Chapter 16 Turn right - 2

In the White House, Vaughan has a reputation for being gregarious and affable.His social energy seems to be boundless.He is always happy to come to a cocktail party or dinner.When he made new friends there, he was always happy to send a letter or make a phone call the next morning to make the government run more smoothly.It would have been the usual thing to do, given the right place to do something else.But doing his job is indeed a dangerous thing. The general's trouble was a sleazy fellow named James Hunt, a former colonel in the Army Quartermaster Corps.There were quite a few people like Hunter, but he was a typical figure among them, and he was also a representative of those who sold officials and sold power at that time.For a fee -- under Truman, 5 percent of profits -- the person who could "match the wire" could make a difficult deal go through.At Hunter's behest, Vaughn exerted absurd pressure on the governing agencies, the Pentagon's acquisition officials, the State Department's Passport Division, and the Department of Agriculture.In occupied Europe, a businessman brought a letter of introduction from the White House to acquire the entire perfume oil supply for a perfume manufacturer.Federal trade regulations were relaxed for one of Hunter's clients, surplus handling was relaxed for another, and the public housing construction program was adjusted for a third.To adjust the peacetime economy, rare construction steel went to California's racetracks, and rare commercial sugar went to soft drink makers.Vaughan himself acted as a medium for the donations made by these beneficiaries.Worst of all, he accepted a personal gift from one of the beneficiaries, which became known as a $520 cooler.

The President's other three old Missouri associates were: Donald Dawson, E. Merle Young, and William Boyle.Their turf is the Renaissance Financial Corporation.It was established by Herbert Hoover to shore up failing manufacturers, financed the defense industry in the early 1940s, and sought to ease the pain of economic adjustment after the war.In the recent period, there has been little need to keep the company, but the business there has suddenly become active.A Senate subcommittee under the leadership of William Fulbright of Arkansas took a look there, only to discover that it was a hotbed of filth.Government grants were used for various ventures, including hotels with casinos in Las Vegas and Miami.Some files are nowhere to be found, others are blatantly partial.The American Lee Folda Corporation applied to the Renaissance Financial Corporation for a loan of 565,000 yuan and was rejected three times, so it paid Boyle 8,000 yuan as a "handling fee" and the latter was also the vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee.So, that loan was approved.Dawson, special assistant to the president, has repeatedly secured loans from RFC for politically connected individuals who lacked collateral.Young was the examiner for the loan at Renaissance Financial Corporation.For a decade he supplemented his salary with "processing fees" from the vendors he approved for loans.After he approved a loan of 150,000 yuan, the company gave Mrs. Yang a gift, a mink coat worth 9,540 yuan, as a token of gratitude.

That gift was a disaster.The one thing most American housewives love most and never dream of having is a mink coat.Now a woman got it just because her husband cheated the government.The Republicans added fuel to the fire—they forgot that their party's national chairman had come forward to secure a large Renaissance Finance loan for the Carthage Iron Catalyst Company, since he himself was the general manager of that company—and the rumors gradually escalated. Word spread, and it was even believed that everyone who worked in a government agency had a cooler in the basement and that their wives had mink coats on them.Senator Blair Moody's wife pinned an invoice for her new fur coat, which listed it as a mink-dyed muskrat coat, for just $381.25, including tax.Harold Reed of the Mink Farmers Association thought it necessary to make a statement that women who wore mink coats were not necessarily married to crooks, but that many were in fact "very respectable men of taste".

Harry Truman said the Fulbright investigation of Renaissance was "stupid."It wasn't, and Fulbright proved his investigation wasn't stupid.Beneath the arc lights and loudspeakers in the Senate chamber, Fulbright laid out before the press evidence that Dawson, seated to the President's right, was in fact leading a cabal that enriched itself by spoofing public interests.One noteworthy piece of physical evidence is the work log of Walter Dunham, director of the Renaissance Financial Corporation.In that diary were careful notes of dozens of phone calls by Dawson and others, clearing the joints of notorious and discredited speculators who had found their way to unscrupulous politicians.Since the events of Tipperdom Tipperdom is a region of the United States. In 1922, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall illegally leased the Tippet Dome oil field.It was later discovered that Fore took bribes and was sentenced to one year in prison and fined 100,000 yuan. - since the translator, Washington has not encountered such a thing, but Truman still pretends not to see it.Young was charged with perjury by a grand jury, and the White House had no comment.Boyle was cleared to resign "for health reasons" after the president staunchly defended him for three months.Dawson, like Vaughn, remains a member of the president's advisory team and has the final say on personnel matters.That was simply abhorrent.

But nasty things happen one after another.As organized as it was then, the Internal Revenue Service was a constant lure for crime.This bureau has 64 sub-bureaus, and each sub-bureau is led by a director.The directors, their deputies, and senior officials in the Washington Directorate were all appointed on the basis of political connections.These positions were given to Democrats who were successful in canvassing in the last election.Treasury Secretary Snyder is an honest Missouri native. He has long had a premonition that a scandal will happen, so he has been trying to figure out the rumors about bribery.He even demanded the resignation of St. Louis bureau chief James Finnegan, but Finnegan and Truman were too close to leave.

By this time, everything changed.A grand jury indicted Finnegan as a congressional committee found circumstantial evidence.In this way, he retired.But he was later found guilty of underreporting $103,000 of income taxable.Snyder then ordered the suspension of San Francisco Bureau Chief Jens Smith and eight of his subordinates; then filed an indictment of conspiracy to defraud the government.Boston bureau chief Dennis Delany resigns, accused of accepting bribes.Brooklyn bureau chief Joseph Marcell was found to have missed $32,000 in income taxable income.He and his assistant, Mordecai Miller, were fired for refusing to explain to the committee the source of their extra income.George Schoenman, the head of the Internal Revenue Service and a former White House aide, resigned, citing ill health.A total of nine Democrats are going to prison, including Matthew Connelly, who was President Truman's secretary to arrange the appointment.

The overwhelming evidence finally forced Truman to react.President Kennedy pardoned Connery in 1962; President Johnson pardoned Caudle in 1965 . .Later, the Bureau will be renamed the Internal Revenue Service, and all its personnel will belong to the civil service system.But that won't be enough to quell critics of the government.It was less than a year before the next presidential election. "Washington is a mess" has become a powerful point of contention in the campaign.Gotta figure out a way to get ahead of the Republicans.So he announced the formation of a presidential commission to investigate corruption within the federal government.

Republicans said they doubt there will be a Democrat honest enough to lead the committee.To Truman, this was no joke.He began by appointing Thomas Murphy, Alger Hiss' prosecutor and now a federal district court judge.After Murphy accepted the appointment, he changed his mind at the last minute without giving any reason.It was a powerful blow to the prestige of the president.Then Truman announced that the cleanup would be led by his attorney general, Howard McGrath.That, say those critics, is worse than disorganization.Because the scandal also involved his Justice Department, and as the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he was the one who brought those who were indicted to work in the government.Republicans yelled that it was just window dressing.Also shouting was Americans for Democratic Action; and the House Judiciary Committee, which voted to take its own investigation of McGrath and the Justice Department.

The farce was now nearing its climax.The president had no choice but to appoint an enlightened Republican lawyer, Newbold Morris, to chair the committee.Morris, in a barrage of "Meet the Press" TV shows that revealed unsubstantiated suspicions about the Justice Department, turned down McGrath's office space and set up one of his own in an office building in downtown Washington. Office, asking Congress to grant him the power to issue subpoenas.But he was rebuffed, and he was later subpoenaed instead — to testify before a Senate committee to question his own law firm about its role in the illegal sale of surplus tankers to foreign governments.Morris then offended everyone in the government by sending out detailed questionnaires to all U.S. government employees, including the entire Cabinet, ordering them to register their net worth and sources of income.When McGrath received the questionnaire, he lost his temper.He mistakenly believed that Morris was his subordinate and sent him a five-character notice: "Suspended with immediate effect." Truman learned of this from the Associated Press teletype.So he lost his temper too—fired McGrath.

