The Lost Crusade
March 25, 1944. Twenty-five Republicans from the House met with Cordell Hull yesterday for a vague, inconclusive, useless two-and-a-half hours of doubletalk. From it they emerged embittered a little more, feeling (and rightly so, considering they have supported the Administration consistently) that they should have been told much more. They commented again, and bitterly, upon Hull’s “evident distrust of the people”—an attitude which in any other land would precede active fear of the people, followed by active suppression of the people, but here only means that the people, instead of being told the truth, will just be lied to with bland and paternal condescension.
More and more it becomes apparent that perhaps the major thing wrong with our war and our foreign policy is age. The men at the top are old, without imagination, without enthusiasm, without heart. It is an old man’s war in which all the young men are permitted to do is the dying, and it will be an old man’s peace in which all the young men will be permitted to do is prepare their sons for dying.
March 26, 1944. The Truman Committee is beginning to succumb like everything else to the virus of politics, an unfortunate occurrence, and one which time and the passage of the election may heal. Certainly it is to be hoped, for it would be no small matter if the committee’s fine work should be hampered permanently by partisanship.
Harry Truman has taken it upon himself to issue a statement urging support of “present leadership” until “the crisis” is over. In extremely careful phraseology he urges this thesis for about 250 words: so careful, in fact, that nearly everyone in the Press Gallery has concluded that this is the tip-off on the invasion. Few have interpreted the statement as another endorsement of the fourth term, even though the Senator is one of its most industrious backers. Perhaps the timing more than anything else, the fact that there is no good excuse for it right now—so far as we know officially—leads to this belief. At any rate the feeling is quite general.
Owen Brewster, however, one of the touchiest men in the Senate when it comes to anything implying Democratic favoritism, has decided that this is just one more declaration of war on the third front, and has persuaded Burton and Joe Ball to join him in a stern reminder to the chairman that he can back Roosevelt as a Senator if he wants to, but not as chairman of the committee. What effect this has had on Truman no one knows, for he has left for Seattle where the amiable Mon Wallgren is already on the ground getting ready to blow the Liberty Ships out of the water with another investigation. Perhaps when he returns oil will flow on the waters and all will be well. This is not too certain, however.
Aubrey Williams, one of the most double-dyed of New Dealers, had dinner with the President the other night and then returned to Atlanta to write a signed article about it for the Atlanta Journal. In it he says he was shocked at the President’s poor appearance and very evident weariness, and came away with the “very strong impression” that he will not be a candidate. For the record it should be noted somewhere now that a good many people in Washington are beginning to have that hunch and have had it in varying degrees of intensity for months. For the record, though, let it be said that it is only a hunch. Only one man knows, and he isn’t talking.
March 27, 1944. Eric Johnston of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce came up today to testify in favor of continuing OPA; a neat, trim, efficient and forceful young man; “Candidate Johnston,” as one Republican Senator remarked drily afterwards. In looks he suggests Robert Taylor of the movies, without the blacks and whites—done in halftone, as it were, on a somewhat smaller scale. There is something rather deliberate about the emphasis and the forcefulness, also; the word, I think, is “practiced.” The charm goes on and off with brisk precision, lost, sad to say, on Taft and a line of stern-faced GOP cohorts, none of whom seemed overly impressed. All in all, despite characteristics which are vulnerable to a certain amount of attack, Johnston is a sound and capable fellow. Somehow I got the impression from watching the Senators look him over, however, that what they want this year is not someone young, not some-one dynamic or forceful or imaginative. Just somebody safe. Somebody good and safe.
March 28, 1944. Wendell Willkie, shadow-boxing in Wisconsin, has found his issue if he only has sense enough to stick with it. He hit upon it yesterday, and it is foreign policy—the only kind of foreign-policy issue the Republicans can pursue and still not seriously endanger the country. In a slashing speech he attacked the Darlan deal, the Vichy deal, the Badoglio deal, the Polish deal, lighting into the hypocrisy that has already come close to destroying the moral prestige and good name of the United States. The practice of fighting a war so that you can reestablish the very thing you were against when someone else wanted to do it has become Mr. Willkie’s target. If he can stick to that, holding firm to the higher objectives of a truly international policy but flaying for all he is worth the tragic, deliberate stupidities which have characterized our policy to date in the war, then he may really have something.
