Bess Truman Read online

  Dad’s growing national fame did not diminish Mother’s interest in local politics. When Independence’s Mayor Roger Sermon fielded an anti-organization slate in the August 1942 primary and won, Mother steamed. “Geo. [her brother George Wallace] says a lot of Republicans voted in the Dem. primary so that explains some of Boss Sermon’s success. Don’t you think Mother can stop trading with that skunk after we leave? [Mayor Sermon ran the local grocery store.] Why, now, should he get a 100 a month out of our family?”

  When that Wallace temper got loose, it too was “somethin!”

  Dad took a somewhat cooler view of Mr. Sermon. He declined to jump on him with both feet. “I know how you feel about Roger,” he wrote. “But I can still get some political mileage out of him.” He meant in Missouri politics, which he was too busy to think about for the time being. He continued his battle royal with the steel industry, which had been allocating too much of its output to favored eastern customers.

  In spite of his often fierce criticism of politicians and businessmen, Dad told Mother he was surprised and pleased at the respect the committee was getting from “people in high places.” If he could avoid major mistakes, he was beginning to think he could “really help win the war. . . . That means fewer of our young men killed and a chance for a more honorable settlement. So you must pray for me to go the right way.”

  This was one of the few times Dad spoke to Mother so seriously in religious terms. Usually when they mentioned religion in their letters, they joshed each other about their failure to go to church often, or commented on the hypocrisy and inconsistency of so-called religious people. But the mounting intensity of the war, the tragedy it was bringing into so many lives, stirred my father’s fundamentally religious nature. Few people can resist religious feelings when they encounter the awesome power of history.

  These feelings undoubtedly had something to do with Dad’s growing distaste for social Washington, where guzzling and gorging continued while American soldiers and sailors were dying overseas. He told Bess he had ducked two major dinner invitations, one from Washington’s premier hostess, Evalyn Walsh McLean.

  “Too much society to suit me,” he wrote. “Maybe I’m nutty but I can’t see anything to those people but a bunch of drunks and parasites, most of whom would be better off in some institution.” He did not like being invited to their parties “as one of the animals for display purposes.” He was more interested in trying “to save the country for our grandchildren.”

  Mother let this blast pass without comment, but she was soon expressing her awe at the headlines the Truman Committee was gathering for its investigation into the steel shortage. She also worried about how hard Dad was working. “I am sure I should be in W. [Washington] to help out at the office,” she wrote, proof, if any is needed at this point, of how closely she was identifying with Dad’s personal war effort.

  The global conflict continued to absorb them on both a personal and a public level. Mother’s oldest brother, Frank Wallace, begged Dad for help when it became almost impossible to compete with the government to buy grain for the Waggoner-Gates mill. “Frank is on the verge of losing his mind over the mill,” Mother wrote. Dad threw his weight around a little and kept the business going. He flew up to Maine to inspect shipyards, giving Mother the airplane jitters.

  Harriette Shields and her husband Leighton reappeared in the headache department. He and several thousand other Americans were interned in Shanghai, and Harriette thought the Trumans should be able to get him out. Leighton finally managed it without their help and began camping in the senator’s office, demanding another job. Dad referred to him as “our persistent and pestiferous friend from China.” In response to Mother’s pleas, he finally got Leighton a job in the Attorney General’s office, so he could get on with the business of saving the country.

  The war began going better. The Americans landed in North Africa in November 1942, joined the British in wiping up the Afrika Corps, and then surged on to Sicily and Italy. In Russia, the Soviets captured an entire German army at Stalingrad early in 1943 and went over to the offensive. This only inspired Senator Truman to work harder to keep America’s defense plants pumping out planes and ships and tanks in ever more stupendous numbers.

  By April 1943, he was exhausted, and Mother insisted on another retreat to the army hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas for a round of tests and X-rays. She demanded to know the results of each examination. She was determined not to let Dad play any cute games on her. “What did the heart man say?” she wrote. “I noticed you skipped that report.” All the doctors could find was an acid stomach. The man was simply working too hard.

