Bess Truman Read online

  Dad’s letters to Mother during July and the first week in August read like local train schedules: “On Thursday, I’ll be in Keytesville at 2, Brunswick at 4 and Carrollton at 8.” At times, both sets of nerves got a little frayed. Bess lost her temper over the way Dad was barking orders and Dad apologized for offending her. “Guess I’m getting cranky,” he wrote.

  Dad zoomed back to Washington and reported every senator and office boy seemed to be rooting for him. He organized a few verbal uppercuts to Governor Stark’s jaw from his fellow solons. Senator Gillette, in charge of investigating campaigns, issued a blast accusing the governor of repeating his dirty trick of forcing state employees to contribute 5 percent of their salaries to his campaign. A half dozen other senators, including Majority Leader Barkley, came to Missouri and endorsed Senator Truman.

  Finally, with Mother and I feeling numb and Dad exhausted, we got to August 5, primary day. That night, we crowded around the radio in the living room at 219 North Delaware Street and listened to the returns. It was one of the worst nights of Bess’ life. The early returns gave Stark a 10,000-vote lead, which he held for several hours. Dad astonished her (and me) by announcing that he was sure he was going to win, and in the meantime, would get some badly needed sleep. He went to bed, leaving us and Grandmother Wallace and Fred and Christine up to our chins in gloom.

  I can still see the tears streaming down Bess’ face as we went to bed. A lot of salt water was running down my cheeks, too. But I realize now my disappointment did not come close to the anguish Mother was feeling. She had tried so hard to help Dad. She wanted him to win with a fierceness, an intensity that transcended anything else she had ever desired. She had come to love her life in Washington, D.C. She had become a success in her own right as a senator’s wife. To have it all demolished by the collapse of Tom Pendergast and the blindness, the simple-mindedness of a few newspapers.

  Bess went to bed, but I am sure there was no sleep for her. She lay in the darkness listening to Harry Truman’s steady breathing next to her. She wanted him to hold her, she wanted to hold him, but she knew how much he needed the sleep he was getting. She lay there, weeping.

  About 3:30 a.m., the silence in the old house was shattered by the clang of the telephone. Bess groped for the black noisemaker in the dark bedroom. “This is Dave Berenstein in St. Louis,” said a cheerful voice. “I’d like to congratulate the wife of the senator from Missouri.”

  “I don’t think that’s funny!” Bess snapped and slammed down the phone.

  Only as she sank back on her pillow did Bess remember that Berenstein was the Truman campaign manager in St. Louis. She charged into my room and shook me awake. “Marg,” she gasped. “I hope I’m not dreaming. I’ve just heard the most incredible news. Do you think it could be true?”

  I was too sleepy to make much sense out of Berenstein’s call. But that eager gentleman was soon back on the line, asking why Mrs. Truman had all but punctured his eardrum with that slam of the receiver. He had presumed that everyone would still be awake, rejoicing over the good news. Dad had carried St. Louis by 8,000 votes and was now ahead of Governor Stark.

  That meant there was no sleep for Mother or me for the rest of the night. We spent the morning glued to the radio, while Dad’s lead went up and down, sometimes sinking to a nerve-shredding handful of votes. Not until 11:00 a.m. was he declared winner by 7,936 votes.

  By that time, he was up, full of glowing, I-told-you-so ebullience. When Dad learned what Mother and I had gone through during the night, he was upset. It troubled him all the way back to Washington, where the Senate was still in session. “I’ll never forget Tuesday night if I live to be a thousand,” he told Bess. “My sweet daughter and my sweetheart were in such misery, it was torture to me.” He found himself wishing “I’d never made the fight.”

  Then he reached out to the fighter in Bess, the athlete’s competitive spirit that she never lost. “But it was a good fight.” He listed all the people who had been against him - the newspapers, state and city employees. He told her that Les Biffle, the secretary of the Senate, had said that in all his years in Washington, he had never seen a victory like it. Finally, Dad appealed to what mattered most to Mother, loyalty. “We found out who are our friends and it was worth it for that.”

  Then he added a familiar question: “When do you want to come on here?”

