Bess Truman Read online

  Dad’s readiness to take on legislative chores soon qualified him to join the ranks of those workhorses, who constitute the inner circle of the Senate. A strong signal of acceptance came from Vice President John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner. He began inviting Dad to his office, known as “the dog house,” to “strike a blow for liberty.” That was code for sharing some of Cactus Jack’s superb Kentucky bourbon. Dad also had won the vice president’s admiration by joining a group of freshmen senators led by Lewis Schwellenbach of Washington who declared their all-out support for the New Deal and their detestation of demagogues who were attacking it, in particular Senator Huey Long.

  One day, Senator Long made one of his interminable speeches to a mostly empty Senate. Vice President Garner was among those who departed early. He asked Dad to preside in his absence. When Huey finally finished ranting, he asked Dad what he thought of his speech. “I had to listen to you because I was in the chair and couldn’t walk out,” Dad said. That was the last time Senator Long spoke to Senator Truman.

  Senator Truman also was quietly but steadily informing people that he was not the senator from Pendergast. On June 26, for instance, he went to a dinner for the new senators at which Joe Guffey of Pennsylvania tried to twist everyone’s arm into voting for his coal bill, officially known as the Bituminous Coal Stabilization Act, which was aimed at shoring up the coal industry. Guffey, who had, Harry noted, “a desire to be a Senate boss,” had taken the precaution of calling Tom Pendergast to insure Senator Truman’s vote. “I think I’ll vote against it,” Harry told Bess, “although I was rather sold on it before that.”

  On July 9, came another forlorn hint - he was hoping that Bess and Margaret Strickler, my future voice teacher, would drive east. He already had told Bess that he had framed and hung her picture in the Senate office. “You sort of dominate the office in that place,” he told her. He kept forgetting to send specials so that she would get a letter on Sunday. “It seems a year since I’ve been home and I guess it’ll be two before I get there,” he sighed on July 6.

  A week later, he reported that Senator Borah of Idaho had told him that they would not adjourn until November. This drove the junior senator from Missouri to desperation. Along with endless Senate sessions and committee meetings and a daily deluge of visitors from home seeking favors, he added a search for a temporary apartment, which he would rent on August 1. On July 25, this idea produced two emotional letters. He was thinking of driving to Missouri over the weekend and bringing Bess and her daughter back. In the second letter, he became almost rhapsodic. “The more I think of that temporary apartment idea the more I like it,” he wrote.

  In the next paragraph, realism took over. He noted the difficulties they faced: “What will you do about Margaret’s school? If she’s here when it opens she’d have to start here and then you couldn’t go home and I’ll have to be at home for at least a month after adjournment.”

  Bess said no without qualifications or any attempt to work out a compromise. Senator Truman was left on his own in Washington, D.C. “I am somewhat disappointed that you don’t look with favor on coming back,” Harry wrote, surely the understatement of the decade. He admitted that a “sensible survey of the situation . . . would say that you are right. I’m not sensible about it. I couldn’t go to sleep until 1:30 thinking about you and home.”

  Out of this tangle of frustration and disappointment emerged one of Harry Truman’s greatest political mistakes. Mother has to share part of the blame for it, I fear. On July 24, 1935, Harry mentioned to Bess that Senator Bennett Clark had told him he had just met three Missourians, all of whom wanted to be governor next year. One of them was Lloyd Stark, a millionaire owner of a vast apple nursery. Earlier in the month, Dad had noted the unexpected arrival of Tom Pendergast in New York. He had returned from Europe a full month early. Senator Truman suspected he was ill, which turned out to be the case.

  Soon after the appearance of Lloyd Stark, Harry began to tell Bess that he was considering a trip to New York to see Pendergast. On July 28, after warning Bess to tell no one, he made the trip and told her why. He had found out that Charles Howell, who had run against Bennett Clark for the Senate in 1932 and had earned his enmity, was going to announce for governor, presuming on Boss Tom’s backing. Clark was certain to oppose him with a candidate of his own, and the Missouri Democratic Party would be in smithereens again. Dad proposed Stark as a compromise candidate. He was rich, he was honest, and he was begging for Pendergast’s support.

