As for the Anderson Democrat, it didn’t seem to know which way to jump. Its name told where its politics lay. On the other hand, Diana McGraw was a home town girl, doing something that got noticed beyond the home town’s borders-not easy, not if your home town was Anderson. “What would you do if it were your son?” she’d asked the Democrat’s reporter after the demonstration ended.
As far as Jerry was concerned, that was the sixty-four-dollar question. Even the Democrat and the Indianapolis Times seemed to understand as much. How could you condemn people who’d lost their boys in combat for wanting to know why? And wasn’t that all the more true when they’d lost boys in combat when there wasn’t supposed to be combat any more?
You might disagree with them-both papers plainly did. But you’d have a devil of a time calling them disloyal. A dead son gave someone carrying a picket sign a decided moral advantage.
Jerry realized he wouldn’t be the only Congressman reading these reports. Come to think of it, he might not have been the only Congressman Diana McGraw saw when she came to Washington. If he wanted to stay in front on this issue, he couldn’t sit on his hands. He had to stand up, or someone else would get ahead of him. His colleagues could and would draw the same conclusions he was drawing.
His own party desperately needed a club with which to clobber the Democrats. The other side had dominated Congress since the start of the 1930s. They’d just won the biggest war in the history of the world. That might set them up to keep winning elections forever if the GOP couldn’t find a shillelagh.
If over a thousand GIs dead since V-E Day weren’t a shillelagh…then the Republicans would never come up with one. Jerry started scribbling notes.
The House was debating a bill that would finish rationing by the end of the year. There wasn’t much debate, because nobody worth mentioning opposed the bill. The whole country hated rationing. The sooner it disappeared forever, the happier everyone would be.
When Jerry raised his hand that afternoon, then, he had no trouble getting the floor. Speaker Rayburn pointed his way and said, “The chair recognizes the gentleman from Indiana.” The wily Texan no doubt hoped Jerry would speak out against the bill. If a Republican wanted to commit political suicide, Sam Rayburn would gladly hand him a rope.
“Thank you, Mr. Speaker.” Jerry liked the House’s ritual courtesies. “Mr. Speaker, I rise to discuss a related kind of rationing-the rationing of our troops’ lives in Germany.”
Bang! Down came Rayburn’s gavel. “You are out of order, Mr. Duncan!”
“Our occupation policy is out of order, Mr. Speaker,” Jerry said.
Bang! “You are out of order, Mr. Duncan!” Rayburn sounded like God right after the children of Israel did something really stupid. If you could imagine God moon-faced and pouchy and bald, he looked like Him, too.
“Mr. Speaker!” “Point of order, Mr. Speaker!” The cries of protest came from a dozen Republican throats, maybe more. Jerry had wondered whether anyone else would back his play. There’d been a one-paragraph AP squib about the demonstration on page fourteen of the New York Times, nothing more. The same squib showed up in the Evening Star. The Times-Herald and the Post didn’t bother running it. Maybe the other Republicans had noticed anyhow.
Maybe Sam Rayburn had, too. He shook his head, glowering down from his high seat on the marble dais. “This has nothing to do with the measure under consideration, and the gentleman from Indiana knows it.”
“May I address that point, Mr. Speaker?” Jerry called.
“Briefly,” Rayburn growled.
“Thank you. It seems to me, Mr. Speaker, that the bill we were debating mainly has to do with how best to wind down from the war. That’s what I want to talk about, too, because the fighting in Germany’s gone on and on, even though the Nazis said they surrendered last spring. Don’t we need to wind that down?”
Rayburn scowled at Jerry from on high. Then the Texas Democrat said, “That damnfool woman who led her silly march comes out of your district, doesn’t she?”
“Minus the unflattering adjectives, yes, Mr. Speaker, she does,” Jerry answered. Sure as hell, Sam Rayburn didn’t miss much.
“All right, then. Say your say, and after you’re done we’ll ease back to the business at hand. It won’t matter one way or the other.” The Speaker of the House sounded indulgent. He knew the kinds of things Representatives had to do for their constituents.
He might not miss much, but he missed something that day when he didn’t quash Jerry Duncan before Jerry was well begun.
“Thank you, Mr. Speaker,” Jerry said once more. “I want to know why the United States Army, the mightiest army in the history of the world, hasn’t been able to stamp out these German fanatics. I want to know why we haven’t been able to hunt down this Reinhard Heydrich, who seems to be the brains of the outfit. I want to know why upwards of a thousand servicemen have been killed in Germany since the so-called surrender. And I especially want to know why the War Department is doing its level best to hide all these deaths and to pretend they never happened.”
Members of his own party applauded him. Democrats jeered. A couple of them shook their fists. “President Truman knows what he’s doing!” one man shouted.
“You’re soft on the Germans!” another Democrat added.
“I am not!” Jerry said indignantly. “When we try those thugs we capture, I hope we shoot them or hang them or get rid of them for good some other way. And I expect we will. That has nothing to do with why we’re wasting so many lives in Germany. It has nothing to do with why we can’t stop the insurgency, either. What are we doing in occupied Germany, and why aren’t we doing it better?”
“Sellout!” that Democrat yelled.
“Isolationist!” someone else put in. The minute the Japs hit Pearl Harbor, isolationism became a dirty word.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Speaker Rayburn plied his gavel with might and main. “The House will come to order!” Bang! Bang! “Mr. Duncan, how do you propose to find out what you want to know?” You don’t really care, Rayburn’s words implied. You’re just making political hay.
Jerry pretended not to hear that. If you didn’t notice, you didn’t have to react. He simply responded to what Rayburn actually said: “Questioning some War Department officials would make a good first step, Mr. Speaker.”
“You think so, do you?” Rayburn rasped a chuckle. With a large majority in both House and Senate, Democrats controlled who got questioned. The Speaker made it plain he didn’t aim to let anybody ask the War Department anything inconvenient or embarrassing.
Shrugging, Duncan said, “You can pull a rug over a pile of dust, but the dust doesn’t go away. It just leaves an ugly lump under the rug.”
Bang! “That will be quite enough of that,” Sam Rayburn said. “Now, returning to the bill we were actually considering…”
Sam Rayburn didn’t want to look at the lump under the carpet. Neither did Robert Patterson, the Secretary of War, even though his department had done most of the sweeping that put it there. And Harry Truman really didn’t want to look at it, and didn’t want anybody else looking at it, either.
Well, too bad for all of them, Jerry thought. It’s there, and they put it there, and I’m damn well going to tell the country about it.
Reinhard Heydrich was a thorough man. When he realized he would have to fight a long twilight struggle after the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS went under, he prepared for it as best he could. He studied English and Russian. He’d never be fluent in either one. But, with a dictionary and patience, he could manage.