Truman (58 page)

“Jim Curley got up to make his little speech,” remembered Matt Connelly, for whom it was one of the memorable moments of the campaign, “and [he] said, ‘We have a very unusual candidate for Vice President. He goes to California, the word comes back to us he’s a Jew; he arrives in the Midwest, the word comes back to us that he’s a member of the Klan.’ And he turned, ‘Mr. Vice President, I invite you to join my lodge, The Ancient Order of Hibernians. We’d be glad to have you as one of our members, and I assure you, we will get out the vote.’

“I said to Mr. Truman, ‘That takes care of the Klan.’ ”

But it was the old Pendergast association that dogged him most, and especially when coupled with the question of Roosevelt’s health. Attacks by the Chicago
Tribune
were sharpest of all:

To the immense relief of the Trumans, nothing was said of the death of Bess’s father, and Truman’s anger erupted only over remarks by Republican Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, the glamorous wife of publisher Henry Luce, who, poking fun at the idea of Bess working on his Senate staff, began calling her “Payroll Bess.” If, as Truman had said, his mother didn’t bring him up to be a statesman, then she would not be disappointed, Mrs. Luce also declared.

In the normal rough-and-tumble of a campaign, Truman could take nearly anything said about him, but at any mention of his family, even an implied slight, he got “hotter than a depot stove.” He would have nothing but contempt for Clare Boothe Luce from that point on, commenting privately that she spelled her name L-O-O-S-E.

Between Truman and the White House there was little or no communication. The real battle, after all, was the one Roosevelt was waging against Dewey, and to the delight of those close to the President, the battle revived him wonderfully. Though he made few public appearances, one before the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in Washington was considered the best campaign speech of his entire career. He seemed his old self, spontaneously adding a little extra to the prepared text, delivering it with great, feigned gravity and savoring the moment as only a seasoned performer could:

As Robert Sherwood, his speechwriter, later observed, the Fala story put the needed excitement into the campaign. “The champ” was back. Ed Flynn, after all his anguish and exertions over the choice of a Vice President, would later tell friends that Roosevelt was in such fine form in the campaign that he could have won had he put Fala on the ticket.

The night the President spoke in Chicago, more than a hundred thousand people packed Soldier Field. He “improved visibly in strength and resilience,” recalled Sherwood. In New York, in the face of a cold driving rain, he rode for hours in an open car, bare-headed, so millions of people could see him with their own eyes and know he was all right. It was an ordeal that could have put a younger, stronger man in the hospital, but at the end Roosevelt seemed exhilarated, glad for the chance to show what he could take.

Dewey had raised the specter of Communist infiltration in Washington. “Now…with the aid of Sidney Hillman…the Communists are seizing control of the New Deal…to control the Government of the United States,” Dewey warned. Roosevelt had grown to detest Dewey as he never had a political opponent, and like the driving rain, this too seemed to brace him up.

The Trumans waited out the returns in Kansas City, in a suite at the Muehlebach, a throng of old political and Battery D friends on hand to help celebrate, and before the long night ended a large number of them were extremely drunk. “I was shocked,” remembered Margaret.

One old political friend from southwest Missouri, Harry Easley, stayed on with Truman after everyone had left. Stretched out on a bed, Truman talked of how lonely he had felt through the campaign. He had seen the look of death in Roosevelt’s face, Truman said. “And he knew…that he would be President before the term was out,” Easley remembered. “He said he was going to have to depend on his friends…people like me, he said…he knew that he was going to be the President of the United States, and I think it just scared the very devil out of him…even the thought of it.’

It was nearly four in the morning before Dewey conceded, and the victory was narrow, the closest presidential election since 1916. The Roosevelt-Truman ticket won by 3 million votes, carrying thirty-six of the forty-eight states. Yet a shift of just 300,000 votes in the right states would have elected Dewey and Bricker. Dewey asked all Americans to join him in the hope that “in the difficult years ahead Divine Providence will guide and protect the President of the United States.”

Roosevelt, before turning in at Hyde Park, said, “I still think he is a son-of-a-bitch.”

In deference to the tragedy of war and the President’s limited strength, the inauguration at noon, January 20, 1945, was a somber affair lasting less than fifteen minutes. It was the first wartime inauguration since Lincoln and the first ever held at the White House, the ceremony conducted on the South Portico before a crowd that included numbers of disabled soldiers. A thin crust of snow covered the lawn. The day was grim. There were no parades. The red jackets of the Marine Band were the one note of cheer in the whole chill, muted scene.

