Word: trumans
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Steinberg tries without much success to paint Rayburn as a courageous defender of liberal principles. For example, he notes approvingly Rayburn's agreement with Harry Truman's remark that "Nixon probably never read the Constitution, and if by chance he had he did not understand it." At the same time, he minimizes Rayburn's support of Truman's unconstitutional seizure of the nation's steel mills during the Korean War and of Wilson's Sedition Act, under which hundreds of citizens were jailed for denouncing the United States' role in World...
Steinberg also depicts Rayburn as an early friend of blacks, despite his rejection of Truman's 1948 civil rights package, which included the elimination of some Jim Crow laws, the abolition of the poll tax and a federal anti-lynching law. Steinberg's explanation: "Rayburn knew that his friend's program now made humanitarian sense but absolutely no political sense in an election year." He doesn't even try to explain away such positions as Rayburn's belief during World War I that the U.S. should "close the immigration gates and open up the emigration gates to deport...
...FALL of 1951, as the Cold War stepped up and the Truman Doctrine thawed U.S. relations with Spain, the Pentagon thought it wise to send a major-general to the Iberian peninsula on an indefinite fact-finding mission. Before the small data-gathering entourage got underway, all of the armed services decided to get in on the act, and when Generalissimo Franco saw that about 100 American military men had come to Spain he thought they had come to sign a defense treaty. The information gathered by this Pentagon milk-run was never made public, and while...
...after the U.S. had excluded Spain from NATO and the Marshall Plan and voted against its acceptance into the U.N., redbaiting cold warriors had begun to show support for Franco. One Congressional representative, James J. Murphy (D-N.Y.), even called E1 Caudillo a "lovely and lovable character." President Truman had a different assessment of Franco's personality. He was reported as saying to the admiral he sent to deal with the Spanish government, "I don't like Franco and I never will, but I won't let my personal feelings override the convictions of you military...
...Truman's stance on the 1953 Madrid Pact--the first executive agreement with Spain--at least in the context of early Cold War politics and the limited capabilities of Soviet bombers seems understandable if not justifiable. But even after the Soviets' development of long-range missiles made the idea of an untouchable Spanish base obsolete, the U.S. continued and increased aid to Spain in spite of Franco...