  It was clever politics at that time. It held the state party together when President Roosevelt was coming under increasingly fierce attack by conservative Democrats, who were numerous in Missouri. But we shall see that for Harry Truman personally, it was a horrendous mistake. If Bess had been in Washington, D.C., and had met Lloyd Stark, I think she might have persuaded her husband to be a bit more cautious about backing the man. I don’t attribute any superior ability to read character to her, but her general approach to life was warier, more pessimistic about human nature and the future than Harry Truman’s. She might have thought Lloyd Stark’s vows of eternal gratitude and warm tributes to Senator Truman’s political acumen were a little too good to be true.

  Suddenly, she had a letter from her husband informing her he was coming home to line up the state for Lloyd Stark. He zoomed through Independence, spending only a single day with her, and then whirled around the state and back to New York a week later, where he told Tom Pendergast that everyone now agreed that Stark was an excellent candidate for governor. Harry Truman was acting as the de facto leader of the Democratic Party in Missouri - at a time when the newspapers were still calling him the Pendergast’s errand boy. In her letters, Bess cheered him on; she particularly enjoyed the way he was pulling the whole thing off without a line of it getting into the newspapers.

  But the long separation continued to be a sore point. In his first letter after his return to Washington from his meteoric trip around Missouri, the senator noted that Bess had failed to kiss him goodbye when they went out to the car. He had wanted her to come back to Washington with him for the next few weeks, and she had refused. Bess heatedly reminded him that she had given him a very serious kiss in the house and was not in favor of public embraces in the first place. The lonely senator apologized, and for the last two weeks of the session, they debated where to go for a vacation.

  The fifty-one-year-old senator was badly in need of one. Always proud of his ability to digest enormous amounts of facts and remember them, he was shocked by a late August lapse. He had gotten a bill on the Interstate Commerce Committee calendar for Senator McCarran of Nevada, and the day it came up, he forgot what it was all about. He had to read the original proceedings in the Senate to recall the whole business - it had to do with putting airlines under the commerce committee. “That ought not to happen and wouldn’t have ten years ago,” he wrote. “Maybe I need a holiday.”

  Mother concurred. She was not finding 219 North Delaware restful. For the first time, she began criticizing some of her Wallace relatives. As we have seen, her sister-in-law Natalie chafed at living under her mother-in-law’s omnipresent eye. Natalie was difficult in other ways, too. On August 14, Bess wrote Harry: “Natalie and Frank are thinking about driving to Santa Fe about the 10th of September & asked if we would be interested in coming. I think she thinks the car would be too full tho’ with Marg along so I don’t see how we could go for I wouldn’t leave her here at home for that length of time.”

  Bess concluded they had better do their own traveling: “It would probably be more satisfactory anyway. They are both of them so old & crotchety.”

  As homecoming neared, Bess resumed her partnership role. She went down the list of the office staff and discussed with the senator who should come home with him and who should stay in Washington. She still maintained a proprietary interest in the staff. When John Griggs fell in love during the summer, Bess wanted to know all about it. She fretted, along with the senator, about secretary Mild
red Latimer’s boyfriend, William Dryden, who was an alcoholic and went berserk on a bus in late August. The senator took the time to visit him in the hospital. He told Bess how expertly Dryden played on Millie’s sympathy, perhaps hoping that the message might be applied closer to home. “He’s like all alcoholics - undependable,” he wrote.

  Bess preferred to discuss the legislative struggle in Washington, which she had been following closely. She thought it would be better if they did not pass the controversial wealth tax bill: “The Dem. party would probably profit considerably (& each one of you, personally) [she meant they would finally adjourn] if the thing doesn’t come to a vote this session.” Huey Long enlivened the closing days of the session by announcing that he was going to run for president in 1936. Bess wanted to know if he had “made any sort of stir” when he declared for the highest office, as if Franklin D. Roosevelt did not exist.

