you can't tell. good evening. hello. g thank you, katie. good evening, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the truman library. i'm kurt graham. i'm the director here, and it's always such a pleasure to welcome a crowd out to another one of our wonderful programs,

especially on a rainy kind of dark and scary night and that you've driven some of you, some length i know to be here. and so we know you're going to enjoy what you what you hear. and we appreciate you, you being here and supporting us. and we've had it's just so great to be back in business and to have these programs and to have these prominent authors from all over the country want to come here and share with this amazing audience that supports the presidential libraries. and you're a unique a unique crowd. and people do enjoy being able to speak to you. pleased to introduce to you tonight, mr. steve drummond, who is an author, educator and for more than 20 years, a journalist at npr in washington, where he is currently a senior editor and executive producer. his work has been recognized with many of journalism's highest honors. before coming to npr, he was a newspaper reporter in florida. and in michigan and has written for many publications, most of

which you, of course, would recognize. he has three different degrees from the university of michigan. he lives in bethesda, maryland, and teaches journalism. when he's not at npr at the at the university of maryland, college park tonight, he's here to speak to us about his new book, the watchdog how the truman committee battled corruption and helped win world war two, which was published just earlier this year in may. i hope that you were able to get a book before if you did and you didn't get it signed. steve will be signing signing books out here in the in the lobby afterwards. so without further ado, please welcome to the stage. mr. steve drummond. good evening. and can i just say thank you all for coming? this is still amazing to me that you would come out and want to hear about the story that i was so lucky and privileged to tell.

i also want to say it's great to be back here in independence and at the truman presidential library and to really thank the people at the truman library institute for inviting me and setting this up and having me and the staff at the library. it's been so wonderful and it's been nice to. a little less rushed. than the first and the last time i was here, the first time i was ever in missouri in april of 2022, my deadline for this book was june of last year. i had to turn in it in june and i had been working on the book on and off for several years without coming to the truman presidential library. i think that would be kind of an oversight. the problem, of course, was the pandemic. i started the book writing the book in earnest in 2021. the publisher said to me, can you write this book in a year? and i said, sure. and that was right in the middle of the pandemic, and everything was shut down. and so i was writing to the

staff here and they were saying to me, it's not our decision were shut down here, it's coming from washington. there's nothing we can do. and finally in april, i got an email from samuel rush here saying, hey, we're opening. up next week. i booked a flight that day and i came out that week and i had a really pleasurable week here. reading documents and learning, you know, going through the paperwork and sorting through the archives here and just easing a lot of anxiety that there was some piece of paper in this building somewhere that would blow up my whole story or change the whole book or or that it turned out after the fact that i had gotten everything wrong. and so i was able to fly back home to washington. a much calmer person. so it's a great, great pleasure to be here. and even one of the things that happened here was i was in a hallway down somewhere, walking

down the hallway, and it was right at the time when they said, steve, what do you think the cover of the book should be? and i'm not an art guy, so it wasn't really my choice. but they were sending me a lot of photos. here's a problem. harry truman, as the united states senator in this period wasn't famous and famous to be photographed really artfully. very few. mostly what i had was like campaign photos. or here's a here's a picture of him where he's like this big standing on the steps of the capitol building or whatever. none of them kind of said what this picture does was, here's a guy ready to he looks like he's ready to rip into defense contractor or military official. and also, we're kind used to photographs of truman as president or later he's kind of older truman and he's a little round and and everything this period of his truman could still fit into his army uniform from world war one. he was still like he was in good shape. he walked several miles a day, but also he was took this job

very seriously. and i wanted a photograph that would capture that. so i was walking down a hallway here and there was a picture hanging on the wall. i don't if you can see, but that's me silhouetted in there taking a picture of that thing. and i sent it off to the book publisher and i said, hey, what about this one? fully expecting the word is in the author world that the art people always overrule you. well, came back a couple of weeks later and they like, hey, we kind of like that. so that's how that came out. so it was one of my side benefits and i feel like this photo gets a little it gets at a little bit of the emotion and the tension and the drama that i was trying to capture in this story. and hopefully when you read the book, you'll you'll think it came off that way. like later when i finished writing the book, i was waiting for my editor at harpercollins and peter joseph to read it and work through it and make changes. i shared it with a few friends, including my boss at npr, edith chapman. and one of the things she said much later, after she'd finished

the book, she said, you know, the first thing i thought was a congressional hearing's really like you're going to get a story out of that. and she made it all the way through. she kind of liked it. hopefully some of you have, too. more importantly, though, how many have read? how many of you all have read david mccullough's book? me too, right. it's such a wonderful book and i was such a huge fan of david mccullough's and weirdly. while i was writing this book, he died right? while i was writing the book, i was sitting at my desk. i had i don't know how real authors do it, but i had books scattered all around me on the floor in my computer, and i was just picking them up and my phone lit up and it said that david mccullough had died. and i looked down and there was my copy of his truman book, open on the floor to the chapter on truman's world war one service. and it was kind of a a strange moment. i, again, i was a huge fan, but also after reading that book, me and probably some, you were

