Harry Truman (27 page)

My father, sitting on the rostrum, instantly saw what Taft had in mind. Under the Senate’s rules, this would have given Senator Taft the right to call for another roll-call vote. Only one Wallace-hating senator had to change his mind and abandon the administration to send Wallace to ignominious defeat. For a moment, Senator Barkley started to say he would yield, then he realized in mid-sentence what Senator Taft had in mind and said he would not do so. Senator Taft objected violently and asked Dad for a ruling. Coolly, my father ruled that Senator Taft might make his motion “at any later time” and let Barkley keep the floor. The George bill was immediately introduced, and the senators demonstrated their opinion of Henry Wallace by voting seventy-two to twelve to take the RFC out of his hands. A few weeks later Wallace was confirmed as Secretary of Commerce.

Woodrow Wilson may have described the vice presidency as an office of “anomalous insignificance and curious uncertainty.” But Dad also found it was hard work. In this letter to his mother and sister, he paints a good picture of his vice presidential routine:

In another letter around this time, he wrote: “We are having about the usual merry-go-round here. I was so tired last night I could hardly walk. Went to bed at nine o’clock and slept right through to seven this morning.”

Another reason for this exhaustion was the vice president’s social schedule. According to protocol, a veep outranks everyone in Washington but the President. Hostesses like to have him at their parties, and it is assumed, since he supposedly has nothing to do, he will accept any and all invitations. John Garner had brusquely ignored this assumption and lived an intensely private life. But my father loved parties and people, and he cheerfully accepted more invitations than any other vice president in recent memory. For a while, scarcely a night went by without him and Mother departing from our Connecticut Avenue apartment, looking tremendously regal in evening dress.

Sometimes I went along to luncheons. I can’t say I really enjoyed myself very often. Because of protocol, Dad and Mother would be sitting at the head of the table, and I would be with the commoners, often surrounded by complete strangers. A fussy eater, I tended to turn up my nose at dishes such as cold poached salmon en gelé and often went home hungry.

One invitation my father regretted accepting was to a National Press Club party. Someone asked him to play the piano, and he cheerfully obliged. Actress Lauren Bacall, also a guest, climbed onto the top of the upright and gave him one of her sultriest stares. Dad, sensing trouble, tried to look the other way, giving the impression he was playing from sheet music somewhere off to his left. But he was trapped between his instinctive politeness, which made it impossible for him to hurt Miss Bacall’s feelings, and his equally instinctive political awareness he was flirting, not with Miss Bacall, but with trouble.

Miss Bacall was merely obeying her press agent, who had seen an excellent opportunity for a publicity-winning picture. The agent was right. The picture was splashed through newspapers and magazines for the next month. Mother did not care for it much. She thought it made Dad look undignified and much too carefree for the vice president of a nation at war.

Generally, my father had a good time as vice president without getting into trouble. He continued to attend luncheon meetings of Lowell Mason’s Chowder, Marching and Baseball Club. At one of these he pulled a typical gag on his protocol-conscious fellow politicians. When Dad arrived for lunch, he unobtrusively took a seat at the very bottom of the table, along with Billy Richardson, who was vice president of the Washington Senators. Sam Rayburn was sitting on Mason’s right, and on his left was a very junior senator. After grace, Matt Connelly arose and issued a vehement protest about the seating order. “Mr. Chairman,” Matt solemnly declared, “it seems to me that you know nothing whatever about protocol, because here you have the vice president sitting way down here at the bottom of the table, furthest from the salt, and you’ve got a very junior senator sitting on your left-hand side, and I think this is an affront to the vice president and I think you should correct this before we go ahead with our eating.”

Burton K. Wheeler of Montana rose to agree emphatically, and several other statesmen added wordy, senatorial-style affirmations. It looked as if Chairman Mason might be impeached before the luncheon began.

With suitable solemnity, Mason yielded. “You’re right and I apologize,” he said. “Therefore, I shall ask the vice president to come up and sit here next to me.”

Whereupon Billy Richardson arose, walked up the room, and sat down next to Mason. The vice president of the United States, who had cooked up the whole intricate joke, sat there laughing. It was Dad’s way of saying nothing had changed between him and his old friends.

To underscore this point, he declined to take over the swanky “gold plated” vice president’s office in the Capitol and remained in his familiar four rooms in the Senate Office Building. He knew nothing offended a politician more than the feeling someone in a higher office was getting a swelled head or putting on the dog. But things beyond the world of personal relationships had changed and as the weeks passed Dad got several blunt reminders of this fact.

One day he was sitting in the small office the vice president has at his disposal in the Capitol. It is just off the Senate floor. My father noticed a young man sitting outside his office. He had been there most of the day. “Who is that young fellow who’s been out there, does he want to see me?” Dad asked Harry Vaughan, who had recently returned from Australia.

“No, he doesn’t want to see you,” said General Vaughan.

“Who is he?”

“Secret Service.”

“Well, what the hell is this?” Dad said. “When did this happen?”

“It started a day or two ago.”

“Bring him in,” Dad said. “I ought to meet him.”

