9—
Making His Mark

While the nation was trying to shake off the remaining wartime economic controls, Americans also were beginning to realize that the postwar period woul9d be one of continuing international tensions rather than any return to normalcy. Civil war in Greece, the Communist presence in Turkey, the ouster of non-Communists from the Hungarian government, the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia, growing animosity between North and South Korea, and the beginning of the Soviet blockade of Berlin would lead the list of troubles overseas.

When the 80th Congress opened on January 6, 1947, it contained three future presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon, and Lyndon B. Johnson. At least one other highly ambitious member had his eyes on the White House—William F. Knowland.

Knowland was part of a Congress that would write laws that would guide domestic and foreign policy for many years to come. He was also among the Republican newcomers who were eager to gain some power. Senate Minority Leader Bob Taft was in control, no doubt about that, but he did promise the younger Republicans two posts on the Republican Policy Committee. During the remaining seven years of his leadership, he would be confronted by these ambitious young Turks again and again.^[1] Before Congress convened, Knowland was named to the Republican Committee on Committees, where he handled assignments of Republican colleagues. He was also named to the Senate Appropri-

ations (his first choice) and Rules and Administration Committees, as well as to the Permanent Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy.

Although Time dismissed Knowland in his first few months in Congress as cutting little ice, the same magazine told quite a different story after he was elected to a full term: "He sailed into Washington with the enthusiasm of a man determined to stay. He was an attentive, fair-minded and active member of the Atomic Energy Committee. He startled the party sages who expected him merely to sit tight, learn the ropes and follow the leaders."^[2] The new class of senators was coming out of World War II with a sense of urgency, and its members were chafing at Senate rules that told them to be patient and wait their turns. Knowland certainly was one of the brashest young senators on the scene. The Senate usually paid little attention to such upstarts, but Knowland was impressing his colleagues with his integrity and his energy.

The junior California senator was becoming known as a man of principles; some said he was stubborn. His colleagues found him fearless, willing to stand up to anyone. Although he would bitterly fight someone over an issue, he almost never held a grudge or took anything personally. They knew when he was angry. They could see the ropey veins in his thick neck bulge out and they watched his face turn red. Bill Knowland told you what he thought and his colleagues knew where they stood with him. There would be no going behind their backs. He found compromise difficult; he was used to getting his way. His determination was clear as he moved with long, quick, powerful strides.

One early skirmish was with Bob Taft, and this may have helped cement a long relationship that would pay off handsomely for the young senator from California. Taft wanted to slash $6 billion from the budget. Knowland was determined to have $3 billion of that money set aside for reduction of the national debt. Taft responded, "My own feeling is that tax reduction is more important than a reduction in the debt," but he agreed to go along with a $1 billion debt reduction.^[3]

Knowland replied that at that rate, it would take 259 years to wipe out the debt, and insisted that the Senate needed to do it faster. He had made the effort to line up maverick Republicans, and he knew that some Democrats would join him if for no other reason than to embarrass Taft. Finally, Colorado's Eugene Millikin proposed that $2 billion be set aside to reduce the debt, but Taft stuck to his position. So did Knowland, arguing that the Senate ought to be willing to reduce the

debt by 1 percent, or $2.6 billion. Taft recognized that Knowland had the votes and eventually went over to his side. The Knowland amendment passed 82-0.

Today's annual budget deficits of hundreds of billions of dollars have proved Knowland's words to be prophetic. But few people listened to him when he addressed the Congress on February 26, 1947, thundering, "I do not believe the Congress of the United States will be faced with a more serious problem during the entire period of our service here. Certainly it is essential that we maintain a solvent Federal Government and a sound fiscal policy. The future of the American people is wrapped up in our doing this, for if we fail the entire national economy can be undermined."^[4]

He was right, of course, but an interesting split was developing in the "public" Senator Knowland and the "private" Knowland. Although he pushed for the federal government to cut spending and lower taxes to keep its budget in balance, his private spending always increased, and he continually strove to raise his own revenues. Instead of trimming his own spending, he repeatedly went to his father for more dividends from the Oakland Tribune .

