Billion-Dollar Watchdog

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Anywhere but in a democracy, the Senate's irreverent Truman Committee would be fair game for liquidation. In a perfect state, free from butterfingers and human frailty, it would be unnecessary. In the U.S., democratic but far from perfect, the Truman Committee this week celebrated its second successful birthday as one of the most useful Government agencies of World War II.

Had they had time, its ten members might have toasted their accomplishments all night. They had served as watchdog, spotlight, conscience and spark plug to the economic war-behind-the-lines. They had prodded Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones into building synthetic-rubber plants, bludgeoned the President into killing off doddering old SPAB and setting up WPB.

They had called the turn on raw-materials shortages, had laid down the facts of the rubber famine four months before the famed Baruch report. One single investigation, of graft and waste in Army camp building, had saved the U.S. $250,000,000 (according to the Army's own Lieut. General Brehon B. Somervell). Their total savings ran into billions, partly because of what their agents had ferreted out in the sprawling war program, partly because their hooting curiosity was a great deterrent to waste.

The Truman Committee was too busy to celebrate. In its 16th month of war, the U.S. had still not digested some of war's first readers. The first annual Truman report, with its shocking evidence of all-around bungling (TIME, Jan. 26, 1942), had not spelled the end of bungling. This week the Committee worked on its second annual report, which would have to recite much the same story, chastise many of the same men, pose some of the same old problems. How big should the Army be? How could the manpower tangle be solved? Where would the nation get its food this year? What was wrong with WPB?

Over these basic questions, which the Truman Committee, on behalf of all American citizens, had hoped would be solved two years ago, the committee still sweated, glowed and tried to shed light.

Closest Thing Yet. The bigger the U.S. arsenal grew, the more important the Truman Committee became. As the arsenal turned into a modern-day Great Pyramid, most Washington officials still lugged just one stone, and many carried it in the wrong direction.

The closest thing yet to a domestic high command was the Truman Committee. Its members had no power to act or order. But, using Congress's old prerogative to look, criticize and recommend, they had focused the strength of public opinion on the men who had the power. They had a fund of only $200,000 (some still unspent) only twelve investigators, 18 clerks and stenographers. But it was an obscure war plant that had never been visited by the committee. Its members had heard hundreds of witnesses, taken 4,000,000 words of testimony. With battle-royal impartiality, they had given thick ears and red faces to Cabinet members, war agency heads, generals, admirals, big businessmen, little businessmen, labor leaders.

In wartime, even more than in peace, a democracy must keep an eye on itself. This eye the Truman Committee has kept unblinkingly and, by & large, well. It has made mistakes. Some of its data have been gathered too quickly, then reduced to generalities that glittered without illuminating. Its members, including Chairman Harry S. Truman, have sometimes failed to look before they leaped to conclusions. But it has never strayed too far off the beam, nor stayed there too long.

Said one Washingtonian last week: "There's only one thing that worries me more than the present state of the war effort. That's to think what it would be like by now without Truman." For a Congressional committee to be considered the first line of defense--especially in a nation which does not tend to admire its representatives, in Congress assembled-- is encouraging to believers in democracy. So is the sudden emergence of Harry Truman, whose presence in the Senate is a queer accident of democracy, as the committee's energetic generalissimo.

Making of a Senator. Neat, grey Harry Shippe Truman was sworn in as Senator from Missouri in 1934. The only men seen to smile during the ceremony were two husky lieutenants of Boss Tom Pendergast's notorious Kansas City Democratic machine, who sat beaming in the gallery.

In a perfect democracy, free from bosses, string-pulling and finagling at the polls, Harry Truman would probably never have reached Washington. He was Tom Pendergast's hand-picked candidate, yanked out of obscurity so deep that few Missouri voters had ever heard of him. He was nominated, over two more deserving candidates, largely by a vast plurality rolled up in Boss Pendergast's Jackson County, whose registration lists were loaded with dead men and men who had never lived. Thanks to the Boss's great power and the New Deal's 1934 popularity, his election was then automatic.

No one yet knows exactly why Boss Pendergast picked Truman for the Senate. One theory: the Boss was in the whimsical mood of a socialite sneaking a pet Pekingese into the Social Register. A better theory: the Boss was impressed by the Midwestern adage that every manure pile should sprout one rose--he saw in Truman a personally honest, courageous man whose respectability would disguise the odors of the Pendergast mob. Certainly Truman was no statesman in 1934. Neither had he ever been touched by scandal.

Making of a Man. Truman grew up on a Jackson County farm 15 miles from Kansas City. He tried for West Point, was rejected for one weak eye, gave up the thought of college and went to work instead. He dusted bottles in a drugstore, wrapped papers for the Kansas City Star, clerked in Kansas City banks. Five years out of high school he was droning along at $100 a month and ready to go back to his father's farm for good.

World War I pulled him off the farm again. He went to France a lieutenant, became captain of the 129th Field Artillery's rough-&-tumble Battery D. He was shy, reserved, wore big shell-rimmed glasses: to his pugnacious Irish privates he looked like something of a milquetoast. At the start he was perhaps the most unpopular captain in France. But he led his men doggedly through St. Mihiel and the Argonne, spiked a panic when German artillery once drew a bead on his battery, lost only one soldier killed and one wounded, was promoted to major. On the ship back from France his men took a cut out of all crap games, bought him a monstrous loving cup four feet high and big enough to hold ten gallons.

The war, brightest spot in Truman's pre-Senate record, was soon followed by the saddest. With a soldier buddy and $15,000 saved and borrowed, he opened a haberdashery on Kansas City's sporty Twelfth Street, roamed behind the counters selling socks, neckties and garters. In twelve months the store went broke, with debts it took years to pay off.

At 37, Harry Truman, bottle duster, bank clerk and would-be haberdasher, was bogged deep in failure. All he had to show for his career was an old army uniform and a loving cup too ostentatious to keep on the mantel.

Errand Boy. Most U.S. political machines, however disreputable, have two saving graces to their credit: 1) they are close enough to the people to know basic human desires, tragedies and needs; 2) their bosses, earthy and disillusioned men, have sometimes found talent where more snobbish souls would never have thought to look. In 1921, with his haberdashery under the hammer and black days ahead, Truman looked up some old servicemen friends in the Pendergast organization. Truman was a veteran, a farmer, a Mason, a Democrat from three generations back; he had friends all over Jackson County. The machine made him road overseer, then country judge (an administrative post), finally U.S. Senator.

Truman was no ball of fire in his first term. He sat meekly in the freshman row, blinked when critics called him Pendergast's "errand boy," was second only to Pennsylvania's Joseph Guffey (whose vote for New Deal measures was pure automatic reflex) in unswerving support of Administration policies.

On Burt Wheeler's Interstate Commerce Committee, he showed unexpected talents as an investigator of railroad high shenanigans. (He and canny Burt Wheeler are still good friends, despite their schism on foreign policy.) But this was too esoteric an assignment to impress many voters back home. They saw him chiefly in another light.

A young U.S. attorney named Maurice M. Milligan was cleaning up Kansas City, sending one Pendergast henchman after another to jail for vote frauds, getting closer & closer to the Big Boss himself. When Milligan came up for reappointment, Truman did his best to ease him out, made one of the bitterest speeches ever heard on the Senate floor. Milligan got the reappointment anyway, promptly sent Pendergast to prison for evading income taxes on some of his slush money. Truman shouted: "Purely political. . . . I won't desert a ship in distress. . . ."

Man with Errand. In a perfect democracy, run without hitch, Truman would never have been returned to the Senate in 1940. A majority of Missouri Democrats, in full revolt against the machine, opposed him in the primary. But Attorney Milligan and ex-Governor Lloyd Crow Stark split the opposition vote, and Truman slipped in with an 8,000-vote plurality. For a nation whose Administration, army and war contractors are not perfect either, it has turned out to be a good thing.

