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Thanks!
Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm your host, Richard Helppie. We've got author and reporter Steve Drummond with us today. Steve, welcome to The Common Bridge.
Steve Drummond
Hi, Rich, thanks for having me.
Richard Helppie
I think we're going to have a great conversation today. It's going to be about Harry Truman. Harry Truman said an honest public servant can't become rich in politics, he can only attain greatness and satisfaction by service. As you examine the life and the career of Harry Truman you'll see he was a true public servant. Today we have the author of a book called "The Watchdog." I'd recommend this book, it is subtitled "How the Truman Committee Battled Corruption and Helped Win World War II." It is very well researched. We have the book's author today, Steve Drummond. Welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm happy to have you here, I enjoyed the book. (Steve Drummond: Thank you.) Let's tell the audience a little bit about you. You're with NPR. What do you do for the National Public Radio?
Steve Drummond
Hi, Rich. Thank you. I've been at NPR for 23 years in August. I've done a lot of jobs there but mostly I'm an editor. I'm, for the most part, a behind the scenes guy. My primary role right now is to edit our education coverage but for the past five years I worked on our podcast about race and identity called "Code Switch." I was the executive producer, I've been the national editor, I was the editor for a while of our afternoon program, "All Things Considered." So a bit of a jack of all trades at NPR. It's really been a rewarding career there since the year 2000.
Richard Helppie
What was the path that led you to NPR? What jobs did you have before and where to go to college and such.
Steve Drummond
I'm a three time graduate of the University of Michigan; two master's degrees - in education, in journalism - education led me to newspapers. I worked in Tampa and St. Petersburg, Florida and for a while down there, I had the notion of becoming a teacher. I went back to grad school. I taught in our own school district, Rich, the Wayne-Westland schools, as a substitute for a while. But I ended up with a job at a newspaper called "Education Week" in Washington, covering education here in the early 90s and after a few years of doing that, I kind of fell backwards into a job at NPR as the education editor. After a lot of paths I'm back where I'm still doing that now in a much different form.
Richard Helppie
Wonderful. It looks like we have a lot to talk about beyond your most recent book. You're a bit of a historian - more than a bit of a historian - and I know one of the people you mentioned, David McCullough, a great historian, great writer, he was an influence with you and perhaps others.
Steve Drummond
Very much. I should also say I worked all through college and graduate school. I worked at Greenfield Village in the Henry Ford Museum for years. I did all kinds of stuff there and that fueled my childhood interest in history so I've kind of always had a foot in this world for a long time. David McCullough, of course, a huge influence on me. He died while I was writing this book, which was kind of weird. I got an alert on my phone, and I looked down and saw he had died and I looked a little further down on the floor, where his copy of the book on Truman was open to the section where I happened to be writing about Truman's combat experience in World War I. It's not really a part of my book, but I had to kind of sketch over it and his book and lots of others were influential in that.
Richard Helppie
Why was it important to write the book "The Watchdog," what motivated you to do that?
Steve Drummond
I ran across the story a few years ago. I was writing a magazine article for the Wayne State alumni magazine, oddly, and I ran across these investigations that Senator Truman, during the war, was running. The United States in 1940, as you know, was extremely unprepared for the war, that lots of people knew what's coming. The US Army at that time, ranked 17th in the world behind Romania in size, Franklin Roosevelt and others knew the United States need to get ready real quick. Detroit - as well as all the industrial parts of the country - would play a big role in this but they had to turn the economy around and do it real fast, from making cars and typewriters to making tanks and planes and boats and ships and all the things that we would need to fight. All that was great, but all this was being done in a hurry, it was costing billions of dollars and there was a lot of room and potential for outright fraud and criminality, but also just lots of wasted mismanagement. So Truman, in early 1941, set out to look into this. And for me, sort of going down an internet rabbit hole some years ago, it's kind of an inspiring story.
Richard Helppie
What did he discover when he began looking at these massive number of contracts that had been led out to government agencies and the private sector to try to pivot to a war economy?