A wistful letter from Bernard Baruch, released this morning, points out that although more than a month has passed since he filed his report on reconversion, and although the Congress had much to say at the time about the bypassing of the legislative branch, nothing at all has been done on the Hill. The point is well taken, especially since everybody is getting ready to go home on March 31 and not come back until April 17. Why, nobody knows—except that there is an “agreement.” Barkley has agreed with White and Joe Martin has agreed with John McCormack and everyone else has agreed that that’s just dandy. In actual cold fact it is inexcusable. Reconversion is hanging fire and a terrific rumpus has been raised because “Congress was being bypassed”—yet here goes Congress off home. There are many annoying things about the way the institution operates, but they are human mistakes, mostly, and they can be understood and suffered without too much protest. But there is one thing absolutely and truly inexcusable, and that is willful delay.
March 29, 1944. The Democrats won in the Oklahoma Second District by around 4000 votes, despite the valiant efforts of Ed Moore and Pappy O’Daniel. Barkley returned today from his successful stump-tour in behalf of the Democratic candidate, exhilarated by the smell of the hustings. “You don’t realize,” he told us dreamily, “how much I enjoyed it, to get out there and talk to the people after sitting around here. You just don’t realize.…” If there has been any doubt in his mind about his own campaign—and there has perhaps been a little—this has probably settled it. Politics, besides being a great many other things, is also fun. If his decision to run again hadn’t already been made, it is probably made now. They are after him to go into New York state and campaign for a candidate there, he said, but (with a sudden chuckle) “Maybe I’d better quit while my rep is still good.” It is a rather interesting contrast with the old days, when the official endorsement came from 1600 Pennsylvania. Barkley seems to be the star performer now.
March 30, 1944. A couple of the powers of Washington came up to testify on the OPA today. President Edward O’Neal of the Farm Bureau, a shaky, sly old man with an innocent expression and a Texas voice, and Albert Goss, master of the Grange, a pink-cheeked, small, grandfatherly old gentleman with an air of gentle reproof for all who consider his motives questionable, came up to see their boys and talk the situation over with them. O’Neal, whose quivering conversation is filled with “I was down at the White House the other day talking to Jimmy—,” “I was down talking to Don the other day—,” “I saw Fred Vinson about that, and he said—,” conducts himself with the bland assurance years of cooperation from Capitol Hill have given him. “You do think price control will work all right for another year, then?” Bob Wagner of New York asked him. “If you will make the amendments we suggest and write in the changes we advocate, perhaps it will,” O’Neal replied with serene self-confidence.
Goss, who took a much more reasonable view on the whole, said that the Grange was still against subsidies but that in order to be “realistic” about the situation it would probably be necessary to continue them, and consequently he urged a limitation of $1,500,000,000. Maloney said that he was delighted to hear that, because that was exactly what he had tried to get through the Senate a month ago. Goss then backed water abruptly, emphasizing that he was not in favor of subsidies—just embracing them out of necessity. “So am I,” said Maloney promptly in his squawky, humorous voice. “I’m entirely against them, and I think it’s too bad we have to have them, but—here we are.” Maloney and Danaher, in fact, working with the cooperation which often distinguishes them, were rather inclined to take Mr. Goss apart and strew the pieces around the committee table. The firm of Danaher and Maloney is not one to tangle with unprepared. Both partners are shrewd, witty, keen-minded, sincerely patriotic and thoroughly capable. Nor is either one above a little blarney when the occasion calls for it. After he got through reducing the Goss logic, Maloney added, “Of course I want you to know that I am very proud indeed of my membership in the Grange.” “And we’re proud to have you, Senator,” replied Goss with equal blandness. Maloney must have noted a certain amount of amusement at the press table, for he glanced over at us quickly with an impish grin and muttered, “Well, I have one apple tree.”
