Bess Truman Read online

  I was startled by the seriousness of his reply. “Yes they are all plotting against your dad. Every columnist and prognosticator is trying to make him VP against his will. Bill Boyle, Max Lowenthal [Senate staffers], Mr. Biffle [secretary of the Senate] and a dozen others were on my trail yesterday with only that in mind. Hope I can dodge it. 1600 Pennsylvania is a nice address but I’d rather not move in through the back door - or any other door at sixty.”

  In my biography of Dad, I quoted that letter to demonstrate his reluctance to accept the nomination. While that is still visible, a lot of other things are now much more visible to me. One is the assumption, already firm in Dad’s mind, that the vice president was going to become president. The other is the extraordinary frankness of the letter. Dad was not in the habit of discussing the inner secrets of his political career with me. If anything, he and Mother had gone to extreme lengths to keep politics out of my life. I am now convinced that this letter was meant for Mother. He was certain I would show it to her - which I did. She frowned, shook her head, and reiterated her disapproval of these plotters. She told me, and her mother that Dad was definitely not a candidate.

  A few hours after he wrote that letter, Dad left Washington, D.C., and drove to St. Louis, where he paused to pick up some tires from a man who was a close friend of Robert Hannegan. With Fred Canfil, he drove up to Kansas City to do some Missouri politicking. Roger Sermon was running for governor in the August 1 primary and Bennett Clark was up for renomination to the Senate. Dad wanted to help both men, but he reported to Mother that they looked like lost causes - a grim comment on the divisions in the Democratic Party.

  The senator wrote a significant letter to Bess from Kansas City. He said it was “good of her to stay at home” the previous night because she was certain he would call. “Wouldn’t I have been some sort of heel if I hadn’t?” Dad asked, and then added: “I hope I never do get into the real heel class.”

  He was obviously nervous about the possibility that he was going to do something that would make Bess angry. I am quite certain that during that telephone call the senator convinced Bess that she should come to Chicago and bring me along. He was still assuring her that he did not want the vice presidency, and was doing everything in his power to avoid it (which he was). But he was beginning to get some idea of the juggernaut that was coming toward him.

  The next day, he wrote Mother another letter, reporting a “tough interview” he had had with Roy Roberts, managing editor of the Kansas City Star, informing him that he did not want the vice presidency. “Also told the West Virginia and Oklahoma delegations to go for Barkley. Also told Downey [Sheridan Downey, Democratic senator from California] I didn’t want the California delegation. Mr. Roberts says I have it in the bag if I don’t say no - and I’ve said it as tough as I can.”

  This was only a warm-up for the pressure Dad faced in Chicago, where the Democratic National Convention was slated to begin on July 19. Thanks to FDR’s deviousness, a veritable covey of politicians arrived at the convention, each thinking he had the president’s backing for second place on the ticket. Henry Wallace was one of them. Jimmy Byrnes, senator from South Carolina and “assistant president” for the war effort, was another one. Alben Barkley of Kentucky was a third. Wallace represented the left wing, Byrnes the right wing of the party. Barkley represented the middle, but his age and previous identification with Roosevelt made him a weak contender.

  Robert Hannegan and a group of other party leaders told FDR it had to be another younger man of the center, Harry Truman. Mr. Roosevelt agreed with this analysis and gave Mr. Hannegan a letter stating that he would be happy to run with either Truman or William O. Douglas, the Supreme Court justice. His name was added to avoid the appearance of dictating to the convention, but he had no support whatsoever in the party.

  How much Dad knew about this conference, which took place in the White House on July 11, I can’t be sure. He left Kansas City on July 14 and drove to Chicago, arriving there on Saturday, July 15. Almost immediately, he confronted a phalanx of party leaders who informed him that he was FDR’s choice. Bob Hannegan flourished the letter the president had given him.

