Harry Truman (43 page)

On November 1, with the cold winter weather just beginning across the nation, Lewis announced he considered the contract null and void and was taking his miners out on strike. Apparently Lewis was gambling on two possibilities - that he could embarrass the President of the United States into more humiliating concessions on election eve or that he could browbeat the electorate into sending a pro-labor Congress to Washington - possibly both. Mr. Lewis was an arrogant man whose ambitions were almost boundless.

This time, Mr. Lewis lost both his gambles. The President of the United States refused to make a single concession to settle the illegal strike. The American voters were enraged by Mr. Lewis’s arrogant flouting of the law and obvious assumption he was a privileged character. They voted pro-labor Democrats into oblivion by the dozen and sent to Congress a thoroughly reactionary majority.

On Wednesday, November 6, my father awoke aboard his special train, en route to Washington, and discovered he had a bad cold and a Republican Congress. He immediately decided he needed a new national chairman for the Democratic Party and a new strategy to deal with what promised to be a thoroughly hostile Congress and a dispirited Democratic Party. Only 34 million people had voted in the election - which meant millions of Democrats had stayed home.

Defeatism was rampant. On November 7, Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas made the brilliant suggestion that my father appoint Senator Arthur Vandenberg as Secretary of State and then resign, making Senator Vandenberg President, so the Republicans could control both the executive and the legislative branches of the government. Dad ignored this bit of idiocy. Believe it or not, some reporters took it seriously, and Charlie Ross, in response to questions, had to issue a formal denial that the President planned to resign. Dad also quietly rejected less pretentious advice offered him by James Forrestal, his Secretary of the Navy. Forrestal urged him to try to work out a nonpartisan approach with Congress in crucial areas, such as labor legislation, foreign affairs, Palestine, and national defense. “He agreed to the principle,” Forrestal noted in his diary, “but I am a little depressed by the fact that he seems to feel that not much will come of such an attempt, that political maneuvering is inevitable, politics in our government being what they are.”

My father knew what was coming from the Republican Congress, and he moved swiftly and decisively to seize the political initiative. On November 11, 1946, he issued a statement pledging his cooperation with Congress and calling for the exercise of wisdom and restraint and the “constant determination to place the interest of our country above all other interests.”

That same day, he wrote one of his interesting letters to his mother and sister. It is a good glimpse of the constant mixture of domestic and international politics in Dad’s mind.

Meanwhile, Dad’s cold persisted, and he developed a most annoying cough. Dr. Graham began to worry about him and decreed a vacation was in order. Where does a President vacation? It was no small task to find a place that could accommodate twenty or thirty reporters, a staff of sixteen, and another fifteen or sixteen Secret Service men. After some investigation, Dad made a choice which he never regretted - the submarine base at Key West, Florida. On November 18, he wrote his mother and sister from there, obviously delighted with the place:

Refreshed by five days of sun and thoroughly imbued with the determination expressed in the last line of this letter, my father flew home to do battle with John L. Lewis. He had kept in close touch with the efforts to head off the strike, which Lewis had set for November 20. In a memorandum he wrote on December 11, Dad described the strategy which he had outlined: “I discussed the situation with the secretaries in the White House at the morning meeting after the strike call, and informed them it was a fight to the finish. At the Cabinet meeting on Friday, before the election, the Attorney General was instructed to take such legal steps as would protect the government. Discussions were held with the Cabinet and special meetings were called. . . . The instructions were fight to the finish.”

My father knew exactly what Lewis had in mind. The Secretary of the Interior, Julius Krug, told him Lewis was boasting he would “get Krug first . . . and then he would wait until 1948 to get the President.” In a meeting at Key West, Dad and his aides hammered out the final strategy. Two days before Lewis’s strike call date, Attorney General Tom Clark served an injunction on Lewis, issued by Federal District Judge T. Allen Goldsborough. Lewis defied it, and his miners struck. The government’s lawyers argued it was a strike against the government, and hence the injunction was legal. The court found in favor of this argument, and Lewis was ordered to stand trial for contempt. On December 4, 1946, he was fined $10,000 personally, and the union was fined $3,500,000.