like, what? possibly can there still be left to be said about harry truman? and i guess that's what i'm here to talk about tonight. turns out, in my opinion, i did find some things still to say about truman and taking a look, especially at this three years of his life and how they might even be relevant today. 31 years believe it or not, since mccullough's book came out, 31 years. i did the math today. i was like, wow, didn't seem like that. my boss, edith, was right in. a sense this is a book about congressional hearings, but i'm here to argue and as i wrote this book, it seemed to me it's about a lot more than that. it's about these young public servants, many of them in their jobs out of college, who got hired to work on a committee in washington. and suddenly, at age 22 or 23, these young people found themselves traveling around the country, getting on a or a train

and heading out to pittsburgh to go undercover at a steel mill or heading to ypsilanti, michigan, to see what was going on in a giant bomber plant there or to a shipyard all the country these people suddenly found themselves right in the center of the biggest national crisis since the civil war. and they found abuse and corruption and waste and inefficiency. these young these young men and women found themselves asking tough questions of generals and admirals and captains, industry and and if these investigators and their boss in the senate hadn't been there in some of these cases, this would have cost lives on the battlefields around the world. so it was kind of an important story. and then of course, this is a story of truman himself. and i think a close look at these three years of his life. it's interesting to me that,

when i did the math, i have several copies of mccullough's book. he spends 44 pages on the week in the summer of 1944, while the democratic party figured out who was going to be the vice presidential candidate for franklin roosevelt's fourth term, truman was way down on the list from the start, and he ends up, you well know, becoming vice president, 44 pages on these six weeks or so of drama leading up to that convention in chicago. on the three years that became before that, the three years in which i argue that truman essentially learned some of the basic leadership skills that he would need as president of the united states. mccullough spends 39 pages almost every biography of truman. somehow they spend all the time in his early life and his world war one service. and, of course, the haberdashery. and then it's like by the time they get to this period of his life, they're in a hurry to get to the really good stuff.

and they kind of skip over the truman committee. it's usually one chapter or less check it out. and so that's where i saw an opportunity. one of the things about this book and this story here's a weird thing about my story as well, right from? page one, you all are know there isn't going to be some surprise ending in the story. we know exactly how and when the story is ending. you know, there's no there's no twist at the end in very first chapter, a january day in 1941, and an unknown politician walking out of his apartment on connecticut avenue in washington, d.c., right across the street from where i used to live, by the way, we know exactly where we're going, where we're heading. and so knowing this to me, part of the fun of all this is that we get to watch truman grow and learn on the job. we know what he doesn't. we know where he's headed in this story. and so each time in this story, he makes a decision.

each tentative, early, each stumble, each surprising victory. we know the stakes involved. if he screws up during these three years, he probably would not have been vice president and president in the united states. and so to me, this story ends up not being about the destination so much, but about the journey along the way. and truman, by the way, would appreciate that because he loved a road trip. truman love to get in the car and and go. there's a whole book about his a very cool book about his road trip after the war. but my story begins with him in a road trip. he gets in its car in washington. he drives out to missouri. and so this for me gives you a chance to have this growing admiration that i did for the man as he kind of figures this stuff out. and as he grows from an unknown state level politician, basically into a national leader, a man who would be president, i'll talk about that some at the end and hopefully have time to answer your questions.

but first, i thought i'd tell you a little bit about how i came to write this book and how it came together. for me, it was a first time author. this was kind of interesting stuff for me, and i thought i'd share a little bit of peel back the curtain a little bit and share some of it with you. a decade or so ago, 21 years ago. boy, time flies. i was asked to write a magazine article about my hometown about the motor city's contributions to the war effort. i'm from just outside detroit. my father was an autoworker. my grandparents were among the many southerners who moved north during the war to work in the war plants and and that's where i grew up. and so i was asked to write about motor cities contributions to the war effort. you all probably know the story, rosie. the. tanks, trucks, guns, planes. all of that was happening. as franklin roosevelt said in one of his fireside chats to the american people. we must be the great arsenal of

democracy is the greatest military buildup and defense spending program history. the numbers even today let me share some are unbelievable. during the war, 100,000 tanks and armored vehicles,. 310,000 airplanes, 860,000 heavy trucks. 12.5 million rifles, 41 billion rounds of ammunition. it is this incredible production across the united states that played a huge role in winning the war. it's a great story. it's a story told in other books. my story is about how the government need to keep an eye on all this and in researching this and detroit's role, i was reading up on the war plants, big and small, around detroit. my grandpa and dorothy melton and james emerson melton worked in several of these plants. my grandma ran a drill press and inevitably this research led me to a place called will run. anybody ever heard of it? a few. yup. it was a big deal back then. a few miles west of where i grew

up, a big open farm field in ypsilanti, michigan, 1940. henry and edsel ford. henry, the original henry ford, now in his seventies and pretty much losing it by this point. and his son edsel in early 1940 140, they began building a giant factory there to make. it would have an assembly line. well, let me show you a picture of it, sir. there it is. it would have an assembly line a mile long, 30,000 people would work there and told briefl my grandfather. it's one of the many production these are b20 four bombers, four engine bombers that were kind of the workhorse of the army's bomber fleet this time. get this. at the end of the war, one of those bombers rolled out of that building every 63 minutes. when they talked, the germans and the japanese. this is why there was no way they could ever even come close to matching that. my grandparents lived in a brand