Knowland's tour of duty in Europe and his foreign travel with the Mead Committee had broadened his views on international relations. He was worried about the civil war in Greece and Communist pressure on Turkey. In a confidential letter to his father, written March 17, 1947, the senator mused on the foreign policy decisions the Senate faced, which he called "the most important decisions made in this generation." The United States, he felt, had two alternatives: to let the Middle East fall into the Soviet orbit or to bolster the strategically located nations outside the Iron Curtain until they were able to take care of themselves. "Either course . . . could lead to war," he admitted.

Knowland insisted that the United States should learn from its mistakes before World War II, when it stood by while Japan and Germany began their aggression: the United States instead should have taken a firm stand against Japan, Germany, and Italy. He accused the Western powers of surrendering at Munich in 1938, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain notoriously promised that his agreement with Germany's Adolph Hitler would bring "peace in our time." If the Middle East were to fall to the Communists, he warned, China and the rest

of the Far East would be next. That fear that would gain credence, and Joseph Alsop would name it the "domino theory" in 1954. President Eisenhower would use the metaphor in explaining his decision to send aid to South Vietnam. Knowland worried that if the Soviet Union were to gain control of that area, the result would be an atomic war that would mean "destruction of the world as we know it."

Congress had to change its foreign policy so that it was consistent throughout the world, Knowland said. But, he warned, the United States could not do everything for the rest of the world: "In my opinion even as rich and powerful as is the United States, we are not in a position to spread ourselves thin in all sections of the world. . . . Whenever we establish a policy this country must be prepared to back it, if necessary with our full power, economic and military. Any other course will destroy our influence abroad and lead the World to disaster."

In April 1947, Knowland resigned from the Mead Committee, which was winding down its investigation of war contracts, use of surplus property, and conditions in the European occupation zones. It was during the Mead Committee assignment that he became involved in the plight of the Nationalist Chinese in what he believed was their struggle to defend their homeland against Communist aggression. What he learned would have a major effect on his political views for the next decade.

Just after Congress adjourned, Knowland and three colleagues requested visas for an October trip to visit Russia as part of a European fact-finding mission. Knowland wrote to his father that he was not optimistic about the international outlook: "Not only does Europe need help but it should be apparent to everyone that the help that they get (or do not get) will have repercussions upon our own economy. . . . I strongly believe that the cause of world peace, our own national security and our American economy will be better served by a rehabilitated Europe. We must constantly keep in mind that the United States is the last great stabilizing force among the nations of the world." The four senators wanted to look over the U.S. embassy in Moscow and see the Soviet capital during their five-week European tour. The Soviets denied them their visas the morning they were to leave the United States. Knowland was furious. A half hour before he had to leave to catch his plane, Knowland sat down at his typewriter to write President Truman a letter of outrage. He suggested that the United States limit the number of Russians entering the country to the number of Americans entering the Soviet Union.

On October 1, 1947, Knowland left Washington, D.C.; after stops in Bermuda and the Azores, he reached Frankfurt at 3 A.M. two days later. On his trip he and Senators Guy Gordon of Oregon, Milton R. Young of North Dakota, and Theodore F. Green of Rhode Island would visit not only Germany but also Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Italy, France, and England. Knowland once more was struck by the destructiveness of the war and by the difficult life of the Germans who were trying to get back on their feet. On seeing Berlin, 75 percent of which had been destroyed, he said, "This once great and proud city stands as a monumental tomb to man's folly." He wished every American could see what he had in Berlin. "Here but for the grace of God might be America," he wrote.

Knowland also described a 500-mile automobile trip through Poland, calling Warsaw the most damaged city he had seen. He was stunned by the ghetto in Warsaw where 400,000 Jews had lived and had been murdered. "The people there say that there are probably still 40,000 buried beneath the ruins 2 1/2 years after the war had ended." (Twenty years later, after he took control of the Tribune , Knowland forbade the use of the word ghetto to refer to the black area of East Oakland. He felt that nothing in Oakland should be compared with what he had seen in Poland.) He noted that the Polish government was dominated by Communists and that the "iron curtain" had descended about 75 percent of the way in Eastern Europe. Knowland said he told Polish leaders that the United States did not want to see a Germany "that could again set out on a program of world conquest." In order to prevent that, Knowland said he foresaw up to forty years of Soviet rule in Germany. His prediction was right on target: almost forty-two years after his letter, the Berlin Wall, which became a symbol when it was built by Communist East Germany to stop a flow of refugees to the West in 1961, came down.

