s campaign, suggesting that they might want to take out an “insurance policy” just in case the incumbent won. Among those officials he approached was James Forrestal, and when Forrestal refused to make any contribution, Johnson made sure the president knew about it.24 On January 28, 1949, Truman offered Johnson the job of secretary of defense, explaining that Forrestal intended to resign for reasons of health. Johnson claimed to have been surprised by the offer, that he had earlier told Truman that in taking the finance chairmanship during the campaign, he had effectively disqualified himself from any appointment within the administration, and that he “neither wanted nor would accept any appointment.” There is substantial evidence to the contrary. Forrestal and Truman had been in talks about Johnson replacing Forrestal at least since the beginning of January.25 Regardless, once Truman forced Forrestal’s resignation on March 1, 1949 (effective March 31), he appointed Johnson to replace him. Immediately, Johnson began to make his power felt in large and small ways. As Time magazine put it, “he moved in like a combine advancing on a field of summer wheat.” He shared Truman’s (and Congress’s) commitment to reducing military spending and unifying the services. At a press conference the day after he took office, Johnson vowed a drastic cut in the number of National Military Establishment (the name for the defense organization before the DOD was formally created) boards, committees, and commissions. He then added, “To the limit the present law allows, I promise you there will be unification as rapidly as the efficiency of the services allows.”26 Johnson ordered half of the Pentagon’s twenty-five thousand workers into new quarters. He ordered all armed service celebrations combined into one Armed Forces Day. He ordered the separate medical services



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merged. He cut down on the private use of official automobiles. In order to cut down on intraservice backbiting, he ordered the consolidation of the separate press services. Finally, he ordered all the Joint Chiefs of Staff to go to Key West, where he asserted his authority without equivocation. There would be unification as provided by law; those who did not like it could resign their commissions.27 Johnson’s roughshod tactics created a backlash. No military service was more incensed than the navy. The army and the air force had accepted Johnson’s appointment without much complaint, but the navy had never been happy. It not only had lost a pro-navy defense secretary, but it believed that Johnson’s earlier statements showed that he favored the air force. The admirals were nervous that, in February, General Eisenhower had replaced Admiral William D. Leahy as primary military adviser to the secretary of defense and the president, an action that removed another naval advocate from the administration’s top circle of advisers. Even more worrisome, a Truman-appointed Air Policy Committee and a Joint Congressional Aviation Policy Board had proposed in 1947 and 1948 to build and maintain an air force of seventy air groups, which called for almost seven thousand aircraft including almost one thousand heavy bombers, the majority of which were to be B-36s. Although Johnson was obviously not involved in making that recommendation, after he took office at the Pentagon, he ordered the building of the first thirty-six of the B-36s and laid the groundwork for building more by canceling other aviation contracts.28 About the same time, the defense secretary proposed to mothball much of the navy’s conventional surface fleet and ordered the navy to scrap its biggest project, the $188 million supercarrier USS United States, thereby ending naval aviation’s dream of striking at the heart of any enemy with the atomic bomb. The secretary of defense did not make his decision unilaterally. He had consulted with Eisenhower (then serving as temporary chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as well as president of Columbia University), and with the Joint Chiefs. As might be expected, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Louis Denfield had strongly endorsed the building of the carrier, but he had been outvoted by Army Chief of Staff Omar Bradley and Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg. Viewing the matter as strictly a military one, Johnson was satisfied that he had vetted the issue fully enough to announce the scrapping of the USS United States without informing his service secretaries. Furious that the new secretary of defense had made his decisions without informing him, Secretary of the Navy John Sullivan tendered his resignation. In a pointedly bitter farewell, he said he was leaving “a navy that no foreign foe has ever defeated.” No one could miss Sullivan’s stress on “foreign.”29

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Both Truman and Johnson extended their opposition to the navy in their treatment of the Marine Corps. The president had a well-known dislike of the marines dating back to his service in World War I, and would infamously say in August 1950: “The Marine Corps is the navy’s police force and as long as I am president that is what it will remain. They have a propaganda machine that is almost equal to Stalin’s.” For his part, Johnson sought to eliminate Marine Corps aviation by transferring its assets elsewhere, and eventually to eliminate the Marine Corps altogether. He also ordered the marine commandant deleted from the official list of chiefs of service branches authorized a driver and limousine, and for whom a special salute was prescribed on ceremonial occasions.30 In fairness to Johnson, he did not limit his budget cutting campaign to the navy or Marine Corps. He ordered the scrapping or sale, instead of the reconditioning or storage, of most surplus army inventories from World War II. He even opposed army requests for reserve stockpiles of small arms and antitank weapons and ammunition. He also made major cuts in military personnel for all the services, but he hit the army the hardest. Of the fifty-one military installations he closed, thirteen were army facilities and eighteen were air force bases.31 In June and July, Johnson appeared before both the House and Senate Armed Services Committees to advocate strengthening his powers as secretary. Some congressmen worried that he wanted too much power, especially after he asked for “the authority to do what the country wants without going to the president,” In the end, however, he largely had his way. On August 10, the National Security Act Amendments of 1949 became law, allowing Johnson to bring about unification of the armed services and achieve vast economic savings. The 1949 amendments also eliminated an earlier provision that powers not specifically granted to the secretary of defense should be retained by the service secretaries. Moreover, the service secretaries lost their status as cabinet members and their places on the National Security Council (NSC). Thus the Office of Secretary of Defense was transformed into the Department of Defense. The DOD became the only executive department in the Pentagon, and its secretary the only cabinet-level official and NSC member. Finally, the amendments created the post of deputy secretary and authorized three presidentially appointed assistant secretaries.32 In this charged atmosphere, senior navy officers mobilized for a battle to save their services from what they perceived as a crippling blow. They identified three major enemies: 1) President Truman, whose determination to cut the total military budget to below $15 billion for 1949 would cause them irreparable harm; 2) Defense Secretary Johnson, for reasons already