  In the spring of 1943, a family crisis absorbed a lot of Mother’s attention. Fred Wallace and his wife and children moved to Denver, where the government offered him a better job. The family decided they could not leave Grandmother Wallace alone at 219 North Delaware Street and moved her to a small apartment on nearby Maple Avenue. She hated it. She missed her garden, her spacious kitchen, the big old house that enabled her to feel she was still Madge Gates, in spite of her sorrow. Mother tried to manage things from Washington, writing worried letters asking whether Natalie and May Wallace were helping her shop, urging her not to overdo anything. She no doubt remembered what happened to Mamma Truman when she moved to unfamiliar quarters. This only multiplied her worry quotient.

  After a flurry of long distance calls, a new plan was drawn up. Grandmother would live with Fred and Christine in Denver. I doubt that this thrilled Christine, but Mother and I went out to Independence in June and took Grandmother and a lot of things Freddy and Chris had not been able to ship, such as bed linen, to Denver. We stayed for the better part of two months, giving me a chance to dip my toe into show business. I got a part in a local production of the operetta, the Countess Maritza. I was one of 365 gypsies who tripped about the outdoor stage (almost freezing to death) and sang our heads off about the joys of Romany life.

  Dad was stuck in Washington, dealing with committee and legislative business. He wrote me a rueful letter of apology for missing my debut in Denver. He also wrote to Mother around the same time saying that he was getting ready to head for Colorado. But it took him the better part of three weeks to get there. The delays involved a drunken member of the committee staff, car breakdowns en route, and several days of politicking in Kansas City.

  While she waited, and I performed, Bess did a slow burn. There are times when every woman feels neglected and unappreciated, and this was one of them. Senator Truman seemed to be putting everything in the world ahead of his family. When the senator finally reached Denver, Bess let him have it with both barrels.

  Dad was so upset that he told Mother he almost wished he had never become a senator. But he did not fight back. That was never his style in arguing with anyone, and especially with Mother. He simply put us on a train to Independence and headed for an investigation in Nebraska. From there he wrote hoping Bess was “all thawed out from Colorado.”

  My neglected debut and her worries about her mother may not have been the only reason for Bess’ angry outburst in Denver. In the midst of his delayed departure from Washington, Senator Truman wrote her one of his most important letters, from an historical point of view. It began with a report on his brother Vivian’s visit to the capital and Dad’s efforts to show him a good time.

  Dad praised the way Vivian’s children had grown up to be solid citizens. “It’s a remarkable job in this day not to raise a jitterbug or a zoot suiter.” He added that Vivian had had some complimentary remarks on his niece (that’s me). “He thought she had real character to be as nice and unaffected as she is under the handicap of her dad - then he said, ‘I guess her mother ought to have credit for that.’”

  With no warning, Dad switched to a meeting he and Vivian had had with Senator Guffey of Pennsylvania.

  He [Vivian] told Mr. Guffey a horse trade story that caused the senator from Pennsylvania to tell me today at lunch that perhaps that farmer brother of
mine could tell me how to make some high-up people here behave. The senator from Pennsylvania took me out into his beautiful back yard (garden in the capital) and confidentially wanted to know what I thought of [Vice President] Henry Wallace. I told him that Henry is the best Secretary of Agriculture we ever did have. He laughed and said that is what he thinks. Then he wanted to know if I would help out the ticket if it became necessary by accepting the nomination for vice president. I told him in words of one syllable that I would not - that I had only recently become a senator and that I wanted to work at it for about ten years.

  This letter marked the first appearance of an idea that was going to wreak havoc in Bess’ life. The more I think of it, the more I am convinced that it was the real reason for her wrath in Denver. She did not realize it, of course, but she was taking on an opponent far more formidable than husbandly neglect. Her old foe, history, was stalking her again.

