Harry Truman (26 page)

For the seven and three-quarters years the Trumans were in the White House, Mrs. Luce was never invited to attend a single social function there. One day, about in the middle of that long freeze, her husband, Henry Luce, the publisher of
Time,
visited Dad and asked him for an explanation, obviously hoping to negotiate a truce. Dad pointed to the picture of Mother he always keeps on his desk and gave Luce a brief history of its travels to France and back with him during World War I. Mrs. Luce stayed uninvited.

In the closing hours of the campaign, the Hearst papers unleashed the biggest smear of them all: Harry S. Truman was an ex-member of the Ku Klux Klan. They based their stories on obvious lies told by a few of Dad’s enemies in Jackson County - especially one whom he had helped to send to jail for embezzlement. This story was quickly refuted by on-the-spot testimony from other friends back home.

Dad received the following telegram from his brother Vivian on October 27, 1944, while he was staying at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago. It shows how the smear artists were operating - and how Harry Truman’s friends remained faithful to him:

My father did his campaigning aboard a special car, the
Henry Stanley.
Mother stayed in Washington with me because I had a few dozen courses in college to pass. My first contact with the campaign was a late October trip to New York with Mother to hear Dad speak in Madison Square Garden. By accident, we happened to be on the scene for the most dramatic episode of his campaign.

In a show of Democratic unity, Harry Truman and Henry Wallace were to occupy the same platform. New York had numerous Wallace sympathizers, and there was good reason for suspecting they would make up a heavy percentage of the audience. My father and his entourage arrived, already worried about this problem. The crowd was large and restless. They waited several minutes, and there was still no sign of Wallace. Several eager pro-Wallace Democrats urged Dad to go onstage and let Wallace arrive late. But George Allen, who was handling the political arrangements for Dad’s tour, immediately saw what the Wallace men were planning to do. Dad would get the bare minimum of applause - or perhaps a few boos - when he appeared. Then, when Wallace came down the center aisle, they would tear the roof off the Garden, and the story would make headlines.

“Mr. Truman goes on when Mr. Wallace goes on,” said George Allen grimly.

Meanwhile, desperate efforts were being made to locate Wallace. Word reached them that he had left his hotel, and then they were told he had returned to his hotel because he forgot his glasses. Then he had left his hotel once more but was walking to the Garden, a strange performance if there ever was one. Eddie McKim, who was there with Dad, later said, “When Wallace came in and was shown back into the Garden offices [where Dad was waiting], he was mad as a wet hen. The only one he spoke to was Truman and he [Wallace] was in a very sour mood. Finally, they walked out through the entrance onto the platform arm in arm and smiling at each other, but I think they were about ready to cut each other’s throats.”

It was an ominous sign of things to come, but my father, who hates to think the worst of anyone, hesitated to pass judgment on the incident.

“Do you think that thing was planned, staged deliberately?” he asked Eddie McKim on the way back to the hotel.

“I think it was,” Eddie said.

“Well,” Dad said, “that’s a funny deal, but it didn’t work.”

We joined Dad for the last leg of his tour. It was my introduction to whistle-stop campaigning, and I loved it. We paused for an exciting torchlight parade at Parkersburg, West Virginia. At Pittsburgh, we had a twenty-six-man motorcycle escort for a dash to nearby McKeesport for lunch. I was awed by the crowds, who were very well behaved, and even more impressed by meeting Orson Welles, who had dinner with us and spoke on the same platform with Dad that night.

In Missouri, instead of going home to Independence, we took a suite at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City. My father yielded to the pleas of his Battery D boys and other Missouri friends who journeyed to Kansas City to be on hand for the victory celebration. This was one election where he did not pull his early-to-bed routine. Instead, he stayed up with his friends and played the piano for them while they huddled around the radio, nervously listening to the returns, which gave the Republicans an early lead. Dewey did not concede until 3:45 a.m. By that time, I was completely exhausted and much too excited to sleep. I was up for the rest of the night.

My father finally got rid of his friends and threw himself down on a bed in the suite where they had been celebrating. His old friend from southwest Missouri, Harry Easley, stayed with him. For the first time, the full reality of what he was facing struck Dad. “He told me that the last time that he saw Mr. Roosevelt he had the pallor of death on his face and he knew that he would be President before the term was out,” Easley recalled. “He said he was going to have to depend on his friends. He was talking about people like me, he said. We sat there and had quite a long deal.”

Whenever I think of this moment in my father’s life, I am always profoundly touched by it. There is something intensely American about it, this picture of a man close to assuming the most awesome responsibility in the world’s history, talking it over with a man not unlike himself, from a small Missouri city, a friend who had stood loyally by him whenever he needed help. If there is a more lonesome feeling in the world than being President, it must be facing the near inevitability of getting the job in the worst possible way - coming in through the back door, as Dad put it. That night his mind was obviously filled with the history of the other men who had reached the White House that way. Would he end as most of them had ended, beaten men, physically, spiritually, and politically?

While other Democrats - including his daughter - celebrated on that election night in 1944, Vice President-elect Harry S. Truman lay awake in Kansas City, worrying.