Steve Drummond
In the macro scale - I'll talk about the big picture thing and then I can talk about a couple of micro/specific examples - in a large way...you know how the government process works. Contractors bid on a project, government looks over their bids, they try and pick the lowest one, and they award the contract. In 1940, 1941 there was no time for this, the government was cutting deals real fast; we needed tanks, 500 of them, right now. William Knudsen, working for Franklin Roosevelt, could pick up the phone and call the head of the Chrysler Corporation and in one day, work out a deal to build a new factory to build 500 tanks, thousands of tanks eventually. So lots of money involved here. But Truman was very suspicious of these, it was called "cost plus fixed fee." Instead of a bidding thing and picking the low bid, they would just say how much they think it's going to cost to build these tanks and Chrysler would respond X number of dollars. The government would say, okay, and then they would add in a certain amount for profit and say, let's go with that. It was fast, but lots of potential for waste here; Truman was deeply suspicious of this; this is just one of the many aspects. The other big thing was there were huge shortages of war materials - aluminum, steel - the government had to decide who was going to get steel. Would the gun maker, Remington Arms, get steel in New York state, would a shipyard building a new battleship get the steel, would shipyards out on the West Coast [get it to] build tanker ships? There were a lot of questions of resource allocation and shortages. So in the big macro-scale, Truman was looking into all of this stuff.
Richard Helppie
I know that in the book, you zeroed in on some of the corruption that was in the steel industry, steel that was the foundation of armaments wasn't being inspected, it was being shipped out with massive defects.
Steve Drummond
One of the coolest things was Truman, early on when he started this committee, he went on the radio and he would say to regular Americans, hey, we need your help. If you see something wrong, you see something going on down at the factory you don't like, if something is wrong let us know, write us a letter. And thousands of Americans over the course of the war did just that; they picked up a pen or a pencil or sat down at a typewriter and they wrote him a letter. I've seen lots of them; hundreds, thousands of them at the National Archives. Dear Senator Truman, hey, you should take a look at this or dear Senator Truman, thanks. Well, in one case, the committee staffers were getting letters from a guy at a steel plant in Pittsburgh. He was the inspection supervisor named George Dye, and he was saying, hey, this isn't cool, we're sending bad steel out the door here, we're faking the inspection numbers. The letters are so dense and jargony and hard to understand that the staffers on the committee kind of blew them off at first, they were like, this guy's...they called it the crackpot file - they put him in the crackpot file. But eventually, it was discovered that a tanker ship had broken one cold night in Portland, Oregon and all of a sudden, they were like, oh...so Truman sent three of his investigators - one of them a 22 year old guy right out of Michigan Law School - up and they went undercover in the plant. They said, hey, you guys are doing a great job up here, can we get a tour around? And as they went around they were like, how do you inspect all this steel? It pretty much led to an investigation that revealed that this factory, whenever steel didn't meet the standards or they didn't have the right inspection numbers, they'd just fake it, send it out the door. So who knew what was going on in the ships or vehicles or materials where the steel was going, whether it was up to speed or not, and boy, did that make headlines around the country.
Richard Helppie
And there were issues with the army camps that they were building. Fort Leonard Wood, one of the major bases in Missouri had problems.
Steve Drummond
Exactly, Rich. This is how Truman got started on the whole thing in the first place. Shortly after his re-election bid, he narrowly won a second term in the Senate,Truman was getting letters from people in Missouri saying hey, they're building an army camp out here, Fort Leonard Wood it's called, something wrong is going on here, nobody's doing any work; these guys are making a lot of money doing nothing. And Truman - this is why Truman is a lot of fun - he didn't send a staffer out there, he didn't create a big congressional delegation. Truman got in his car in Washington, DC one morning in January 1943 and he drove out there himself, straight to Missouri. He starts wandering around this army camp asking questions, not making a big deal, just a guy in a suit. What he sees makes him extremely angry; piles of lumber sitting out in the snow going to ruin, guys sitting around playing cards, contractors soaking the government for three, four times what they should be getting paid. Truman went to a bunch of other army camps, he saw the same kind of thing. He came back to Washington hopping mad. That's when he went on the floor of the Senate and says, hey, we should be investigating this stuff.
Richard Helppie
And that's when they formed the committee that became known as the Truman Committee.