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stated; and 3) the US Air Force, which allegedly was misrepresenting the capabilities of the air force and navy in the nuclear age.33 For patriotic and political reasons, navy brass could not attack the president directly. They decided instead to direct their attack against Johnson, especially since he was so closely allied with the air force. Their method of attack was at first propaganda, building up the navy while denigrating the usefulness of the air force and attacking Secretary Johnson. Early in 1949, Cedrick R. Worth, a former naval commander serving as a special assistant to Undersecretary of the Navy Dan A. Kimball, began compiling whatever information he could, including rumors, gossip, and half-truths, to be used in the campaign. Worth then prepared an “anonymous” dossier that alleged fifty-five instances of wrongdoing by Johnson and Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington. Worth also charged that the B-36 was an ineffective and vulnerable weapon that could not live up to expectations and that Johnson and Symington still went ahead with the procurement even though they were aware of the bomber’s problems. Thus began the so-called revolt of the admirals.34 The allegations were so sensational and received so much publicity that a reluctant Carl Vinson, head of the Armed Forces Committee, was forced to hold hearings on the charges. Johnson had plenty of enemies in Congress, in part because of his bullying personality, his anti-navy position, and his known political ambitions. Johnson’s enemies thought they had found two issues on which to attack him: 1) the fact that he seemed to have been given such a high and important policy post purely as a payoff for being Truman’s money raiser; and 2) the fact that he had served on the board of Convair, the company that manufactured the B-36 bomber.35 The first set of House hearings was held in August, the second set in October. Active or retired Admirals Bull Halsey, Arthur W. Radford, Louis Denfield, William Blandy, Gerald Bogan, Thomas Kinkaid, Chester Nimitz, and Raymond Spruance all testified before the committee, expressing their outrage at what was happening to the navy. Radford, a former vice chief of Naval Operations and commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, attacked the B-36 and the atomic blitz theory of warfare on moral grounds. He stated that if the American people knew that the B-36 lacked precision-bombing capability and would be used to annihilate civilian populations, they would consider it “morally reprehensible.” He also risked his naval career by stating that he believed the top naval officers lacked confidence in the secretary of defense.36 Several other senior naval officers, such as Captain John C. Crommelin, a prominent naval aviator serving on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Denfield, had their careers sharply

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curtailed as result of the hearings. Crommelin, who had lost two brothers during World War II and was himself nearly killed when he was blown off the deck of a carrier, called in the press and issued a statement claiming that the navy was being systematically and intentionally “nibbled to death” by Johnson and the Joint Chiefs. He told reporters that he knew he was throwing away his thirty-three-year career but that he had to speak out because his beloved navy “was going to pot.” As a result of his statement, Crommelin was forced to retire. Admiral Denfield remarked, “As the senior military spokesman for the navy, I want to state forthwith that I fully support the broad conclusions presented to this committee by the naval and marine officers … who proceeded me.” He went on to criticize what he called “arbitrary reductions in funds allocated to the navy and the arbitrary decisions made in the Pentagon.” A few weeks later, Secretary of the Navy Francis P. Matthews fired Denfield, remarking that he and the admiral disagreed widely on strategic policy and unification.37 Ultimately, the revolt of the admirals failed. Secretary of Defense Johnson proved to be a compelling witness. He defended himself and decried what he called “terroristic accusations of those opposing unification in an attempt to scare me away.” A surprise witness, Cedrick Worth, then acknowledged that the “anonymous” document containing the charges against Johnson and Symington was a spurious piece of work that he had personally concocted.38 As in the case of the MacArthur hearings, however, the most persuasive witness was Omar Bradley. The recently appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had earned a reputation during World War II as the GI’s general because of his concern for the common soldier. A modest, shy, and rather colorless figure, Bradley electrified the hearing room when he followed the testimony of the admirals by blasting the navy for being too preoccupied with the past and for failing to foresee a need for fresh military strategies. General Bradley noted how the navy had opposed unification every step of the way. He claimed that naval leaders had deliberately made false accusations against Johnson and the Joint Chiefs. He deplored the navy’s “open rebellion against civilian control” and accused the “overzealous enthusiasts” and “self-appointed martyrs” of being “fancy Dans who won’t hit the line with all they have on every play, unless they can call the signals.”39 The next day’s headlines described the deflation of the “fancy Dans” of the navy. Besides Crommelin and Denfield, other casualties of the hearings included Blandy and Bogan, who were both forced into retirement. Radford, however, was able to save his career and go on to become chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When the Armed Services Committee



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issued its report, it praised the air force and the B-36 program, cleared Secretaries Johnson and Symington of any wrongdoings, and made clear its full confidence in them. Although the report criticized Johnson for his brusque manner and lack of appropriate consultation in terminating the supercarrier, it upheld his decision. The congressional report also supported unification of the services, although it called for a more cooperative and consultative approach within the Pentagon if unification was to become a reality.40 As in many bureaucratic struggles, the victor is not always victorious. Such was the case with Louis Johnson. Although the secretary of defense emerged from the revolt of the admirals with his reputation seemingly intact, the controversy made him all the more unpopular at the Pentagon and with the president. Truman was especially irritated that Johnson seemed to back General Douglas MacArthur’s efforts to undermine the administration’s policy of neutrality with respect to Formosa during the Korean War, including his reluctance to carry out Truman’s command to order MacArthur to repudiate remarks he sent to the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 1950 in which the general wrote that not to defend Formosa against an attack from the Communist mainland would be to shift any future battle five thousand miles eastward.41 Furthermore, the secretary of defense had alienated other members of the cabinet, most notably Secretary of State Dean Acheson. To prevent what he considered “end runs” by the services, Johnson consolidated within his own office State-Defense liaison concerning “major matters of interest within the politico-military field,” an arrangement that Acheson and the State Department considered obstructive. The two men also disagreed on policy matters. Acheson viewed Europe as indispensable to US security, while Johnson emphasized Asia. These differences caused Acheson to disdain Johnson. He even believed the secretary of defense was mentally ill.42 Finally, Johnson had not only faithfully pursued President Truman’s defense economization policy, he had aggressively attempted to implement it even in the face of the steadily increasing threats presented by Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang before North Korea invaded South Korea on June 23, 1950. Johnson consequently received much of the blame for the initial United Nations setbacks in Korea. His failure to plan adequately for US conventional force commitments, to adequately train and equip current forces, or even to budget funds for storage of surplus army and navy warfighting materials in case of emergency, cost the United States dearly after the fighting started in Korea. Johnson requested supplemental appropriations after the war broke out, but it was too late. Facing growing public opposition to his handling of the war and wishing to deflect attention from

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his peacetime economy measures, Truman asked for Johnson’s resignation on September 19, 1950. He replaced him with General George C. Marshall. Johnson returned to his law practice, which he pursued until his death at the age of seventy-five.43 The revolt of the admirals had been the most serious military challenge to Truman until MacArthur’s open opposition to his Korean War. Strong-willed interservice competition for more money, weapons, and missions still persisted, as did some forms of resistance by the military services to the Secretary of Defense and Department of Defense. Still, the role of the secretary of defense within the national security structure had been more completely delineated, and Louis Johnson had achieved much greater success than James Forrestal in imposing the secretary’s authority on the Pentagon.44 Many gripes continued to be voiced against Truman in Congress, about where and how he was waging the Cold War. His congressional critics grew even outspoken following the Soviet detonation of the A-bomb, the fall of China to the Communists, the outbreak of the Korean War, and the changing fortunes of the war following the Chinese intervention into the conflict in November 1950. Yet their rumblings against the White House’s handling of the Pentagon diminished considerably.

