Harry Truman (14 page)

Another of my father’s Senate problems was Bennett Clark. At first, the White House gave most of the federal patronage in Missouri to him, in spite of Senator Clark’s often violent attacks on the New Deal. Wooing his enemies with gifts was one of Roosevelt’s favorite tactics. My father never believed it was good politics and frequently said so. He thought it discouraged your friends and only made your enemies arrogant. It certainly worked that way with Dad and Senator Clark. Like many sons of famous fathers, Bennett Clark was an unstable, complex man. He felt compelled to seek the presidency because his father, “Champ” Clark, had been deprived of it, in the 1912 Democratic Convention, by an unexpected surge to Woodrow Wilson. Poor Senator Clark simply lacked the stature for the job. But the desire for it made him an instinctive foe of the Roosevelt Administration.

At first, Senator Clark regarded my father with contempt and made no effort to conceal it. But he was also intelligent enough to realize he needed the help of the Jackson County Democrats if he was to win reelection in 1938 - an absolute necessity for his 1940 presidential hopes. So he began consulting Senator Truman on appointments, and they chose mutually agreeable men. When it came to picking the WPA director for the state of Missouri - probably the most important single federal appointment, from a political point of view - my father had a lot to say. The job went to Matt Murray, a Jackson County Democrat. This meant the Jackson County organization controlled the thousands of jobs that were handed out by the WPA across Missouri.

While Dad legislated and politicked, my mother and I struggled to adjust to our new way of life. I was enrolled at Gunston Hall, a local Washington girls’ school in the old Southern tradition. It was a nice school, but I was there only six months of the year. At the end of June, we always packed up everything, abandoned our furnished apartment, and went back to Independence for the next six months. There I went to junior high school just a block from home. Then, on the first of January, we packed everything again and moved to another rented apartment on Connecticut Avenue - I knew every block of Connecticut Avenue before Dad’s senatorial career ended. Back I went to sedate, ladylike Gunston Hall.

Our trips to and from Independence were quite an ordeal. The government gave congressmen special boxes to pack the linens, clothes, and other personal effects they transported back and forth each year. I can still see my father toiling over these boxes in the Washington heat in June or early July. He prided himself on being an expert packer, and he was. My mother and I were hopeless in this department, and still are. Dad can get more things into a box or trunk than anyone I’ve ever seen.

Among the things he packed each year were the clothes for my Raggedy Ann doll. I was not a great one for dolls. Raggedy Ann was the only one I ever cared for. She had a rather large wardrobe, which my aunts, all experts with the needle, frequently supplemented. One day, I was standing around our hot Washington apartment watching Dad toil over a box that was about full. With a sigh, he took the first of Raggedy Ann’s wardrobe off her formidable pile and began folding it. Suddenly he looked up at me. I was no longer ten years old. This was 1938 or 1939, and I was fourteen or fifteen. A Mamma-Truman-like glint came into his eyes. “In the first place,” he said, “you’re pretty old to be carrying a doll back and forth. In the second place, if you insist on doing it, you’re certainly old enough to pack for her.” With that, he strolled into the kitchen for some iced tea and left me to finish packing that box. Raggedy Ann soon stopped making the trip from Independence to Washington.

On this semiannual commute, we always went by car. My father did most of the driving, and this always made for interesting family discussions. My mother was convinced he drove too fast, and she was absolutely right. I don’t think Mother ever really saw any of the scenery between Missouri and the District of Columbia. She always had at least one eye on the speedometer.

Our route usually took us through Hagerstown, Maryland, and over the mountains to Cumberland. In 1938, we came to grief in Hagerstown, and another chapter in the history of Dad’s unbreakable, unlosable glasses was written. It was a Sunday morning, and a stop sign at a key intersection was obscured by a parked car. A man in another car plowed into us as we went through the intersection. Our car was completely wrecked. It was almost a miracle we escaped alive. Dad had a cut on his forehead, and Mother had a badly wrenched neck. Sitting in the back, I escaped with nothing more than a bad fright.

As I was pulled out of the car window, I saw Dad’s glasses on the floor, surrounded by upended suitcases - intact. He had flung them over his shoulder at the moment of impact.

First the police were inclined to give the Trumans a very hard time for missing the stop sign. But Dad pointed out the stop sign was obscured by the parked car. Later, we heard that the man who hit us had had two other accidents that month. Dad called his secretary, Vic Messall, and he got dressed in record time and drove down to pick us up. We never did go back for the car. I guess it was towed to the nearest junk heap.

