Harold Ickes

Harold Ickes appears in the account as both an official whose oversight the War Department tried to avoid and a sharp critic who brought the Canol pipeline’s weaknesses before the Truman Committee. His interventions also extended beyond wartime spending: as the vice-presidential contest took shape, he saw in Harry S. Truman a possible political liability for Franklin Roosevelt’s ticket.

Cabinet Official and Wartime Oversight

Ickes was Secretary of the Interior and head of the Petroleum Administration, a position that made his views especially relevant to a secret military project built around oil. The Canol scheme had been kept from other civilian authorities in part to avoid his interference; the account describes him as notoriously irascible. That effort at secrecy brought into focus a larger question raised by the committee’s work: whether military officials could launch costly projects without effective civilian scrutiny.

The Canol Project

When Ickes learned of the plan, he appeared before the Truman Committee and traced it to “a one-page memorandum from General Somervell, who was anxious to conserve paper….” The project called for a four-inch pipeline running 1,200 miles from Canada to Alaska. It had been approved secretly by Brehon B. Somervell with little regard for terrain, climate, materials, manpower, or the judgments of oil experts, the Corps of Engineers, and the War Production Board. The War Department budget contained a $25 million item for military facilities in Canada and Alaska, without identifying the pipeline.

Ickes called the pipeline useless, and the committee reached much the same conclusion. He also ridiculed the project’s adviser, James H. Graham, a dollar-a-year man, as “worth every penny of it.” The inquiry found that Graham did not know the pipeline’s length and had made no estimate of its cost; he told the committee, “I don’t regard cost in time of war.” Ickes’s testimony thus did more than attack one construction scheme: it exposed how secrecy and deference to military authority could shield a poorly assessed project from ordinary checks on its purpose and expense.

Truman and the Vice-Presidential Choice

In a separate political episode, Ickes recorded his view of Truman’s prospects as Roosevelt considered a running mate. Writing in his diary after a conversation with the President, he observed that little had been said about Truman and concluded, “I gathered that he felt, as I do,” that Truman might be acceptable but could raise a political-boss issue. Ickes thought that charge would be especially useful to Thomas E. Dewey, whose political prominence had come from fighting political bosses.

The diary entry reveals Ickes’s assessment, not a settled decision by Roosevelt. It places him among those trying to interpret the President’s intentions while recognizing that Truman’s association with machine politics could shape how the choice was presented to voters. Across the two episodes, Ickes is shown scrutinizing power in distinct settings: military authority over wartime spending and the political liabilities surrounding a vice-presidential nomination.