  Senator Guffey was not the only Democrat who was troubled about Vice President Henry Wallace. He represented the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party in all its high-minded craziness. He was an example of FDR’s tendency to place ideology above competence in many of his appointments. As a vice president, Wallace had been a disaster. That is no mean trick, to gum up that job. All a veep has to do is preside over the Senate and ingratiate himself and the administration with its leaders. Henry Wallace did the precise opposite, ruffling feathers, rarely appearing to preside.

  Even worse was his performance as Chairman of the Board of Economic Warfare. It was probably an impossible job, but he proceeded to get into a public shouting match with Jesse Jones, head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and idol of the Senate conservatives. FDR had to publicly rebuke both of them.

  Another worry that emerged in whispers among Democratic Party leaders as 1944 began was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s health. His body already crippled by polio, he was showing signs of the strain of running a global war. In 1943, exhausting trips to international conferences in Casablanca, Quebec, and Cairo had added to the stress. The toll on his health became more and more visible. For a while, some people wondered if he would run for a fourth term, especially as the momentum of the war shifted in favor of the Allies.

  But most people believed FDR’s leadership would be needed to carry the war to a successful conclusion and to construct a lasting peace. One of the first politicians to make this point was Harry Truman, in a Jackson Day Dinner speech in Florida, early in 1944. He made the same speech three or four more times in the next few months. Simultaneously he began pushing other candidates for vice president.

  Almost all these candidates were critical - or at least independent - of Roosevelt. As he did on most issues, Dad was reflecting the mainstream of the Democratic Party. The politicians sensed that roughly half the Democrats now disliked or distrusted Franklin D. Roosevelt. The president’s zigs and zags on countless issues, his habit of dumping or humiliating loyal supporters, had accumulated a host of disillusioned enemies within his party. Time magazine quoted a prominent Washington Democrat as declaring: “I haven’t an ounce of confidence in anything Roosevelt does. I wouldn’t believe anything he said.” Southern Democrats were especially restive. They threatened to organize a new party that might back a Republican for president and deny Roosevelt reelection in 1944.

  The president’s attempts to outmaneuver his enemies only added to the disenchantment. As 1944 began, he announced that the New Deal was dead. It was no longer needed to doctor America’s ills. “Dr. Win-the-War” was now in charge. Two weeks later, in his economic message to Congress, he made some of the most radical proposals of his career, calling for an “economic bill of rights” that would guarantee jobs, housing, medical care, and education to every American. The message, to quote one of FDR’s biographers, “fell with a dull thud into the half-empty chamber of the United States Congress.” But it convinced his conservative opponents that Roosevelt was still determined to destroy the free enterprise system.

  Next came a ferocious brawl over a tax bill. Roosevelt wanted to boost taxes to combat inflation. The lawmakers declined to go along and sent a tepid compromise to the White House. The bill had been passed by FDR’s fellow Democrats, who controlled both houses of Congress. Yet the president vetoed it and used scathing language to defend his action. He called it “relief not for the needy but for the greedy.” Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley resigned in protest and castigated the president for his “calculated and deliberate assault upon the legislative integrity of every Member of Congress.” For the first time in the history of tax legislation, the bill was passed over the president’s veto.

  These nasty episodes help explain why the Democratic leaders in 1944 felt that the man they put up as vice president had to be opposed to, or at least distinctly independent from, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Henry Wallace, who identified himself totally with FDR, would cost the Democrats 40 percent of the vote at the precinct level, the party leaders warned.

  Senator Barkley was Harry Truman’s first candidate for vice president. That boomlet collapsed when “Dear Alben” accepted reelection as majority leader and made his peace with the president. Dad turned to another prospect, Speaker of the House of Representatives Sam Rayburn of Texas. He took Mr. Sam to Missouri and presented him to the people as an ideal vice president. Everyone liked him - Texas and Missouri have always had kinship feelings - but that boomlet too collapsed when conservative Democrats seized control of the Texas state convention and humiliated Sam by refusing to endorse him as a favorite son because he was a Roosevelt supporter.

  Meanwhile, Senator Truman was getting more and more letters from friends in Missouri urging him to enter the race himself. To each of these letters, he wrote an earnest negative reply, giving as his chief reason the one he had given Senator Guffey - his desire to stay in the Senate.