new development a few miles away in a house that wasn't even finished. a place called norway. they were slapping up one of the big problems with the well, one of the big problems with willow run initially, though, and this is how we get into the story, was the plant wasn't working very well. they weren't making bombers. they weren't making any bombers for the first months. and the press was starting to call it. will it run? one of the problems was one of the problems was, as i said, 30,000 people needed to work there. there were no places for those 30,000 people to live and there were no roads for them to get to the factory. people lived in detroit 20, 30 miles from detroit, no roads to get there. so it just all this infrastructure, it's one of many, many problems going on it. well run the government throughout the war would get reports back from from combat pilots and they would say, hey, this doesn't work or we need an extra machine gun here or there. so the government was constantly demanding changes while these planes were on the assembly line. this was driving the ford motor company crazy. they had, you know, stacks of

regulations and changes they had to make. and they had to figure this all out. so anyway, in reporting this article for this magazine, i ran across these references of something called the truman committee coming to willow run to investigate. here they are at the plant underneath one of those bombers. there's truman. several of the the other senators on the committee, some little kid who i keep wondering if he's still alive, that that little boy and and and this was fascinating stuff for me. this is right in my wheelhouse as a guy, son of an autoworker who's, you know, grew up learning all about this stuff. and so i finished the article, but this led me down one of those giant internet rabbit holes happens a lot, too, to the website of this place here, the truman library, and to reading about some of the young men and women truman hired on the staff for this investigating committee. one of them was this guy. it's a guy named bob irvin in

1941. he was 23 years old. he had just from the university of michigan law school go blue. he came to washington looking for a job. someone told them, hey, there's an opening over in the senate investigating committee. and he joined the truman committee. february, 1942. i know all of this because decades later, somebody from here at the truman library, went out to california with a tape recorder and interviewed bob erb, and they had this whole oral history project to interview all the people that knew truman, all the parts of his life, his world war, combat buddies, his business partners, everybody who had dealings with truman, they were on this big crusade in the sixties and early seventies to go interview these people. and wonderfully, for me the transcripts of those oral histories online here at the library. and so for several years, this was kind of a hobby of mine reading these stories in accounts. and bob irvin had one of the best ones, his first job out of the country. as he said, he's he's traveling

around the country is going at a steel plant near pittsburgh. he wrote he talked a lot about how people notable his boss the junior senator, missouri put aside their partizanship. nobody asked him when he came to the committee. he said nobody asked him who he voted for, what party. he was a member and they just hired him. they put aside their partizanship the public interest. it was clearly for bob irvin, for this young man. you're looking at him at what he considered the most exciting time of his life, the most exciting thing that ever done. and i'm reading these stories. this is by way he lived on capitol hill with one of the other staffers who you'll meet in a little while. this is a snapshot from a photo album that one of the sons of of these people sent me. and i'm reading this and i'm like, you know, i don't really remember this from david mccullough's book, but it's in there 39 pages. but the detail and then as some of you know, a journalist, i'm a reporter and the reporter in me is reading this stuff saying,

hey, you know what? i think there's a story here. i poked on this on and off for several years as a hobby. at some point, i said to my boss, i think i'm going to take a day off here and there and spend it at the national archives. i eventually worked up a sample chapter and a proposal shopping around to agents, and finally i found agent and an editor, harpercollins, who said, hey, you know, willing to take a chance on this story and can i just say, spending your days at the national archives is for a history nerd like myself. a lot of fun spending a day in here at a table reading musty documents. not some people's of tea. but for me, this was the most fun you could poss do. this is the reading room at the national archives in washington, d. yr tax dollars work? i wrote to them. they said, hey, come o over. they hooked me up withhe legislative archives to a great guy named adam baer and back. and they bring out these documents for you. and that's, you know, part of

the service they provide to a taxpayer. i guess we all pay for that. and and so for the next several years here, there i started going through the records of the truman committee, which take up about. 700 linear feet in the archives. i would go there. adam would pull a card for me, all of boxes ready for me. many of them have not been opened or read the 1940s. this is what, about six linear feet? so you can imagine how much space this stuff takes up in the archives years and years and years. and of course, washington ran on paper those days. everything was in paper with carbon copy in triplicate. and basically i would go through these in a day that's about a day's worth of work there with my cell phone and take photos. i didn't have time to read documents, mostly like i had a limited time in the archive, so mostly i just got in the habit of just snapping pictures. and then, as i said, the pandemic happened and shut everything down.

adam would let me know every now and he'd say, hey, we're opening up next tuesday. you want to come over? and i was like, let's do it. and that's how i got onto this story. the story that begins, as i said, of truman walking out of his apartment a cold day in 1941. he just won his second, narrowly won reelection to his second term in the senate. and on that day, he was about as much of a nobody in washington as the united state senator can possibly be. now, here he is around that time, he'd been in the senate for six years. he'd done almost of note at that time, there was no major piece of legislation that had his name on it. no. truman this or truman that. he had there quietly and learned and, watched, kept his mouth shut again. skills we could use a little bit today in washington. not only many of you probably know this from around here. not only was he unknown, but he was. those who didn't know him,

viewed as a as tainted as a tool of the kansas city political machine and its boss, tom pendergast, in washing town. among the press and those in the know. truman was generally kind of disdainfully known as the senator from pendergast. he narrowly this reelection campaign and a brief break from that, truman came back into washington in early 1941 and on his desk were from constituents of fairly stream of letters from people writing in about an army camp under construction in the missouri ozarks called fort leonard wood. it's still there, as you know. let me just set the scene a little bit. 1941, war, 1941, early 1941 war has been going on for a year and a half in europe and in the pacific and in china and in japan. but the united states was not in the war yet, but just about everybody knew that that was coming. or franklin roosevelt and everybody in the know knew that it was coming. and so the united states once again throughout our history,

the war comes in and the united army in 1939 was ranked 17th in the world in size behind romania, once again, as we've done so many times throughout nation's history after world one, they sent all the soldiers home, they buried all the plans. nobody knew what to do. and the army had shrunk down to nothing. there were almost no airplanes, no tanks, none of the stuff needed to fight a modern war. and and and so there was this race to build army camps. so truman was getting these letters. one of the things that makes truman so much to write about is he decides to check out what these letter writers were saying. not by sending a staffer out there to check things out, not by arranging a congressional junket that would sweep into town and grab a of headlines. nope. truman got in his car that morning in washington, d.c., and he drove to missouri and he showed up at this army camp, a little guy in a very nice suit and a bow tie wandering around

asking questions. no, senator, real fanfare at all. and what he saw there was what his letter writers had told him are men sitting around doing nothing? there was lumbers sitting out in the snow, going to waste water and getting ruined. there were contractors soaking the government four, four, five, six times what they should have been getting paid. and truman got pretty. and from there he kept going. he went to army camps in several other states on this trip, and he found the same. he came back to washington pretty angry. and on february 10th, 1941, he got up the senate floor and he made a speech asking for an investigative commission that would look into all this stuff. nobody, including president united states, was crazy about this, but they gave him his committee $15,000. and again, one of these decisions that in hindsight can see was good. he hired this guy, a guy named hugh fulton, 3year old prosecutor working for the justice department, who had just

he had just put in jail head of a utility, a national electric utility, sent him to jail for like 20 years for stealing $200 million, which at that time a lot of money from the american people and this decision, truman's decision to offer this guy the job, hugh fulton fulton's decision to take the job a risk was one of the best decisions. either man ever made. once you fulton came on board, he hired a bunch of young people and put them to work. bob irvin, who you just met and other wonderful young people who threw their stories, their oral and through their grandchildren and grandchildren who i've gotten to know quite well. and it was one of the great pleasures of writing the story. i'll take a moment here, introduce you to some of them. this is a guy named wilbur sparks. he had just graduated from law school in missouri at columbia. at that, theniversity of missouri. is that in columbia? yeah. thank you.

and he went to the masonic convention that followed with his dad, who was some kind of local walking down the street. they run into head of the missouri masons. senator harry truman. the father introduces his proud father introduces his son to the senator. and truman says to wilbur, what are you going to do? what are you going to do now that you're graduating? oh, i'm probably going in the army he says, i think. but until that happens, i'll probably i'll work at my dad's law firm. truman says, well, i got a better idea. how'd you like to come work for me in washington, d.c.? he hires wilbur right there on the street. a couple of weeks later, wilbur gets a letter, pack your stuff. come on to washington. and he work for the committee. i got to know wilbur's daughter, sally sparks. pretty well, i spent a lot of time late at night on zoom calls. she was very patient, answering my question. and she let me know that walter and his wife eben were huge in the barbershop quartet movement in the united states. here he is later in life, and it's just one of the things that made him a charming guy. he was kind of the square on the

committee. he was very earnest and serious. the other members loved to make fun of him, but he was a very good and and he told a good story in his oral history. here's two of my favorite people on the committee. on the left is a woman named shirley kee. she hired she was the fifth employee of the truman committee. she 22 years old, right out of college, very well-educated, whh, of course in washington, d.c., of that time as a woman meant that she was qualified for what secretary work course up and but she quickly rose up and became the boss of the other secretaries and she was in charge of greeting people who in early on, hugh fulton realized that truman committee needed a press. somebody was going to talk to the press, deal with reporters and everything. and he got a line on a guy in new york city. this guy right here, walter haymaker, hammer down from new york on the train, a beautiful spring day in 1941. he walked in, he m this young woman here and she said, hey, us, mr. portman's busy right now. why don't you go take walk around the city and look at the

cherry blossoms, come back in a little while. they hit it off. eventually they got married. they had children. i've gotten to know their son, christopher, quite well. he me these photos right here in the mail and one time and shirley kee like bob irvin said, this was the most exciting job she ever had in her life. here she was working in this office? famous that she was reading about in the newspapers. were coming in all the time and meeting them and wanting to talk to her boss, senator truman. walter, 1946, wrote a book called this man truman at a couple of chapters, give a firsthand account of the truman committee's work by. somebody who actually was there. and it was a great help in writing this book. hugh fulton had a farm up in new jersey. he was a total workaholic, and truman were the first two people in the office every day. they both kept farmer's office, and they were both here at six or seven in the morning. they had a meeting every day and they went to work there. he was a workaholic. his wife, jessie, did not care

for washington very much so. on the weekends, they would escape to their farm in new jersey and a couple times during the war, brooks a couple of times during the war, he would invite the young staff. they didn't have children. he was very fond of the young people on the committee. they would invite everybody to come up to the farm for the weekend and have a, you know, a little break from the from the work. and this is chris hammer sent me this photo that mom shirley on the right there and on the left is a young woman named toomey who got a law at 20. well, that's long story, which you can read about in the book. the headline in the newspaper says pretty mis to become lawyer or whatever. she was the youngest lawyer in graduating law in d.c. so of course, went to work at the truman committee as a secretary. exactly she quickly, too, excelled. she became hugh fulton's administrator straight of assistant, and eventually she would be promoted to investigate later as well.

later her she's one of the most fascinating people in the story. later and later in life, she became she got accepted the virginia bar she beat she she became a pro-bono lawyer working with family law issues free at the legal aid society. sadly for me, i started working on this story years ago. as i said, i started working on this earnest in 2018. marian toomey lived to be 100 years old. she died in 2016. it's a little bit sad to me that i missed her by like two years. i did get to know her children very well. they've been very generous. on zoom calls late at night and and a lot of fun writing the story anyway, truman hired all these people and they got down to work. their first big report was army camps, and it was a bombshell front page news around the country. the committee concluded that the united states army had wasted about $100 million building army

camps in the wrong place or in a place without any water supply, or in one case, they had forgotten that they would need tanks, needed concrete roads to drive on, and that they were sinking into the ground all all kind of ridiculous, absurd stuff. from there, they moved on to more reports, airplanes. what americans learned from the truman committee was that the bombers, the b-24 bombers i just showed you, the american pilots were flying, were good, some of the best in the world, the fighter planes, the little planes that went down and shot down the other bombers and protected to the skies from enemy bombers. not so much the ones that german and japanese were flying were in many ways a lot better. the committee was very critical of the p40 tomahawk ane, or warhawks, as it was called. clearly they failed to recognize a tran committee in their report. how cool it looked with a shark mouth painted on it. as a little boy, this was my

favorite airplane. my father grew up near the factory in buffalo and he used to go out in the backyard and watch them fly over as they took off out of the factory. and from there they kept going. in early 1943, another giant investigation put truman on the front page of virtually every newspaper in the country and the word that appeared in most of the headlines was fake steel. this is really the story that me, bob irving, told it in his oral history that got me to decide there was a book here and it led me to one of the other fascinating and completely unknown characters in this book, a guy we would call him a whistle blower. his name was george e di. i don't even have a picture of him. his how obscure di is today in history. but in 1942 and 1943, he began sat down at his desk in brownsville road in pittsburgh with a pencil and pen, and started writing letters to senator truman and the committee. in the end, dozens of letters about what he saw going on the

steel plant where he worked outside pittsburgh. it's the problem was he letters are so incredibly full of jargon. they're so dense and they read kind of like a boy. he's he's saying all this kind of stuff. the truman committee was by then getting a lot of letters and a lot of them they called i'm going to use the term used the committee crackpots. they put them and basically this guy's letters just went in the crackpot file by but eventually the truman committee and i can tell the long story realized. this guy was not a crackpot. he was serious. and what he was saying about the steel plant in pittsburgh was serious. here's of his letters right here. you can see respect the league post 2902 brownsville road. i would like to send you additional information regarding, chess substitutions and also. test reports. you'll be able to all of these to go to letters which are mailed november 14th. he was just sending letters constantly and they were just everybody. every letter would get a very pretty much of a brush. thank you for your letter.

we will take this under consideration or whatever. i tell in the book and i can tell you later how suddenly they were like, oh my gosh, this guy's for real. and as bob irvin and two other lawyers went up to pittsburgh in a hurry to investigate, george dye had even drawn the of the factory and the office where the inspection records that were being fraudulently kept were were placed. one of the coolest things about again i've been reading this stuff online for years. i find myself sitting in that reading at the national archives, holding actual documents in my hand. it's a very cool thing. and the story that i tell is how i begin the book, how all this tied into a strange incident. in january 16th, 1943, in portland, oregon, brand new tanker ship literally never had left its harbor before. 500 feet long, $3 million ship sitting in calm waters about 1030 on a cold january night.

suddenly broken to the sound was heard a mile away. the fbi and the police raced to the scene was wartime. so everybody's thinking sabotage, right here. it is the next this is what it looked like. i filed freedom of information act request from the federal bure oinvestigation. they sent me a thick stack of documents inside informants, all interviewstrng to figure out what the heck happened in the ship and essentially the initial fear was sabotage that proved to be a false lead. and for several months. the reason the ship and the other tanker and merchant ships that were cracking and getting cracks in them was a giant mystery. a mystery that would be solved one day in a hearing room in 1943. you can read all in the book, but it led to one of the truman committee's giant bombshell investigations. front page news on virtually every newspapere country. and the words that showed up, big steel.

