Free People, Free Markets. George Melloan
that the bomb would likely end the killing, as it in fact did.
Moley had a serious point to make: that the bomb should impel intelligent men to think more clearly about the political arrangements this new destructive force would necessitate. “Political and economic devices result from, they do not cause, scientific discovery. They are conditioned by the known facts of the physical world. They do not anticipate. They follow.”
By forcing a Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945, the bomb did spare the lives of countless U.S. soldiers and both Japanese soldiers and civilians. Before that, the Journal had also turned its attention to the latest summit meeting on the future of Europe, where the war had ended with the surrender of Germany on May 8. The meeting at Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin, was the first for Harry Truman, who had ascended to the presidency after the death of FDR on April 12, and also for British Labour Party leader Clement Attlee, who had become Britain’s prime minister on July 26, after defeating wartime leader Winston Churchill. The other participant, Russia’s Joseph Stalin, was a veteran of wartime summits.
The Journal was skeptical of such “Big Three” proceedings and was hopeful that Potsdam would be the last, as it indeed proved to be. While the editorial writer admitted that there had been a certain glamour to these secretive meetings of the Allied chieftains, “there was about the practice a suggestion of personal government which was certainly alien to the traditions of both the United States and Britain.” As that sentence implied, Joe Stalin was no stranger to “personal government.”
The Journal decried the practice of lasting international decisions made by the “sudden inspirations of men whom circumstances have clothed with extraordinary power. However wise these men, they cannot in a period of days have all the information they should have . . .”
The editorial remarked that, after the death of Roosevelt, his successor, Harry Truman “discovered that there was no one who could tell him exactly what went on at the Yalta conference [February 4–11, 1945] and what agreements were made there.” Many historians have argued that FDR, in failing health and not in full command of his faculties, had in effect ceded the future of central Europe to the imperialistic Stalin.
The unsigned editorial, which bore the fingerprints of Grimes, concluded with a small bouquet for Harry Truman for negotiating machinery that would bring about more systematic negotiations by lower-level officials. “How expert Mr. Truman may be in foreign affairs, we don’t know. Whether he could beat Stalin in a game of poker, we don’t know. Whether Mr. Stalin liked him, we don’t know. We don’t think they make any difference. What makes a great deal of difference is that Mr. Truman seems to understand the process of government administration.”
After K.C. Hogate’s death in Palm Springs, California, in February 1947, Dow Jones was firmly in the hands of Barney Kilgore, who would proceed with his plans to turn The Wall Street Journal into a compact, readable, national business newspaper.
Later in 1947, Grimes won the first Pulitzer Prize awarded the Journal. His entry was a series of editorials in 1946 that, among other issues, deplored the postwar spread of dictatorships to much of the world, particularly in the nations of central Europe that were falling victim to Soviet imperialism. His editorials were again an expression of the Journal’s long-standing adherence to a belief that the preservation of personal freedom was of paramount importance in the conduct of both foreign and domestic policy.
Grimes in 1946 also had aimed a feisty and very brief parting shot at former vice president Henry Wallace, a leading New Dealer and early fan of Soviet collectivism who helped craft the 1933 farm bill that regimented farmers into a system of quotas and subsidies. Wallace might have become president if Democratic Party elders had not forced FDR to drop him from the ticket in 1944. After Truman fired him as Commerce secretary in 1946, he joined the left-leaning New Republic magazine. Wrote Grimes: “Henry Wallace has become editor of the New Republic. We suggest it serves both of them right.”
Grimes would guide policy through Truman and Eisenhower years, which were the early years of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, a war that quickly became a hot war when a Soviet-backed North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950 and Truman acted to protect the South. The Journal approved of Truman’s spunk in establishing a “containment” policy to curb Soviet imperialism. World War II evidently had destroyed any belief at the Journal, as it had for most Americans, that the United States could isolate itself from the troubles of Europe and Asia.
An editorial on March 13, 1947, had said that the president had not tried to hide the difficulties his containment policy would entail for the American people. But the “alternative is to withdraw from world affairs and see Europe and the Middle East, at least, come immediately under Russian domination. That means deportations, firing squads and the wholesale transfers of peoples. It means for a great many years at any rate the Christian idea of dignity of the individual will have to live underground if it lives at all, in a great part of the world.”
The editorial went on to say that the Soviet-U.S. conflict was not one for power or territory but a conflict of ideas. “The idea that man is an individual with inalienable rights and that one of these is the right to associate with other men in forming institutions of their own making is on one side. On the other is the idea that man is a cog whose function is to be part of a great machine built and engineered by the most ruthless and powerful . . . Between these two ideas there can be no compromise.”
That marker laid down by Henry Grimes would be a core Journal policy throughout the Cold War. The Journal supported the Marshall Plan, which provided economic aid to Europe to successfully counter efforts by Soviet-backed Communist parties to take over governments. There would, however, be differences between the Journal and Truman and his successors on Cold War tactics.
After North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950 and Truman sent American troops to counter the Soviet-backed invasion, the Journal cautioned against extending the war to China, a position that was mooted when China entered the war on its own. In December 1950, Grimes wrote that “if there must be a war then it should be fought with Russia, the inspiration and the brains of world aggression. It would be silly to fight China or any other Russian satellite. Undoubtedly, that suggestion will shock some of our readers, but we think logic will support it.”
The Journal’s reservations about war, and particularly U.S. involvement in wars in Asia, would apply later to Vietnam, when it opposed JFK’s plan to send American advisers to aid the South, the first step toward what would become an enormous American involvement. But when the United States was once engaged in wars, the Journal supported whatever was needed to prosecute them successfully.
On domestic policy, Grimes was suspicious that Truman might resurrect some of the high-handed policies toward American industry that had characterized the New Deal. But, as mentioned earlier in this book, it was Truman who chose to bring the differences between the two out into the open. During his 1948 campaign for reelection against Republican Thomas Dewey, Truman fired up an audience in McAlester, Oklahoma, by attacking the Journal as the Republican “Bible,” saying “they used half their editorial columns giving me hell because I am for the people!”
Grimes, of course, welcomed the challenge. What could be more fun for an editor than to have a public slugfest with the president? Wrote Grimes: “If President Truman is a consistent reader of this newspaper—as we certainly hope he is—he must be aware of the fact that our loyalties are to the economic and governmental principles in which we believe and not to any political party. We regret he chooses to distort this newspaper’s position.”
That was certainly true in principle, but Truman had a point. Although the Journal learned from its bad experience with Herbert Hoover that endorsing candidates can come back to haunt you, its defense of free-market capitalism had always had more adherents among Republicans than Democrats and still does.
When Truman, in response to a steel strike during the Korean War, issued an edict putting the mills under federal control on grounds that the strike endangered the war effort, Grimes had one of his fits of temper. His leading editorial writer, Vermont Connecticut Royster, writes that he was planning to ask Grimes for a raise. But when he peeked into the editor’s office, he observed Grimes jumping up and down on his hat in fury over this arbitrary