Notes

1. Bryce, American Commonwealth, 77. 2. “C-SPAN Survey of Presidential Leadership: Historian Results Category: Total Score/Overall Ranking,” National Cable Satellite Corporation (http://legacy.c-span.org /PresidentialSurvey//Overall-Ranking.aspx); and “C-SPAN’s 2000 Survey of Presidential Leadership,” National Cable Satellite Corporation (http://www.americanpresidents.org /survey/). 3. Algeo, Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure. 4. Beschloss, Presidential Courage, 196–239. 5. Kaufman, Korean War, ix–x, 32–48, 76–82, 92–111. 6. Ibid., 106–8. 7. McCoy, Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 99, 105, 112–13, 121–23, 126–27, 141–42. 8. Caraley, Politics of Military Unification, 24–35, 46–49, 145–77; Hogan, Cross of Iron, 23–68; Herspring, Pentagon and the Presidency, 54–63; and Millett, War for Korea, 54–57. 9. The standard biography of Forrestal is Hoopes and Brinkley, Driven Patriot. On Congress and the military, see Kolodziej, Uncommon Defense and Congress, 1945–1963, 33–65. See also Hamby, Man of the People, 309, 404, 411, 414; McCullough, Truman, 738; and Ferrell, Off the Record, 191–92. 10. Hoopes and Brinkley, Driven Patriot, chaps. 2–25; Albion and Connery, Forrestal and the Navy, 2–13; and Millis, Forrestal Diaries, xvi–xxiv. 11. Millis, Forrestal Diaries, 250–52; Albion and Connery, Forrestal and the Navy, 188–89; and Hamby, Man of the People, 405–14. 12. Pearson’s comments may be found in “James Forrestal,” http://www.spartacus



Truman, Congress, & the Military

.schoolnet.co.uk/USAforrestal.htm. See also Hoopes and Brinkley, Driven Patriot, 433–36. 13. Albion and Connery, Forrestal and the Navy, 262–86; Haynes, Awesome Power, 93–108; McCoy, Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 147–48; and Neal, Harry and Ike, 86. 14. Herspring, Pentagon and the Presidency, 62–64; and Truman, Memoirs, vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope, 52–53. Forrestal’s frustration in getting the services to work together was reflected in his diary. See, for example, his diary entries of April 13 and 24, 1948 in Millis, Forrestal Diaries, 413–14, 424–25. See also Hoopes and Brinkley, Driven Patriot, 351–83. 15. LaFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War, 74–75. 16. Millis, Forrestal Diaries, 394–95; Hoopes and Brinkley, Driven Patriot, 404–07, 415–23, 429; McFarland and Roll, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, 171–72; and Kolodziej, Uncommon Defense and Congress, 66–107. 17. Anderson, Peace, War and Politics, 146–47; Anderson, Confessions of a Muckraker, 8, 144; Hoopes and Brinkley, Driven Patriot, 434–35, 439–40; Hamby, Man of the People, 511–12; and Hogan, Cross of Iron, 184–85. 18. The quotes can be found in “James Forrestal,” http://www.spartacus.schoolnet .co.uk/USAforrestal.htm. 19. Hoopes and Brinkley, Driven Patriot, 425–68; Millis, Forrestal Diaries, 543–55. See also Hamby, Man of the People, 511–12; and Akashah and Tennant, “Madness and Politics,” 89–92. 20. “Armed Forces: Master of the Pentagon,” Time 53, June 6, 1949, http://www .time.com/time/printout/0,8816,801886,000.html; McFarland and Roll, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, 4–110; and Hamby, Man of the People, 512–13. 21. McFarland and Roll, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, 116–29; and Hamby, Man of the People, 512–13. 22. McFarland and Roll, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, 129–30. 23. Ibid., 137–38. 24. Ibid., 138–44. 25. Ibid., 144–49. 26. “Armed Forces, Master of the Pentagon,” Time 53, June 6, 1949, http://www .time.com/time/printout/0,8816,801886,000.html. 27. Ibid.; Truman, Memoirs, vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope, 56; and McFarland and Roll, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, 144–67. 28. McFarland and Roll, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, 172–73. 29. Washington Post, April 27, 1949; Haynes, Awesome Power, 126–27; McFarland and Roll, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, 173–74; and Kolodziej, Uncommon Defense and Congress, 109. 30. Truman, quoted in Neal, Harry and Ike, 86. See also Herspring, Pentagon and the Presidency, 65–66. 31. McFarland and Roll, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, 198, 203. 32. Herspring, Pentagon and the Presidency, 64–65; Haynes, Awesome Power, 113; and Neal, Harry and Ike, 149, 152. 33. McFarland and Roll, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, 176; Barlow, Revolt of the Admirals, 2–21, 105–30; “Armed Forces: Revolt of the Admirals,” Time, October 17, 1949; and Lewis, “Revolt of the Admirals,” 2, 10–16. 34. Barlow, Revolt of the Admirals, 167–69; Lewis, “Revolt of the Admirals,” 21–22, 27; and McFarland and Roll, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, 176, 178. 35. McFarland and Roll, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, 176–77. 36. Lewis, “Revolt of the Admirals,” 28–33; Barlow, Revolt of the Admirals, 21–23; “Armed Forces: Revolt of the Admirals,” Time, October 17, 1949; and Kolodziej, Uncommon Defense and Congress, 109–11. 37. Lewis, “Revolt of the Admirals,” 30–33; “Armed Forces: Revolt of the Admirals,” Time (October 17, 1949); Herspring, Pentagon and the Presidency, 65–67; and Haynes,

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Awesome Power, 126. 38. McFarland and Roll, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, 178–79. 39. Herspring, Pentagon and the Presidency, 67; McFarland and Roll, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, 183–84; and Lewis, “Revolt of the Admirals, 33–34. 40. Lewis, “Revolt of the Admirals,” 34–35; and McFarland and Roll,” Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, 185–87. 41. Kaufman, Korean War, 72–73; Acheson, Present at the Creation, 423–25; Millett, War for Korea, 1950–1951, 213–14; and McFarland and Roll, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, 322–25. 42. Acheson, Present at the Creation, 321, 348–50, 373–74, 430–32, 440–41; McFarland and Roll, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, 320–22; and Haynes, Awesome Power, 193. 43. Haynes, Awesome Power, 192–93; Herspring, Pentagon and the Presidency, 73–74; Millett, War for Korea, 1950–1951, 144, 204; and HST to Bess Truman, September 7, 1950, in Ferrell, Off the Record, 189–90. 44. McFarland and Roll, Louis Johnson and the Arming of America, 362–63.