While on the trip, the senators visited Pope Pius XII at the Vatican. In a private audience, the pope told the senators that he hoped statesmen might reach an agreement that would eliminate future wars. He apparently made his appeal with the forthcoming conference of the Big Four foreign ministers in mind.

This European tour seems to have convinced Knowland to support the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, although most of his Republican colleagues in the Senate opposed both. Before he went to Europe, Knowland had written Marshall that he was in general agreement that the United States needed to furnish dollars as long as doing so didn't undermine the country's economy. He observed that it was in

the best interest of world peace to bring economic stability to Europe. "However," he cautioned, "it does seem to me that if this nation disrupts its own economy through a runaway inflation or bankrupts the Federal Treasury through over-extending its resources and we head down the road that Great Britain appears to be now taking, we can neither be of service to the rest of the world nor to our own people."^[5] Having gone so far as to note that U.S. reserves in such strategic resources as tungsten, lead, mercury, and petroleum were running low, he recommended that the United States trade its dollars to countries with large supplies of those raw materials and then stockpile them. "The difference between having abundant stockpiles of all types of raw materials . . . might be the difference between victory and defeat should we be so unfortunate as to again become involved in a war wherein we were cut off from world supplies." This dollars-for-resources deal, he said, "would command more respect than if we endeavor to run an international WPA. Not even this nation, as rich and powerful as we are, is in a position to do that."

Wherever he turned in Europe, Knowland was dismayed by the effects of the war on people. In particular, he was appalled by the difficulty American soldiers had adopting war orphans. He cabled his office, and by the time he returned to Washington a bill was ready for him to introduce in the Senate that would make it possible for Americans to adopt war orphans and bring them to the United States without waiting for a quota number. Knowland detested red tape.

Knowland returned to the states in time for the special session of Congress, which he believed ended on a satisfactory note. As he wrote to his father on December 21, the session ratified the Inter American Defense pact, adopted the Emergency Aid Program, and made "a start on a program to level off the inflationary spiral without placing the nation under a government controlled economy."

The California senator's international knowledge was increasing, his policies were developing, and his skills in the upper house were being refined. He also was framing a complex and sometimes pompous code of respect and courtesies that he believed belonged in government. Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan and Knowland were becoming close working colleagues. Several times during the session, Vandenberg, one of the ranking Republicans as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, asked Knowland to preside over the Senate as president pro tem. Once while sitting in, Knowland turned red-faced when Senator Glen Taylor (D-Idaho) compared President Truman to Benito Mussolini as a warmonger. Knowland stepped down from

his chair and took the floor, where he ripped into Taylor. "As long as he sits in the White House," Knowland said, "President Truman is my presid9ent."

Knowland's letters to his father, once filled with the personal side of his life, now focused on the politics of Washington. On February 29, 1948, he got the first taste of what his future would be like, when for a week he acted as the majority leader. "While I had sat in for short periods before this, it was the first extended tour of duty in the front seat. It was interesting and the boys seemed to approve of the way the job was handled." In calling his colleagues "the boys," Knowland was using the language of the Senate, at that point an exclusive all-male club.

Knowland was also learning about hardball politics. He complained to his father that the Democrats were blocking the nomination of a Republican for a judgeship. "Downey [U.S. Sen. Sheridan Downey (D.-Calif.)] and I are going to the White House this week. If they do [block the nomination] I shall ask the Republican policy committee to hold up confirmation on all California patronage (customs, internal revenue, U.S. Attorney, Marshal, etc.). If they want to play rough they will find that two can play that way."

Knowland was becoming more and more concerned with the Soviet Union's forays into Eastern Europe. The Soviets began their blockade of Berlin in April 1948.

"The chips are down," he wrote his father on March 28, "and anything can happen. I do not think that the Russians want to provoke a war now but they did want to get all they could by finding soft spots into which to move. There are no more soft spots left. The real danger is that something may start in Yugoslavia or Bulgaria and the fuze [sic ] will be burning before the Kremlin realizes it's so close to the powder keg." Knowland saw other danger spots in Iran, Turkey, Berlin, Trieste, Sweden, and Norway. He also feared a Communist attempt to overthrow the governments of France and Italy.

On April 2, 1948, Congress approved the European Recovery Program (the Marshall Plan) on a 69-17 vote. Knowland voted for it. Know-

land earlier had tried to tie aid to the Nationalist Chinese to the plan, but his effort failed.

Knowland was convinced that the Democrats would lose the presidency in the 1948 elections. "The Democrats are in a blue funk," he wrote his father. "Never saw such a change in such a short period of time. Between Wallace and the South, the President will be left with no head or no tail to his donkey." Knowland himself was in close contact with one potential presidential candidate, California governor Earl Warren. On his frequent visits to Washington, Warren's first stop was usually Knowland's office, and he sometimes held news conferences there. The talk was that if Warren were to be elected president or vice president, Knowland would earn a cabinet seat as secretary of defense, but Knowland downplayed that possibility. "I like being a senator," he said. "I wouldn't trade it for any other job."^[6]

Already in late 1947, Knowland was projecting New York governor Thomas Dewey as the front-runner and Bob Taft in the second spot on the Republican presidential ticket. Knowland praised Dewey's "courage and intellectual honesty," but he cautioned that "his chief drawback is a strong hunch that he can't be elected, on the part of the state and national leaders." Minnesota governor Harold Stassen would enter the Republican National Convention in third place, Knowland predicted. Of Warren, he said, "Earl, I believe is in a very good position. Hardly an article or cartoon is published in the east wherein candidates are mentioned that his name is not given a prominent position."

However astute Knowland may have been in his predictions, he made a bad mistake during the 1948 Republican convention, when his poor timing lost a major bargaining chip for Earl Warren. Knowland was chairman of the California delegation, and as such, he was expected to help California's favorite son, Warren, in his first bid for the presidency. The battle for the nomination came down to Tom Dewey and Bob Taft, with Warren a distant third. After two ballots, Dewey was just 28 votes short of securing the nomination. During a dinner break before the third ballot, Warren wrote out a statement releasing his delegation to Dewey, telling Knowland to get on the rostrum with the message. This, Warren believed, would put him in a position to bargain with the New York governor.

Warren and Merrill F. Small, the governor's traveling secretary, went back to their hotel room to watch the convention on television. "And then towards 9 o'clock, the California delegation went into the famous huddle . . . Knowland in the middle and all the delegates who'd arrived

there . . . leaning over and listening to him as he read this statement the governor had written for him," Small described the scene. "This was the first they knew that they were being released, although, of course, they could figure it out, many of them, but you could see Margy Benedict crying, and you could see one of the men going like this as if he were cussing his lungs out, you know." The television cameras focused on Knowland, who was trying to fight his way to the platform. "He should have gotten there long before they called the convention to order—he should have been up there. They watched him, literally, just trying to shove his way through. Then they trained on John Bricker, and this became a marathon."

The Ohioan Bricker got there first and released his delegation, which put Dewey over the top. "And Knowland had become an also-ran, and a second-guesser, and unimportant," Small said, "and California just didn't have the bargaining position that Warren wanted them to have." Dewey then gained the nomination, to which Warren raised his glass and said, "Well, that's that. You can't win them all."^[7] Despite Knowland's convention blunder, the size and power of California made Warren the choice for second place on the ticket. Dewey noted that "no other candidate could muster even a majority." Although Warren had previously said that he would never consider the vice presidency, he accepted Dewey's offer.^[8] Apparently, Knowland's failure to switch the California delegation to Dewey hadn't hurt Warren after all.

As the presidential campaign began, the Republicans saw a chance to regain the White House for the first time since 1930. But Governors Tom Dewey and Earl Warren failed to hold the early lead they had built over Truman. And although Knowland was confident Warren would put California on the plus side for Dewey, Warren was unable to deliver his state.

At Warren's headquarters at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on election night, Knowland told CBS, "I firmly believe California is going to be in the Republican column. The returns which we have from various sections of the state so far indicate, I believe, that Governor Dewey and Governor Warren will carry California by at least a 250,000 [vote] margin." Late returns from Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota indicated that Truman was pulling ahead. Then California began to slip. Knowland was still confident: "I am still convinced that California is going to end up in the Republican column by more than 100,000—maybe between 100,000 and 175,000 would be a good estimate at the present time." Knowland was wrong again, and Truman triumphed. He won despite two other candidates in the race who were

predicted to draw off his votes: southern Democrat Strom Thurmond, running on the States' Rights Party ticket, and Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate. Between them they could only poll 2.3 million votes; Harry Truman confounded all predictions, recapturing the presidency by 2.1 million votes out of relatively light turnout of 48.7 million voters.