He shook hands with the young man, George Drescher, destined to be in charge of the White House Secret Service detail. “I don’t see much sense in this but if you fellows are detailed to do it, I’ll give you all the cooperation I can,” he said.

Thereafter, a Secret Service man rode to work with him each day in the front seat of his official car.

The Secret Service guard, a very good idea, originated with General Vaughan. My father had made him his military aide - the first in the history of the vice presidency. Looking over Dad’s security arrangements and knowing President Roosevelt’s precarious health, General Vaughan was appalled. He went to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and said, “Mr. Secretary, it seems a little bit incongruous to me to have seventy-five or a hundred people guarding the President and absolutely no one guarding the vice president.”

Morgenthau agreed and detailed three men. This was the beginning of our long, often hectic, but never unfriendly relationship with the Secret Service, probably the finest, most dedicated group of men I have ever met.

Another more alarming reminder of his role in the government hit my father on February 20. A rumor swept the Capitol that President Roosevelt had died. He was en route home from Yalta aboard the USS
Quincy
at this time. Badly shaken, Dad called the White House and learned there had, indeed, been a death in the presidential party - Major General Edwin M. “Pa” Watson, the President’s appointments secretary, had died at sea. With a sigh of relief, Dad went back to being “a political eunuch,” as he playfully called the vice presidency at times.

Occasionally we took a trip with Dad when he had a weekend speaking engagement. One of these expeditions brought us to New York, where he wrote a rather interesting letter to his mother and sister Mary on the stationery of the old Sherry Netherland Hotel.

Another trip my father took around this time had a more melancholy purpose. On January 26, Tom Pendergast died in Kansas City. More than a few people wondered what Harry Truman would do. He was vice president of the United States now, and Tom Pendergast was an ex-convict. Dad did not hesitate for even five seconds. He flew to the funeral. “He was always my friend and I have always been his,” Dad said. He was recalling those lines he had written when he was county judge, asking himself who was closer to heaven, the Boss or the hypocrites who condemned him on Sunday and did business with him on Monday. The sad truth about Tom Pendergast, who many thought was still worth millions, was revealed when his estate was audited. After heavy debts were subtracted, there was barely $13,000 left to his heirs. Dad’s presence at the funeral meant a great deal to Pendergast’s family, and that is all Dad cared about.

Although my father tried not to think about President Roosevelt’s health, there were times when he could not avoid the unpleasant truth that the President was continuing to decline. On his return from Yalta, he reported to the Congress on his historic meeting with Prime Minister Churchill and Marshal Stalin. The President spoke seated in his wheelchair in the well of the House of Representatives. He looked terribly weary, and his speech was lifeless and rambling. Worse, he told Congress nothing about the Yalta agreements that they did not know already from reading the newspapers.

Not even my father could bring himself to comment favorably on the President’s Yalta speech. He had to resort to sarcasm, when some friendly reporters caught him in the hall just after the joint session of Congress adjourned.

“What did you think of the speech, Senator?” they asked, using the title Dad still preferred.

“One of the greatest ever given,” he replied and then joined the reporters in hearty laughter.

A few weeks later my father joined the President at the head table for the annual dinner of the White House Correspondents Association. Like everyone else, he was appalled by how bad Roosevelt looked and even more alarmed by his dazed, vacant manner.

After President Roosevelt’s return from Yalta, my father had a chance to see him only twice, on March 8 and March 19 at the White House. On neither visit did they discuss anything significant. The President continued to make no effort to bring Dad into the inner circle of the administration. This worried him deeply. But he was more concerned by the continued deterioration of the President’s relations with Congress. The brawl over Wallace had reawakened many old animosities, and the President’s insistence on a “work or fight” bill - which would have empowered the government to draft workers - also outraged many senators on both sides of the aisle. A grim example of the Senate’s hostility was the overwhelming rejection of liberal Democrat Aubrey Williams for the relatively minor post of Rural Electrification administrator. My father had done his best for Williams, but he, poor man, took the brunt of the pent-up resentment many senators still felt about being forced to vote for Henry Wallace as Secretary of Commerce.

In spite of denunciations by scores of senators, the administration still insisted on a compulsory manpower bill. Other senators seethed over the President’s refusal to take them into his confidence about Yalta and his seeming lack of interest in the way the Russians were installing a Communist government in Poland. Arthur Vandenberg, leader of the internationalistic Republicans, fulminated against what was happening in Poland. But not a word was spoken from the White House to reassure him.

On March 30, 1945, the Senate was thrown into turmoil when one of those “other little things” the President had vaguely referred to in his speech on Yalta was suddenly revealed. Britain had been promised six votes in the forthcoming United Nations, and Russia and the United States were supposed to get three each. Numerous senators denounced the idea, among them Senator Vandenberg, who was the key to Republican cooperation on a peace treaty and the Senate approval of the United Nations. My father was horrified by the clumsy handling of such a delicate issue. He was convinced America must not commit the blunder that wrecked the peace after World War I - a blunder that was in large part caused by President Wilson’s poor relations with the Senate.