Works Cited

Acheson, Dean. Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1969. Akashah, Mary, and Donald Tennant, “Madness and Politics: The Case of James Forrestal.” Proceedings of the Oklahoma Academy of Science 60 (1980): 89–92. Albion, Robert Greenhalgh, and Robert Howe Connery. Forrestal and the Navy. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962. Algeo, Matthew. Harry Truman’s Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2009. Anderson, Jack. Confessions of a Muckraker. New York: Random House, 1979. ———. Peace, War and Politics: An Eyewitness Account. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1999. Barlow, Jeffrey G. Revolt of the Admirals: The Fight for Naval Aviation, 1945–1950. Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1994. Beschloss, Michael. Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789–1989. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007. Bryce, James. The American Commonwealth. 2 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1920. Caraley, Demetrios. The Politics of Military Unification: Study of Conflict and the Policy Process. New York: Columbia University Press, 1966. Ferrell, Robert H., ed, Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. Hamby, Alonzo L. Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Haynes, Richard F. The Awesome Power: Harry S. Truman as Commander in Chief. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974. Herspring, Dale R. The Pentagon and the Presidency: Civil Military Relations from FDR to George W. Bush. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. Hogan, Michael J. A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945–1954. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Hoopes, Townsend, and Douglas Brinkley. Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.



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Kaufman, Burton I. The Korean War: Challenges in Crisis, Credibility, and Command. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1997. Kolodziej, Edward A. The Uncommon Defense and Congress, 1945–1963. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966. LaFeber, Walter. America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945–2002. 9th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002. Lewis, Andrew L. “The Revolt of the Admirals. A Research Report Submitted to the Faculty in Partial Fulfillment of the Graduation Requirements.” Air Command and Staff College, Air University. Maxwell Air Force Base, AL, April 1998. McCoy, Donald R. The Presidency of Harry S. Truman. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1984. McCullough, David. Truman. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. McFarland, Keith D., and David L. Roll. Louis Johnson and the Arming of America: The Roosevelt and Truman Years. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Millett, Allan R. The War for Korea, 1950–1951: They Came from the North. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010. Millis, Walter, ed., The Forrestal Diaries. New York: Viking Press, 1951. Neal, Steve. Harry and Ike: The Partnership That Remade the Postwar World. New York, Touchstone, 2002. Truman, Harry S. Memoirs. Vol. 2, Years of Trial and Hope. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1956.

Newspapers and News Magazines Time Washington Post

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Contributors Richard S. Conley is associate professor of political science at the University of Florida. His research is focused on presidential-congressional relations and comparative executives and legislatures. He is author of The Presidency, Congress and Divided Government: A Postwar Assessment (2002), Historical Dictionary of the Reagan-Bush Era (2007), and Historical Dictionary of the George W. Bush Era (2009), and editor of Reassessing the Reagan Presidency (2003), and Transforming the American Polity: The Presidency of George W. Bush and the War on Terror (2004). Michael J. Devine is director of the Harry S. Truman Library and president of the Harry S. Truman Library Institute for National and International Affairs. He has also served as the director of the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, the Illinois state preservation officer, and assistant director of the Ohio Historical Society. He has been a Fulbright lecturer in Korea and Argentina, and has taught at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies. He is the author of John W. Foster: Politics and Diplomacy in the Imperial Era, 1873–1917 (1981). Louis Fisher is scholar in residence at the Constitution Project. Previously he worked for four decades at the Library of Congress as senior specialist in separation of powers at the Congressional Research Service and specialist in constitutional law at the Law Library. He has testified before several congressional committees investigating such issues as war powers, state secrets, CIA whistle-blowing, covert spending, NSA surveillance, executive privilege, and presidential impoundment authority. He is the author of more than fifteen books, including Presidential War Power (revised edition 2004), Constitutional Conflicts between Congress and the President (revised edition 1991), Military Tribunals and Presidential Power (2005), and Congress and the Constitution (2011). Ray Geselbracht is special assistant to the director of the Harry S. Truman Library. He also served at the Richard M. Nixon Presidential 199

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Materials Project and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. He holds a doctorate in history from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is the coeditor of Affection and Trust: The Personal Correspondence of Harry S. Truman and Dean Acheson (2010) and editor of The Civil Rights Legacy of Harry S. Truman (2007), and has published many articles about Harry Truman, the Truman Library, and other historical and archival subjects. Alonzo L. Hamby is Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio University, where he specializes in twentieth century US history, especially politics and culture. His books include Beyond the New Deal: Harry S. Truman and American Liberalism (1975), The Imperial Years: The United States since 1939 (1976), Liberalism and Its Challengers: F.D.R. to Reagan (revised edition 1992), Man of the People: A Life of Harry S. Truman (1995), and For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s (2004). Susan M. Hartmann is professor of history at Ohio State University, where she has specialized in twentieth-century American history and women’s history. She is the author of several books including Truman and the 80th Congress (1971), From Margin to Mainstream: American Women and Politics since 1960 (1989), and The Other Feminists: Activists in the Liberal Establishment (1998). She has served on the board of directors of the Harry S. Truman Library Institute and was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Ken Hechler served on President Truman’s White House staff from 1949 to 1953. He was a member of the US House of Representatives from 1959 to 1977, and served as the secretary of state of West Virginia from 1985 to 2001. In 1965, he was the only member of Congress to march with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Selma, Alabama. He has written several books including Working with Truman: A Personal Memoir of the White House Years (1982), and the bestselling The Bridge at Ramagen (1957). He has taught at Columbia University, Princeton University, Barnard College, and Marshall University. Robert David Johnson is professor of history at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His areas of specialization include US foreign relations, American political parties, the American presidency, and the CIA and American democracy. His books include The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations (1995), and Congress and the Cold War (2005), and with Stuart Taylor Jr. Until