“Bushy-browed John L.,” as Dad called him in one of his letters around this time, announced he would appeal to the Supreme Court. Charlie Ross announced the President was going on the air that night to make a direct appeal to the miners to go back to work. Faced with the threat of annihilation of his prestige and authority as a union leader, Lewis capitulated. On December 7, he ordered his miners back to work “immediately, under the wages and conditions of employment in existence on and before November 20, 1946.” Two days later, Dad wrote to his mother and sister: “Well, John L. had to fold up. He couldn’t take the gaff. No bully can. Now I have the auto workers, steel workers and RR men to look forward to. They’ll get the same treatment if they act the same way.”

From now on there would be no doubt in anyone’s mind about who was in charge of the White House.

AS YOU CAN see from the preceding exchange, the Trumans did not let John L. Lewis, Stalin, Molotov, Henry Wallace, et al., ruin their high spirits. When we were together as a family, we acted pretty much as we always did, constantly teasing each other and playing jokes at every opportunity. Dad’s favorite sport was selecting the most outrageous tie he could find - I sometimes think he sent General Vaughan or one of his other pals out on special expeditions to find some of his worst horrors - and wearing it to breakfast. He would sit there with great aplomb, ignoring insults about his color blindness and bad taste from Mother and me.

One night, early in our White House sojourn, I invited two friends to spend the night with me in Lincoln’s bed. Dad heard about it and conjured up a fiendish plan to scare the life out of us. Mayes, one of the White House butlers, was a tall, rather cadaverous man who resembled Old Abe. Dad decided to put his presidential high hat on Mayes’s head and pop him in the doorway of our room at the stroke of midnight. Mr. President rushed downstairs in search of his accomplice and discovered to his chagrin Mayes was not on duty. Mayes later confided to me he had no desire whatsoever to play an apparition and was glad he was not working that night.

Although he treated the subject lightly, Dad sometimes liked to think the White House was haunted. Early in September 1946, he sent Mother a letter describing how he woke up in the middle of the night, distinctly hearing a knock on the door of his bedroom. He listened, and the sound was repeated. He got up and went to the door, opened it, and nothing was there. But he heard the sound of footsteps moving down the hall. In a letter to me, written around the same time, he said: “I told your mother a “hant” story which you’d better have her read to you. This old place cracks and pops all night long and you can very well imagine that old Jackson or Andy Johnson or some other ghost is walking. Why they’d want to come back here I could never understand. It’s a nice prison but a prison nevertheless. No man in his right mind would want to come here of his own accord.”

A few days later, he commented again about visiting spirits: “Now about those ghosts. I’m sure they’re here and I’m not half so alarmed at meeting up with any of them as I am at having to meet the live nuts I have to see every day. I am sure old Andy could give me some good advice and probably teach me some good swear words to use on Molotov and de Gaulle. And I am sure old Grover Cleveland could tell me some choice remarks to make to some political leaders . . . I know. So I won’t lock my doors or bar them either if any of the old coots in the pictures out in the hall want to come out of their frames for a friendly chat.”

One night early in 1946, as we were getting ready for a big reception at the White House, Dad remarked that Senator Bricker was among the invited guests. This led to some rather acid comments about the senator’s failure to send him a congratulatory telegram after the 1944 elections.

Only a day or two earlier, King Ibn Saud of Arabia had sent Dad a magnificent gold scimitar with a priceless diamond in the handle surrounded by emeralds and rubies. “If you trip old Bricker when he comes down the receiving line,” Dad said to Mother, “I’ll give you the diamond out of old Saud’s sword.”

“Why don’t you ask me?” I said. I had already spent several hours mentally wearing that diamond.

“I wouldn’t ask you. You’d do it,” Dad said.

“I’ll do it even for one of the smaller stones in the setting.”

At this point, Mother ordered both of us to behave. But I kept right on offering to do the dirty deed. By the time Senator Bricker appeared for his ceremonial handshake, Dad was thoroughly unnerved and kept eyeing me as he and Mother shook hands with the guests. He really thought I was going to upend the old reactionary.

When Dad is in a sarcastic mood, he can be deliciously wry. His mother was upset by a local newspaper attack on him. He told her: “They can’t do me any harm now. As Ed McKim says, there’s no promotion in this job.” Early in June 1946, Mother and I made our annual retreat to Independence. In one of his first letters to us, he described some emergency repairs on the White House:

He then discussed some of our touchy relatives and said: “I don’t know what the Trumans and the Wallaces and the Campbells and the Gates and the others of the clan will do for a clearing house when your Dad’s gone. I don’t suppose you’d take over? It’s a lot of fun making prima donnas happy - male and female. . . . Look at the Supreme Court - and my Cabinet.”

