National Affairs: I Know How They Feel

Harry Truman’s dander was up. The 81st Congress had constantly stepped on his executive toes. Now the new 82nd was trying to tell him what he should do. A number of Congressmen were demanding that he fire Dean Acheson; a number of others were trying to hold his feet to the fire for his foreign policy, an attempt to which he angrily assigned a purely political motive. It was in defiant reaction to those irritations that he had tossed off his truculent assertion that the President had the right to send U.S. troops anywhere in the world, whether Congress liked it or not.

Of course, said Mr. Truman, bouncing on his heels, he would consult Congress out of politeness, as he always did. But he didn’t have to. And if any Congressmen wanted to go to the country about the matter he would go with them. He had licked ’em once before.

“Constitutional Crisis.” That did it. Last week Congress was in an uproar. An indignant Robert Taft saw the country at a “constitutional crisis.” Claims made for “unlimited power to commit troops,” said Taft, were “based on the most superficial arguments.” Nebraska’s Kenneth Wherry introduced a resolution which would prohibit the President from sending any troops to Europe, except for the purpose of repelling an outright attack or as part of the present garrison in Germany.

The constitutional question was arguable. Historians could and did cite numerous precedents for almost unlimited presidential powers in an emergency. But there was an obvious difference between sending a few ships to squash the Barbary pirates in 1802 and figuring on sending perhaps eight divisions of U.S. troops to encamp more or less permanently in Europe. Such action, based on last month’s Brussels agreement (which the Senate had never been asked to approve), was in fact a drastic phase of far-reaching and brand-new national policy.

More important, it was a policy which could not succeed without a united government behind it. By his truculence, by using the stick instead of the carrot, Harry Truman had started a wrangle, not a debate. He had put a great national policy in peril of being crippled by bickering.

“An Absolute No.” Fortunately, at this juncture, tempers soon began to cool. From Foggy Bottom emanated the voice of Secretary Acheson, spreading some oil. He thought a compromise could be worked out, he said. And he even tried to explain his old statement, made in 1949, that the North Atlantic pact did not mean sending a large number of troops to Europe. (“The answer … is a clear and absolute no,” he had said.)

Said Acheson: the situation had changed since then. It also appeared that in 1949 he had not exactly understood the original question—although no man ever gave a more positive answer to a question he did not exactly understand.

Other men began backing away from their various irreconcilable positions. A number of Republicans frowned on the Wherry resolution. Taft, with an air of what’s-all-the-fighting-about, judicially announced that he was ready to “leave the legal question in abeyance.” Now he would be satisfied to vote on a bill specifically committing such-&-such a number of troops to Europe, he said. Democrats also began to calm down. Georgia’s Walter George thought there was merit in Taft’s idea.

The upshot was a tacit agreement among a bipartisan group of Senators to try to smother the Wherry resolution in committee, meanwhile prepare another document which would 1) affirm senatorial support of the Brussels agreement, 2) give the President specific authority to send troops to Europe. Whether the authorization would include the number of troops involved still had to be debated and would depend somewhat on the report which Dwight Eisenhower made on his return, when the resolution would be sprung.

Nothing New to Say. As for Harry Truman, facing his press conference once again, he said he would appreciate it very highly if the Senate would pass such a resolution, even though, he reiterated pleasantly, he did not need the Senate’s O.K. Since he had to whip somebody, he whipped the White House correspondents and newspaper reporting for being at the bottom of the whole affair. At week’s end, he went to the dinner of the Business Magazine Editors (see The Presidency) and laughed it all away.

“Somebody sent me a cartoon from Punch a day or two ago,” he recounted, beaming, “in which the cartoonist was depicting an argument in the Senate of the Carthaginians, and one able Senator of the Carthaginians was saying that Hannibal should not be allowed to use elephants simply because the Senate should control the use of those elephants.”* The President grinned and shrugged. “That has been going on ever since we have had Senates and Senators, and I have served ten years in the Senate and I know just exactly how they feel. And actually, no matter what they say for publication, when the time comes for action they will be right there . . . Honest criticism is necessary. I don’t object to that. There is nothing new you can say about me anyhow.”

*The reference was not a happy one. In 219 B.C., Hannibal destroyed the Iberian city of Saguntum, starting the Second Punic War. But he did not have the full support of his Senate, whose conservative wing was jealous of his power. Hanno, leader of the aristocratic party, considered his campaign an act of aggression. Few elephants survived the march over the Alps. Because of lack of supplies, Hannibal finally had to withdraw from Italy. He lost the war.