Contributors

Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case (2007). Burton I. Kaufman is adjunct professor of history at the University of Utah and former dean and professor of history and interdisciplinary studies at Miami University of Ohio. He is the author of ten books, including The Presidency of James Earl Carter Jr. (1993, revised edition with Scott Kaufman, 2006), The Korean Conflict (1999), The Korean War: Challenges in Crisis, Credibility, and Command (1986), and Trade and Aid: Eisenhower’s Foreign Economic Policy, 1953–1961 (1982). George S. McGovern served as a US representative and senator from South Dakota and was the Democratic candidate for president in 1972. During World War II he enlisted in the US Army Air Corps and flew combat missions in Europe. He received a PhD in history from Northwestern University and was professor of history and government at Dakota Wesleyan University. His books include Grassroots: The Autobiography of George McGovern (1977), Terry: My Daughter’s Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism (1996), The Essential America: Our Founders and the Liberal Tradition (2004), and Abraham Lincoln (2009). Donald A. Ritchie is historian of the US Senate. An occasional commentator on congressional history on C-SPAN and National Public Radio, he is the author of several books including Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (1991), Reporting from Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps (2005), Electing FDR: The New Deal Campaign of 1932 (2007), and The U.S. Congress: A Very Short Introduction (2010). Raymond W. Smock is director of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Legislative Studies at Shepherd University. From 1983 to 1995 he served as historian of the US House of Representatives and oversaw the preparation of The Biographical Directory of the United States Congress and other reference works relating to Congress. He is the editor (with others) of Masters of the House: Congressional Leadership Over Two Centuries (1998), and Congress Investigates: A Critical and Documentary History (2010); and the author of Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the Age of Jim Crow (2009). Robert P. Watson is professor and director of American Studies at Lynn University. He is the editor (often with partners) of thirty books, including The National Security Legacy of Harry S. Truman (2003), Anticipating

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Madame President (2003), Life at the White House: A Social History of the First Family and the President’s Home (2004), and Campaigns and Elections: Issues, Concepts, Cases (2005). Dr. Watson is the founding editor of White House Studies, a founder of the think tank Think Act Lead, and a community activist who organizes town halls, History Day programs, and voter registration drives.

Index References to images are in italic.

A

Acheson, Dean on Democratic senators, 125–26 and McCarthyism, 10, 75, 112, 130–31 and Truman, 6, 112, 119, 120 on Truman’s foreign policy, 118, 146, 148–49, 151, 152, 170–73, 193 Adams, John, xiii, 180 Andrews, Russell, 13 atomic bomb, 10, 88, 101, 132, 181, 189 Atomic Energy Act, 18 Atomic Energy Commission, 38, 129–30 Austin, Warren, 72 Ayers, Eben, 54, 117

B

Bailey, Josiah, 27 Barkley, Alben, xv, xix, 4, 11, 40, 58, 101–2, 120n2 Baruch, Bernard, 168, 188 BeLieu, Kenneth, xxvii Bell, David, 13 Benson, Michael T., 118–19 Benton, William, 134 Berger, Henry, 148 Beschloss, Michael, 181 Berlin Airlift, 3, 118, 181, 182 Biddle, Francis, 158 Biden, Joseph, xxxvi the “Big Four,” 11, 58, 59 Black, Hugo, 109, 165 Boyle, Bill, 9 Brandon, Henry, xxxix Bretton Woods Agreement, 18 Bricker, John W., 49, 66, 75 Bridges, Styles, 73 Browder, Earl, 10 Bryce, James, 180 “the buck stops here,” xiii, 180 Bureau of the Budget, xix, xxiii, 12–13, 115, 116

203

Bush, George H. W., xviii, xxxii–xxxiii, 32, 41, 157, 173 Bush, George W., xviii, xxxiii–xxxv, xxxvii, 32–33, 163–64, 175 Butler, Hugh, 38 Butler, John, 10, 135 Byrd, Harry F., 36–37, 37, 66, 145 Byrd, Robert C., xxxii

C

C-SPAN presidential poll, xvii–xix, xxii– xxv, xxvii, xxix, xxxii, xxxiv, 124, 180 Campbell, Beth, 22 Capehart, Homer E., 66, 74, 75 Carroll, John, 57 Carter, Jimmy, xxviii–xxx, xxxii, xxxix, 103, 105, 106, 114 Castle, Michael, xxxvi Chambers, Whittaker, 113, 128–29 Chicago Tribune, 102 Childs, Marquis, 33 China and communism, 10, 77, 112, 136 and Nixon, xiv and State Department allegations, 77, 161 and Truman’s foreign policy, 88, 92, 151, 181–182, 194 Churchill, Winston, 61, 145, 187 CIA, 118, 181 civil rights, Truman and, xvii, xx, 7–8, 11–12, 19, 36, 37, 71, 81, 87, 95–96 Civil Rights Commission, 107, 118 Clapp, Gordon, 38 Clark, Tom, 164, 165 Clifford, Clark, 7 Clinton, Bill, xviii, xxxiv, 23, 103–4, 157, 173 Clubb, O. Edmund, 161 Cold War containment policy and, 3–4, 9–10, 144, 145–46 domestic issues and, 84, 92

204

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Cold War, continued and Greek-Turkish aid, 147, 149 Marshall Plan and, 149–50 and Truman foreign policy, 87, 125–27, 153, 182, 183–85, 194 Congress, US and bipartisanship, xviii, 73, 89, 95, 115, 125, 126, 147–48, 150–53, 156 Carter and, xxviii–xxx, xxxii, xxxix, 103 Clinton and, xviii, xxxiii–xxxiv, 32–33, 41 dysfunction of, 111–12 Ford and, xviii, xxvii, xxviii, xxxviii, 41 George H. W. Bush and, xviii, xxxii– xxxiii, 32, 41 George W. Bush and, xviii, xxxiv–xxxv, xxxvii, 32–33 Johnson and, xviii, xxiv–xxvi, xxviii Kennedy and, xxiii–xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxviii, xxxvii, xxxviii, xxxix micromanagement by, 109–10 Nixon and, xxvi–xxvii, xxviii, 32 Obama and, xxxv–xxxviii, 104 Reagan and, xxx–xxxii, xxxvii, xxxviii, 32–33, 41 See also congressional sessions by year Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), 30 Congressional Liaison, Office of, xxii. See also legislative liaisons Connally, Tom, xxii, 11–12, 125–26, 131 Connelly, Matthew J., xxi, 5, 55 Constitution, US commander in chief clause of, 33, 79, 175, 182 in times of crisis, 173–74 containment policy, 3–4, 9–10, 144, 145–46 Conway, Rose, 11 Corwin, Edward S., 172