  Bess decided she had better remain in Missouri, because the Trumans had another election to win in November. It was a good thing she did, because lack of money, a quarrelsome staff, and a formidable Republican opponent soon had everyone anxious. In St. Louis, Dad’s administrative assistant Vic Messall and other Senate staffers got into a brawl with local politicians and called Bess to straighten it out. At another point, Dad had to implore Bess to protect him from Mary Chinn Chiles, head of his woman’s division, who was turning into a female Lloyd Stark in front of his eyes. She was demanding a post on the National Democratic Committee. “Next thing she’ll want to be senator or governor,” the candidate growled. Lloyd Stark did not help matters by sitting out the campaign without a single word or gesture of support.

  In Washington, the Senate sat far into the night, quarreling over the military conscription bill, the first ever proposed in peacetime. Prominent Americans such as John L. Lewis, head of the mine workers, and William Green, head of the AFL, denounced it, along with dozens of clergymen, college professors, and isolationist politicians from both houses of Congress. Dad fretted about the Wheeler-Truman Transportation Bill, which was still struggling against the international turmoil. Hitler was bombing London, and FDR was proclaiming the United States the arsenal of democracy. The conscription bill, providing for a one-year draft and requiring all men between twenty-one and thirty-five to register for military service, finally passed. In Missouri, Mary Chinn Chiles was in a sulk. Jim Pendergast, commanding the remnants of the old organization, was in a rage because Dad had decided, in the interest of party unity, to recommend Maurice Milligan for reappointment as federal attorney to serve out his term. He had had to resign to run for the Senate.

  “If I can just do something to make the state chairman and McDaniel [Larry McDaniel, the Democratic candidate for governor] angry I’ll be batting 100%,” Dad wrote. Bess, the family baseball fan, knew he meant 1,000 percent. Getting mad himself, Senator Truman made a significant declaration, “I don’t care much of a damn what they do or don’t from here out. I’m going to do as I please and they can like it or not as they choose. I’ve spent my life pleasing people, doing things for ‘em and putting myself in embarrassing positions to save the party and the other fellow. Now I’ve quit. To hell with ‘em all.”

  When Bess read this letter in Missouri, she could have had only one comment. “Hurray.” She never had much patience with the egotism and power plays of the politicians who swirled through her life. But she never gave the public a glimpse of this side of her mind. Even more to her credit, she had let Dad deal with them his way.

  To make things completely cuckoo, Harriette Shields and her alcoholic husband, Leighton, whom Dad had shipped off to be U.S. attorney in Shanghai, showed up in Independence. Harriette’s health had broken down, either from Shanghai’s climate or from Leighton’s drinking or both. Bess could not resist feeling sorry for them. She sent them on to Washington with her blessing. There, Leighton grandly informed Dad that he wanted an appointment with the president. It is not clear whether he wanted to advise FDR on the situation in the Far East or simply ask him for a transfer. Senator Truman told Leighton that he had trouble getting an appointment for himself.

  This episode was not a total loss. It prompted another one of those declarations of independence that Senator Truman began issuing around this time. “I’m not going to see the president any more until February,” he told Bess, “and then he’s going to want to see me. I rather think from here out I’ll make him like it.”

  That one definitely got a hurrah from Bess. She never completely forgave FDR for the cynical gam
e he had played with Lloyd Stark in 1939-40. She thought - and I agree with her - that Harry Truman deserved better treatment from the president for the support Dad had given his domestic and international policies.

  The topper in this endless series of headaches was the Truman farm. A vindictive county court judge, elected on an anti-Pendergast “reform” ticket, foreclosed the mortgage of $35,000 Mamma Truman had borrowed from the county school fund, and after eighty years of struggle and heartbreak, the land was lost. The only motive was an attempt to embarrass Dad. In hard times, such mortgages were routinely extended and the unpaid interest added to the principal. Dad and Vivian had to move Mamma Truman to a small house in Grandview. Bess did her best to help with the transition, for which Dad was grateful. “I’m glad you went to see Mamma,” he wrote. “No matter how much front she puts on, she hates to leave the farm.”

  By the end of September, the combination of campaigning and getting bills through the Senate had the candidate frazzled. “I was never so tired in my life,” he wrote to Bess. “My desk looks like a cyclone had piled up all the unanswered letters in the world. The Senate will not adjourn.” He found himself wishing he had just bundled her up and taken her back to Washington with him. “I need somebody I can tell my troubles to most awful bad - and it looks like you are it.”

  In spite of these fits of gloom, the senator was soon home in Missouri, and if he stopped long enough to tell his troubles to Bess, no one except her noticed it. Once more, there was a whirlwind campaign, but this time, election night was a celebration instead of a sob session. Dad coasted to a relatively easy victory over his Republican opponent, winning by more than 40,000 votes. It was a campaign that attracted national attention. Harry Truman won without the support of a single major newspaper or political organization. He had proved he was a political power in his own right.

  For Bess, this was a source of pride in itself. But from her woman’s point of view, this 1940 victory also meant something equally important. After almost twenty years of political and economic peril (one writer described Dad as a man who had been doing a high-wire act without a net), the Trumans had achieved safety, permanence, security, and - not unimportant to Mother - just the right amount of prestige. She liked being the wife of the senator from Missouri. She looked forward to playing that pleasant role for the rest of her life.

  Our Christmas on North Delaware Street in 1940 was one of the happiest of many happy holidays in that stately old house. We had the usual huge tree, and no one felt any need to scrimp on the presents. Little more than a week later, on January 3, 1941, Mother and I were back in Washington to see Dad sworn in for his second term while the entire U.S. Senate rose to give him a standing ovation.

  In our five-room apartment at 4701 Connecticut Avenue, Bess tackled redecorating with the air of a woman who was thinking of the place as home. I remember one exhausting day when we moved every piece of furniture in the house from one side of the room to the other for about five hours before she decided things looked right. No. 4701 was a pleasant place to live. We had a second-floor apartment with French doors that opened onto a small porch. Writing to her mother, who did not want to hear anything nice about Washington, Bess described the porch as “2X4.” It was a little bigger than that. In the spring, irises and azaleas bloomed on the lawn around us. It was hardly the equal of 219 North Delaware Street, but it was several dozen degrees nicer than your ordinary city apartment.

  Another nice thing about 4701 was a nearby restaurant to which the Trumans could take guests. Although Bess did our everyday cooking, she had neither the inclination nor the talent for major efforts in the kitchen. In this respect, she remained her mother’s daughter. One day, in the fall of 1941, someone sent us a couple of ducks. “I guess I’ll have to experiment on them tomorrow,” she told her mother. “It sure will be an experiment.”

  It sure was. The result probably accounts for my lifelong hatred of duck. I was seventeen years old at this point and rapidly acquiring my own opinions about everything from entrees to escorts. I had a lively circle of friends at Gunston Hall. We tooled around town on our own, going to the movies or visiting back and forth. For me, Washington had become a second home, too.

  With less need to worry about entertaining me, Bess plunged into the capital’s senatorial social life. In mid-January, she gave her mother a rundown of her schedule. It included three teas and a supper on Sunday, a luncheon, a tea, and a dinner at the Mayflower on Monday. It made me tired just reading it.

  In February, she went to a formal dinner at the White House. As the third-ranking woman present, she sat next to young Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg. He and his parents had been invited to Washington to demonstrate American disapproval of the Nazi seizure of their small country. “He is just twenty one and is as nice and attractive and democratic as any young American,” Bess told her mother. On her left sat Senator Maloney of Connecticut. “He’s lots of fun so I really enjoyed it,” she wrote.

  A few days later, she took Ernestine Gentry, a youngish sister-in-law of her friend Mary Shaw, to a Congressional Club tea for Mrs. Roosevelt. Ernestine, who could be rather uppity to people Bess’ age, was properly thrilled. Although by this time Eleanor Roosevelt had come under fierce attack for her support of people and causes that conservatives considered left wing, I never heard Mother say a word of criticism against her. She particularly admired the way she tried to give women a stronger voice in American politics.