In the final months leading up to the 1952 party convention, Truman's position became increasingly shaky.His handling of that year's steel strike emulated the ingenious way he had brought John Lewis to heel six years earlier, and it was self-defeating.When the steel companies refused to comply with the Wage Adjustment Board's March 20 arbitration, which mandated wage increases for workers but not steel prices, Truman ordered Commerce Secretary Charles Sawyer to take over those plants and manage them as state property.He thought his emergency powers would allow him to do that, and believed the Supreme Court would too.But the Supreme Court disagreed, ruling on June 2 that the receivership was illegal.Anyway, the United Steel Workers went on strike, and in order to get the union's 600,000 workers back to work at a 16 cents increase each, the President had to agree to a five-and-a-half-cent increase in the price of steel—that's exactly What he always wanted to avoid happened.

At the same time as this humiliation in the White House, the GOP has become increasingly unscrupulous.Having been out of power for so long, and having lost confidence in voters -- who had voted against the Republican Party in the past five presidential races -- the minority party was determined to undermine the Democrats' prestige at any cost.It has both the right and the duty to expose the thieves and thieves under the Truman umbrella.Attacking the government for corruption and dereliction of duty is to serve the country, and this is how a democratic system should function.But the unusually ferocious Republican attacks on Dean Acheson and George Marshall were another matter.These two have no connection to crooks like Caudle and Finnegan.As the voices of the United States abroad, they represent the whole country, or at least they should be recognized as decent people working for noble goals. Acheson was a man of noble birth and culture, and he treated his political opponents with a cold and even arrogant attitude.General Marshall, on the other hand, was a wartime hero who, like Eisenhower, had nothing to do with either party.His trip to China as the President's emissary was as above partisan politics as Eisenhower's landing in Europe.In cabinet he avoided being influenced by partisan policies.Only once did he take a position that drew criticism, and that was during the row over MacArthur's dismissal.He then vigorously defended the idea of ​​limited war, which no doubt angered MacArthur's supporters in Congress.But Omar Bradley and the Joint Chiefs of Staff also vigorously defended that claim.In addition, before MacArthur was not recalled, the Republican Party's antagonism towards Marshall had already been revealed. In September 1950, 20 Republican senators publicly declared their opposition to Marshall's appointment as Secretary of Defense.Rep. Dewey Short of Missouri called him Truman's "pawn."Joe Martin called him "the appeasement man" who was responsible for Mao's takeover of China. On the eve of World War II, Martin had effectively led some struggles, vetoing legislation for the fortification of Guam and Wake Island.He had said at the time that fortifying those places might provoke Japan's warlords. .What inspired them to do it? Why did they fixate on a brilliant soldier who was once called "the greatest living American"? The answer to the question lies here: Marshall was a national symbol beyond politics.In the relentless struggle for power, anyone who is impeccable is a threat to them.If he wasn't on their side then, he might one day be on their side.That being the case, they need to preemptively damage his reputation completely so that no one will believe any opinions he expresses in the future.The last stage of the job was done by McCarthy. On the afternoon of June 14, 1951, he began his longest and most famous speech to the Senate, charging Marshall with "a conspiracy so great and so disreputable that it dwarfs anything of that kind that has ever occurred in the history of mankind." Liberal Republicans struggled to form a sensible, responsible opposition to the Truman administration.Margaret Chase Smith declared that she did not want to see her party triumph by "the four horsemen of slander - fear, ignorance, bigotry and slander".Emmett John Hughes advocated against using phrases like "Washington's mess," calling them "petty, self-righteous, and exaggerated."Hughes also thinks it's dangerous to cast doubt on Democrats' patriotism.But by the beginning of 1952, the ruling elder faction of the party had not heeded such advice.Throughout that year, Republican debaters even insisted on referring to each other as "TheDemocraticParty. scorn. Speeches made by the right wing of the Republican Party divide Democrats into five categories: criminals, traitors, cowards, incompetents who are always at war, and weaklings who are not brave enough to invade China and conquer it.Politicians who disagree are generally tolerant of each other, but the fallout from such a verbal attack has deeply divided the two parties. The Republican position is popular with the general public.Most Americans had begun to disapprove of Truman's presidency, and even his travels during the presidential campaign did not endear him to them as much as before.Gallup's polls continue to check public opinion. His first term was the most unpopular in 1946, with only 32% of voters supporting him.For the entire year of 1950, that figure hovered between 37 percent and 46 percent.After that—during his last two years in office—he never got more than 32 percent in favor.Sometimes it drops to 23%, which means less than one in four Americans supports him.He never showed the charisma and magnetism he has as a leader.It seems like he's at best a gutsy guy who overcomes his incompetence with sheer determination.That's how he judged himself. At his 300th press conference in April 1952, he told reporters: "I have done my best to give my all to the country. There are many, many people - I think there are in this country A million people - can do the job better than I can. But since it's given to me, I'll do it well. I always quote the epitaph in the cemetery in Tombstone, Arizona .It reads: 'Here lies Jack Williams. He died at the end of his life.'” But for a Democrat of his convictions, the prospect of a Republican administration is chilling.The name of the Democratic nominee Estes Kefwell was heard everywhere except Truman.He has signed up for all the qualifiers, and he has a very large following.Truman was unmoved.The president prides himself on being a politician who manipulates the party organization, and he dislikes reformers who tarnish his reputation as a Democrat.But most other qualified candidates have a disadvantage of one kind or another.Alben Barkley is 72, too old.Georgia's Russell is the liberal arch-enemy.Harriman never ran for public office. In the fall of 1951, Truman felt he had found the best of all those who could succeed him.He invited Chief Justice Fred Vinson to the presidential villa in Key West and suggested to the latter that he resign as a judge and become a leader.Vincent hemmed and hemmed for a while, saying that the Supreme Court should not be used as a stepping stone to the White House, but finally agreed to go back and talk it over with his wife.His wife was even less fond of the proposition, which Truman regrettably noted in his papers that the chief justice "categorically declined."The president then turned his attention to Illinois.In the November 1948 general election, the gubernatorial candidate there produced a remarkable personal victory, winning by an unprecedented margin of 572,067 votes.Truman's own advantage in Illinois was only 33,612 votes.No doubt, on his own, he would have lost the state.He told a presidential aide, David Lloyd, not to forget to let him know the next time Governor Adlai Stevenson came to visit Washington. In the same month, a Republican governor, Sherman Adams of New Hampshire, became chairman of the state's commission for Eisenhower's presidential bid.He immediately ran into a problem.If a candidate is to be named for the upcoming New Hampshire presidential primary, he is required by law to provide evidence that his candidate is a member of the Republican Party.Adams sent an inquiry letter to the county seat of Eisenhower, Kansas, and the following letter is the reply from Moore, the county clerk: As far as I know, Mr. Eisenhower has never voted in this county. The primary election law went into effect in 1928. He has never voted since then. I have been since January 14, 1927. Clerk of this county, as far as I know, Dwight was not in the city until the end of World War II, at least he never voted, or I would have known, since the primaries or branding laws passed in the spring of 1927, in The list of party members has been here since the primaries came into effect in 1928. Dwight's father was a republican and always voted republican until he passed away, but that didn't matter to his son, because many people don't follow their father, which I regret, many people It has become a habit to believe in debt, to see how much money is available, and to bankrupt the country.