Steve Drummond
Very much. That was a teeny tiny appropriation. I just say Truman was a Democratic senator, working in the administration, he was a loyal soldier to his president, Franklin Roosevelt, a president of his own party. Roosevelt, like most other Democratic leaders, were not at all crazy about this idea of an investigation that would look into whether they were doing a good job or not. But it quickly became clear that if a Democrat didn't do it, the Republicans were ready to go, they would happily investigate the war effort. So giving Truman his committee was kind of a way of taking the pressure off Roosevelt a bit.
Richard Helppie
The other things that were very interesting in the book were planes that didn't perform. How people could, in good conscience, send young airmen up in airplanes that didn't fly, that leaked gas, [poor] landing craft, which I want to talk a bit about as well. Truman also had some frustrations about the contracts being let; it was all big business and predominantly white-owned, that were getting the defense contracts versus putting something in there for the little guy and the racial minorities.
Steve Drummond
Very much so. Truman had been a small businessman, he had been a farmer; and as you know, he's the last president who did not have a college degree, Truman was a blue collar guy. And when he saw these defense contracts going to mostly large corporations in a certain part of the country, in the Rust Belt, we call it, or in the industrial northeast, Truman was very upset. He was getting a lot of letters from small business owners around the country saying, hey, we can help out too, so he was very angry about that. One of the primary goals he brought to the Truman Committee was trying to spread this out a little bit and move it away from these giant corporations - US Steel, General Motors, Ford - all of whom made great contributions to the war effort, we shouldn't imply that they didn't, but his point was that there were lots of other companies that could help out and that all of this money and all of these jobs could go to other places in the country as well.
Richard Helppie
It's really interesting, because that's the way the system was designed with the government representing the people, keeping an eye on the private sector to get all the innovation and efficiencies from the private sector, but to not let them abuse rights or allow them to not perform. Look at the intertwining now that we have between our federal government and the biggest companies on the planet. You just wonder who's speaking for the general public these days; better times...(Steve Drummond: Yes.) When you were researching the book, what did you expect to find in terms of the issues with the function of the outputs and the cost and what surprised you the most, that you said, I never thought I was going to find this?
Steve Drummond
There are a lot of parallels, as you know, today. We've read for most of our lives about the $200 toilet seat or whatever, coming out of the Pentagon. There is always going to be this opportunity to make money off of a government contract. What impressed me and what surprised me most with the Truman Committee were a couple of things. One, while Truman was chairman - he resigned as chairman of the committee in August 1944 when he was chosen to be Franklin Roosevelt's running mate for him for a fourth term - during his time as chairman, the Committee put out 32 reports. Every single one of them was unanimous and bipartisan; that was amazing and it speaks both to Truman's leadership and as you mentioned a minute ago, it was a different time. But he worked really, really hard to build consensus, so that when the Truman Committee put out a report, it wasn't seen as a partisan thing or somebody playing politics or somebody trying to grab headlines. It was viewed by the media and by the public as something they could trust. So that was very surprising to me. The other thing I found, as a guy who is a journalist in Washington today seeing the toxic nature and the partisanship and the distrust that people have for the government - and sometimes the contempt that people in the government have for the people - the way everyday Americans responded to the Truman Committee...so many times I've picked up a letter, I've read so many of them in the archive; Dear Senator Truman, I've got a son overseas fighting right now and how dare the steel company be making profits on that? You're doing a great job, keep up the good work, thank you for this. That was really, really inspiring and again, it just struck me as being very different than the atmosphere we work in today.
Richard Helppie
If I understood the book correctly, they acknowledged the letters; if somebody is reporting a problem, they wrote back. That was prior to computers, someone had to sit down, a stenographer had to record it and type it out and post it; government responsive to the electorate. I just want to let that sink in for a moment, think about that. One of the other things I thought was really interesting is the Navy wanting to bring in the amphibious vehicles versus a private company in Louisiana that was building them. Ultimately they were used to transport infantry and tanks into the D-Day invasion. Tell us about that. That is a really interesting part of the book.
Steve Drummond
A thing that I didn't know about or I was unaware of the story completely when I got into it, but we've all seen the movie "Saving Private Ryan." There are so many times over the years soldiers or Marines going ashore on D-Day or on some island in the Pacific, they're in these little boats. Let me just back up a second. It was a big giant question in World War II with occupied Europe or a Pacific Island, they couldn't just sail a boat into the port and have the sailors and soldiers climb off of it. The challenge was we're going to transport thousands of men on ships to a foreign, hostile territory. We're going to unload them from the ships and get them to the beach. How are we going to get them to the beach? There was no such thing to do that. There was a lot of experimentation, inventing of what were called landing craft. The Navy, as you mentioned, had its own design that it developed in the late 1930s that everybody - except the people in the Navy - seemed to know was terrible. It was under-powered, it couldn't get over reefs, couldn't carry heavy tanks, and if the seas were choppy it wasn't cutting the mustard, and yet somehow the Navy stuck with this design. There was a entrepreneur, a boat builder in New Orleans named Andrew Jackson Higgins - these boats came to be known as Higgins boats - who had a much better design. He kept trying but he couldn't get in the door, the Navy kept blowing him off, saying, no, we have our own design. He was a bit brash, he was kind of a jerk sometimes and they didn't like him so they kept dismissing him and his design. Finally he reached out to Senator Truman, he said, hey, help me out here. Truman came up with an idea. He said to the Navy, put a tank on this guy's boat and one on your boat and put them out in the choppy waters and see what happens. This happened down off of Norfolk, Virginia, in the waters down there. Higgins' boat sailed its tank several miles, landed on the beach and then came back to circle around the Navy's design, which was at danger of sinking and foundering in the heavy seas with the big tank on it. So all of a sudden, the Navy was forced to realize their mistake. These boats were called Higgins boats; thousands of soldiers at D-Day went ashore in them, Dwight Eisenhower gave them credit for being one of the single inventions that made the D-Day landing a success. They were used throughout the Pacific War. It was a big success story of World War II and Truman played a tiny part in making that happen.
Richard Helppie
It's really an interesting story, because we've all seen the heroism and the carnage of the day and heard from survivors of those awful days and what you don't hear is that, hey, the machines failed, the enemy defenses were so strong and things didn't get to shore because of the enemy fire. But think if the story was about half the landing craft sank and couldn't get to shore. Absent the design by Mr. Higgins and absent the work of the Truman Committee, perhaps D-Day would not have been the Allied success that it turned out to be. (Steve Drummond: Very much so.) Then the bipartisanship I think is so interesting. Near the end of the book, the talks about the ALCAN Highway really showed the limits of what bipartisan support could do because that turned out to be kind of a boondoggle didn't it?
Steve Drummond
We've seen this many, many times since. Let me tell you what this was. There was a thing called the ALCAN Highway. Early in World War II Alaska suddenly became very, very important. It was kind of on the way to Japan and there were strategic concerns that eventually the Japanese would invade and capture two islands out there, so there were a lot of concerns about Alaska. There was a plan to build a road called the ALCAN Highway through Canada to get soldiers and equipment up to Alaska. At a certain point we thought, we're going to need some oil to serve those things. The Navy was ready to put oil on ships and take it up there; gasoline or oil. Somehow the Army came up with this very strange idea to build a pipeline from a remote area in Canada down to another remote area in Canada and that was going to solve this oil problem. A lot of people were saying this is not a good idea, Standard Oil and others are saying this is not a great idea. This one general in the Army put his foot down, said, we're going to do this. A lot of money got invested, it very quickly became clear that this was a boondoggle, it was wasting a lot of money, it was never going to produce as much oil. As I said, of course, sooner or later, the Truman Committee gets involved and they start investigating, holding hearings. As happened in this case, and many times since, the military closed ranks, shuttered down, and they said, we're not talking about this, this is a national security interest and he pretty much shut Truman out. So the Truman Committee very successfully made clear that this was a giant waste of money but that didn't stop the military from wasting some $200 million of the taxpayers money on this thing, even all the way up through and past the end of the war, when they sold it off for scrap for a couple of million bucks. It was Truman's realization that once the military chose to claim it was a national security interest they could shut out Congress, they could shut out the media and do whatever they want. We've seen this many, many times in the years since World War II, and this was an early example of that. While the Truman Committee was hugely successful, this case showed the limits of how far a congressional investigation could go.