ONE THING THAT especially worried my father was the image of him as a bumbling, ineffectual second-rater that many newspapers had striven to construct during the campaign. In one of his few really bitter public remarks about the press, he accused the newspapers of creating a “straw man.” In those same remarks, he urged the papers to bury this straw man. My father was speaking, as he often did, with that amazing objectivity which enabled him to look upon himself as a public servant in a way that made listeners think he was talking about a separate person. I have never heard him express the least concern about the names he was called by other politicians or by newspaper editorialists. But at this point in his career, so close to assuming the enormous responsibilities of the presidency, he was concerned about the impact of his image - if I may use a word that was not in vogue at the time - on the nation.

One symptom of this derision and contempt was the failure of his Republican vice presidential opponent, Senator John Bricker of Ohio, to send Dad a telegram, conceding his defeat and offering his congratulations. In some ways, my father found this more unforgivable than Lloyd Stark’s failure to make a similar gesture, in the 1940 senatorial campaign. Stark at least had the excuse of bitter personal disappointment. Senator Bricker’s discourtesy seemed studied and much grosser. Fortunately, Mother and I, the grudge bearers of the family, did not have much time to worry about it. We were much too busy coping with our first experience as national figures. The mail was overwhelming. Everyone I had ever met seemed to have seized a pen or rushed to a typewriter to congratulate me. Total strangers also joined the avalanche. It was an exhausting job to answer all of them, especially in longhand. We were totally devoid of secretarial help.

My father, meanwhile, relaxed from the rigors of the campaign for a few days in Florida. But he too found he was operating on a larger political stage. “It was impossible for me to dodge the publicity,” he wrote to me. “Reporters were at the train at Memphis, Birmingham, Jacksonville, Tampa, and one was in the front yard when we arrived at the . . . house.” Worse, his luck with Florida weather remained bad. A cold wave followed him in from Kansas City. But he assured me he was nevertheless determined to “get three days rest, really and truly.”

As I have said, we stayed in Kansas City for election eve and Election Day, and the victory produced some pretty wild celebrating. I was rather shocked by the way some of the local politicians handled their liquor. I mentioned this to Dad in the letter I wrote to him while he was in Florida and got an interesting comment in return: “Your views on . . . the middle-aged soaks are exactly correct. I like people who can control their appetites and their mental balance. When that isn’t done, I hope you’ll always scratch them off your list.”

After Christmas, the only thing we thought about was the inauguration. Mother and I combed Kansas City for the better part of a week, trying to decide on a wardrobe. I finally settled on a simple gray-green woolen dress with a hat to match. For warmth, all I chose was a fur scarf, one of the worst mistakes I ever made in this department.

For my father, the inauguration was a political nightmare. President Roosevelt decided, because it was wartime and also because he wanted to conserve his strength, to take the oath of office on the South Portico of the White House. Only 7,800 people were invited - which sounds like a lot, until you remember we are a very big country. Moreover, only a handful of people could get blue tickets, which gave them a place on the portico.

On January 13, 1945, Dad wrote to his mother and sister:

My problem was not “prima donnas and stuffed shirts,” as Dad called his tormentors, but examinations. Inauguration week coincided with my midterms, and I had to somehow cram in a lot of studying while simultaneously entertaining aunts and uncles, friends and neighbors from Kansas City and Independence. They swirled through our five-room apartment on Connecticut Avenue at all hours of the day and night. To complicate my woes, Inauguration Day was incredibly miserable - a cold rain mixed with sleet came pouring out of a gloomy sky. Mother and I had quite a set-to over my determination to brave the icy downpour protected by nothing but my new fur scarf. I finally departed with them for the religious ceremonies at St. John’s Church across Lafayette Square from the White House, wearing my school coat and feeling very sorry for myself.

A few hours later, I stood on the South Portico between Mrs. Woodrow Wilson and Senator Harry Byrd of Virginia, shivering in the cold, looking for two girlfriends from Kansas City who were standing in the slush on the White House lawn. I had a terrifying examination in the governments of Europe, one of my major courses, on the following day, and my mind kept jumping from the history in which I was participating to the history I would have to write tomorrow. We were jammed on the portico, practically sardine style. The guest list for the portico was limited to 140, but a number of people who had been invited by the President to a religious service in the East Room - and who had
not
been invited to the inaugural ceremony - simply sashayed out on the portico, sans tickets, and joined - or more correctly, created - the crush.

My father took his oath of office first, administered in accordance with political tradition by the outgoing vice president, Henry Wallace. Meanwhile, just inside the French doors that led to the portico, President Roosevelt was arriving in a wheelchair, pushed by his son James in his marine uniform. The President looked haggard, his face pale, with dark circles under his eyes.

Out on the portico, James Roosevelt and a Secret Service man lifted the President to his feet, and he grasped the edge of the speaker’s lectern. He shook hands with my father, took his oath of office, and then gave one of the briefest inaugural addresses in history - less than five minutes in length. He stood coatless, the freezing wind whipping his hair. He looked so worn and spent, I suddenly found myself feeling depressed at the climax of a day I had thought was going to be one of the high points of my life.

