Harry Truman (19 page)

In the first days of August, Senator Clark leaped into the fray, lashing Lloyd Stark with sarcasm in his best style. He charged that the governor had “licked Pendergast’s boots” to win his support for his 1936 governorship race and now was trying to use the Pendergast name as a smear to defeat Harry Truman. Rather hysterically, Governor Stark replied that the Truman campaign had collapsed, and everyone in Missouri but Senator Clark and Senator Truman knew it.

Meanwhile, another behind-the-scenes drama was taking place in St. Louis. The nominal head of the St. Louis organization was Bernard Dickmann, the mayor. But a rising star in the city politic was a young Irish-American, Robert Hannegan. They had a candidate running for governor, Larry McDaniel. In the opening rally at Sedalia, Truman supporters had cheered vociferously for McDaniel every time his name was mentioned. They supported him and expected the St. Louis organization to return the compliment. As my father’s campaign gathered momentum, the St. Louis leaders grew more and more jittery. They kept getting calls from numerous Truman supporters around the state, but particularly from southeast Missouri where Dad had a tremendous following, warning them they were going to vote against McDaniel unless St. Louis came out for Truman. Hannegan, shrewdly sniffing the political wind, decided Dad looked like a winner and tried to persuade Mayor Dickmann to switch. But the mayor stubbornly stayed with Stark. Hannegan proceeded to pass the word among his own followers - who probably outnumbered Dickmann’s - that Senator Truman was the man to back.

My father ended his campaign with a rally in Independence. Lloyd Stark issued one last plea to “save Missouri from Pendergastism.” The newspapers continued to pour mud on the Truman name, right down to the final hour. The
Post-Dispatch
declared on August 5: “The nomination of Harry Truman . . . would be the triumph of Pendergastism and a sad defeat for the people of Missouri.” The
Globe-Democrat
topped even this bit of hysteria by printing between the news articles throughout the paper “Save Missouri - Vote against Truman.”

After taking this kind of abuse in St. Louis for a week, more than a few members of the Truman team were feeling rather glum on primary day. My father’s confidence remained unshaken, but the early returns made many of his friends wonder if he was living in a dream world. All during the early evening of August 6, 1940, Stark maintained roughly a 10,000-vote lead. Dad had to admit things did not look encouraging. But with that fantastic calm which he has always maintained in moments of crisis, he announced, “I’m going to bed.” And he did.

Mother and I stayed up, glued to the radio. I remember answering the phone about 10:30. It was Tom Evans, calling from campaign headquarters. He was very discouraged - and astonished when I told him my father was already asleep.

Mother and I finally went to bed around midnight, very weepy and depressed. Dad was still behind. I remember crying into my pillow and wondering how all those people out there could prefer a stinker like Lloyd Stark.

About 3:30 a.m., the telephone rang. Mother got up and answered it.

“This is Dave Berenstein in St. Louis,” said a cheerful voice. “I’d like to congratulate the wife of the senator from Missouri.”

“I don’t think that’s funny,” snapped Mother and slammed down the phone.

As she stumbled back to bed, Mother suddenly remembered Berenstein was our campaign manager in St. Louis. Then she realized what he had said. She rushed into my room, woke me up, and told me what she had just heard. Berenstein soon called back and explained why he was extending his congratulations. Dad had run very well in St. Louis and was now ahead of Governor Stark.

For the rest of the night and morning, Dad’s lead seesawed back and forth, drooping once to a thin 2,000, then soaring to 11,000, and finally settling to 7,396. By 11:00 a.m., Senator Truman was a certified winner. Just as in 1948, he was bouncing around after a good night’s sleep, shaking hands and accepting congratulations, as refreshed and lively as a man just back from a long vacation. The rest of us were staggering in his wake, totally frazzled from lack of sleep and nervous exhaustion.

My father captured St. Louis by some 8,000 votes - just about the same as his margin of victory. But he also polled about 8,000 more votes out-state than he had done in 1934 - running against two candidates who supposedly had strong out-state support. And he drubbed both Stark and Milligan in Jackson County as well. Obviously, the people who knew him best were least impressed by the gross attempts to link him with Tom Pendergast’s downfall.