The Senate Committee Investigating National Defense was Truman's own idea. As country judge he had awarded $60,000,000 in contracts; he knew how hard it had been to get honest performance. Up rose the Senator to demand that Congress keep an eye on war expenditures: he had never yet found a contractor who, left unwatched, "wouldn't leave the Government holding the bag."

At first nobody took the Truman Committee seriously. The Senate gave him $15,000 (about as much as the Dies Committee spends every seven weeks) and a group of colleagues chosen mostly from junior Senators, such as Minnesota's young Joseph Ball, Washington's first-terming Mon C. Wallgren, New York's busy James M. Mead. Also on the committee went cagey old Tom Connally of Texas, to see that the juniors kept their heads. For its first assignment, the Committee chose a modest chore: delving into the more flagrant charges of graft in camp and war-plant construction, plugging some of the more open sewers down which Government money drained.

But Truman had bigger ideas. In selecting the Committee's chief counsel, he rejected all political recommendations, went instead to Attorney General (now Justice) Robert H. Jackson for advice. Thus he got a top-flight investigator: rotund, brilliant, young Hugh Fulton, a Justice Department prosecutor who had sent Howard C. Hopson, head of Associated Gas & Electric Corp., to prison.

Truman's junior Senators, hungry for tough assignments, went to work with a will. Harry Truman, a shrewd politician, a maker of friends, a great man for shooting trouble, always kept his committee, happy and on the ball. It got more money, branched out, found itself deep in every phase of the war. Today few committees, and few men, wield such power.

Disappointed Warrior. Harry Truman would rather be fighting the war than policing it. At 58, he still goes solemnly through his setting up exercises every morning, can still get into his World War I uniform. In 1939, like any old soldier, he dug out his old artillery maps, hung them on his office wall to help follow the fighting. He applied for active duty after Pearl Harbor, still likes to think the Army was wrong to say no. When Senate office building janitors began marking off air-raid shelters, he fetched his two rusty World War I helmets to his office, announced that he was ready to serve as warden. No planes came over Washington, so he finally stacked the helmets in his office fireplace and redoubled his efforts on the committee.

To a man once called errand boy, those efforts have produced gratifying results. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which once threw at him everything its angry editors thought fit to print, recently called him "one of the most useful and at the sAme time one of the most forthright and fearless" of today's Senators. In Kansas City he was feted by the Chamber of Commerce, which once fought him tooth & nail. A naturally shy and self-effacing man, Harry Truman brushes off the praise: instead of speaking himself in Kansas City, he introduced the members of his committee, let them talk. But even a perfect democrat could not have helped being pleased.

Happy Crusader. Truman is still a politician, would be loyal to the Pendergast machine today if it still existed. "Tom Pendergast never asked me to do a dishonest deed," he says. "He knew I wouldn't do it if he had asked me. He was always my friend. He was always honest with me, and when he made a promise he kept it. I wouldn't kick a friend when he was down."

But Harry Truman has many another quality not usually associated with machine politicians. He is scrupulously honest: when a magazine paid him $750 for an article on his committee, he added the money to the committee's funds. His only vices are small-stakes poker, an occasional drink of bourbon.

As committee chairman he is a man with a crusade: he says, "The goal of every man on the committee is to promote the war effort to the limit of efficiency and exertion. It doesn't do any good to go around digging up dead horses after the war is over, like the last time. The thing to do is dig this stuff up now, and correct it. If we run this war program efficiently, there won't be any opportunity for someone to stir up a lot of investigations after the war--and cause a wave of revulsion that will start the country on the downhill road to unpreparedness and put us in another war in 20 years. . . ."

In many ways Harry Truman and his committee, celebrating their anniversary this week by poring over another report, seemed the best living proof that democracy, even when imperfect, can be a success.

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