  Still Dad resisted. Jimmy Byrnes, who was as devious as FDR, had called Dad just before he left for Chicago and told him he had the president’s blessing, and asked for Senator Truman’s support. Dad had given it to him without hesitation and now, he insisted, that message superseded Hannegan’s letter.

  In his desperation, Dad had summoned two of his closest friends, Tom Evans and Eddie McKim, to come to Chicago to help him fend off the nomination. Tom was the owner of Station KCMO in Kansas City. Eddie, whose name I have mentioned before, was his old army and reserve officer buddy, who had become a prominent insurance executive in Nebraska. Both were baffled by his reluctance to accept the vice presidency. It was to Tom Evans that Dad revealed - or half revealed - his real reason for refusing it. Here is how Tom later recalled their conversation.

  “I don’t want to drag a lot of skeletons out of the closet,” Senator Truman said.

  “Wait a minute. I didn’t know you had skeletons,” Tom Evans said. “What are they? Maybe I wouldn’t want you to run either.”

  “I’ve had the Boss on the payroll in my Senate office and I’m not going to have her name dragged over the front pages of the papers and over the radio.”

  “Well Lord,” Tom said. “That isn’t anything terrible. I can think of a dozen senators and fifty congressmen that have their wives on the payroll.”

  “Yes, but I don’t want them bringing her name up,” Dad insisted. “I’m just not going through that.”

  After repeatedly declaring myself out of the running as a psychologist, I am afraid I am forced to assume the role here. You have just read the words of a man who is yearning to tell his friend the whole truth - but can only tell him part of it. The metaphor Dad used is especially, sadly, revealing. The skeleton he was trying to keep in the closet was not Mother’s name on his Senate payroll. It was David Willock Wallace’s suicide.

  Having seen the cruel way the newspapers had exhumed Mr. Roosevelt’s ancestors and used them to try to smear the president, Harry Truman’s fears - which were Bess’ fears - were not completely unreal. But they were somewhat hypothetical. Dad’s anguish revealed Mother’s anguish - her extreme sensitivity about this tragedy, forty-one years later. If her mother had died during these intervening years, Bess might have been less sensitive. She dreaded the impact of the story on Madge Wallace far more than on herself.

  Meanwhile, at Dad’s request, Eddie McKim had been touring the state delegations trying to tell them that Senator Truman did not want the nomination. The more Eddie talked to the delegates, the more convinced he became that his old friend’s nomination was not only inevitable, it was necessary.

  On Monday, July 17, Eddie, John Snyder, and several other friends tackled Dad in his hotel room. They barraged him with arguments. He was the only man who could prevent the Democratic Party from splitting down the middle. If Byrnes got it, the liberals would take a walk. If Wallace got it, the South would defect en masse. Dad continued to shake his head. “I’m still not going to do it,” he said.

  “Senator,” Eddie said, “I think you’re going to do it.”

  Dad furiously demanded to know where Eddie got the nerve to say that.

  “Because there’s a ninety-year-old mother down in Grandview, Missouri, who would like to see her son President of the United States,” Eddie said.

  Dad walked out of the room and did not speak to Eddie for twenty-four hours. With uncanny intuition, Eddie had invoked the name of the one woman who could challenge Harry Truman’s devotion to Bess.

  That same day, Mother and I left Denver for Chicago. Mother seemed perfectly calm to me at the time. But my research for this book discovered a sign of her inner agitation. She did not tell her mother where we would be staying in Chicago, and Grandmother, having no other address, wrote to the empty house in Independence for the rest of the w
eek.

  We arrived in Chicago on the night of the 18th, and the convention started the next day. Dad continued to resist the nomination for the next two days, but he found no support for his reluctance from anyone. The AFL and railroad labor leaders said they would not consider anyone else. Even Sidney Hillman, the left-leaning CIO leader, told him he was that union’s choice, if Wallace could not be elected.