  In the last week in August, the Senate passed a staggering number of major bills. The Banking Act reorganized the Federal Reserve System, the Public Utility Holding Act transformed that industry, the Guffey-Snyder Coal Act did likewise for the miners, and a modified version of the Wealth Tax Act passed on the last day. Senator Truman voted for the utility bill in spite of a plea from Tom Pendergast and a warning from the Kansas City Journal Post, the only local newspaper that regularly supported the Democrats. The paper happened to be owned by an oil magnate who violently opposed the bill. The Journal castigated the junior senator on its editorial page as a “tool of the Roosevelt administration.”

  Earlier in the summer, discussing their finances, Harry had told Bess that he hoped to build a reputation as a senator that would “make the money successes look like cheese.” But he warned her that she would have to put up with a lot “because I won’t sell influence and I’m perfectly willing to be cussed if I’m right.” In spite of their differences in the ragged summer of 1935, on this crucial point Bess Wallace Truman was in complete agreement with the junior senator from Missouri. There was not a word of reproach for his defiance of the big boss and the newspapers. When he finally got home, I am quite certain that there were words of praise.

  I suspect, however, those words came somewhat later. The first thing on both their minds was some time together, away from everyone. In a matter of days, they were in the car heading for Colorado, accompanied only by their eleven-year-old daughter, who still was unaware of the drama that was swirling around her.

  When Senator Truman returned to Washington early in December of 1935, Bess and daughter remained in Independence. Bess refused to consider the possibility of celebrating Christmas any place but at 219 North Delaware Street. For the senator, this was not good politics. Every time he came home from Washington, he got his picture in the paper and was deluged with pleas for jobs and favors. The Depression still was rampant, in spite of all the things President Roosevelt was doing to fight it. “I dread the trip home,” he wrote to Bess, “because I know what they’ll do to me.”

  In fact, the fifty-one-year-old senator had found the three months he spent in Missouri almost as exhausting as the previous year in Washington, D.C. “You’ve no idea how tired I was,” he wrote in another letter. “I’m not starting home until Dec. 21st if that suits you. It’ll take me until then to rest up.”

  Meanwhile, the same lament that had dominated his letters in the summer began to reappear: “If you and Margey had just come on [to Washington] with me everything would be perfect.” There was an unintended dividend from his loneliness. He spent his evenings reading the interstate-commerce law and all the relevant court decisions and became an expert on the transportation business, which in those days mostly meant the railroads.

  During the day, the senator spent a lot of his time looking for an apartment. He found one for $130 a month and was so elated he could not sleep. There was no lease, but they could have it until June. Alas, Bess did not go back to Washington with him after Christmas. I had a cold, and she, fearing the worst as usual, decreed I was too ill to travel.

  This left the senator adrift in the heavy seas of the Washington social season. His tension headaches returned, and he went to a fancy party at Senator Guffey’s house and discovered almost everyone in white tie and tails. He and Sherman Minton of Indiana, who was also out of uniform, commiserated on their wifeless state. “He said never, never would he come to town again without Mrs. Minton,” Harry wrote.

  My cold refused to go away, and Bess refused to budge until I was in perfect health. One day I had a fever, the next day I didn’t. On January 14, I had recovered, and Bess began packing. But on the fifteenth, the chilblain palace on Delaware Street struck again, and I had another cold. The expedition was canceled. The senator said he had not been so disappointed since he lost the 1924 election for eastern judge of Jackson County. “I honestly believe that house is infected with cold germs or something,” he wrote, obliquely putting his finger on the real problem. “If you ever arrive, I’ll never let you out of my reach again.”

  When we finally got there the following week, there were more problems. Nettie, the maid and sometime cook who had been a big help the previous year, was getting married, and this made her unreliable. She began disappearing for several days at a time. From Independence came advice that ignored the Trumans’ tight budget. “Let the house go and take your dinners out,” Madge Wallace told Bess.

  I rediscovered my old friends at Gunston Hall and met a few new ones, so Bess was soon able to assure her mother that I was perfectly content - news that Madge seemed reluctant to believe. Along with the usual Washington whirl of parties and receptions, Bess undertook to shepherd two younger relatives, Elsie and Oscar Wells, who were living in Washington. He drank too much, and Bess tried, pretty much in vain, I think, to comfort her.