Maurice Milligan conceded his defeat, wired my father his congratulations, and assured him he would support him in November. But from Governor Stark there was only silence. He never congratulated my father, and it was clear he intended to sulk throughout the November election campaign. He wrote FDR a long, whining letter blaming his defeat, among other things, on a drought which prevented (for some reason) the farmers from going to the polls to vote. In reply, FDR assured “Dear Lloyd” of his “personal feelings” for him and urged the governor to get behind the Democratic ticket.

Not even urging from the President himself, however, dissuaded Governor Stark from sulking in his mansion. My father considered his conduct unforgivable. During the November campaign, Edward J. Flynn, the Democratic National Chairman, visited Missouri and told Dad the party had scheduled speaking engagements for Governor Stark in Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. Dad got really angry and did a little table-pounding. The governor was obviously trying to build up some national prestige in order to land a federal appointment in Washington. By the time Flynn left Missouri, Stark’s speaking dates had been canceled.

My father was a forgiving man, but there
are
some sins he considers unforgivable, and one of them is a refusal to close ranks after a primary fight and support the party ticket. He considers this principle fundamental to the success of the two-party system, and he believes the two-party system is essential to the political structure of the nation. The contrast between his attitude toward Lloyd Stark and Maurice Milligan is a perfect illustration. In September, Dad asked FDR to reappoint Milligan as federal attorney - he had resigned to enter the race, in accordance with the provisions of the Hatch Act, which forbids federal employees from participating in politics. The following year, President Roosevelt considered naming ex-Governor Stark to the National Labor Mediation Board. My father asked his friend former Senator Sherman Minton, recently made a federal judge, to write a strong letter to FDR, informing him the appointment would be personally obnoxious to Dad. Ex-Governor Stark remained a private citizen.

The November campaign for the Senate was almost an anti-climax, after the primary battle. My father spent much of his time in Washington fighting for - and finally winning - passage of his transportation bill. But his opponent, Manvel Davis, copied his primary style and went into every county in Missouri, making an energetic fight out of it. On August 22, the Republicans connived with the presiding judge of the Jackson County Court to pull the kind of dirty trick that convinced me - at least at the time - that all the terrible things Mamma Truman said about Republicans were true. With farm income battered by the depression, my grandmother had been forced to refinance the various mortgages against her farm in 1938. She did so by borrowing $35,000 from Jackson County. The new presiding judge in 1940, elected on an anti-Pendergast slate, foreclosed on this mortgage before my father or Uncle Vivian knew what was happening. The process servers sold the farm at auction, and Dad was forced to move his mother and sister Mary into a small house in Grandview, where a few months later, coming down an unfamiliar staircase, Mamma Truman missed the bottom step, fell, and broke her hip.

It constantly amazes me that my father’s faith in human nature and his ebullient optimism about life survived these experiences without even a tinge of bitterness.

In the final stages of the fall campaign, the Republicans tried another maneuver aimed at the strong residue of Klan feeling in many rural parts of Missouri. They distributed thousands of imitation ballots in which my father’s name was printed “Harry Solomon Truman.” With these went a whispering campaign that Dad’s grandfather, Solomon Young, was Jewish, not German. I remember a friend handing me one of these ballots. I stared incomprehensibly at it and laughed. I had never heard an anti-Semitic word uttered in our house, so the accusation did not arouse an iota of concern in me. My father treated the whole thing as if it were ridiculous.

In numerous speeches, Manvel Davis tried mightily to paint my father as a tool of “the Dickmann-Pendergast axis” - which was pretty silly, since everyone knew Barney Dickmann had gone down clinging to Governor Stark. Davis also spent a lot of time calling Dad a rubber-stamp senator and begged the Jeffersonian Democrats - as distinguished from the New Deal Democrats - to desert Truman and repair to the Davis standard. Dad practically ignored him and devoted most of his campaign to defending FDR’s third-term bid against the savage attacks of most of the state’s papers. Davis’s energetic campaign did make a fairly impressive impact, but my father won by 40,000 votes.