  I spent most of these two days touring Chicago’s department stores with Marion Montague, a school friend from Washington whom I had invited to join me. Mother remained in our hotel, the Morison, and discussed the situation with Dad when he returned from the Stevens Hotel, where Robert Hannegan and the other heavy politicos were staying. She had invited an old Independence friend, Helen Bryant Souter, who lived in Evanston, to join her. Helen fended off numerous reporters who wanted to talk to Mother as it became more and more evident that Dad was the probable vice presidential nominee.

  In Denver, Grandmother Wallace and Freddy and Chris listened to the radio and read the newspapers with growing puzzlement. On the 20th, Grandmother wrote a letter telling Mother that she missed her and was fighting off a “homesick spell,” She added that “F and I listened to several talks over the radio last night. They don’t seem to think Harry is not a candidate.”

  The climax to the struggle was a telephone call Bob Hannegan put through to FDR, who was in San Diego, about to depart on a Pacific inspection tour. Hannegan held out the phone so Dad could hear the president declare that Truman was his choice. “Why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place?” Dad snapped, furious at Roosevelt’s deviousness, which had already given him so many headaches and, in 1940, near heartbreaks.

  At this point, Bess still could have forced Harry Truman to issue an absolute, unshakable no, a refusal on the order of General Sherman’s historic turndown of the presidential nomination in 1884. She could have told him that the whole idea of him becoming president and her becoming First Lady was intolerable to her. He would have said no, even if he really believed that his refusal might, in FDR’s words, “break up the Democratic Party in the middle of a war.”

  But there was an invisible line in their partnership that Bess never crossed - a line that divided a wife’s power over her husband between influence and control. Bess never hesitated to try to influence Harry Truman’s decisions. But she never attempted to control him - especially in those lonely moments when he confronted his deepest instincts that drove him to risk the pain and sacrifice of meeting history head on. This was the most awesome of those moments. Bess allowed him to accept its inevitability, even though she dreaded the pain it might cause her.

  For the next few days, the nomination did not look inevitable. The Wallace backers in the party were numerous and vocal, and they put up a vigorous fight for their candidate. They packed the galleries and staged ear-splitting demonstrations in the sweltering convention hall. On July 20, they came within a whisker of stampeding the convention into renominating Wallace by acclamation. After a night of furious politicking, the Truman forces met the wild-eyed Wallace devotees in a tremendous brawl the next day.

  Mother and I were in a box looking down on the floor, where the state delegations sat like regiments waiting to be hurled into battle. Helen Souter was with us, still doing her best to keep reporters at bay. Several thought she was Mrs. Truman and tried to interview her. Dad remained on the convention floor with the Missouri delegation, of which he was the chairman. Ignoring his pleas, they already had voted unanimously to make him their candidate.

  Henry Wallace led on the first ballot, mostly because favorite sons controlled a dozen delegations and were hoping for a deadlock that might have made one of them a compromise candidate. In the second ballot, Dad edged ahead. Suddenly delegation after delegation switched to him, and the final result was a landslide 1,031 to 105. Pandemonium exploded as exultant Truman supporters cavorted in the aisles.

  Take a look at the picture in the middle of the book showing Mother and me as the final count was announced. I am cheering my head off. Mother was barely able to muster a smile. At twenty, of course, I reveled in the pandemonium and was relatively unbothered by the suffocating heat. I also had been having a good time in Chicago while Mother suffered through anguished days and sleepless nights.

  I can sympathize with her now. I can see what she saw, what she felt. It was not only the fear of her father’s suicide returning to haunt her and her mother. She was losing the serene, comfortable life of a senator’s wife, which she had worked so hard to master. She was fifty-nine years old, and all her life she had been making sacrifices for people, putting herself and her concerns second to her mother’s peace of mind, her brothers’ welfare, her daughter’s health, her husband’s career. She had a right to eight or ten years of serenity and fulfillment - and she had to sit there and watch that wish annihilated by these whooping, howling maniacs who were determined to put her husband in the White House.