Back in Missouri during those mid-thirties years, my father combined politicking with a continued interest in the army reserve. Almost every summer, he spent two weeks on active duty. By this time, he was a colonel in command of a regiment. He and his friends had served without pay all through the years since World War I. Along with his enthusiasm for military lore, Dad found the army an invaluable way to maintain friendships with men from many parts of Missouri. Typical of these was an affable St. Louis banker, John Snyder. Two other close friends were Harry Vaughan and Eddie McKim. They were a pair of big easygoing jokers, constantly kidding each other, and Dad.

Eddie McKim was always accusing Dad of owing him $36. He had been a sergeant in Dad’s battery. While Dad was away for two weeks at a special artillery school, a replacement captain had busted McKim to buck private. When Dad returned, Eddie asked for his stripes, or at the very least, a promotion to private first class. Dad shook his head. “I was thinking of busting you myself, McKim,” he said.

Eddie insisted this was cruel and unnecessary punishment, and he carefully counted each month he would have earned an extra two dollars as a first class private and insisted that, morally, Dad owed him the money. The accusation, of course, gave Dad an excuse to call him the laziest, most insubordinate soldier in the history of the U.S. Army.

This was a reputation Eddie never denied. In fact, he was proud of it (although in civilian life he was a demon worker and rose to head one of the nation’s biggest insurance companies). One day at summer camp early in the decade - probably 1930 - Eddie was serving as Harry Vaughan’s aide. As an ex-enlisted man, he had only recently achieved captain’s rank in the reserve. Colonel Vaughan asked him to carry a chair up on a porch. Eddie obeyed, but he muttered that his record was ruined. It was the first work he had done in their entire two-week training tour.

Several years later, Eddie and Dad came out to St. Louis by train. Dad wired John Snyder and Harry Vaughan to meet them for an impromptu reunion. They cheerfully agreed and were waiting when the train pulled into the station. Onto the platform stepped a very worried looking senator and a very blotto friend - McKim. Dad seemed terribly upset. What would the St. Louis papers say, if they saw their favorite target, Senator Truman, escorted by a drunk? Quickly, Harry Vaughan took charge. He sent Dad and John Snyder in one direction and hustled the reeling McKim in the other direction.

Unfortunately, there was only one cab at the taxi stand, and they had to share it. But Colonel Vaughan shouldered McKim through the lobby of the Missouri Athletic Club, where he and Dad were staying, and into the elevator while Dad registered at the desk. On the sixth floor, Eddie fell out of the elevator on his face, and poor Colonel Vaughan had to hoist him onto his back and lug him the rest of the way down the long hall to the room. It was a hot day, and by the time they reached the room, Colonel Vaughan was streaming perspiration. He flung Eddie on the bed and called him a drunken so-and-so.

A moment later, Dad and Snyder walked into the room. Eddie bounced to his feet and took cover behind the couch, a big grin on his face. “You would make me carry that chair up on that porch and spoil my record,” he said, to the open-mouthed Harry Vaughan.

Eddie and Dad had cooked up the gag on the train, and it had worked beyond their wildest expectations.

This fondness for a good laugh was a universal trait in Dad’s close friends. I never found one who was not to some degree a joker. But few had Eddie McKim’s talent in this department. Eddie never quit. When Dad introduced him to President Roosevelt at a White House reception, Eddie proceeded to tell FDR in a very serious tone that he ought to do something about the $36 Senator Truman owed him. Naturally the President looked baffled. When Eddie explained, FDR threw back his head and laughed heartily.

Dad’s favorite Eddie McKim story recalled the day his artillery outfit was being reviewed by the commanding general at Fort Riley. Eddie was riding the lead horse of the team that was pulling one of the field pieces, en route to performing an intricate maneuver. Colonel Truman sat on horseback beside the general, making small talk. “Captain McKim was in my outfit during the war,” he began. At this point, something went wrong with either Eddie or the lead horse, and in a twinkling the gun, the horses, and Eddie were wrapped in an incredible tangle around a tree. The disaster coincided precisely with the end of Dad’s remark, and without even drawing a breath, or breaking the rhythm of his sentence, Colonel Truman added, “and he never was any damn good then either!”