Truman's victory also helped sweep in new Democratic senators who would be major players for years to come, including Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Paul Douglas of Illinois, Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, and Robert Kerr of Oklahoma. When it was over, the Democrats controlled the Senate, 54-42.

Nationally, and especially on the East Coast, attention was fixed on Europe, while those on the West Coast focused on the Far East, because of its war-making and trade potential. As a Californian, Knowland naturally reflected that "Pacific Rim" view, but he also was genuinely concerned about the fall of the world's most populous nation to the Communists; that concern was to set the tone for his foreign policy interests for the remainder of his years in the Senate. He had his own misgivings about Chiang Kai-shek's competence, but Chiang's army was the only one standing between the Communists and the rest of Asia. Although Knowland was not a lone voice in the Senate for the Nationalist Chinese, no one else fought for them with such energy or will.

The Communist movement in China had been growing stronger during and following the war. Encouraged by the Soviet Union, the Communists stepped up their attacks on the Nationalists. In 1945 President Truman had sent General George Marshall to China to seek a truce between them, but after a year he gave up, condemning both sides for their lack of effort. Nonetheless, Truman supplied the Nationalists with $2 billion in equipment and economic aid to battle Mao Tse-tung's forces.

In 1947 a full-scale civil war broke out in China. In 1948 Congress appropriated $400 million more to the Nationalists, despite Marshall's warning that nothing would save them. Knowland was the leader of a small but determined group of Republicans who threatened to block the appropriation for the Marshall Plan unless the Nationalists were given the funds. He was convinced that Chiang Kai-shek had not received "sufficient support, both moral and material, from the U.S."^[9]

Leery of information he was receiving from the State Department,

the California senator was relying on his own sources for information about China. One of those sources was a letter from Allen Griffin, the publisher of the Monterey, California, Peninsula-Herald , who was serving on the U.S. Economic Cooperation Administration in China. According to Griffin, the State Department was "dragging its feet" on China affairs. "No one in China can tell us what State Department policy is, since the latter appears to be chiefly negative. We have been confidentially informed that there is a lack of common purpose and harmony on the part of the State Department with the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

Unlike Knowland, Griffin worried about the fitness of the Nationalists, and he suggested that the feeling in China was that when Dewey won the presidency, "the floodgates will be opened and American money and materiel will flow into this country to bolster the Nanking regime regardless of the competence it shows or its coordination with essential American interests." The Chinese were told all they had to do was hold on until January and that all would be well. "The result is a negative influence on efforts . . . to bring about improvements here that are necessary if the Central Government is not to collapse." Reforms are necessary, he wrote, "unless China is to be a veritable rat hole down which we fruitlessly pour American money. In fact there won't be any central government except in name unless drastic changes are invoked to win back the confidence of the people and to cause an improvement in the deplorable military situation and the daily economic deterioration." Knowland sent a copy of the confidential letter to Arthur Vandenberg, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.^[10]

In a letter of December 8, 1948, Knowland asked if Senator Vandenberg had seen a 1947 report prepared by General Albert Wedemeyer, commander of U.S. forces in China. It suggested that because Nationalist troops were demoralized, the Nationalists should seek a coalition government with the Communists. Knowland, who had a hunch that the State Department was behind the report, felt that it would be "of vital interest to the nation's security to know if some of those who were active in disclosing the secrets of their own government to a foreign power had any hand in the lower levels in helping to initiate a policy which has played so tragically into the hands of the communists in China." Stressing that his concerns transcended partisan politics, Knowland urged that Republicans and Democrats "should be interested in working out a constructive American China—Far East policy with adequate safeguards against departmental sabotage."^[11]

Vandenberg replied that he had not seen the Wedemeyer report but that General George Marshall had briefed him on it. Although he believed that no one other than Wedemeyer had written the report, "I can understand your suspicions about some of the men in the lower echelons of the [State] department at that time in respect to China," Vandenberg wrote. "I always shared those suspicions."^[12]