D

Darman, Richard, xxxii Davis, Elmer, 85 Dawson, Donald, 108 Defense, US Department of, 118, 181, 188, 190, 194 Democratic National Committee, 9, 11 Deschler, Lew, 17 Dewey, Thomas E., 7–8, 33, 185, 186, 188 Dies, Martin, 158 Dieterich, William, 4

Dirksen, Everett, 135 “Do-Nothing” Congress. See 80th Congress (1947–49) domestic policy agenda, Truman’s, 85–86, 87, 91, 98–99. See also Fair Deal Douglas, Helen Gahagan, 135 Douglas, Paul, 134 Douglas, William O., 159 Downey, Sheridan, 135 Dreyer, Philip, 9 Drury, Allen, xix

E

Early, Steve, 4, 90, 100n4 Eastland, James, 133 Eaton, Charles, 147–48 Ecton, Zales N., 66 Edgerton, Harry, 163 80th Congress (1947–49) as “Do-Nothing” Congress, 6, 111, 148–49, 182 Fair Deal and, 5–8 House votes in, 24, 42n11, 46–47 1948 presidential election and, 6, 19, 182 and Roosevelt legacy, xix–xx, 95–96 Senate votes in, 24, 48–49 support for Truman in, 16, 26–28, 33–35, 34, 36, 39, 42n14 and term limits, 64–65 Truman on, 67 Truman position votes in, 24–26, 28, 31, 32 Truman strategy during, 40–42 Truman’s success during, 21–23, 28–31, 35–40, 37, 39 Truman vetoes during, 29–31, 41, 62–63, 62 81st Congress (1949–51), xx, 8, 19, 22, 66–67, 96–97, 113, 132 82nd Congress (1951–53), xx, 19, 22, 97–98 Eisenhower, Dwight, 61, 99, 108, 186 in C-SPAN poll, xxii, 24 and Congress, xviii, xxv, xxi–xxii, xxxviii, 32, 41, 91, 116, 175 election of, 173 judicial appointments by, 104 vetoes by, 105, 106, 114 elections. See by year Ellender, Allen, 8 Elsey, George, 5, 7, 8, 22, 24, 78, 79, 80 Emanuel, Rahm, xxxv, xxxvi Employment Act of 1946, xx



Enarson, Harold, 13 European Recovery Program. See Marshall Plan Executive Reorganization Act of 1939, xix, 90

F

Fair Deal, Truman’s congressional opposition to, 10, 19, 81, 87–88, 103, 115 80th Congress and, 5–8 81st Congress and, 67, 96–97 82nd Congress and, 97–98 Fair Employment Practices Committee, 5, 94 FBI, 9, 112, 128, 136, 157, 158–59, 163 Feeney, Joseph, xxi, xxii, 4–5, 56, 57, 74–75 filibusters, xxxvii, xxxviii, 40, 93, 135 Fink, Gary M., 27 Ford, Gerald, xvii, xviii, xxvii, xxviii, xxxviii, 41, 105, 106, 114, 124 Forrestal, James, 182, 183–86, 188, 194, 196, 195n14 Frankfurter, Felix, 109, 160, 165 Fuchs, Klaus, 130 Fulbright, William, 33, 102 Fulbright Scholars Program, 18

G

Gallup polls, xxxvi, 102, 129 George, Walter, 126 Gillon, Steve, xxxiii Gingrich, Newt, xxxiii–xxxiv Gouzenko, Igor, 128 Grassley, Charles, xxxvii Great Depression, 16, 18, 86, 99, 108, 111 Greece and Turkey, U.S. aid to, xv–xvi, 28, 38, 125, 127–28, 144, 146–49, 153, 156. See also Truman Doctrine Green, Theodore Francis, 40, 66, 131

H

Hamby, Alonzo, 128 Harding, Ken, 11 Harding, Warren, 5 Hardy, Benjamin, 8 Harlow, Bryce, xxii, xxv–xxvii, xxviii Harriman, Averell, 9, 110, 116 Harrison, Pat, 4 Hastert, Dennis, xxxiv Hatch, Carl, 29, 40 Hayden, Carl, 40, 66

Index   205

Herter, Christian, 182 Hickenlooper, Bourke, 129–30, 131 Hill, Lister, 40 Hilty, James W., 27 Hiss, Alger, 10, 112, 128–29, 130 Hitchcock, Gilbert M., 168–69 Hoffmann, Clare, 128 Hoover, Herbert, xviii, 109, 125, 126, 128, 168 Hoover, J. Edgar, 9, 112, 128, 136, 157 Hoover Commission, 118 Hope, Clifford, 152 House, Edward M., 168 House Appropriations Committee, xxviii, 145 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 9–10, 112, 124, 128–30, 132, 136, 162 Humphrey, Hubert, 134 Hyman, Harold, 15

I

immigration, 63, 77, 113, 118, 133, 136, 155, 163–68 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, 63, 104, 113 Immigration Service, 166–67 Internal Security Act of 1950, 63, 77, 104, 110, 113, 124, 133, 174 Iraq War, xvi, xxxiv, 173, 175 isolationism, xxvii, 72, 73, 88, 103, 111, 113, 126, 148, 182 Israel, establishment of, 118–19, 181, 184

J

Jackson, Robert, 165–66 Jay, John, 173 Jefferson, Thomas, xiii, 180 Jefferson-Jackson Day, 119 Jenner, William E., 66, 74–75, 74 Joint Chiefs of Staff, 79–80, 118, 182, 189, 191–93 Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 129–30 Johnson, Louis, 182, 186–94 Johnson, Lyndon B., xiii, xxv, 81, 99, 104, 105, 106, 114, 175 Jones, Roger W., 12, 116 judicial appointments, 103–4, 104