Truman, wrapped in a heavy dark blue overcoat, his shoulders braced as if at attention, took the oath of office from Henry Wallace, a serious look on his face. Then the President was helped to his feet by his Marine son Jimmy and a Secret Service agent. Roosevelt wore only a thin summer-weight suit and moved slowly, stiff-legged from his braces, until he could reach out and grip the edge of the lectern. Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, standing close by, was suddenly reminded of how her husband had looked when he went into his decline.

Truman was Vice President for eighty-two days and as busy as he had ever been, doing what was customarily expected of a Vice President—presiding over the Senate, attending parties and receptions, shaking endless numbers of hands. Roosevelt was out of the country until the end of February. He had slipped away from Washington in strictest secrecy just two days after the inauguration, traveling by rail to Norfolk, where the cruiser
Quincy
carried him to the Mediterranean Sea, to the island of Malta. From Malta he went by plane to the old Black Sea health resort of Yalta, for his second Big Three conference with Churchill and Stalin. Jimmy Byrnes had gone, too, as a special adviser, and so had Ed Flynn, as a kind of official stowaway. Vice President Truman had been told only that if it was “absolutely urgent,” he could make contact with the President through the White House. Since taking office, Truman had seen nothing of Roosevelt nor had he been told anything at all about the conference. Truman had not even met the new Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius.

To his surprise, however, he was enjoying himself. The round of social engagements not only didn’t bother him, he delighted in it. “The amiable Missourian with the touch of country in his voice and manner,” reported
Time,
“had conquered a schedule that had Mrs. Truman and Capitol society writers breathless.”

Perle Mesta, heir to Oklahoma oil money and the widow of a wealthy Pittsburgh toolmaker, gave a party in the Vice President’s honor that was described as “one of the most glittering in Washington’s long history of glittery parties.” Mrs. Mesta had come to Washington initially as a Republican, but “jumped the fence” to become a Democrat only the summer before, because the Republicans had refused to renominate Wendell Willkie. Now she had “taken up” Harry Truman.

“He circulated around in as comfortable, unpretentious, and agreeable manner as could be,” wrote the author John Gunther, after seeing Truman at a dinner party given by the foreign affairs editor of the Washington
Post.
Truman had been the first to arrive, Gunther noted.

Later, during an interview on the Hill, when Gunther asked him what he liked most, Truman answered, “People.”

Old friends on the Hill found him wholly unaffected by his new role, “homespun as ever.” He kept his same quarters in the Senate Office Building, Room 240, using the Vice President’s office in the Capitol mainly as a place to greet visitors, under the dazzle of a seven-tiered crystal chandelier.

For senators of both parties it became, as Charlie Ross wrote, “the most natural thing in the world” to drop in on Truman for a chat, or perhaps a nip of bourbon. “Many of them observed on these occasions that they had never been in the Vice President’s office when Henry Wallace was there. Wallace to them was otherworldly. He didn’t speak their language; Truman does.”

He, Bess, and Margaret were still living in the same five-room apartment at 4701 Connecticut Avenue at the same $120-a-month rent. The only difference was that his mother-in-law, Mrs. Wallace, had also moved in.

“Harry looks better than he has for ages—is really putting on weight,” Bess wrote to Ethel Noland. “Marg has gone to a picture show and Harry to a poker party,” she told Ethel in another letter. “Mother is practically asleep in her chair—so it’s very peaceful.”

The one new personal convenience with the job was an official car, a black Mercury limousine, and a driver, Tom Harty, who picked the Vice President up each morning and returned him home again at day’s end. En route to the Capitol, they would drop Margaret off at George Washington University, where she was in her junior year. Also, in the front seat rode a young man whom Truman at first assumed was a friend of Harty’s who needed a lift. He was George Drescher, the first Secret Service man to be assigned to a Vice President. The idea had been suggested by Harry Vaughan, who had returned from active duty with the Air Corps to become Truman’s military aide, another first for a Vice President. Appalled to find that no security arrangements had been made for Truman, Vaughan went to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and told him it seemed a bit incongruous to have seventy or a hundred people guarding the President and no one at all guarding the Vice President.

“I used to get down here to the office at 7 o’clock,” Truman wrote his mother and sister from his office.

What inner fear or concern Truman still felt over the President’s health, he seems to have kept to himself. Nor did he appear to be making any effort to prepare himself for Roosevelt’s death. It was as if all the dire speculation of the summer before, the nightmare he had had on the campaign train, were forgotten, locked away, now that the unthinkable was so much nearer at hand. The closest he came to open speculation on the future and its problems was an off-the-record conversation with a correspondent for
Time,
Frank McNaughton, who later wrote to his editor in New York: