The Watchdog by Steve Drummond

Author:Steve Drummond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Published: 2023-02-23T23:53:24+00:00

16

BAD ENGINES

On March 22, the same day Truman, Fulton and the other senators were grilling Lester Perry and Benjamin Fairless about faked steel inspections, investigator Donald Lathrom was at his desk in Room 160, finishing up a report about another case of fraudulent inspections. This time, it was a factory that made airplane engines in Ohio.

In a pattern familiar from the movie hearings, the Truman Committee had once again uncovered serious problems, the army had vowed to conduct its own detailed investigation, and the committee agreed to wait for those findings. Fulton wrote to the senators on March 23 that Colonel Miles Knowles, a war department liaison officer, had “emphasized the importance to Army morale of the airplane crews having confidence in their engines. For that reason, he has asked the committee not to make public anything with respect to the investigation,” at least for the time being.1

Three days later, Truman found himself again on the front pages for an entirely different matter—a bit of Washington theatrical drama notable as one of the rare times during the war that the committee went into a public hearing fistfight and came away bruised and battered. As part of a series of hearings to gather information on manpower, efficiency, and turnover, Fulton had invited several national labor leaders to testify, including William Green, president of the AFL, Phillip Murray, head of the CIO, and John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers.

At sixty-three, Lewis looked like Hollywood’s version of a gruff, scowling thunderous labor boss, and for twenty-three years as head of the mine workers union, he had been just that. In late March, Lewis was dropping hints of a strike, noting that while prices were going up, the pay of his miners was not. And that while they were spending fifty-three hours a week underground—when you counted traveling up and down the mine shafts—they were only being paid for the forty-two hours they actually spent working coal. Lewis and other labor leaders had agreed after Pearl Harbor to forgo strikes for the duration of the war, but this was an uneasy truce at best. He and others felt that a promise made by the administration—that in exchange for the no-strike pledge it would create an agency to hear and address labor’s concerns—had not been met.

Lewis loved a good argument and delighted in thumbing his nose at the powers in Washington: his response to Fulton’s request to appear before the committee was, maybe. “I will be glad to appear if I can, but am not able at this time to make a definite commitment.” Fulton, always a little prickly, especially when he felt the committee was being disrespected, shot back: “The committee expects you to do so and desires confirmation by return mail.”2

Lewis, enjoying himself, responded that he was shocked that Truman or his distinguished Senate colleagues could have approved of either “the peremptory tone or studied lack of courtesy” in Fulton’s response. Truman put a stop to the bickering by issuing a

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