K

Kayle, Milton, 13 Kem, James P., 48, 66 Kennan, George, 145, 147

206

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Kennedy, John F., xiii, xv, xvii, xxii–xxvi, xxviii, xxxvii, xxxviii, xxxix, 8, 99, 105, 106, 114 Kerr, Robert, 114, 117 Kilgore, Harley, 102, 110, 134 Knauff, Ellen, 157, 164–68, 174 Knox, Frank, 89, 183 Korean War, 88, 92, 99, 131, 161, 182 Congress and, 68, 194 Truman’s decisions leading to, 9, 78–80, 78 United Nations Security Council and, 80, 157, 168–75, 193

L

labor issues, 5–6, 21, 24, 29–30, 40, 41, 61, 86, 110–11, 144 Labor-Management Relations Act. See Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 Langer, William, 117, 129, 133, 134 Lansing, Robert, 168 Lawton, Frederick, 116 Laxalt, Paul, xxx League of Nations, 143, 168 legislative liaisons, xviii–xix, xxi–xxiii, xxix, xxx–xxxi, xxxvi, 4–5, 55, 56, 57 Legislative Reorganization Act of 1946, 18–19 Lehman, Herbert, 113 Lilienthal, David, 37–38, 40, 129–30 Lincoln, Abraham, x, xvi–xvii, xix, 3, 15, 120, 171, 180 Lindsey, Jake W., 60 Lodge, Henry Cabot, Jr., 126–27, 131–32, 148, 168–69, 176n44 Lodge, Henry Cabot, Sr., 125 Loyalty Review Boards, 10, 157–63 Lucas, Scott W., 10, 66, 130–31, 133, 135, 171

M

MacArthur, Douglas, 75, 88, 98, 172, 181–82, 192, 193, 194 Madison, James, 101, 180 Marcantonio, Vito, 172 Marshall, George C., 71–72, 72, 74, 116, 146, 147, 150–51, 154, 194 Marshall Plan and Congress, 77, 125, 144, 149–53, 182 and interim aid, 60 McGovern on, xiii–xiv success of, xix, 3, 72, 87, 116, 117, 118, 156

Maylon, Charles, 4–5, 57 McCain, John, xxxvii McCarran-Walter Immigration Act. See Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 McCarran Internal Security Act. See Internal Security Act of 1950 McCarran, Patrick A., 11, 76–77, 76, 113, 132–34, 135–36 McCarthy, Joseph, 9, 10, 38, 73, 75, 88, 112, 130–32, 135, 157 McCarthyism, 10, 75, 112–13, 124, 130–32. See also McCarthy, Joseph McCormack, John W., 58 McCoy, Donald R., 182 McFarland, Ernest, 37, 58 McFarland, Keith D., 188 McGovern, George, xiii–xvii, 3, 13n3 McGrath, J. Howard, 40, 66, 117, 167 McKellar, Kenneth D., 36, 37–38, 37, 145, 169 McMahon, Brien, 126–27, 129, 130 McPherson, Harry, xxv midterm elections. See by year Minton, Sherman, 165 Mondale, Walter, xxix–xxx Moore, Edward, 25 Moore, Frank, xxix Moore, John Norton, 171 Moynihan, Daniel P., xxxiii Mundt, Karl, xv, 129, 130, 133 Mundt-Ferguson bill, 113 Mundt-Nixon bill, 47, 113, 129, 134 Murphy, Charles S., 59, 66, 121n44 Murray, James, 113 Myers, Francis J., 39, 66

N

National Military Establishment, 188 National Resources Board, 181 National Security Act of 1947, 181, 183, 184 National Security Act Amendments of 1949, 190 National Security Council (NSC), 118, 181, 190 Neustadt, Richard, xxiii, 13, 22, 116 New Deal and anti-New Dealism, 18, 23, 27–29, 36, 42n14, 88–89, 90, 92, 112, 128 bureaucracy of, 108–9 rollbacks of, 19, 21, 23 Southern Democrats and, 26, 27–28, 90–91



and Truman, 33, 40, 85–86, 96–97, 98 New Republic, xxxiv Newsweek, 126 Newton, Walter, xix New York Times, xxvii, xxxiv, 16, 30, 61, 136, 166 Nimitz, Chester, 11, 191 9/11 terrorist attacks, 163–64, 167 1944 presidential election, 89, 90 1946 midterm elections and foreign policy, 144–45 outcome of, 29, 70, 94, 95, 115, 125 and Truman, xx, 6, 23–24, 26, 33, 41, 86, 95, 102, 128 1948 presidential election, xx, 3, 6–9, 19, 21, 30–31, 33, 38, 40, 41, 91, 95, 115, 148, 182 1950 midterm elections, 97–98, 135 1952 presidential election, xxi, 9, 75, 119, 173, 181 1958 midterm elections, xxiii 1960 presidential election, xv, xxiii, xxiv, xxxiii 1964 presidential election, xxv 1972 presidential election, xv 1976 presidential election, xxviii–xxix 1992 presidential election, xxxiii, 23 1994 midterm elections, xxxiii 94th Congress (1975–77), 41 Nixon, Richard, xiv, xviii, xxvi–xxviii, 9, 32, 104, 105, 106, 114, 128–30, 133, 135 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), xvii, 3, 72, 88, 118, 143–44, 173

O

O’Brien, Lawrence, xxv–xxvii O’Daniel, W. Lee, 36, 38 O’Mahoney, Joseph C., 39, 66 O’Neill, Tip, xxxi Obama, Barack, xxxv–xxxviii, 104 Obey, David, xxxiv–xxxv Organization of American States (OAS), 143–44, 147

P

Palestine, 118, 183, 184 Pelosi, Nancy, xxxvii Pendergast, Tom, 4, 102–3, 108, 112, 132 Pepper, Claude, 39, 40, 126, 132, 145, 149 Persons, Wilton (Jerry), xxi–xxii Phillips, Cabell, 102

Index

207

Point Four program, 3, 8 Porter, Paul, 6 Potsdam Conference (1945), 5, 169, 170 presidential vetoes, xxviii, xxxiv, 104, 105, 106, 114 Price Administration (OPA), Office of, 5, 6, 111 public opinion polls, xxxiv, 102, 129

