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After Pearl Harbor, Truman requested active service, and was rejected for age. Then he conceived a genuine chance to serve: he asked for a special Senate Committee to investigate war expenditures. Harry Truman put his plodding talents to smoking out Army waste, business grabs and Government inefficiency. His Committee was not so quick to shoot its mouth off as Martin Dies's; people gradually learned that Truman usually knew what he was talking about. The Truman Committee became the nation's wartime watchdog.
The Committee's fiercest blasts were directed at Administration mismanagement, but Truman steadfastly continued to vote the New Deal line. When it came to choosing a Vice President, this made him palatable to C.I.O. as a compromise choice. He has voted as a liberal on Negro measures, such as anti-polltax measures. He is halfway a Southerner (his Confederate parents were driven from their home in the Civil War), so the Southerners can swallow him. And he has been so consistently "regular" that the bosses know he can be trusted to go down the line. So last week in Chicago, the mousy-looking little man from Missouri was offered a chance at the nation's No. 2 job, which has become the steppingstone to the No. 1 job six times in U.S. history upon the death of a President (see cut).