“You’ll be okay, sir,” he said, hoping he was right. While he was busy like that, the mortar bombs still coming in seemed more an annoyance than a danger.
Stretcher-bearers with Red Cross armbands that wouldn’t do them any good carried the wounded major away. They also ignored the mortar fire. Cade wondered whether the battalion had any healthy officers senior to him. If it didn’t, he’d just inherited it. Well, if Lou Klein might swing a battalion, so could he-again, he hoped.
–
It was getting close to the top of the hour. Harry Truman turned on the radio on his desk to WMAL to catch the NBC news. It would tell him a little of what was going on in the country and the world. And the way it told the stories would let him judge how big a son of a bitch the people who ran NBC thought he was.
He didn’t care, or not enough to let what they thought of him change anything he did. For better or worse, he was his own man. He might make mistakes-he had made mistakes-but they were his, nobody else’s. The buck did stop here. It had to.
Bong! Bong! Bong! The NBC chimes sounded. “In Washington today,” the announcer said, “Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin again lashed out at the Truman administration. Here is a recording of some of his remarks.”
A momentary pause, and then Joe McCarthy’s raspy voice poured out over the airwaves: “How much trouble have the Democrats landed us in because they’re soft on Communism? All the Reds we uncovered in the State Department must have told Stalin we were weak. They must have pointed out where our defenses had holes. Otherwise, how could the Reds have hit us so hard? Treason and blindness to treason lurk in too many high places.”
“That was Senator McCarthy,” the newsman said. “He-”
“-has his head wedged,” Truman finished for him, and turned off the radio with an angry twist of the wrist. McCarthy had started his Red-baiting witch hunt even before the Korean War broke out. He’d got shriller since the fighting started, and shriller yet after the A-bombs began to fall.
At first, Truman had figured McCarthy was a stalking horse for Robert Taft and the other Republicans who still wanted to be isolationists. Tail Gunner Joe said the things politer pols like Senator Taft only thought. And he didn’t just say them-he bellowed them at the top of his lungs.
He’d succeeded in convincing Truman he was nobody’s stalking horse. He was for nobody except Joe McCarthy. Did he aim to run for President in 1952? He’d be awfully young. Bob Taft had been waiting his turn for a long time. Or Eisenhower might get the nod, the way U. S. Grant had in 1868.
Truman wasn’t thrilled about the idea of either of those men in the White House. Taft did want to pretend nothing existed beyond the borders of the United States. That was hard in the middle of World War III, but he might try anyhow. And Eisenhower struck the President as an amiable but lightweight executive, someone who might run an auto company but not a country.
Next to Joe McCarthy, though, they both looked like the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. They were reasonably honest. You might not fancy their principles, but they had some. McCarthy…The way it looked to Truman, McCarthy didn’t just want to be President. He wanted to be Führer, and he didn’t care whose toes he trampled on his way to the job.
Lie? Smear? Cheat? Invent? He used all those stunts, and wrapped himself in the American flag while he did it. That was part of what made him so dangerous: if you attacked him, you seemed to attack the country as well.
I have to decide whether I’ll run, Truman thought once more. If it looked as if he would lose and drag the Democrats down with him, then he’d do best to bow out. With this war, he wondered whether he would have a chance against anybody the Republicans put up.
But if he didn’t run, who would? The Democrats hadn’t had a disputed nomination since 1932. He shrugged. If he decided he wouldn’t run, he also wouldn’t need to worry about that any more. No one would care what he thought thirty seconds after he announced he was through. He would turn into the lamest of lame ducks.
Stalin and Mao had no worries like that. They’d give orders till somebody carried them out feet-first. Truman had done his best to arrange that for Uncle Joe, but it hadn’t quite worked out. A damn shame, really. How the Reds would have worked out who succeeded their longtime dictator would have been…interesting.
Muttering under his breath, he fired up the radio again. He did need to hear what was going on. The sound came on almost at once; the tubes were still warm. “Defense Secretary Marshall has declined to comment on Senator McCarthy’s latest accusations,” the newsman said. “McCarthy continues to charge that the war is not being fought hard enough, and that, while Marshall was Secretary of State, he permitted many Communists to join the State Department.”
There had been some Reds in the State Department. A few of them had given Moscow a hand. More were people who’d been Communists in the 1930s, when, if you were young and you hated the Nazis, that was where you were liable to end up. Just about all of them had got over it.
There were also some Reds at Los Alamos and other places that worked on A-bombs. Without their help, Stalin might not have had any of his own yet. That was a crying shame, no two ways about it. Things there had also tightened up, though. Or Truman sure hoped they had.
He telephoned George Marshall. When the Secretary of Defense came on the line, Truman said, “Isn’t it wonderful to be loved?”
“Excuse me, Mr. President?” Marshall said.
“Well, let me put it this way instead-when an SOB like Joe McCarthy comes after you with a meat-axe, you must be doing something right.”
“Oh. Him.” The patrician distaste in Marshall’s voice could have belonged to a Roman senator eyeing a barbarian chieftain sightseeing in the imperial city during Hadrian’s reign.
“Yeah, him,” Truman said. “He’s a snake, and a poisonous one at that.”
“People like him are part of the price we pay for living in a free country.” Marshall paused. “I keep telling myself so. Some days, I have more trouble believing it than others.”
“I know what you mean, and this is one of those days,” Truman said. “This is one of the days when I remember how many people in the Weimar Republic said the same thing about that beer-hall babbler in Munich. His stupid party would never amount to a hill of beans, not in a million years.”
“Oh, yes. That’s also crossed my mind, sir,” Marshall said. “The Nazis didn’t amount to much, not until the Depression gave them a boost. I can hope McCarthy won’t, either.”
“So can I. So do I.” But Truman wasn’t happy with his own answer. Marshall was right: the Depression had let Hitler take off. A national disaster had a way of discrediting the people who were in charge when it happened.
Well, what was World War III if it wasn’t a national disaster? So far, only Maine and the western part of the United States had had bombs fall on them. But Truman knew so far meant just that and no further. The Russians weren’t done. He’d just hit them again. Now they would try to hit back. American defenses would do their best to stop whatever Stalin came up with. And maybe their best would prove good enough, and maybe it wouldn’t.
What would happen if, say, Detroit got it, and Chicago, and Boston, and Miami? Would that be enough of a catastrophe to make the citizens storm the White House and the Capitol with torches and pitchforks and-very likely-nooses? If it wasn’t, what would be?
And wouldn’t that be the kind of tide a power-hungry, opportunistic bastard like Joe McCarthy could ride to power? Tail Gunner Joe was bound to hope it was. Not quite aware he was thinking out loud, Truman said, “That man ought to have himself an accident.”