To Tell the Truth, Mr. President

Review by Bill Doughty

Autocratic dictators lie.

So said President Harry S. Truman, American everyman leader-philosopher.

"The dictators of the world say that if you tell a lie often enough, why people, will believe it," Truman wrote, as quoted in Jon Meacham's insightful "The Soul of America" (Random House, 2018). "Well, if you tell the truth often enough, they'll believe it and go along with you," Truman wrote.

Our previous Navy Reads post shows some of the ways the Navy was influential in history – an unintended subtext in Meacham's book. This blogpost focuses on Truman's and other leaders' roles, especially during the Cold War, when democracy was threatened by a politician who sought to divide people with fear, hate and intolerance: Wisconsin's Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

Using fear, religion and his version of patriotism, McCarthy spewed the conspiracy theory of a deep state with communists behind every tree. Meacham reports McCarthy's words: "'Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity,' McCarthy told the Ohio County Republican Women's Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, on Thursday, February 9, 1950."

McCarthy reveling in headlines about himself.

McCarthy "exploited the privileges of power and prominence without regard to its responsibilities; to him politics was not about the substantive but the sensational," Meacham writes. "A master of false charges, or conspiracy-tinged rhetoric, and of calculated disregard for conventional figures (from Truman and Eisenhower to [Gen. George C.] Marshall), McCarthy could distract the public, play the press, and change the subject – all while keeping himself at center stage."

"McCarthy was an opportunist, uncommitted to much beyond his own fame and influence."

"How he loved the story of himself as a brave warrior, a story that dominated the newspapers of the day. McCarthy needed the press, and the press came to need McCarthy. He was fantastic copy, a real life serial. The twists and turns of the McCarthy saga meant more bylines for the reporters, more exciting headlines for the editors, and, given the subject matter – alleged infiltration of the government of the United States by a fatal foe – more copies sold for the owners. Radio and television amplified McCarthy's impact."

He manipulated the media and news cycles and kept the spotlight on himself. He advocated for banning books by authors such as Dashiell Hammett's "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Thin Man" because of the author's leftist leanings.

McCarthy and Cohn

According to McCarthy's own New York attorney, Roy M. Cohn, who ultimately turned on his boss by reflecting about McCarthy: "He was impatient, overly aggressive, overly dramatic. He acted on impulse. He tended to sensationalize the evidence he had ... He would neglect to do important homework and consequently would, on occasion, make challengeable statements," Cohn said.

"He saw the dramatic political opportunities connected with a fight on Communism. McCarthy was gifted with a sense of political timing," Cohn added. "Sometimes he misjudged, but on balance his sense of what made drama and headlines was uncommonly good."

Sen. Margaret Chase Smith

Allied against McCarthy were Eleanor Roosevelt, who compared McCarthy's tactics to "hitlerism"; Winston Churchill, who called for defending "the Anglo-American tradition of fair play"; Maine's Republican Senator Margaret Chase Smith, who said McCarthy created "a national feeling of fear and frustration that could result in national suicide and everything that we Americans hold dear"; editor Palmer Hoyt, who told his reporters to call out lies when statements were "demonstrably false"; reporter Edward R. Murrow, who said, "We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men"; and (former Army captain) Truman, who believed in telling the truth in plain English.

"On Thursday, March 30, 1950, at a press conference at his Florida retreat in Key West – where Truman could indulge his fondness for Hawaiian shirts, bourbon and poker – the president told the assembled journalists exactly what he believed, 'I think the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy,' Truman said ... The net effect of the McCarthyite campaign,Truman said, was to undermine confidence in the country in a time of cold war. 'To try to sabotage the foreign policy of the United States,' he said,'is just as bad in this cold war as it would be to shoot our soldiers in the back in a hot war."

Young Navy war hero Sen. John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert F. Kennedy aligned themselves with McCarthy in the early 1950s and later regretted it. RFK even served as a young lawyer on McCarthy's staff.

