WASHINGTON — Once upon a time, not so very long ago, there was a plain, ordinary, honest man who, almost by accident, ended up as a U.S. senator. Years went by, and then after several years of toiling in obscurity, he did something that made him a national hero.
His name was Harry Truman, and today he is remembered as one of our best Presidents. There are still old-timers, some of them Republicans, who will tell you they would vote for someone like him again in a heartbeat. They remember and admire him for his honesty, and toughness in standing up to race-baiters and the Russians.
Few people know, however, the details of what he did to make himself one of the most famous people in the nation, a story that is as fascinating as it is little-known, and which is told brilliantly in an important new book: The Watchdog: How the Truman Committee Battled Corruption and Helped Win World War Two, by Michigan native Steve Drummond, now an editor at National Public Radio.
“It was a time, however brief, when Washington worked,” Mr. Drummond concluded, at the end of his spellbinding tale. (Full disclosure: Steve Drummond was once a student of mine, and shared many of the fascinating details of this story as he researched it.)
This is, indeed, a book that’s not only hard to put down, but which has a lot to say about how government can, and should work.
The story itself seems like something out of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Nearly a year before Pearl Harbor, as America was making a belated and massive effort to gear up for World War II. Truman, who wasn’t yet much of a powerhouse in the Senate, put together a committee to investigate waste, fraud and abuse.
All signs show that he wasn’t doing this for political reasons, but out of moral outrage. Constituents had written him about suspected abuses, and Harry Truman got into his not-very fancy car, and drove out and poked about. “Right before his eyes, he saw millions of dollars — tax dollars paid by hard-working Americans — being squandered,” with huge cost-overruns and waste.
Indignant, Harry Truman persuaded the congressional leadership and America’s all-powerful President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to let him form a committee, though at first they gave him only a laughable shoestring budget of $15,000.
Somehow, Truman put together a remarkable staff of young, ambitious and aggressive men and women researchers and investigators, and persuaded a bipartisan group of six other senators, four Democrats and two Republicans, to also be committee members.
Then, they went to work, crisscrossing the country, ferreting out abuses. Republican U.S. Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan later joined the committee, and Harry Truman traveled to Detroit, Ann Arbor and Willow Run in Ypsilanti. The members of the committee represented a spectrum of ideologies, but every one of the 32 reports they issued over the next three years had the unanimous support of every member of the committee, a stunning achievement.
Years later, President Truman would be among those claiming the committee saved America billions, and many servicemen and women’s lives. “It likely did both those things, though each is impossible to quantify,” the author notes. What we do know is that a billion 1941 dollars is equivalent to more than $21 billion today.
Not bad, considering the committee cost Congress less than a million dollars over the years it operated.
The Truman committee didn’t always succeed, as the author notes. While its leader proclaimed he wanted to steer government contracts to small businesses, rather than huge powerful corporations, there’s no evidence much of that occurred.
Though Harry Truman would later be remembered for recognizing Israel and integrating the armed forces, he was still largely a man with the prejudices of his time, region and class; his letters are filled with cheerful ethnic and racial slurs.
“Truman’s views on race at this point in his life were, at best, evolving,” the author notes. He resisted calls to have his committee look into blatant racism and discrimination in government contracts. However, indications are that he would have had little support for doing so from the White House or his fellow senators.
The Truman Committee would eventually unearth a mysterious hole into which vast sums were going, only to be told by a high administration official to back off — and did. It was a part of the secret Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb, which, ironically, it would be up to President Truman to use.
Other than that, the committee paid little attention to claims of “national security.” Sometimes they were frustrated, as when they failed to prevent an arrogant general from wasting millions on an unnecessary pipeline project. But more often they succeeded.
The committee made the previously unknown senator a national hero, and forced him to take the one job he positively didn’t want: Vice President of the United States. Less than three months after that happened, he was summoned to the White House late one afternoon, to hear Eleanor Roosevelt tell him that FDR was dead.
Historians today largely rank Harry Truman as one of our greater presidents. But it would never have happened had it not been for the committee he created, at a time when, as author Drummond concludes, Washington really worked.
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