This informal Missouri style was something all the Trumans had to shed when in Washington, D.C. Although there was plenty of room for jokes behind the scenes, on stage a senator had to be dignified. This was equally true of his wife and daughter. Washington was a small town, or at best a small city, in those days. It had a sedate Southern air, which included a great deal of formality. I can remember driving with mother through the White House gates (without anyone even stopping us) and up to the front entrance. A butler came out carrying a silver tray, and I reached through the car window, and gravely laid our calling cards on the tray. The butler gave us a solemn little nod, and we drove away. Protocol was still
very
important in pre-World War II Washington. Senators’ wives had to be “at home” on Thursday afternoons to pour tea for anyone who cared to visit. Congressmen’s wives were at home on another afternoon, and Cabinet wives had their day. Of course, the ladies got together and negotiated mutual assistance pacts, which eliminated the nightmarish possibility of everyone descending at the same time on one hapless woman.

On the afternoons when mother was “at home” or visiting someone else who was wielding the teapot, I rode the streetcar to the Senate Office Building and reported to Dad or his stenographer, Millie Dryden. For the next two or three hours, I was on my own, wandering the corridors or perching in the Senate gallery to watch the action - or lack of it - on the floor. Occasionally Dad introduced me to senators and other politicians who visited his office. Two that stand out in my mind are Vice President Garner and Huey Long.

My father was enormously proud of his friendship with Garner. It was justifiable pride. Garner did not make friends casually. Away from the Senate, he was practically a recluse, shunning invitations to all parties. Moreover, as a conservative Democrat, he did not agree with many of Senator Truman’s New Deal votes in the Senate. I sensed Dad’s pride and did my best to be polite to Garner. He was a small taciturn man, who did not smile easily. Much later I realized he was immensely powerful behind the scenes in the Senate. He took his vice president’s job seriously and seldom left Washington while Congress was in session. But his real work was done not while presiding over the Senate but in his “doghouse” where he huddled with influential senators over legislation and committee memberships. There were ritual pauses to “strike a blow for liberty” with some of the best bourbon served in Washington. Garner was an artist at soothing ruffled tempers and repairing damaged egos, particularly among Southern and Western Democrats who had no great love for Franklin Roosevelt.

With Huey Long, on the other hand, I could see an opposite emotion in my father’s eyes: dislike. This character from Louisiana was upsetting both the Senate and the country in 1935. He dealt in personalities and personal insults on the floor of the Senate in a style that anticipated Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. He was a raucous critic of the New Deal, offering as a substitute his “Share the Wealth” plan, which was a pie in the sky, made with nonexistent apples. All twelve of Dad’s fellow freshman senators - they called themselves “the Young Turks” because they were the most ardent New Dealers in the Senate - loathed Senator Long and issued a statement denouncing him. I was very cool to Long - not that it made any difference to him, I am sure. But I must confess, from the viewpoint of an eleven-year-old, I enjoyed his antics on the Senate floor. He added interest to what was usually a rather boring show.

I will never forget a little drama, hitherto neglected by Long’s biographers, I believe, that I saw enacted in the Senate chamber one day. Long’s chair was just a few feet away from swinging doors to the right of the vice president’s chair. Huey arose and was obviously about to launch one of his interminable harangues. Senator Joe Robinson of Arkansas, the tall distinguished Democratic majority leader, sprang to his feet and announced, in that remarkably courteous language which almost always prevails when senators address each other, that if the honorable senator from Louisiana said another word, he was going to wipe up the floor with him. My head swiveled from Huey to Robinson, when the senator from Arkansas erupted. Now my head swiveled back to Senator Long. There was no one there. Only the doors swinging in the breeze of his hasty departure.

My father and Huey Long were almost total opposites in their approach to the Senate. Long spent his time looking for headlines. He never devoted an hour to constructing legislation. This is the real work of the Senate, and it was - and probably still is - done by thirty or forty senators who toiled wearisome hours on the various committees. These workers were the senators whom Dad instinctively joined. His experience running a county government in Missouri gave him an insight into the practical side of legislation. This, plus his appetite for hard work, made him a first-class legislator. Older senators, such as Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, were delighted to see a younger man willing and eager to tackle the many problems the Senate was attempting to solve. To my father’s delight, he was put on the Appropriations Committee and the Interstate Commerce Committee, both fields where he had had considerable local experience.