and so this is basically'm reading this, writing this stuff, you can sort of see truman now a year f tw years into the truman committee finding his feet. he's learning he's he's learning on the job and growing to become as investigator as a senator and now suddenly as a leader, he was learning how to in public never one of his strong suits. he learning how to talk to the press. also he never quite figured out how to when not to talk to the press, when to hold his tongue, but he was learning how to talk tough. truman was a captain in the army. suddenly he's across the table as a senator facing. the top generals, the top admirals, the most powerful corporative executives in america. and he's asking tough questions. he's also learning when not to ask some tough questions. and to work behind the scenes. he was talking to the leadership of his party. he was talking sometimes critically to the president of the united states.

and here's the cool part, too, about this story. along the way, americans him for it here. they found a guy who seemed to be looking out for them, looking out for their sons and daughters who were serving in the military there, their sons fighting in combat overseas. and sometimes he was telling them information sometimes not welcome, but he was getting the straight information about how the war and how the government was doing. nobody was super wild about reading that. our fighter planes were not very good. we're pretty much used to in america, we're the best right. and truman was bringing tough news to these folks and one of the early decisions he made, as i said, that we see him in hindsight really pays was truman asked the american people for help. he went on the radio very and several times in the truman committee, and he said, hey, help us out, america. if you see something going on down to the factory, something wrong over at the shipyard, let us know. and the started coming in a

trickle first, and eventually more than a hundred letters a day, thousands of them. i've read so many of them letters, like those from george die and thousands others with the steel investiga. asian americans had gotten really mad here was a steel company making profits so that they could ship bad steel that would go in to ships, maybe battleships or warships that. their sons were getting on and sailing around the oceans. people were really, really ticked off and. i thought i'd share one of them with you again. there's hundreds of them, but i've always been f this one from mrs. seymour almon on hickman street in cinciat here's what she writes what is the matter with our government th ty allow such thingas have been going on in our war plants such as this fake tests steel. my god. men, our sons are over there dying, gintheir all while these crood,reedy bloodsuckers are sending our faulty material for them to ght with. and eyave the gall to say they had no of what was going on.

i ask in god's name, what do you think we parents feel like doing when we hear of such things? i have a son over there, and not ly is he over there, t is turning most of his little pay back into war bonds. that's what mrs. moorman in cincinnati. many of these letters, as i said, very serious ones like this, a lot of them were pretty wacky, too. here's something called the christmas battle plane. this was going to be a giant with the six engines and 88 machine guns and cannons and 26 men were going to fly on it. tons. there's the hilarious in there. and i got to read them all and they're quite funny. here's one that i like to. it's a fairly simple one. at the beginning, a new york man into advice. h's read about the committee and reader's digest, and he wants to say, with the shortage of steel, he's got an idea he's been driving around the country and he's seenotof old iron rails above, ground or a used

for horse cars or trolley cars that could be used. i venture to say there are sufficient steel rails unused to satisfy the reirents of the wholeorld. and then i saw the signature did somebody just say that it's written by somebo ned dinty moore of. dinty moore glass and bottle museum. and so what i'm saying is the same dinty moore that made that ef stew i used to eat in college for a dollar. unclear all my skills. a journalist and a historian have. the murky history, the dinty moore beef stew company has a little clear. but somebody who will hopefully write a dissertation on that someday. truman's favorite was a guy he encountered who. his idea was that every soldier in the united states army have his own personal airplane, and at a certain moment they would fill all these airplanes up with dirt, with united states soil. and the would take over, take off and fly over tokyo or berlin and this dirt onto the cities and cover them with united

states soil. that was the plan. truman loved that story. he told it well to the end of his life. but you can see through all this, he struck a chord. he made a connection. people he was and they felt here was a guy in washington looking out for them. and he'd become in just two years, one of the best known public officials in the country. i just pulled this off the wire one day because here's a bomber somewhere over in in europe. truman committee on it. you know, usually they had pictures of pinupr cartoon characters, daffy duck or whatever. and here was one tt a united states senator made, the front no longer by time could truman st show up at a navy base or an army camp. the arrival of the truman truman committee anywhere in the country was big news. and everywhere he went, he wrote to bess, the national press would follow truman. love to write to bess and margaret. how much, how little he cared about the press. i don't care about the press, he

said. and then the next two paragraphs would be detailed accounts of what page he was on in the st louis club democrat that day. totally not seeing the irony of that. it's very funny. and then this happened march 1943, the same week the steel broke, this happens. truman picks up the shows up on the cover of time magazine. at that time, that was a big deal. it's not so much anymore, but it was huge then here's the headline investigator a democracy has to keep an eye on itself. clearly, he's arrived on the national scene and knowing where this is headed, we're seeing truman learning on job. the other fun part of the story i mentioned, bess and margaret, was truman, as this time was a a struggling to have a family life. and amidst all this work he was doing and he was working long hours to the degree several