  Her personal fears and desires were only part of Bess’ opposition to the nomination. She knew Harry Truman’s tendency to overwork. If he pushed himself to the brink of breakdown as a senator, what would he do as a president? Everyone was talking about the toll the presidency had taken on FDR. She envisioned an equally deadly impact on Harry Truman, who had recently celebrated his sixtieth birthday.

  Mother’s political instincts were even more opposed to the nomination. She foresaw that anyone who succeeded FDR, especially through “the back door,” as Dad put it, was going to have a terrible time becoming president in his own right.

  All in all, hindsight tempts me not only to sympathize with Mother, but to say she was right. On a rational, reasonable estimate of the situation, Dad should have said no.

  But Mother was confronting - she and Dad were both confronting - something deeper, stronger than reason, logic, or common sense.

  A phalanx of policemen helped Dad fight his way to the platform. An exultant Bob Hannegan held up his arm, as if he were a prizefighter who had just won a knockout victory. The delegates continued to go berserk in the aisles. Dad finally seized the chairman’s gavel and banged for order. The celebrators sat down and listened to one of the shortest acceptance speeches in the windy history of political conventions:

  You don’t know how very much I appreciate the very great honor which has come to the state of Missouri. It is also a great responsibility which I am perfectly willing to assume.

  Nine years and five months ago I came to the Senate. I expect to continue the efforts I have made there to help shorten the war and to win the peace under the great leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

  I don’t know what else I can say except that I accept this great honor with all humility.

  I thank you.

  As he left the platform, Dad commandeered another cordon of police and fought his way through the frenzied crowd to our box. There we were blinded by the flashbulbs of a hundred photographers. Men pounded and pawed us, screaming congratulations. Women wept and flung their arms around us, all but fracturing our spines. Dad told the police to get us out of there as fast as possible. Clinging to each other like shipwreck victims on a raft in the middle of a hurricane, we let Chicago’s finest batter their way through the mob to a waiting limousine.

  As we got into the car, Bess glared at the nominee. “Are we going to have to go through this for the rest of our lives?” she asked.

  It was not a good beginning.

  The next morning, the reporters were after us like a brigade of hunters gunning for quail - or sitting ducks. Bess had a press conference in which she did not try hard to disguise her lack of enthusiasm for her husband’s nomination. She frankly admitted she had been opposed to it but now said she was “almost reconciled.” When asked why she had felt that way, she replied that her reasons were “perhaps selfish.” She liked the calm of a senator’s life and disliked the “pressures” she foresaw in the vice presidency.

  In her oblique way, Mother gave the reporters a glimpse of how her political
partnership with Harry Truman operated, although no one paid much attention to it at the time. She said that she “understood the issues” but had no intention or desire to comment on them. That was “the Senator’s job.” With shrewd political instinct she omitted the source of her understanding: her intense scrutiny of the newspapers, her daily reading of the Congressional Record, her discussions with her husband. She sensed that if she sounded too knowledgeable, the hostiles among the reporters would instantly churn out stories portraying Harry Truman as his wife’s yes-man.

  Asked if she had any relatives who had been in politics, Bess said that her grandfather, Benjamin Wallace, had been one of the first mayors of Independence. She coolly short-circuited further questions about her family by saying that “as far as she knew” she was not related to Henry Wallace, but she considered him “a very fine man.” Then she summed up the Truman-Wallace contest with a remark that gave the reporters another insight into Bess Wallace Truman. “It’s nice to win,” she said.

  Bess patiently answered a lot of nonsensical questions about Dad’s favorite foods (beefsteak and fried potatoes) and what she did with her spare time. I put in a plug for her fried chicken and her chocolate pie, two of her best dishes, and had to answer a lot of even sillier questions about my spare time. I had just finished my freshman year at George Washington University, majoring in history. Studying is not a momentous activity, nor is going to the movies and concerts and taking voice lessons. I spent most of my time doing these things, and I found it hard to understand why the reporters were interested. One of them, Margaret Alexander of the Kansas City Star, began following me around. That I distinctly disliked.