  Although she stayed behind the scenes, Bess’ interest in politics remained intense. Congress was still divided between isolationists and interventionists, but both sides agreed that the United States needed a strong national defense. They voted stupendous sums to build a two-ocean navy, to expand steel, aluminum, and other defense-related industries, and to build training camps for the men being drafted into the army. The total appropriation came to something like $25 billion, and no one seemed to know or care how it was being spent.

  Across Dad’s desk in those first weeks of 1941 came a lot of letters from Missourians telling him of the shocking waste and corruption visible even to a casual observer in the construction of Fort Leonard Wood, in Pulaski County. What made him even angrier was the discovery that 90 percent of the defense dollars were going to giant corporations, most of them in the Northeast. One night, he sat down and discussed the situation with Bess. He did not want to embarrass the president at this crucial period, when the isolationists were looking for ammunition to smear him, but he was convinced that the corruption and misdirection of the defense program could wind up wrecking the Democratic Party. Bess reminded him that Harry Truman had quite a reputation as an investigator of large, complex businesses, and he had promised her - and himself - that after his reelection he was not going to worry about what FDR thought.

  On February 10, 1941, Dad made a fateful speech in the Senate proposing the creation of a committee to investigate these enormous defense expenditures. That was the moment when history, that faceless, unpredictable force that kept butting into Bess’ life, began making mincemeat of her hopes for a serene existence as a senator’s wife.

  The game began with some typical Roosevelt maneuvers. The president told the press he warmly welcomed Senator Truman’s idea and simultaneously had his man on the Senate Audit and Control Committee bottle it up. But FDR was finally forced to swallow the proposal in order to head off a dedicated Roosevelt hater, Georgia Congressman E. Eugene Cox, who was putting together a similar committee in the House. The president next tried to cripple the investigation before it started by having the Audit and Control boys vote the Truman Committee a munificent $15,000 - to investigate $25 billion.

  This time, FDR was dealing with an old pro who had vowed to do things his way and make the president like it. Dad promptly hired a staff and arranged to pay them by stashing them on the payrolls of various government agencies, an easy thing to do if you have senatorial clout. Dad made sure he had that vital ingredient by refusing to let Majority Leader Alben Barkley and V
ice President Henry Wallace shove a lot of Roosevelt yes-men onto his committee. Instead, he chose Carl Hatch of New Mexico and Mon Wallgren of Washington, who shared Harry Truman’s fondness for hard work and his dislike of grandstanding. He also chose Tom Connally of Texas and James Mead of New York, two veteran senators with tremendous influence in the government. They were Roosevelt supporters, but not yes-men.

  For his first target, Dad went after the new army camps. The dirt he turned up stunned Washington and the country. The government was letting architects and contractors earn as much as 1,669 percent above their average annual profits. Time-and-a-half and double-time wages at Fort Meade in Maryland cost $1,803,280. Dad soon had documented $100 million worth of waste in the $1 billion camp-building program.

  When Mother and I went home to Independence for a visit during my spring break from Gunston Hall, Dad wrote Bess that a procession of Roosevelt appointees had “come down to tell me how to run my committee.” He ignored them and went back to the Senate to ask for more money to continue his investigations. This time he got $85,000.

  At home, Bess found herself coping with several crises. Mamma Truman had fallen in her unfamiliar new house and broken her hip, inspiring Dad to wrathful commentary on the local politicians who had forced her to sell the farm. Christine Wallace was also ill, and we had to pitch in with the care and feeding of her two children. Dad had gotten Fred Wallace a job at the Federal Housing Authority, but he still preferred to live at home with his mother, to his wife Chris’ considerable distress.

  The spring visit had become a necessity to calm and console Madge Wallace. She was now in her eightieth year and was becoming childishly dependent on Bess. Once, in January 1941, Bess telephoned when Madge was lying down. Later in the day, Bess telephoned again, and Madge told her she was “about to have a good cry” because she did not get a chance to talk to her. Swelling in her ankles forced her to stay in bed, and she “lay there all day thinking of you and Margaret.” Even phone calls did not help much. In May, she told Bess that one had made her “homesick.”