times it made him sick and he had to go to a military hospital several times to recuperate. here he is in their apartment on connecticut avenue. these were photos shot in 1943 or 44 for life magazine is kind of famous. i used to live right down the street from this buildg. i drive by it all the time it's called the truman building. now, he never rich. his letters to bess make up a huge chunk of my story are full of how much he spent on his dry cleaning, or that getting the car fixed cost $13. or how much he had for lunch that day. he took a bus, the capitol building, a lot, and the quiet domestic life that he and had loved so much was about to change forever. now, by late 1943, 1944, truman was starting to be talked about as a possible vice presidential candidate. roosevelt was still up in the as to whether he would run for a fourth term. everybody in the democratic party was praying fervently that he would. they didn't like the vice

president, henry wallace, wanted to change. and so all of this speculation begins and slowly truman's name kind of almost by default, is rising to the top of the list, as many of the other, much more popular and better known people kind of fell off the list. finally, in august 1944, again, a famous story that david mccullough and many others have told the chicago convention. roosevelt gets truman on the phone and tells him to take the job. there are many funny, comical versions of what truman thought about that conversation. you can read my, take on it, but along the way and so this is kind of where the story wraps up along the way, truman and his committee time and again brought americans tough news about the war production effort told them about that $100 million wasted on army camps. he told them their sons were taken to the skies and airplanes that weren't very good. he told them the german submarines are sinking way more merchant ships in the atlantic than anybody knew.

the navy pushed back and truman came back and said, show me your numbers. and and this navy secretary had to come out and eat a little bit of crow and say, actually, truman was right. and that big steel from that pittsburgh steel plant had gone into some of those ships along the way. he and his bipartisan committee, five democrats and two republicans, it grew during the war they had issued 32 reports. and here true, here, too, truman had shown leadership and see him growing into the job and learning this stuff. he and hugh fulton had created a new model for how these congressional investigations should be done. a lot of the things that they did we take for granted now. but because that's because the truman committee them all those years ago a model that exists as an example all the way down to the kefauver hearings organized crime in the fifties, kennedy assassination investigation in the sixties, watergate hearing the seventies all the way down to the investigations of today,

the financial collapse in the 2000 that have lessons for, how congressional investigations are still done. one of the things that truman. they that truman started and fulton they would give witnesses advance notices of their of their appearances and let them read an opening statement that generally wasn't done before. there was no attempted surprise witnesses or badger them. there was respectful question, but firm. hugh fulton, a bulldog as a prosecutor, firm questionings. they would send drafts of the reports before they delivered it to the senate. they would send a draft to ford motor or u.s. steel or the the the army or the navy and say, hey, take a look at this. and they would receive back suggestions factual errors and and they would go over them and make changes so that hugh fulton signals when these reports came out actually they were proof and factually was key, too. they stayed away from opinions. they stayed away from grabbing

headlines or spin. and they basically just said, what's going on? take it or leave it. and then with those drafts, truman and the other senators would hash out the details often over bourbon and scotch in his private office, known as the doghouse in the senate office building. little room where they could meet and sit and talk. and one of the things truman would do here as well would share the credit he didn't need name on everything. he'd let another take the lead on this or that investigation. even the republicans he'd let a a given senator deliver the full report to the senate. take a little bit of the credit didn't matter of course everyone just called it the truman committee anyway. in another lesson that would serve truman well as president he showed skill in handling the military many times during the war. he'd let them fix the problem itself. he had no interest in embarrassing the military, certainly not as the head of his party, franklin roosevelt if the military took care of a problem, no harm, no foul, no one would

ever knew about it. it's one of the problems of tallying up how much money or how many lives a truman committee saved, often a phone call, a problem went away. the military became very, very frightened of the truman committee, and they eventually had whole teams of people following truman around and trying to get their heads up on what he where it was going next. he would call up marshall, chief of staff of the army and say, hey, you've got a problem here. if they fixed it, no problem when the military or when a defense company stonewalled, though truman had a temper, and that's when he would say, okay, here come the subpoenas. here comes a public hearing. we're going to invite all the reporters. and you're going to sit there and answer questions. and that happened time and time again and again, as i said earlier, harry found himself a former captain in the army sitting across from these top military officials, holding them to account. and truman learned how to build consensus. and this is maybe where all kind wrap things up here. one of the things he was most

proud of later in life, every single one of those 32 reports, the truman committee put out was by partizan and unanimous. there were no dissenting voices he would build. each one was put out unanimously, with all the senators agreeing to it. it's a it's a record that especially when you're someone like me who lives in the washington, d.c., that i work in and cover today seems incredible. and maybe as i said before, some lessons could learned there. as we know the story ends right? we expect it to end. here's resignation letter as chairman of the committee from august 3rd, 1944, as he prepared to campaign as the vice presidential nominee, the other senators on the committee, including the republicans, argued this, said, now stick around. let's keep the word going. truman's point was he couldn't be head of an impartial, nonpartisan investigating committee and also be the democratic party's

representative for national office and basically, that's what he says in this letter, is, i have to i have to now promote the line of my party and i can no longer do this anymore. and he didn't want to he didn't want to taint the reputation the truman had established at that time. after he read that letter in the senate, he left the senate floor. he went over to the senate office building and went downstairs. the truman committee worked in the basement in a room called, room 160, all staffers, two dozen or so stenographers and, investigators. they all had desks down there. and truman went around talking with every single person in the room. some of them were crying, and he shook their hands. and from there, well as they say, that's another story for another writer. perhaps this one for me was a lot of fun to write and with that i'd be happy to answer any of your questions or talk about this stuff some more. thank you.