McCarthy tried to associate himself with a hero of naval history when his adversaries spoke out against him:

"In the early 1950s legions of people were entranced by McCarthy's Manichaean vision of life. He spoke in the starkest of terms, savoring superlatives. Everything was dramatic, contentious, perilous: So few things, McCarthy implied, stood between American freedom and Communist slavery. But one of those things – perhaps the most important of them – was McCarthy himself, who quoted John Paul Jones: 'I have just begun to fight.'"

Eisenhower failed to take on McCarthy when he became president, but he did address the nation about resisting fear. "His April 1954 speech about fear, which falls about midway between these landmarks (of his speeches about D-Day landings and warning about the 'military-industrial complex') ... described the disposition necessary to survive life in an age of strain and uncertainly.'"

Department of Army attorney Welch and Sen. McCarthy in Senate hearing."Have you no sense of decency?"

McCarthy's downfall came after Eisenhower's speech on fear, Murrow's public denunciation and an event that occurred in Congress involving the U.S. Army and Roy M. Cohn, when McCarthy seemed to slander and call into question the integrity of an army lawyer.

"In an iconic moment, the counsel for the army, Joseph N. Welch, attacked the senator, who had clumsily attempted to impugn the loyalty of a young lawyer on Welch's team. 'Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your selfishness,' Welch told McCarthy. 'Little did I dream you would be so reckless and cruel to do injury to that lad ... I fear he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think that I am a gentle man, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me.' McCarthy blundered forward and took up the theme again. Welch was ready and struck with force. 'You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? You have done enough. Have you left no sense of decency?'"

President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Sen. Prescott Bush

Meacham points out that even after the wind left McCarthy's sails, he still had a base support within the country, with 34 percent still backing him. It took a Senate censure to finally evaporate his power. Among those senators who spoke in favor of censure was a senior senator from Connecticut, Prescott Bush, father of President George H. W. Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush.

"When Joe McCarthy died at Bethesda Naval Hospital on Thursday, May 2, 1957, he was once more the center of attention," Meacham writes. "'Years will pass before the results of his work can be objectively evaluated,' Vice President Nixon said, 'but his friends and many of his questions will not question his devotion to what he considered to be the best interests of his country.'"

Meacham's book serves a tray of rich appetizers from history. He reveals how Americans have survived division and dissension, how we've been able to vanquish real threats to our democracy and live up to our ideals set forth by the nation's founders. We're left hungry to learn more, and fortunately we have a list of books and authors from Meacham, both in the chapters and in the extensive bibliography, all of which contributed in some way to the soul.

For example:

Garry Wills's "Inventing America"

The works of Thomas Jefferson, Aristotle, Cicero, Locke, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Ulysses S. Grant, Frederick Douglass, Emerson and Thoreau

Corey Robin's "Fear: the History of a Political Idea"

Jacob A. Riis's "How the Other Half Live"

Sinclair Lewis's "It Can't Happen Here"

Nathaniel West's "A Cool Million"

Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings"

Robert Penn Warren's "Segregation" and "The Legacy of the Civil War"

John Lewis's "Walking with the Wind"

Authors: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Alexis de Tocqueville, Stephen Ambrose, Taylor Branch, W.E.B. Dubois, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Eric Foner, Chris Matthews, Theodore C. Sorensen, Thomas Aquinas, Barbara Tuchman, David McCullough and Fareed Zakaria, among scores of others.

Meacham dedicates the book to fellow historians Evan Thomas and Michael Beschloss. "They are reassuring, selfless, and kind."

"The Soul of America" is a recent #1 New York Times bestseller, supplanted this week by Navy veteran Senator John McCain's "The Restless Wave" (Simon and Schuster, 2018).

In closing, we share these words from Thomas Paine, quoted early in Meacham's book: "As in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king."

Remembering the thoughts of Truman and Paine: Dictators and kings who think they have absolute power lie. The law – based on the Constitution, the support of the American people and the better angels of our nature – stands for truth.