The St. Louis
Post-Dispatch,
obviously working on the assumption its readers had no memories whatsoever, proceeded to eat its previous words and pretend it had been behind Dad all the time: “Senator Truman has been on the whole a satisfactory Senator. Now seasoned by experience, he should make an even better record in his second term.”

The day after the election, my father flew back to Washington. Because of the world crisis, Congress was still in session. When Dad walked into the Senate chamber, every senator in the place rose and applauded. These professional politicians knew what he had achieved out there in Missouri. No one could call him names anymore, or smear him with ugly guilt by association. He was the United States Senator from Missouri in his own right.

EARLY IN SEPTEMBER 1941, we became permanent Washington residents - more or less. Congress was obviously going to stay in session for the duration of the world crisis. It was a harrowing time. Hitler ruled supreme in Western Europe, and the British had retreated to their island fortress, where they shuddered under a rain of German bombs. Churchill’s voice, summoning his people to blood, sweat, and tears, thrilled us over the airwaves, and President Roosevelt pushed the U.S. defense program to full throttle.

Our transfer to Washington caused a minor crisis in my own life. Early in 1940, I had decided to change from the piano to vocal training and had begun taking singing lessons from Mrs. Thomas J. Strickler in Kansas City. A permanent move to Washington meant I could only see Mrs. Strickler at random intervals, when we went home to Independence for holidays or during the summer months. But my mother and father decided it was more important for me to spend a full, uninterrupted year at Gunston Hall and get a diploma from that school. So we moved from Independence to Washington, taking Grandmother Wallace with us. We rented another apartment on Connecticut Avenue and settled down to life as year-round political - that’s the poor kind - capitalists.

My father, watching the mushroom growth of army camps, the multiplication of battleships and merchant ships, the retooling of thousands of factories for war work, became more and more worried about this vast national effort. He feared it would either collapse into chaos, or produce mass disillusion, when its inevitable corruption and mismanagement was revealed to a shocked public. He knew, from his memory of World War I days, this was what had happened in the early 1920s. Congress had waited until after the war to start digging into the contracts between the government and businessmen, and the stench that emerged had played no small part in creating the cynical, amoral mood of the twenties. Moreover, during the senatorial campaign, he had spoken out emphatically in support of a strong defense program, and numerous citizens, aware of his interest, warned him that from what they could see, there was an alarming amount of waste and confusion in the construction of Fort Leonard Wood, right there in Missouri.

After he was sworn in for a second time on January 3, 1941, my father departed from Washington for a month-long, 30,000-mile personal inspection tour of the defense program. He roamed from Florida to Michigan. On February 10, he was back in Washington, and he rose to make a fateful speech in the Senate - fateful because it was to change the course of all our lives. Earlier speeches or election victories, while they played vital roles in my father’s political growth, could not really be said to have made him a national figure. This speech did. He told his fellow senators of staggering waste and mismanagement he had seen with his own eyes, in his personal inspection tour of the defense program. On the day he spoke, the House voted to raise the ceiling on the national debt to $65 billion. Obviously, this vast spending spree needed a watchdog. In Senate Resolution 71, Senator Truman recommended the creation of a committee of five senators who would shoulder this large responsibility.

The twists and turns of politics are both fascinating and amusing. When my father submitted his resolution and warned against the chaos threatening the defense program, Congressman Eugene Cox of Georgia had already made a similar speech, in the House of Representatives, calling for a similar investigation. The Roosevelt Administration shuddered at the thought of a Cox-led investigation - he hated FDR. Jimmy Byrnes, the senator from South Carolina, one of Roosevelt’s chief spokesmen in the Senate, seized on Dad’s suggestion as an ideal way to put Cox out of business. At the same time, he demonstrated just how much the Roosevelt Administration really wanted anyone investigating its programs.