  Unquestionably, Mother and Dad discussed the vice presidency during the first months of 1944. It was inevitable, because the senator now had a friend close to the president. Early in 1944, Dad had proposed Robert Hannegan, a St. Louis politician who had given him crucial support in the 1940 election, to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee. When Bob got the job, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch promptly declared that this appointment moved Truman into prime consideration for the vice presidency.

  We now know something even more important. Mr. Hannegan, who began seeing FDR regularly, became convinced that the president would not live out a fourth term. The choice of a vice president thus became considerably more than a matter of winning the 1944 election. It involved the future of the United States of America.

  Dad undoubtedly heard about the president’s declining health from Bob Hannegan and others. When friends and staffers such as Max Lowenthal urged him to accept the vice presidency, Dad used me as his first line of excuse. Later, Mr. Lowenthal recalled that he said he had “talked it over with the Mrs. and he had decided not to be a candidate. Also, he had a daughter and the White House was no place for children.” Bess undoubtedly pointed to the awful smears and rumors that had swirled around the Roosevelt children and asked Dad if he wanted to subject me to a similar ordeal, at the age of twenty. She also stated her own antipathy to the idea for reasons we shall soon discuss.

  In the spring of 1944, the Independence Examiner suddenly published an editorial, grandly informing the world and the state of Missouri that Harry Truman did not want to be vice president. I have no hard evidence, but I would be willing to bet a lot of money that the source of that editorial was Bess Truman. She did not have to use any clandestine device to get it in the paper. She may have told the paper’s editor, Colonel Southern, himself, or told her sister-in-law, May Southern Wallace, with the implicit confidence that the news would soon reach her father’s ears.

  A Missourian sent Dad a copy of the editorial and asked him if it was correct. Dad said it was. He had worked nine years to become an influential senator and did not want to throw it away. “The Vice President . . . is a very high office which consis
ts entirely of honor and I don’t have any ambition to hold an office like that,” he wrote.

  Mother had every reason to assume that the matter was settled by the time the D-Day landing on June 6, 1944 pushed political news off the front page. In mid-June the entire family, including Dad, left Washington and headed for Denver, where again Mother planned to leave Grandmother Wallace for the summer. They now had a new worry in that locale. Fred Wallace’s wife, Christine, was pregnant again, and the doctor was predicting twins.

  June 28, 1944, was the Trumans’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. It is an index of her brother Fred’s importance to Mother that she celebrated this day not at 219 North Delaware Street or at our apartment in Washington, either of which place might legitimately be called home, but in Freddy’s rented house in Denver. Nevertheless, Harry Truman made it a memorable day. He gave Mother twenty-five roses and a chest of Gorham silver in the Fairfax design. If anyone doubts that this ex-farmer had good taste, a look at this silver (it is now on display at 219 North Delaware Street) would change that opinion. It is exquisite.

  I had been collaborating with Dad on the silver since Christmas time, when I helped him buy it. Two days before the anniversary, I bought the chest in which he gave it to Mother. So I was almost as excited as she was when she saw it. The set was not only beautiful, it was complete. Along with eight place settings, there were sixteen teaspoons, ladles, and salad forks. Bess was overwhelmed. Her two sisters-in-law had sets in this design, which Dad had long admired. Mother had chosen another much simpler design for her wedding silver.

  That anniversary was one of the happiest days in the Truman marriage. But Bess found it difficult to sustain her happiness in the anxious weeks that followed it.

  The senator returned to Washington, where the push to make him vice president resumed with furious intensity. Now that the Second Front was established, President Roosevelt was certain to be renominated for a fourth term. (It may surprise some readers to learn that he did not announce he was a candidate until July 11, 1944.) In Denver, I had seen a newspaper story about Dad becoming vice president and asked Mother about it. She dismissed the idea as a “plot” by Robert Hannegan and other ambitious politicians and assured me Dad did not want the job. I wrote him a letter, remarking offhandedly that I hoped he would continue to keep the “plotters” at bay.