The Senate met for an hour or so, principally so that it could recess again until Saturday. Technically the President has until midnight Friday to decide on the soldier-vote bill, and if Congress should be in recess by then and he had not signed it, there would be a pocket veto. Inasmuch as they want to give him ample opportunity to do whichever of the three things he is going to do—veto it, sign it, or let it become law without his signature—they decided to delay the start of their vacation for a day. The tall, heavy, broad-faced, white-haired Swede from Minnesota, Henrik Shipstead, finally got approval for his resolution to investigate the legal authority for Executive orders. Barkley supported it, but suggested that it be amended to restrict it to the legal basis for them and not to the occasion which gave rise to each one, something the Republicans rather wanted to go into. On second thought, however, they seem to have agreed that to do so would consume entirely too much time and get into political controversy in a field where they don’t particularly care to go. After all, other Presidents will be issuing Executive orders after this one is gone, and you don’t want to tie your own hands by being too particular—the same theory, in fact, which has prevented the Republicans, in this year in which they have virtual control of both branches, from doing anything about the amendment to limit the President to two terms.
March 31, 1944. ’Way off in Wisconsin, so remote that only its faintest echoes reach the Hill, seeming to have nothing to do with the affairs of the country as they function here, a familiar husky voice is crying in the wilderness. The campaign to let Willkie talk himself to death in a vacuum is nearing the end of its second week. Next Tuesday will decide whether or not it has been successful. It was a shrewd move, a combination of circumstance, strategy and his own desire to join the issue and fight it out. The issue has been joined—with empty air. The battle is being fought out—with nothingness. If he can survive that, he will deserve to survive anything.
Ever since he entered public life four years ago, he has acted like a man who is not a politician but knows he ought to be and consequently is doing his damnedest. But politics is a good deal more than rules and formulas. It is an instinct, and Willkie apparently doesn’t have it. If he does win the nomination and election he will still have to deal with a Congress dominated by leaders in whose faces barely a scant six months ago he threw the arrogant statement, “I can have the Republican nomination if I want it.” On that day he came very close to guaranteeing that he would never be President of the United States. Politics is an instinct for handling people. You don’t handle them that way.
As for the Republican Party, on the other hand, it will in all probability be muffing the best chance it has had for a long, long time if it turns him down and accepts a trimmer, a do-nothing, or a general. At least he is constructive, at least he is progressive, at least he represents an aggressive hope. At least he possesses the ability to grow to a stature somewhat commensurate with the office to which he aspires. The same cannot be said for most of his opponents within the party.
All over the country there is a great instinctive protest against the continuation of Roosevelt in power. It shows itself in a million places, and as noticeably as anywhere else in the liberal journals which are hopefully urging the Republicans to nominate somebody to whom progressive opinion can turn. Deep down under, America is restless under a domination which has continued too long: it just doesn’t feel right about it. And yet unless the Republicans meet the challenge with a really good man, the country will turn once more to Roosevelt.
It is a curious thing, this vast psychological protest, unthinking, unvocal, truly instinctive, with which people are hoping so desperately that the Republicans will give them the answer. But people will know whether or not the Republicans have given them the answer, and they will vote accordingly. If the party comes forward with a trumped-up legend, an empty head and a platform of platitudes, it will have missed the great chance to return to power with a truly democratic and liberal administration.
April 1, 1944. April Fool’s Day couldn’t really pass without a joke. Theodore Francis Green and Scott Lucas gave us one—another soldier-vote bill. It hasn’t a prayer of passage, but it will annoy everybody intensely and keep the issue alive for a while longer, and maybe force the Republicans to extend their voting record on the matter a little more. All in all, it is probably worth it from one point of view.
That point of view was officially summed up by the President himself in a cogent and reasonable discussion of the conference bill. He didn’t like it very well, he said; he regarded it as impossible to tell whether or not more soldiers would vote than under Public Law 712; accordingly he would let it become law without his signature. (“I wonder how that jibes with his demand that the Congress stand up and be counted?” Brewster asked tartly. “Where does the President stand and how shall he be counted?”) And he urgently requested the Congress to at least—“at least,” when it took four months and endless wrangling to get even the slim Federal ballot of the conference report—extend the Federal ballot to overseas servicemen. Theodore Francis popped up and put in the bill to do just this in today’s brief session. All he wants to do is give the Federal ballot to all overseas servicemen who have not received a state ballot by October 1—the provision of the conference bill requiring application for a state ballot would be removed—the certification by state legislatures would be repealed. In other words, Green wants everybody to give up everything, write off five months of controversy, three debates, six separate bills, and more than three weeks of seesaw Senate-House conferences, and just go right back to the beginning and start all over again. But it will keep the issue alive, and it will furnish more campaign material, and perhaps that is reason enough for its introduction.
The President nominated Homer Bone to be a judge of the Ninth Circuit Court in San Francisco today, and the Senate confirmed it immediately without even the formality of referring it to Judiciary. The Senator had gone to the Naval Hospital at Bethesda, Md., for treatment of the bone injury and illness which have kept him on crutches for months. A quick, nervous man, his drawn, pale, sick-looking face conceals the infallible humor with which he manages by sheer will-power to keep ’em laughing. I remember offhand only one remark of his, but it is typical. A reporter approached him for a story one day, and—“What do you want to do, you scrivening jackal?” said Homer Bone. “Pillory me some more on the point of your unprincipled pen? Jesus Christ, my Samsonian locks have been cut so short already by the press that I’d hate to have anyone try to trim them with a blunt ax.” All of this in a very rapid, quick, amusing way of speaking. It is the way he talks most of the time. At other times, also in a quick, somewhat more terse fashion, he will discuss some point of parliamentary order with great emphasis. His third mood is one in which the eagle screams and Homer becomes more and more flamboyant and indignant. He is a good man and a true liberal, and an excellent adornment for any court.
Every time a member of the Senate dies or moves on to some other office, the continuity of the Congress is re-emphasized. In the long run, aside from the great issues which confront it from time to time, the individual man matters little. Men come, stay for a while, and go, and others take their places. The institution lives on.
April 3, 1944. Every once in a while in the press up here you get to work and dig out a good, sound, factual, dull story about the operations of Congress—one of those things you know perfectly well the office downtown will cut to pieces or withhold altogether because nobody has the space to run it, and anyway, who’s interested? Nonetheless, from time to time in a sort of defiant desperation you say to yourself, “I don’t care; damn it, people ought to know about this.” So you go ahead and write it. It’s purely a moral triumph.
In pursuit of such a worthy but foredoomed objective I went around today to see a few people about proposals to streamline Congress. The subject is in one of its periodic states of agitation at the moment, various articles are appearing here and there in some of the magazines, and Maloney is industriously filling up the Record with reprints of editorials. He has remarked frequently that if he doesn’t do anything else while he is in the Senate he is going to start the ball rolling on that. His efforts are commendable, even though they haven’t produced much so far but talk. Talk helps in the long run.
Maloney himself has gone off to Connecticut for the recess, but Taft was in, thoughtfully clipping his fingernails with a small pair of scissors as he slowly considered the legislative problem. “Obviously something should be done,” he said in that flat, reasonable voice. “But I hardly hold with the theory that Congress ought to be turned into an executive agency. Congress isn’t an executive agency. Congress is a jury, in a sense, expressing the will of the people and passing upon proposals put before it. I think you can overdo this streamlining business.… I do think, however, that much of the trouble lies in the fact that the agencies downtown and the Congress up here are working on different philosophies. I think perhaps if you get a Republican administration in” (this with a thoughtful examination of the right index nail, which received special attention by way of emphasis) “if you get a Republican administration in, then you won’t have that disagreement.… They say ‘Congress is just a debating society.’ Well, it is, to a considerable extent, and to a considerable extent that’s what it’s supposed to be. No Congress can expect to become expert on all the many complex problems of administration. I do believe the number of committees should be reduced, and in the case of technical committees like Appropriations, a larger staff of expert assistants should be provided … but I don’t hold with the idea that Congress ought to be an executive body.”