R

Rayburn, Sam, xxii, 17, 40, 46, 47, 57, 58, 70–71, 117, 135 Reagan, Ronald, xvii–xviii, xxx–xxxii, xxxvii, xxxix, 32–33, 41, 103, 124, 128 Reedy, George, 132 Reid, Harry, xxxiv, xxxvii Republican National Committee, 144 Robby, Joe, xv Robinson, Joseph, 4 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 97 Roosevelt, Franklin in C-SPAN poll, xix, xxv, 180 and civil rights, 26 and Congress, xix, xxv, 64, 86–89, 90–93, 101, 143, 145 court-packing plan of, xix, 18, 27, 40, 87, 92 death of, 33, 95, 102, 115 and Dies Committee, 158 and Truman, xviii, xxii, 60, 85–86, 89, 100n2 vetoes by, 104, 105, 106, 114 See also New Deal Roosevelt, Theodore, 180 Rosenman, Samuel I., 5, 94 Ross, Charles, 9 Rowe, James, 24, 29 Russia. See Soviet Union

S

Salmond, John A., 38 Schiliro, Phil, xxxv–xxxvi Schlesinger, Arthur, Jr., xxiv Schmidt, Steve, xxxvii Schwellenbach, Lewis B., 109 Secretary of Defense (OSD), Office of, 181, 182, 190, 194. See also Defense, U.S. Department of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, xx, 11–12, 72, 117, 125–26, 131, 143 Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS), 35–36, 77

208

Congress & Harry S. Truman

Senate Judiciary Committee, 11, 77, 109 74th Congress (1935–37), 42n14, 92 75th Congress (1937–39), 22–23, 27, 28, 36, 37, 39, 42n14 76th Congress (1939–41), 22–23, 27, 28, 36, 37, 39, 42n14 79th Congress (1945–47), xix–xx, 18, 23, 94, 113 Sheppard, Harry, 11 Short, Joseph H., 22 Smathers, George, xxv, 132 Smith, H. Alexander, 126–27, 148 Smith, Harold, 12 Snyder, John W., 109 Social Security, xxxv, 8–9, 21, 24, 29, 30, 81, 87, 96 Soviet Union and climate of fear, 10, 112, 128–29, 181, 183–84, 185 containment and, 72, 145–46, 151–52 See also Cold War Spargo, Mary, 129 Sparkman, John, 12, 39, 40, 117 Specter, Arlen, xxxvi Spingarn, Stephen J., 59, 119 Staats, Elmer, 12, 116 Stalin, Joseph, 3–4, 132, 190 State of the Union address, xx, xxvi, 5, 8, 60 State Department, US, 8, 77, 79, 113, 125, 130–31, 146–47, 161 Steele, John, 134 Steelman, John R.,109 Stevenson, Adlai, 99 Stimson, Henry L., 89, 187 Stowe, David, 13 Supreme Court, US, xix, xxxii, 16, 18, 87, 92, 109, 160, 163, 165, 166–67

T

Taber, John, 145 Taft-Ellender-Wagner Housing Act of 1949, 8–9, 13n17, 115 Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, 21, 24, 40, 41 congressional support for, 29–30, 113, 149 House position votes, 46 Senate position votes, 48 Truman veto of, 31, 62, 63, 87, 95, 96, 104 Taft, Robert A., 8, 9, 19, 74–75, 74, 80, 115, 147, 172 Tannenwald, Theodore, 110

Taylor, Glen, 25, 37, 145 term limits, 64–65 Thomas, Elmer, 152 Thomas, J. Parnell, 128 Thurmond, Strom, 38, 118 Time magazine, 132, 134, 186, 188 Timmons, William, xxvii Tobey, Charles W., 66 Treaty of Versailles, 125, 143, 168, 169 Truman, Bess, 6, 17–18, 53, 54, 75, 95, 180 Truman, Harry S., 54, 56, 60, 72, 73, 76 approval ratings, xiii–xiv, 98, 102 assessment of, 101–3, 118–20 and conflict with Congress, 107–14 on Congress, 53, 54, 68–69 and constitutional issues, 156–74 diary of, 8, 61, 67 humor and resiliency of, 6 judicial appointments by, 103, 104 memoirs of, xxi,16,75, 80, 143, 147–48, 162–63 in the Senate, xxxviii, 16–17, 27, 41, 42n14, 61, 76, 89–90 strategy of, 115–17 vetoes by, 29–31, 41, 62–63, 62, 87, 95, 96, 104–7, 105, 106, 114, 117 as vice president, 17, 27, 40, 61, 63 Truman, Margaret, 95, 135 Truman Committee, xx, 17 Truman Doctrine Congress and, 87, 124–28, 147–50, 156, 182 McGovern on, xv–xvi significance of, 3, 181 success of, 72, 77, 118 Turnip Day Session, 8, 21, 29, 60–61 Twain, Mark, 42, 53 2004 presidential election, xxxv 2006 midterm elections, xxxiv, xxxv “two presidencies” thesis, 22, 24, 28 Tydings, Millard, 10, 131, 135

U

United Nations and communism, 77 creation of, 118, 143, 147, 169–70 and Greek-Turkish aid, 148–50 Korean War and, 80, 168–75, 193 United Nations Charter, 18, 61, 157, 169–70, 171–73, 175 United Nations Participation Act of 1945, 80, 170, 171–73, 175



United Nations Security Council, 79, 80, 157, 168–70, 172, 173

V

Vandenberg, Arthur, 16, 61, 102 and bipartisanship, 73, 89, 115, 126 and Greek-Turkish aid, xv–xvi, 127–28, 146, 148–49 and Marshall Plan, 150–52 and Senate Foreign Relations Committee, xx, 72, 117 Vandenberg, Hoyt, 189 van Devender, Charles, 9 vetoes. See presidential vetoes Vietnam War, xvi, xxv–xxvi, xxvii, 175 Vinson, Carl, 127–28, 191 Vinson, Fred, 109 Voorhis, Jerry, 9

W

Waggonner, Joe, xxiii Wagner, Robert F., 8–9, 66, 115 Wallace, Bess. See Truman, Bess

Index   209

Wallace, Henry A., 3, 13n3, 30, 95, 145, 183 Walter, Francis, 113, 166 Warren, Earl, 7, 117 Washington, George, xiii, xiv, xviii, xix, 16, 180 Washington Post, xxxv, 33, 129, 136 Watergate, xxvii Watson, Richard A., 104, 105 Webb, James, 12–13, 115–16 Weinstein, Allen, 132 Wherry, Kenneth S., 66, 73, 79 White, William S., xxii Wildavsky, Aaron, 22 Williams, John J., 66 Wilson, Woodrow, 125–26,143, 168–69 World War II domestic issues after, 23, 86, 88, 94, 144, 150 foreign policy and, 38, 98, 118, 126, 143, 156, 157–58, 174 See also Marshall Plan; Truman Doctrine