Immediately after the inauguration ceremony, there was a tremendous buffet lunch for 1,805 guests. President Roosevelt could not face the ordeal of shaking hands with this mob and retired to the family rooms of the White House almost immediately. Dad, Mother, and Mrs. Roosevelt gamely threw themselves into the breach, shaking hands with every one of these frozen VIPs, who had endured the ceremony out on the windswept, slushy lawn.

A heavy percentage of the guests were from Missouri. The Roosevelts, in line with their desire to play down the inauguration, had generously given us the lion’s share of the guest list. Practically every politician above the precinct level had trekked to Washington to honor Missouri’s first vice president. Before the reception, there was a lot of kidding about the danger of light-fingered Missourians departing with most of the White House’s silver. A few days later, when the White House staff finished its post-inaugural silver count, only one spoon was missing. The honor of Missouri had survived temptation.

At the end of this first reception, my father retreated to his Senate office to call Mamma Truman and I stumbled home to take a nap. Mother and Mrs. Roosevelt stayed on duty to shake 678 more hands at a tea for second-rank VIPs - undersecretaries, Democratic National Committee people, and family friends. It was Mother’s first taste of White House receiving. Fortunately for her peace of mind, she had no idea she was practicing for seven and three-quarters years of these endurance contests.

This may sound strange, after what I have written about my father’s acute awareness of President Roosevelt’s failing health, at the nominating convention and on election night, but once the election was over, he simply stopped thinking about it. I cannot recall a single instance when he ever discussed the possibility of becoming President with Mother or me after he became vice president. This is perfectly understandable, if you think about it for a moment. Roosevelt was not
visibly
ill. He was failing, he looked alarmingly weary. But a good rest might easily restore him to health again - as far as Dad knew. In the first months of 1945, there was a distinct impression the President’s health had improved. Mother commented on it, with evident relief, in a letter to my cousin Ethel Noland. Another equally strong possibility was the end of the war. This would have lifted a tremendous burden from the President’s shoulders. Still another reason was the tradition that the vice president does not make comments or inquiries about the President’s health. The best way to avoid such a gaffe is by shutting the subject completely out of your mind. This is what my father tried to do.

Besides, he had very little time to think about the Big If. After two more hectic days of partying, I collapsed with a beautiful case of the flu, and he plunged into the vice presidency with his previously stated determination to make it more than a fifth-wheel job. Only two days after he was inaugurated, President Roosevelt departed for Yalta and left my father with a task that was to give him more than a few frantic moments. In a style that totally lacked his usual political finesse, the President fired Jesse Jones as Secretary of Commerce and asked Dad to persuade the Senate to approve Henry Wallace in his place. Defeated in his attempt to become the Democratic Party’s heir apparent, Wallace was now trying to use his great personal influence with the President to land one of the most powerful - if not the most powerful - jobs in the administration. The Secretary of Commerce also controlled the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which had already lent $18 billion to small and large businesses. There was still $8 billion left in the original war authorization.

Evidently President Roosevelt had hoped the switch could be accomplished behind the scenes. But Jesse Jones refused to go in peace. Instead, he released the President’s letter to him, in which FDR literally asked him to resign because Henry Wallace wanted his job. Jones also released his reply, a savagely sarcastic blast that practically called the President a hypocrite to his face. Jones also flatly declared Henry Wallace was not qualified to handle the vast financial responsibilities of the RFC.

Immediately, Senate liberals began girding their loins to do battle for Wallace. Southerners, conservatives, and Republicans - just about everyone who had any reason to oppose President Roosevelt - grouped around “Uncle Jesse,” as they called Jones. It looked for a while as if the Supreme Court packing donnybrook would be replayed, in wartime, with possibly disastrous consequences.

My father went to work. He dragged senator after senator down to his office to cajole him into going along with the President. But it soon became obvious there was no hope of the Senate giving Wallace control of the RFC. So Dad, with the help of Senator Tom Connally, worked out a shrewd compromise. He divided the two jobs and persuaded Senator Walter George of Georgia to introduce a bill creating an independent Federal Loan Administration. Then he returned to pushing Wallace as Secretary of Commerce, urgently reminding reluctant senators - and there were still plenty of these - that the Senate rarely if ever declined to give the President his own way on the selection of his Cabinet officers.

In these delicate maneuvers, Wallace was his usual uncooperative self. He went to New York to attend a rally on his behalf and made a truculent speech, insisting he had a right to both jobs. Only desperate efforts on the part of Dad and Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, Wallace’s chief Senate supporter, held together a tremulous majority. But there were still some hair-raising moments ahead. My father worked out with Majority Leader Alben Barkley a strategy which called for swift action on Senator Barkley’s part. As soon as the Senate convened on February 1, he was supposed to introduce the George bill, which would eliminate the chief objection to Wallace as Secretary of Commerce. But the anti-Wallace senators called for an executive session, which would have forced an immediate vote on Wallace for both jobs. That dramatic roll call ended in a tie, forty-two to forty-two, in effect a victory for the administration, and Senator Barkley rose to introduce the George bill. But Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, one of the Senate’s shrewdest parliamentarians, leaped to his feet to ask Barkley if he would yield, so Senator Taft could change his vote from yea to nay.