Thus with Marshall chipped and Acheson scarred, McCarthy inflicted substantial damage on the last three years of the Democratic administration. Truman was staunch but he lacked the guile in dealing with him that Roosevelt would have shown. He was not good at digging pits for the Senator and mocking him when he fell into them. Lack of guile, however, was better than lack of courage, which was the deficiency which Eisenhower displayed, and which was to make the period of his campaign and the first eighteen months of his presidency the apogee of McCarthy’s parabola. In Truman’s day he sullied America. In Eisenhower’s he ran amok and threatened to undermine the Army as well as the State Department. Fortunately he over-reached himself and the quick collapse began.
10
TRUMAN’S THIRD WAR
The dominant event of 1950 was not however the eruption of McCarthy but the outbreak of the war in Korea. It was also the great test of Truman’s second term. Did it strike him out of a clear blue sky? The answer is mixed. In his State of the union message on January 4th he had stated unequivocally: ‘The greatest danger has receded …’ He was referring, with justification, to the improvement of the position in Europe. But the statement was geographically unqualified, and was given practical backing by the fact that he announced a defence budget for the fiscal year July 1st, 1950 to June 30th, 1951 of $13.5 billion against $14.4 billion for the year then in progress. Despite the early Russian achievement of an atomic weapon the United States was planning to continue with its post-1945 policy of a military establishment dictated by economy rather than by any attempt at conventional balance.
Nevertheless, within a month, Truman commissioned a major internal government study of the future risks and needs of US defence policy. This was carried out largely by Paul Nitze, working under the direction of Acheson, although with some Pentagon participation. The result was a secret document known as NSC (National Security Council) 68. It was delivered to the President on April 7th. It was an explosive state paper. It predicted Soviet nuclear equality by 1954 and said that by then the United States, because of a defence budget totally inadequate to the commitments it had assumed, would be in a ‘disastrous situation’. The shield of atomic superiority, let alone monopoly, would be gone, and the American people would be placed ‘in their deepest peril’ by their weakness in conventional forces. This danger could only be counteracted by an entirely different scale of defence effort. What was needed was a budget not of $13-14 billion, but of $40-50 billion.
What Truman would have done, in the absence of the Korean War, about this deeply disturbing document is almost impossible to conjecture. It was not without its critics within the government. Kennan and Bohlen thought it exaggerated and even hysterical. But its message was such that it could not comfortably be set aside. But its costs were such that they seemed impossible to accommodate within the framework of responsible peace-time finance. The only assuagement was that while the threat was dire it was not immediate in the sense of requiring action within a few weeks. In any event the recommendations clearly could not be implemented without a major programme for the education of public and congressional opinion.
This was a fence that Truman did not rush. In May he made the most extensive speaking tour of his second term. The nominal purpose was to dedicate Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State. He did the journey both ways in the presidential train and was away from Blair House for two weeks, making 57 speeches in twelve states. It was nominally a non-political trip, but this did not unduly inhibit the President’s combative style. There were a lot of pre-election swipes at the Republicans. Margaret Truman, who was of the party, wrote of it as the high point of the second term, engendering in her father a feeling which presaged ‘smashing Democratic victory in the fall elections’.
‘It was a delightful trip,’ she added. ‘There was none of the tension of 1948.’1 Perhaps there was not enough tension. It was certainly no Midlothian campaign conducted by a latter-day Gladstone. Truman stuck mostly to domestic issues, although he interlaced them with warnings against the perils of isolationism. But he sounded no call to arms, or even a call to pay vastly more for arms. Nor did he engage head-on with McCarthyism. This was due, not to cowardice but to his mistaken belief that the evil Senator’s machinations would quickly snuff themselves out if not fanned with too much attention.
At the time of the Grand Coulee trip Truman had already decided and committed firmly but privately to paper that he would serve no more than another 2¾ years. Only nine days after he had received NSC 68 (but not I think in any way because of it) he chose a peculiarly fine Sunday, with Washington suffused in sunshine and cherry blossom, to commit himself to not staying there any longer than he had to.