Richard Helppie
When we look at the aftermath of that, during the Reagan administration, David Stockman's Office of Management and Budget said, we can't audit the Defense Department, we don't know if there's 10,000 or 10 million suppliers and everything's behind this cloak of national security. Of course, we've seen a lot of examples that lately, including some heavy censoring. One of the quotes that I believe is a good one, I'll try to restate it as best as I can, President Truman said, “I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in '47 if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.” The erosion of rights, I think that speaks to Truman's pure patriotism. I mean, he was a politician in this phase of his life and he clearly was a Democrat. When things weren't going well with the Office of Production Management, in Truman's first report, which was going to be devastating, he gave it to FDR three days in advance. When the report was made public, FDR on the same day, said, well, we're revamping all that, we're now changing to the War Production Board. So he didn't blindside his president, but he still managed to make sure that the facts weren't buried so that our war economy could continue to thrive, to serve our military.
Steve Drummond
Many times during the war, one of the things that made the Truman Committee a success was Truman was willing to not have to get credit for everything. He didn't need the headlines. He didn't need his name on everything. Many times he would defer to Roosevelt, give Roosevelt the quiet heads up, the job would get done. Truman, he says in his memoirs, I didn't care who got the credit, I just want this thing to happen. Also, he was generous with the fellow senators on the committee, the Republicans and the Democrats, he would let them issue, write the report, he would let them stand up in the Senate and deliver the report; Truman was capable of letting someone else get the spotlight. As a result, he got the respect of the media and the public. So I always say the Truman Committee set out to avoid press coverage and by doing that got an awful lot of it. Truman somehow came through, gradually during the war, people were saying, hey, this guy's a square shooter, kind of honest. Slowly, through this three year period, Truman went from pretty much being an unknown nobody in early 1941 to by 1943, people starting to look around saying, who's going to be Roosevelt's next vice president, maybe this guy Truman, and eventually that's what happened. So it was this gradual...it was fun while I was researching, writing the book, fun to watch Truman learning on the job and growing into this position where he becomes a national figure.
Richard Helppie
People reflect and think, well, the World War II period, we were all united and such, but there were conflicts and divisions then. We had labor unrest, racial tensions, income issues, partisan politics; did it seem like Truman rose above this or he just knew how to play it better?
Steve Drummond
A little bit of both I think. It's funny. I've been talking to a lot of people since the book came out and there's a powerful tendency that we all do which is to say that was a simpler time, there wasn't the social media and all those sorts of things that make things instantaneous news, constant TV pressure. There's a powerful tendency to say it was a simpler time. Well, it didn't seem that way at the time; there were newspapers and there were leaks and there were political constituents. Roosevelt certainly did not control the entire Democratic Party, there were giant disagreements within the party. Truman had been kind of a nobody in his first six years in the Senate, but he also sat and watched and learned and paid attention to what was going on and did so gradually. Here in the Truman Committee, he made some mistakes. There were a couple of leaks, he overstepped in criticizing Roosevelt a couple of times, but gradually he started get the hang of working his fellow colleagues in the Senate, working the media, working Franklin Roosevelt, working the American people. Basically, it goes back to him saying - not so that he could become president of the United States, he didn't want that at all - so the United States could win the war, so the soldiers had the best equipment, the best tanks or guns or whatever they needed to fight with. It's - again I keep saying it, sounds corny - it's kind of an inspiring story.