  Even more time-consuming were another couple, Harriette and Leighton Shields, who were about the same age as Harry and Bess. She was the daughter of a St. Louis businessman who had been a Truman supporter - one of the few in that city. But it was sentiment and not politics that attracted Bess to Harriette and Leighton. This was another marriage mangled by alcohol. Harriette was sweet and pretty; Leighton was a lawyer who had drunk his way out of a promising legal career in St. Louis and had a minor job, probably arranged by his father-in-law, with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

  The two decided that jointly they could convert the Trumans into a meal ticket. Bess felt so sorry for Harriette she could not resist urging her husband to do something for Leighton. While Bess could be hard on those who needed no help, sympathy overwhelmed her judgment when she saw a woman afflicted with a drinking husband.

  The couple had her feeling sorry for them in the spring of 1935. That summer, they had showered the bachelor senator with dinner invitations, and he reluctantly accepted one of them, after which he wryly reported to Bess that Leighton was sober for once. In December, he remarked that Leighton was coming into the office to see him. “I fear he is going to become a nuisance,” he warned. But he continued to put up with them because he sensed that Bess’ deepest feelings were involved.

  Leighton Shields wanted the senator to make him an assistant U.S. attorney. Instead, with a shrewdness that he always concealed beneath his plain farmer manner, Harry Truman found him a job that got Leighton and Harriette far away from Bess. He persuaded the Roosevelt administration to appoint Leighton the district attorney in Shanghai, China. There was a United States court there that handled cases involving U.S. residents of several Chinese ports at which Americans had treaty rights.

  Politics were relatively tranquil in the early months of 1936, in Congress, at least. Most of the action was in the U.S. Supreme Court, which began declaring unconstitutional much of the New Deal legislation that Senator Truman and his confreres had sweated over in the preceding summer. The outrage within the Roosevelt administration was immense. But most of the politicians’ thinking was focused on the presidential election that was coming in the fall. Roosevelt, wary about offending the party’s conservative
s and stunned by the court decisions, did not try to pass much innovative legislation.

  Once more, with hindsight to bolster us, we find it hard to believe that the Democrats were worried about the 1936 election. But most of the nation’s newspapers had swung sharply against Roosevelt, and the business community also had lost faith in his social engineering, which had failed to end the Depression. Father Coughlin had declared himself an all-out foe of the New Deal and launched a third-party movement with a galaxy of assorted extremists in his retinue. Huey Long had been killed by an assassin’s bullet in the lobby of the Louisiana State House in the fall of 1935, but no one knew where or how his discontented followers would vote.

  Harry Truman continued to work for a unified Democratic Party in Missouri, pushing the election of Lloyd Stark as governor as the best guarantee of this goal. Early in May, he dashed back to the state Democratic convention in Joplin, Missouri, where he continued to line up backers for Stark’s candidacy. He told Bess all about it in a letter crowded with names of forgotten politicians. He stopped in Independence to see Mrs. Wallace, and she told Bess what a pleasant surprise that was. Madge was beginning to look with a little more favor on her son-in-law.

  But Madge still was unreconciled to separation from Bess. On April 16, when Bess had been in Washington less than three months, her mother began asking her when she was coming home. This became a regular feature of succeeding letters that spring. Bess tried to defend herself by sending Madge a rundown of her schedule. “What a world of things you have to do this week!” Madge exclaimed. “How do you keep it up? I imagine you will enjoy the quiet and rest when you come home.” Underlining each word, she added: “How much longer will it be before you are here? We are growing very impatient.”

  By June 15, Bess again was back in Independence, and Senator Truman was wandering around their empty apartment, telling her how lonesome he was. He returned to the subject of buying a house. Their big fear was the possibility that they would not be able to sell it if he lost his bid for reelection four years hence. “I’m sick of this two-time move every year,” he wrote. “It costs more than we get for the stay in Washington no matter what we do, and that rent if we were smart enough, could be an investment.”