yeah. and then that's what they're saying is, i guess we're going to go sign some books after this. we doing that now. all right. we have questions like, are we out of time? did i talk to me? let's take a couple. all right. all right, great. my fault. or maybe we're good to go. kurt, let's oh, here's a question right here, sir. you said that it's difficult to estimate how much was. what what is this? yup. truman somehow got onto the term of $15 billion. he said that his life every there are a few historians, you know, quite a few historians you've studied the truman committee. everyone from journalists at the time to the historians who covered since agree no question it's in the billions dollars. if you just take those army camps or whatever or

renegotiating contracts, the government was signing contracts. let's build 5000 tanks. how about $200 million or whatever? that's fine. nobody had ever made thousands. nobody had ever made a bomber. every 63 minutes before. so nobody knew how much it cost. what truman, a big fan of us saying, okay. but two years later, let's go back and look at that contract you signed. and if you're making giant profits, let's get some of that money back. and they pulled back hundreds of millions of dollars that way, 15 billion is about as good or a bad as any number that would exist. same with the question of how many lives did they save the? landing boats that we've seen famously every movie about d-day or the u.s. invasion that went ashore and dropped the ramp down. the navy had a terrible design for them and stuck with it since was a new orleans boat builder named andrew, who had a much better design. the navy like them, he was a bit of a loudmouth and kind of a jerk, but he was a brilliant boat designer and he came to truman and said, help me out. truman said, here's an idea.

let's take your boat in, the navy's boat, and let's put a 30 ton tank on each one and let's run through the choppy waters and see which one works better. higgins's boat sailed through the water, delivered its tank, the shore down off norfolk, virginia, and then came back to circle the navy boat, which is almost sinking. but there's a heavy tank on there. and the navy finally said no. okay. and they ordered i mean, time and time again, truman did stuff like this. how many lives were saved because men didn't drown in these terrible navy boats? incalculable, certainly thousands. and this happened with aircraft, all kinds of different investigations. one more question here and then. yes. what surprised you the most of your research? i'm that's a really good question. let me think about this. that nobody had ever told this story before that maybe not quite the answer that you want you're i'm just reading this stuff and i'm like, this is amazing. these guys literally going

undercover in these plants and going all over the country and. part of my fear was like, you know, i started to think about writing a book about this. somebody must have told this before. and it was just shocking to me especially when you go back the truman committee, the headlines are everywhere that nobody had ever done this story before. and i felt really, really lucky to say, hey, i think i'm going to take a swipe at this again, a book about congressional hearings a little surprising. it's also fun. it's fun for me. how quietly the reputation of the truman committee spread through the military. and they by 1943, the military was living in deathly fear. every command or of the base lived in fear that that the truman committee was going to show up. i write in the book that came up all these terms for they called it paul revering was the way if the navy heard truman committee was coming the call went out to the army base and it brooms the sweeps and the mops came out. everything would get cleaned up. everything looked shipshape when the truman committee arrived,

there was a hole. there was. a whole group of these comical terms came up for that. i just found that really funny, really feared and a lot of them really came to resent. truman made a lot of enemies in the military that he had to deal with as president from things that they found out. and again, his point over and over again fixed the problem. no harm, no foul, nobody says anything will keep. i won't. you know, he had no interest in going to the reporters and getting a headline if the problem would get fixed and. as we know how the military works and big corporations work, they would try and they would try and stonewall him. and that's when he would lose temper. and he'd say, okay, public hearing time. here we go. we should help. one last question here, man. i'm sorry. these companies that were not doing what they were supposed to your. bosses would be go to question. and again, it's not to say these companies were playing huge roles in the war effort. it's not to say, oh, they were

crooked, whatever, but in their steel plant, there was incredible pressure meet demands. they they had tons of bad steel sitting around and they could spend a lot of money in destroying or they could just sell it to the government and. that case, a few people got fired. there were investigation was there was criminal investigations that eventually fizzled away or went nowhere in the case of an engine plant that was shipping bad engines to the air force, to the army air force, the time truman loved to say this was causing the you know, they were putting these engines in airplanes. three officer, three inspector ers were court martialed in that place several times. the truman committee's work led to criminal charges, often people would be or dismissed or whatever, but also, as happens today, big corporation know how to work the pr machine and after getting burned by the truman committee, some of these companies started to fight back. oh, the truman committee. u.s. steel came out right after this investigation. oh, well, i guess we have to do

all these inspections now. hey, our steel production is down. the truman committee is slowing us down. they're hurting the war effort. hey, there's a war on. we don't have time to do all this stuff. so just like today, these companies learn how to push back and fight back. and it wasn't always as simple as it seemed. that's the way it goes. i we should stop there. thank you all very much. very nice. if you want if you have other questions, steve we'll be out here in the in the mural room and able to sign books. so please join us. here.