Richard Helppie
It is, it's an honest guy doing honest work and not looking for a reward for himself but at a great cost to himself; he often worked himself to exhaustion and needed to go down to Arkansas for the hot springs and be rejuvenated, a lot of time away from his wife and daughter, a selfless man serving, which would be something we'd sure like to have back. Think about how he named Republican Harold Burton to the Supreme Court, can you imagine that today? People are trying to undermine the Supreme Court and not respect the division among the three branches of government and close down any kind of debate..which is another Truman quote; he said, "When even one American who has done nothing wrong is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then all Americans are in peril. " I believe that that's true, that we're seeing this unfold with us today and yet the structure of our government is the same. It's been the same since 1770s. The processes that we have with the balance of powers among the three branches is the same. There should be independent journalism, yet we have people that are afraid to speak their mind, are ostracizing people for their thoughts and beliefs, yet no different in the 1940s run up to World War II, in the conduct of the war and, indeed, after the war - and we're in the same country. [Cross talk]
Steve Drummond
In the book, this came up a lot. Before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 there were a lot of people in the country who thought the United States had no business being in this war and no business spending all this money on tanks and planes and all this stuff, no business having a big giant military that could get in trouble. All that ended on December 7, 1941. But Truman and others had seen early on that it was going to be impossible; the terrible atrocities of Hitler and what the Japanese were doing in China, a lot of people knew the United States would end up in this war. And so there were these deep divisions in the country, it's not like it was some giant monolith that everybody was on board with all this stuff. It was a complicated, controversial time of disagreements. And time and time again it's reassuring to see the country figure it out and work it out. It leaves me hope when you see other times when the country has faced deep crises and worked through it, it makes you hope we get through this phase too.
Richard Helppie
Indeed. I shudder to think about some of the characters that we have in the House, in the Senate today, and how they would be behaving. But looking through that historical lens, the civilian economy going to a war economy, and some of the stats from your book from 1940 to 1942; in 1940, United States economy produced 3,611 military airplanes, two years later 48,000 and on a pace to make 65,000 a year. Started making 56,000 combat vehicles, 670,000 machine guns, 181 million artillery shells, 10 billion - billion with a "B" - rounds of small ammunition; an amazing pivot. Then one of the other things I really enjoyed about your book, because it hasn't been covered very well, here was this ramp-up to a war economy, all these contracts let out, now the war is over. The war economy; now how to change to a civilian economy. What would happen to a community that was building tanks and is now told, we don't need the tanks anymore. That's a very interesting piece of history. I don't believe I've ever read much about it. Tell us about that.
Steve Drummond
Same thing, I found that really fascinating, too. In my own interest, in my own reading, I think about, oh, we have to take a country that makes cars and typewriters and all, and convert it to war economy...what everybody realized; that was easier than doing the reverse. By 1943 the war still had a couple years to go, everybody realized we can make an incredible number - tens of hundreds of thousands of airplanes or tanks or whatever - but after D-Day, it became clear that the United States and its allies were going to win the war - there's still a lot of hard fighting, understanding of that - but if the United States kept right on making tanks right up till the end of the war, what was the point of that? There would be a lot of tanks that would never ever even see combat or any kind of war material. So even while the war was still going, they had to start thinking about how are we going to turn all this off? How are we going to put it back? And then the question was - which I find really fascinating, I found in a book I read - was a historian saying, put it back to what? Before the war was the Great Depression, 25% unemployment at its worst, millions of people out of work, so what were they going back to? The macro thing, like I mentioned the example of tanks, Chrysler made this big factory to make tanks, all over the country; companies not only had to make new products, but they had to make new factories to build a product. So now the United States suddenly had a whole inventory of the best, most modern factories in the world. But weirdly, in a lot of cases, they were owned by the federal government. So should the government just give it away? Should they sell it? Who should get it? How is all this going to happen? How are we going to stop making war planes? It was so incredibly complicated and everybody realized by 1943 or so this would be way harder than gearing up to war. And the danger was huge; if they goofed it up, the country could go back into the Great Depression, which Americans had suffered for ten years with depression and unemployment. So it was really complicated, it's the ending part of the book, but I agree with you. I think it's really fascinating, it'd be really fun to learn more about that.
Richard Helppie
Again, I'm going to recommend that everybody read "The Watchdog" because this is a topic that's not examined much. I mean, we know the big picture, that as the war ended here in America, as Steve Drummond has said, that we had the only modern factories on the face of the planet. Asia and Europe were in ruins. Our consumers had money in hand because they were working during the war years. Essential materials, rubber for example, were rationed so they couldn't spend the earnings. So they returned home and made a lot of babies and hence we had the Baby Boomers until around the early 1980s, who dominated the planet in every economic measure. And so here's Harry Truman now who didn't aspire to become the vice president, but there were enough people that wanted the then vice president, Harry Wallace, to be removed from the ticket. Do you know why FDR wanted to make that change?
Steve Drummond
It's unclear whether it was Roosevelt or the Democratic leadership or both. Roosevelt, famously, was very reluctant to give up power. He liked to control things, it was one of his greatest strengths and weaknesses. Henry Wallace was the vice president, he had been Secretary of Agriculture. He was kind of an intellectual, a very deep thinker but a lot of the rank and file Democratic leaders felt like Wallace was a bit off in the clouds and he didn't really understand how actual politics worked. He didn't know how to build a consensus, create local leadership, get out the votes, all of that stuff. Wallace was pretty much ignorant of that. So, in 1943, as it became clear that Franklin Roosevelt would probably - hopefully for the Democrats - run for an unprecedented fourth term, there was an attempt to shove Wallace off. Roosevelt didn't really care, was reluctant, so for about a year there was this giant battle over who would be the vice president. Then all of that filtered to the fact that Franklin Roosevelt by this time was a very sick man. Nobody really out in the country knew it; it was kind of an open secret in Washington, DC. But the Democratic leadership was realizing that whoever was going to be the vice president was very, very, very likely to become the president of the United States and so into 1944 this jockeying continued. Gradually Truman, with the success of his committee, slowly was working his way up to the top. Truman didn't want it. His wife especially didn't want him to be vice president. Truman thought it was an empty job. He didn't really seek it out. Finally, at the Chicago convention in August 1944, Roosevelt got on the phone and basically told Truman to take it, and Truman did. So that's how that ended up.
Richard Helppie
So if you think about the parallels in history, here's the Democratic Party with an older, very ill president, a vice president that the party didn't have any confidence in searching around for a new vice president going into what might be a difficult re-election period during a time when the country is still in crisis. As a historian, I'm sure you can see the repeats that going on here.
Steve Drummond
We've seen this movie.
Richard Helppie
Yes, indeed. What we seem to be missing in today's scenario is the people with a track record of running committees rooted in the facts, speaking clear truths, being bipartisan. Again, it's one individual's willingness to be bipartisan, to reach across the aisle; there has to be a hand extended from the other side, as well. Hopefully, better people will prevail. Harry Truman served as vice president for only 82 days before the sudden death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I think history will treat him kindly. I think Mr. Truman was looked at as a good president. That he was also faced with one of the most difficult decisions, which also came from the Committee, and that was the decision to drop the atomic bombs, as he did. That was a secret that he kept. When the Committee was investigating they said, don't look at Tennessee, Washington; we've got something going there, we just don't want to talk about it. And he had the judgment to protect that secret.
Steve Drummond
He did. It was called the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, as you know, probably the single - at that time, certainly the biggest - single weapons program or defense spending program in the government's history. Inevitably, several times people were writing to Truman saying, hey, they're buying up all this land and wasting all this money around the country in New Mexico and then near Knoxville, Tennessee, and in Hanford, Washington. And inevitably, Truman would say, hey, we've got to look into this. Well, sure enough, Army Chief of Staff, George Marshall shows up in Truman's office and basically said back off, this is top secret, keep your hands off, don't touch it, trust me on this, and Truman did. So the secret was, for the most part, preserved. This would come back to haunt Truman; he sort of knew the general outline that something was up but suddenly, as president of the United States for three months, he had to make this profound decision to drop this bomb on Japan. I'm no expert around the decision to build a bomb but I think, for Truman, it wasn't a decision he agonized over a lot. I think it was a simpler decision for him to drop this weapon and end the war quickly and save American lives. I don't think Truman gave it a lot more thought than that.
Richard Helppie
There was an essay that's a favorite of mine by a fellow named Paul Fussell. That might be another good book project for you. He wrote a column "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb." He had been a soldier and seen action in multiple theaters and was being prepared to go invade the Japanese homeland. And when he heard that the bomb had been dropped, he said, oh my goodness, we're going to get to live to be old men, because they viewed it as a suicide mission. They were calmly going to go out there and do that assault. I've been to Hiroshima years ago. I've talked with people that were in their teens then. And I don't know that they knew what they were telling us but they were being told kill as many Marines as you can, any way you can; sharpen sticks, make yourself a weapon, etc. That was not going to be an invasion without cost...we couldn't even imagine. I'm wondering what documentation there is about the president's decision to use the nuclear bomb.
Steve Drummond
I'd very much like to read up on this more. I don't know if there is the book out there but it's got to be one of the central aspects of Truman's presidency, and of the 20th century when you get right down to it. I'd really like to know more about it and poke into the decision and whether Truman even really had a choice; whether it was so far down the road or whether somebody could have put a stop to it and if so, why. Anyway, it's really a fascinating area of history.
Richard Helppie
My father was being trained in naval aviation to attack Japan when they dropped the bomb, so he didn't have to go do that. Steve, this has been a great talk, what didn't we cover today that maybe we should have been talking about?
Steve Drummond
Frankly, a lot of great questions, we hit so many of the things that really inspired me about the book; I just keep coming back to saying Truman is a lot of fun. I had a lot of fun writing this book and delving into it. We didn't really talk about...the other thing is, during all this time that we talked about, Truman was trying to be a dad and be a good husband and raise a daughter. His daughter, Margaret was finishing up high school and going to college during this period. Truman loved his wife deeply; she did not, Bess Truman, did not like Washington, DC, she did not like the political life, she wanted to go back to Missouri and did every chance she got. Lucky for me, because throughout their marriage, Truman, whenever they were away, almost every day he wrote a letter to his wife, Bess. If he was traveling or if they were not in the same place, he wrote a letter to her. That makes it very, very pleasurable to cover this story, to write the story because not only can I see in the newspaper that Truman was in Los Angeles on a trip on a certain day in 1942, but I can tell what was in his mind that day and what he ate for breakfast and what he was thinking about, because he wrote a letter to his wife. And he comes across as, again, a decent and for the most part, inspiring guy, and he was trying to juggle this, his role in this great historical event that was going on. But he was also still trying to be a dad and husband. I found that really moving and another window into this guy.
Richard Helppie
Indeed, in the faith, in the family, and then in service. It's a great combination. I know that there are people that are trying to take us away from that. Another quote that I really like from Harry Truman is that as he worked with the political opposition and opposition within his own party he also understood the enormous power of the government. Today, we have the government and the tech complex, as some pundits have termed the "censorship industrial complex." Truman said, "Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it only has one way to go and that's down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens, and creates a country where everyone lives in fear." And we've seen that in other countries very much during the course of human history. We need to understand that it's up to us to make sure that we don't fall down that rabbit hole, that trap. What's next for Steve Drummond?
Steve Drummond
That is a really good question. Writing a book, it turns out, is a difficult thing, I found out, and took a lot of work and I have a day job. So I have a few ideas. I wouldn't mind trying this again. But this started as a germ of an idea several years ago, I was poking around spending a day here and there at the National Archive, and then for about the last two years, when I wasn't working my day job at NPR I've been working on this. So I'm enjoying talking to people like you and talking about the book and meeting a lot of really fun people, getting great questions. And then maybe sometime around there I'll try it again. I don't know.
Richard Helppie
Well, we'd sure enjoy reading that. Again, the book is called "The Watchdog" written by Steve Drummond. It's a great tale. It's a really fun read. I encourage everyone to get a copy and read this. Steve, before we wrap up today, any closing thoughts for the listeners, readers and viewers of The Common Bridge?
Steve Drummond
I'm struck by some of the things you said, the country is going through a rough patch right now but it was both inspiring and helpful to me to read and write about a period when we faced some very serious challenges and the nation, the United States, came through successfully. That, to me, is kind of a help, as I both watch from the side and find myself covering, as a journalist in Washington, what's going on right now; hopefully we'll get through this. That sounds a little corny, but that's where I'm at right now and writing this book helped.
Richard Helppie
I think I share that sentiment. I appreciate you saying that. We've been talking today to Steve Drummond of NPR about his book "The Watchdog" about the Truman Committee during World War II. So with our guest, Steve Drummond, this is your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
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(Watch, Read or Listen) Government With Integrity - When The Truman Committee Battled Corruption