In the middle of July 1946, Dad enjoyed his first break in his crisis-filled schedule. For the better part of two weeks, nothing really worth mentioning happened. In an ironic mood, he told his mother: “The foreign affairs and even domestic affairs have been so quiet and as they should be that I have had to start a political fight to give me a chance to do something. Had the tamest Cabinet Meeting today I’ve had since April 12, 1945. The Secretary of Labor said he hadn’t had a major strike to deal with since June 10th and that it looked as if he and Dr. Steelman would have to stir up some trouble so that they would have something to do. The Secretary of State opined that foreign affairs were in such a state that there were no waves not even in Trieste or Nanking. I’ve had the stomachache because things are so quiet. Haven’t had a crisis for two weeks. Looks like the country is going to hell or Republican.”

The political fight Dad mentioned was a battle between him and Congressman Roger C. Slaughter of the 5th Missouri Congressional District. Dad had always had a very strong personal interest in this district. It was the one he had helped to create in the early 1930s by lobbying in the Missouri State House - and then had taken away from him by Tom Pendergast. Slaughter had cast one of the key votes in the House Rules Committee that blocked the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Committee. At his news conference on July 18, Dad said Slaughter should not be renominated because he had opposed every bit of legislation the President of his own party had sent to Congress. “If Mr. Slaughter is right, I am wrong.”

To his mother, Dad wrote: “I gave Mr. Smart Alec Slaughter a kick in the pants yesterday and maybe I can find some more entertainment of the same kind. Suppose the K.C. Star and Indp. Examiner had a nice fit over it. Now we must beat him.”

Slaughter was defeated in the primary, but to Dad’s chagrin, a Republican beat the Democratic candidate in the fall election, and the 5th Missouri was in the hands of the enemy. This was mortifying. Privately, Dad told his mother he had been given very misleading advice about the strength of the local Democratic organization. The American presidency may be the most powerful office in the world, but it is not infinitely powerful, not in our rough and tumble American democracy.

Lest you think the presidency is nothing but frustration piled on frustration, this might be the place to let Dad tell the story of one of his most satisfying appointments - Fred Vinson as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

Among the minor pleasures of Dad’s off hours was reading letters from crackpots - what we all called nut mail. “There are immense numbers of nuts in the USA,” Dad remarked to his mother, after she had shipped him a batch of screwball letters. One day in the summer of 1946, while Dad was aboard the
Williamsburg
off Bermuda, he heard Dr. Graham say he always answered every letter he got, no matter how nutty it was. “I asked him to let me see some of them,” Dad told his mother in a letter a few days later. “He brought me about two dozen and I gave them one tear across the middle and threw them in the ocean. He almost wept because he thought I’d lose some prospective votes by his not answering their letters. He’s the most conscientious boy I ever saw. Just like his Dad.”

Earlier in 1946, an oddball broke into the National Gallery and cut a hole in Dad’s portrait. His comment on it, in a letter to me, was a little more serious: “Somebody went to the National Gallery and cut a hole in my picture last night. It is one the young Virginia painter made and a very good one. He evidently thought well of it because he was insuring it for $10,000. Somebody had gotten left out on meat [these were rationing days] or something like that. It is funny how human beings react. They always want more from their leaders than they can give them and they always like to put mud on their Presidents. That’s bad for the Presidents!”

Dad was even able to joke about serious things. One of his proudest accomplishments as President was the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency. Before it was established, intelligence was gathered by a half dozen agencies, and very little of it reached the President. One day, he sent the following memorandum to Admiral Leahy and Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers, the first CIA chief:

This refusal to let the seriousness of his work make him solemn was typical not only of Dad but of the men around him. Matt Connelly was one of the great all-time teasers. He loved to hang ridiculous nicknames on people and would solemnly introduce “Corporal” Vaughan and “Field Marshall” Canfil to befuddled visitors. Bill Hassett was known as the “Bishop” because he was a solemn, scholarly Catholic.