White, looking kindly and benign as always, and as always swamped with work, said that one of the main things he wanted to see is a reduction in the number of committees. “The way it is now, why, my gosh, a man has so many things to keep up with that he can’t possibly handle them all. Particularly in the minority, where there just aren’t enough of us to go ’round. Unless you can keep up with the committees day by day, you’ve simply lost the thread of them and you never can catch up. But I’m workin’ on it; I’m workin’ on it. One thing I particularly want to do away with is this matter of proxy votin’ in committees, and I want to enforce real committee quorums, and I’d like to see the number of committee membahships a man can hold cut down to three at the most.… The basic problem simply goes back to the fact that government has become so gigantic and complex, touching the life of the individual in a thousand ways never dreamed of a generation ago. But I’m a nut on this thing, and I’m goin’ to have somethin’ definite soon.”
As for things now in the hopper, Guy Gillette on July 1, 1943, submitted a resolution providing for a study of the rules of the Senate. It was referred to Rules Committee and has been there ever since gathering dust. The same fate has befallen a concurrent resolution by Maloney, providing for a joint committee composed of six from the House and six from the Senate to study the whole problem of making Congress more workable; and a resolution by Bob La Follette which sets out in characteristic fashion to state exactly what objectives it hopes to achieve and then tells exactly how to achieve them. The last would boil the committees down to 13, have the majority of them composed of 12 members (24 for Appropriations, as befits the extent of its work), and authorize them to act jointly with corresponding committees of the House. It is entirely typical of the man who proposed it, an admirable character in a great many ways, not the least of them being the dogged persistence with which he has gone on fighting for 20 years for things he has only rarely succeeded in attaining. It would have broken a less determined man long ago, and even he sometimes shows a certain humorless tiredness. But he sticks with it regardless, and by that fact alone contributes much to his country.
April 5, 1944. Wendell Willkie made his choice, and today can repent it in vain. With the same political ineptness that has distinguished him throughout, he chose to make isolationist Wisconsin the battleground for his internationalist ideas. Like the Republican Old Guard which went into the traditionally Democratic Oklahoma Second District and cried “We dare you to beat us!,” Willkie in his turn walked blindly and deliberately into defeat under the strange impression that he could pick a fight and win it against people who wouldn’t fight because their minds were made up long ago.
It was bad politics, stupid strategy, and inept planning. It was also a personal tragedy for a man who, whatever his faults, is honest and courageous and forward-looking. If it results in his losing the nomination, as everyone here is positive it will, then it will prove also to be a tragedy for a Republican Party which chose to play it safe in an age in which only the imaginative could succeed.
Old Guard jubilation on the Hill, of course, was resounding this morning. Butler and Wherry, in whose state Willkie makes his second primary bid next Tuesday, were smugly unsurprised. Joe Ball, whose lieutenant commander, Harold Stassen of Minnesota, came into port in second place, said he thought it showed Dewey’s strength but also showed Stassen’s, since he had made such a good record under the handicaps of absence and a relatively unorganized campaign. Wallace White remarked drily that one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and Taft said much the same. “I might say that this kills Willkie deader than a doornail,” he told me. And then with his sudden, sardonic chuckle, he added, “except that that might be premature.” He ought to know.
April 6, 1944. Willkie threw in the towel last night like a man who, scorning the use of the airplane, tried to fly by flapping his arms and when that didn’t work gave up in disgust.
Comments on the Hill were judicious in some cases, disturbed in others, sincerely respectful in one or two. None were regretful. Only goodhearted Warren Austin, apparently seeing in the Wisconsin debacle the same reactionary triumph that Gerald Nye crowed into it, asked earnestly whether or not it meant that the Midwest has “sagged back” into isolationism. He regretted Willkie’s withdrawal although he would not say so directly, preferring to maintain that “the cause is the thing.” Who else will be found to carry it on in the Republican Party is something he did not venture to discuss. Taft remarked that it was “regrettable that Mr. Willkie in withdrawing should have expressed opposition to other elements in the Republican Party.” The rest of his statement sounded a note of obvious relief. Wherry for one sounded respectful and quite sincere when he praised Willkie’s courage—the Nebraskan’s instincts are basically sound, whatever his personal enthusiasms. Others hailed “unity” with hysterical thankfulness. Tom Dewey, strong and silent, “attended to a stack of legislative matters” on his desk in Albany and refused to comment.