Westbrook Pegler
Rome News-Tribune/February 15, 1954
The fact that Harry Truman was president of the United States for more than seven years by the original decision of the Communist Sidney Hillman should not shield him from objective historical appraisal as to his guilt or innocence in re the growth of Communism in government. This man came of bad political background which he has never had the morals to apologize for. And he went from bad to much worse when he graduated from the Senate to the White House on Roosevelt’s death.
If a man has been a dignified and responsible president, even though a mediocre one or terribly incompetent, we are justified in giving him the benefit of all doubts out of respect for the office. After all, we elected him, in a manner of speaking, although it is a fallacy to say that the people actually do choose presidents, and we should take the consequence of his honest failures.
But Truman has been making frequent political forays into New York where he has led vulgar processions of city-side reporters up Park and down Lexington, crying flippancies at hackmen and clowning it in contrast to another former president who lives soberly and sedately in the same tall building, the Waldorf Tower. Not even Theodore Roosevelt ever descended to such crude vulgarity. It is not that reporters and hackmen are unworthy of an ex-president’s attention on the streets. It is not they who are cheap and raucous. It is Truman who degrades the office which he held so long and with such terrible consequence to all of us when he remarked recently that he always slept well and had never taken a sleeping pill in his life.
Bitter Letters
I got bitter letters from parents of young men who had been wiped out in their most promising time of life. They really hate this man and they do not sleep that well. One writer said he woke up almost every morning at four o’clock, the time when his son went down in a plane.
Now the issue is being joined: was the Democratic party the party of the treason? How can any Democratic politician deny that it was? I am not now attempting to argue that the Democratic voters were intentional parties to the betrayal of the country which so many of them love with a devotion as great as any Republican ever could boast of. I do insist, nevertheless, that on the very face of the record this is the party which recognized Soviet Russia, actively permitted the permeation of the federal bureaucracy by spies of a hostile foreign power, suffered the theft of military and scientific secrets for Soviet Russia and corrupted the constitutional government into a preliminary phase of the Marxian design.
It is not necessary to go further into the details of the guilt of the Democratic party. Sam Rayburn, of Texas, the minority leader of the house, has great but characteristic Democratic impudence in warning President Eisenhower that he and some of his colleagues are getting tired of the awful truth. If we don’t stop heaping proof upon proof of his party’s sole guilt they will do something. Well, what? The insinuation is that to suppress the record and escape political or more personal punishment for their guilt, possibly in the historical pillories, these Democrats will make it impossible for Eisenhower to redeem some of the crimes of the Democratic party and its Communist porters.
Blame Inescapable
Truman’s personal blame is inescapable. He was the chief of state and the principle of the chain of command plainly applies to him, and to the party which first yielded to the enemy in 1933. Truman and his predecessor appointed spies to important offices and abused and in many cases frustrated patriotic men and women who tried to protect the country. Cabinet officers selected by these two presidents cooperated with Russian agents and with American friends of Soviet Russia who insist that they are very intellectual fellows but also that they were duped.
I could name many of them who might have been shot by firing squads before the American people were brain-washed of their true patriotic instincts.
In the final analysis, Roosevelt and Truman were responsible.
It is futile to say that they did not know.
Even if they were deceived and there has been no trial to decide whether they were mistaken they accepted the job and responsibility and the failure was theirs.
Treason means adherence to the enemy giving him aid and comfort. But must we have written proof of “adherence” if we have proof of aid and comfort given to the enemy? And can the Democratic party say that Russia was not and is not now the enemy merely because Congress has not formally recognized that enmity by a legal declaration of war? Is any Democrat going to argue today that Russia has been anything but an enemy since recognition in 1933 even when Averell Harriman, Harry Hopkins and Henry Wallace were dumping mountainous masses of our human production of treasures wrought of our irreplaceable national resources on the enemy.
(Source: Google News, https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=BJbdYPG6LGMC&dat=19540215&printsec=frontpage&hl=en)
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