After persuading the Senate to pass my father’s resolution, Senator Byrnes, as head of the Audit and Control Committee, voted him a grandiose $10,000 to conduct the investigation. Dad had asked for $25,000, and he finally got $15,000. He committed more than half of this to hiring the best lawyer he could find, big, heavy-set Hugh Fulton. My father got him by calling Attorney General Robert Jackson and asking him to suggest one of his best men. Fulton wanted $9,000 a year. Dad swallowed hard and gave it to him. Fulton had a distinguished record in the Justice Department. He had recently won several big cases against crooked tycoons. One of his big recommendations, as far as Dad was concerned, was his fondness for getting up early in the morning. They were soon meeting between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m. in Dad’s office to outline future investigations and plan the day’s work.

My father gave the same careful attention to selecting the other members of his committee. Majority Leader Alben Barkley and Vice President Henry Wallace did their utmost to pack the committee with Roosevelt yes-men. Dad dismissed more than a few of his fellow senators with remarks like, “He’s an old fuddy-duddy” or “He’s a stuffed shirt.” They finally settled on Tom Connally of Texas, Carl Hatch of New Mexico, James Mead of New York, Mon Wallgren of Washington, and Republicans Joe Ball of Minnesota and Owen Brewster of Maine. Senators Hatch and Wallgren were close personal friends of Dad’s and, like him, hard workers without an ounce of the grandstander in them. Senators Connally and Mead were Roosevelt men, but not in any slavish or dependent way. They were also tremendously influential in Washington, and they helped my father borrow investigators from government agencies so the committee could operate on its meager budget. Among these key men were a future Supreme Court Justice, Tom Clark; a future Democratic national chairman, Bill Boyle of Kansas City; and a future White House appointments secretary, a shrewd, witty Irishman named Matt Connelly.

My father knew his first and biggest problem was to convince his fellow senators - especially his fellow Democrats - that his committee could serve a positive purpose without doing a hatchet job on the Roosevelt Administration. At the same time, he had to convince the Senate there was something worth investigating out there. He chose as his first target the army camps. They were not controversial, and they dealt with fundamentals anyone who ever owned a house might understand.

In standard Truman style, the committee went to nine typical camps and conducted hearings on the spot. What they found was almost incredible. At Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania, the estimate for construction of the camp’s utilities had been $125,000. The actual cost came to $1.72 million. At Camp Wallace, Texas, costs jumped from $480,000 to $2.54 million. At Camp Meade, Maryland, the commanding general had coolly ignored the advice of the architect-engineer and had chosen a site that was almost totally lacking in drainage, construction roads, and other necessities.

The prices the government paid enabled one architect-engineer to earn 1,478 percent above his average annual profits. A contractor earned 1,669 percent. Unions were no less guilty of plundering. Time-and-a-half and double-time wage rates at Fort Meade cost the government $1.8 million. The army’s attitude toward money almost gave Dad apoplexy. They claimed they had no way of knowing how much things should cost, because plans for expansion - five volumes, no less - had been drawn up in 1935 and then lost somewhere in the library of the Army War College. Often, instead of buying equipment, the army rented it and wound up paying twice as much as its original cost.

In August 1941, my father documented $100 million of waste in the $1 billion camp-building program. The army immediately went to work at changing its procedures, and Lieutenant General Brehon B. Somervell, who later became chief of the Quartermaster Corps Construction Division, estimated the army had saved $100 million by heeding the Truman Committee’s criticisms.

My father asked the Senate for more money to continue his investigations. This time he got $85,000. The Truman Committee was off and running. I know that is a cliché, but it is also an accurate description of the pace Dad set for himself for the next three years. He was always on a plane or a train en route to hear testimony at a shipyard or an aircraft production plant, an army base or a munitions depot. I missed him intensely while he was gone, but during these years, by way of consolation, he began to write me my first letters. I was now seventeen, and he obviously felt I was too old to be included in his letters to Mother with a side remark or a closing “kiss Margie for me.” Of course, this decision also involved a little self-improvement for me. It was understood I had to write letters to him, too. Or else.

The first of these letters came from Springfield, Missouri, dated October 1, 1941:

Four days later another, totally different letter came from Nashville, Tennessee:

A month later, he was down in Roanoke, Virginia, sending me another history lesson:

A week later he was in a sentimental mood again: