Bess Truman Read online

  We have seen how traumatic Mother’s memories of newspaper publicity were. They went back to the anguish of her father’s death, the agony of her close friends, the Swopes, during those grisly murder trials. Even more influential was the low opinion of reporters’ tactics and ethics that Mother acquired during Dad’s political struggles in Missouri.

  All of these things entered into Mother’s decision. But the bottom line, I think, was a simple fact. Bess Wallace Truman was a different woman from Eleanor Roosevelt. She did not want to be a public personality. She had reasons, strong, even heartbreaking reasons, for wanting to preserve her private self. She also had the courage to insist on it, in the face of violent disapproval.

  Mother agonized over the decision. At one point during the first presidential week, in spite of enormous reluctance, she agreed to a press conference. At the last moment, she canceled it and decided to go her own way.

  This decision did not mean that Mother put newspapers and reporters out of her mind. On the contrary, she was concentrating in those first days on something she regarded as supremely important for the success of Harry Truman’s presidency - the choice of a good press secretary. She had not forgotten the letter that Mary Paxton Keeley had written to her about the need for one when Dad was vice president. Now it became trebly urgent. The White House correspondents had had a negative reaction to Leonard Reinsch, a radio newsman whom Dad had appointed on a temporary basis.

  Bess was particularly upset about this situation because Duke Shoop, the Kansas City Star reporter, was running all over Washington telling everyone that he had the appointment as press secretary in the bag. He had also printed a nasty paragraph about Bess in his column: “it’s far too early to say that Mrs. Truman will not enjoy being the first lady of the land, but it’s violating no secret to report that she doesn’t like her new position thus far. President Truman said today [April 13] ‘Bess cried most of the night and it wasn’t for joy, either.’”

  That put Mary Paxton Keeley on the warpath. She told Bess she was outraged by the insinuation “that you could not do the job.” Mary reported that she had written to the Star’s managing editor, Roy Roberts, and had received an apologetic letter. “I hope I did some good,” Mary wrote. “I notice he [Shoop] has not had a signed column since and I hope he never has.”

  Mother urged Dad to give top priority to finding a new press man and recommended as the ideal choice their old Independence classmate, Charlie Ross. President Truman agreed and asked Charlie if he would take the job. After some anguished hesitation - he was giving up a salary of $35,000 a year to take a job that paid $10,000, and he knew the brutally demanding hours he would have to work - Charlie said yes.

  Not long after, Bess wrote triumphantly to Mary. “Don’t worry about Duke. He’s made an ass of himself the way he broadcast the fact that he was going to be H’s press Sec’y. Even went down to the press club and spread it there of all places. If there is anybody on earth that H. has absolutely no use for it’s D.S.”

  Mary replied that she was “very happy about Harry putting Charlie in. Charlie can be a great help to him. He has a splendid background for it and he and Harry talk with the same Missouri accent.”

  Other aspects of Bess’ correspondence with Mary during these first White House weeks are extremely interesting. Mary assured Bess that she was confident Harry Truman would do a good job. She said it was a task “more important to us all than any job any man has had.” Then she spoke, as only a friend can speak, to Bess. “Yours is the hardest job I have ever known any woman to undertake but I have never known you to do anything that you did not do well.”

  Bess’ reply to those consoling words is the most revealing statement she ever made about Harry Truman becoming president. “I think you have sized up the situation pretty well. We are not any of us happy to be where we are but there’s nothing to be done about it except to do our best - and forget about the sacrifices and many unpleasant things that bob up.”

  Regretfully, lovingly, I must disagree with one word in that statement: “we.” In his deepest self, Harry Truman found it impossible to resist the chance, the challenge, to be president, once he realized the door to the White House was open. He did not want to become president at the time and in the manner that he inherited the job. He did not want it because he knew Bess did not want it. But he could not turn his back on this opportunity to confront the history of his time, just as he could not evade World War I or the decision to run for the Senate in 1934, although he knew he was making Bess unhappy both times. His whole life pointed toward these rendezvous with destiny. This was something Mother found hard to accept or understand.

  I am not writing as a daughter here. I am using that historian’s tool - which can so easily become a judgmental weapon - hindsight. As a daughter, I know - because I went through the experience as well - that history is not something you think about while you are part of it. All Bess could think of was, the way this decision to become vice president, which we knew meant becoming president, was tearing her life apart. Day and night, her mind was filled with foreboding. Was she going to watch another man whom she loved, another man to whom she had entrusted her happiness, stumble into catastrophic defeat, this time with the whole world watching?

  As I have already said - and spelled out the reasons for it - Mother was never an optimist. Now all her pessimism about human nature, about life itself, rushed into her feelings. All her fears about Dad’s health, his tendency to overwork, his (in her opinion) tendency to trust people too much, added to her anxiety.

  During these same emotion-filled days, Harry Truman was confronting problems and making decisions that would shape the postwar world. On his first night as president, he decided that the San Francisco conference to create the United Nations must proceed as scheduled, in spite of FDR’s death. He found out from men such as Harry Hopkins and W. Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, that our relationship with Russia had begun to deteriorate months before Franklin Roosevelt’s death, when Stalin started ignoring or distorting the Yalta agreements. From Secretary of War Henry Stimson he learned about the most awesome secret of the war, the project to build an atomic bomb.

  Dad selected not only a new press secretary, but a new appointments secretary, a genial, witty former Truman committee staffer named Matthew Connelly. For his military aide, Dad chose his friend, Harry Vaughan, who had become a major general with some help from Harry Truman. He named Fred Vinson, a tall, genial Kentuckian who had succeeded Jimmy Byrnes as head of the Office of War Mobilization, his secretary of the treasury.

  “Poppa Vin,” as Mother and I soon called Fred Vinson, had been in Washington since 1924, when he was elected to Congress. He later became a federal judge, a position he held until President Roosevelt drafted him to serve as a key White House war administrator. Few people could match his insider’s knowledge of national politics.

  For another politically sensitive post, secretary of agriculture, Dad chose Senator Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico, a friend from the Senate years. He saw that it was absolutely necessary to surround himself with his own team, loyal to him, not Franklin Roosevelt.

  On April 18, the thirteenth and last truck loaded with the Roosevelts’ personal possessions rolled away from the White House. Mrs. Roosevelt stopped at Blair House to say goodbye to the Trumans. She was somewhat apologetic about the condition of the White House. The war and her heavy travel schedule had never given her time to do much decorating or housekeeping. She also warned us that the place was infested with rats. A big rat had run along the porch railing when she was lunching with three friends on the south portico a few months earlier.

  On April 19, the seventh day of the Truman presidency, Mother and I went over to inspect our new quarters. The expression on Mother’s face when she saw the dingy, worn furniture and the shabby white walls, unpainted in twelve years, was more expressive than a paragraph of exclamation points. I am referring to the private rooms, upstairs, where first families sp
end most of their time. The splendid first-floor rooms, which every visitor to Washington lines up to see, were polished and glowing as always. But the private quarters were far below the level of the furnished apartments Bess had lived in during her first years in Washington, before we settled into 4701 Connecticut Avenue. In my diary, I wrote: “The White House upstairs is a mess. . . . I was so depressed when I saw it.” If that was the way a casual twenty-one-year-old felt, you can imagine Mother’s feelings.

  We fled back to Blair House’s elegance, and Mother ordered a major redecoration before we moved in. To allow me some privacy and a place to entertain friends, she gave me a suite that included a sitting room, bedroom, and bath. She let me pick out my own color scheme - Wedgwood blue for the walls, flowery chintz curtains, rust-red sofas. For her suite, she chose lavender in the bedroom and gray in the sitting room.

  Meanwhile, she was grappling with her own staff problems. She persuaded Reathel Odum, a petite, attractive young woman who had worked in the Truman Senate office since 1936, to become her personal secretary. Reathel was bright and willing, but she did not know any more about the way First Ladies operated in the White House than Mother. Yet it did not seem a good idea to retain anyone from Mrs. Roosevelt’s staff. Like Dad, Mother felt she needed her own team. Discussing this with me in Blair House, Mother decided to bend this principle somewhat. “I’m going to ask Mrs. Helm to stay on. I think I can work with her,” she said.

  Edith Helm was the White House social secretary. The widow of an admiral, she was a dignified, charming woman who could hold her own with any of the so-called best people of Washington, because she was one of them. She knew everything about everything when it came to protocol, the press, the pressures on a First Lady. Moreover, she had perspective. She had begun working in the White House during Woodrow Wilson’s administration, so her memory went back to those distant days when the First Lady was not named Eleanor Roosevelt and did not give press conferences. I was there when Mother asked Mrs. Helm to stay on the job. She was delighted by the offer, and Mother was delighted with her prompt acceptance. With her on the team, Mother’s worries about diplomatic or political gaffes subsided.

  We moved into the White House on May 7 so that Dad could celebrate his birthday there the following day. Instead, we found ourselves celebrating the surrender of Germany, along with the rest of the country. Dad wrote his mother and sister a lively letter describing the big event.

  I am sixty-one this morning and I slept in the president’s room in the White House last night. They have finished the painting and have some of the furniture in place. I’m hoping it will all be ready for you by Friday [when they were coming for a visit].

  This will be an historical day. At 9:00 o’clock this morning I must make a broadcast to the country announcing the German surrender. The papers were signed yesterday morning and hostilities will cease on all fronts at midnight tonight. Isn’t that some birthday present?

  It was a wild day, in Washington and in the country at large. Mobs of people poured into the streets to cheer and yell and kiss. At the end of his brief talk, Dad reminded everyone that “our victory is only half over.” We had another war to win with Japan, an empire bigger and far more fanatic than Nazi Germany. He added a plea to Japan’s leaders to lay down their weapons and tried to soften the terms of unconditional surrender that Mr. Roosevelt had decreed. “Unconditional surrender does not mean the extermination or enslavement of the Japanese people.”

  No one wanted a swift, bloodless end to the war with Japan more than Harry Truman. He had the grim statistics of recent battles on his desk. It had cost 25,489 marines, a third of the landing force, to capture eight square miles of volcanic rock known as Iwo Jima. On Okinawa, a larger island south of Japan, the toll had been 49,151 Americans. Kamikazes - suicide planes - had sunk 34 U.S. ships and damaged another 368. His military experts were telling him it would cost a minimum of 1.25 million American casualties, and God knows how many ships to invade and subdue the main Japanese islands.

  For Bess, the German surrender had a strong personal meaning. Unlike many of his ancestors, Mary Paxton Keeley’s son had survived the war. “I thought about you mighty early on VE day,” she wrote to Mary a few days later. “It must be almost beyond belief to you that Pax isn’t, now, constantly in danger.” Pax had already selected a wife, a young woman Mary described as “better than I could have picked if he had asked me to find a girl for him - which he did not ask me to do. She is tall and blonde like Margaret.” Mary hoped Bess could come to the wedding. Bess said she would love to come, if she was in Missouri when it took place.

  To keep the women reporters from exploding in frustration, Mrs. Helm suggested that Bess invite them to tea in the upstairs rooms, so they could at least give their readers a few details about how the Trumans were living. Bess agreed but requested Mrs. Helm to make it clear that she was not going to answer questions. Everything that was said had to be off the record. The women eagerly accepted this arrangement, and I was drafted to help the conversation flow smoothly. But Mother found it hard to relax. She disliked being required to invite these inquisitive people into her private life.

  Two days later, on May 28, the Trumans gave a formal reception at the White House for the Prince Regent of Iraq. It was Bess’ first encounter with the incredible minutiae involved in these official visits. She and the president received a six-page memorandum detailing every step of the affair, from the moment the prince regent’s three cars came through the White House gate until he departed.

  Here is a sample of these marching orders. “After a suitable interval, the president will take the Regent into the White House and present him to Mrs. Truman. The acting secretary of state will introduce Nuri Pasha [former prime minister and political boss of Iraq] to Mrs. Truman. She will then be escorted by a White House aide to the Red Room. The president, with the Regent on his right, will proceed to the Blue Room.” The next paragraph went into equally intense detail about who would not be introduced to whom until they got to the Red Room, where Bess was to serve the Regent a cup of tea.

  This was pretty trying stuff to people used to the informal hospitality of Missouri.

  Missouri was where Bess decided to go, not long after this reception. She had a good excuse: 219 North Delaware Street was being painted, renovated, and overhauled on its way to becoming “the Summer White House.” For a while the newspapers had called it The Hyde Park of the West and other silly names, such as The Gates Victorian Mansion. Bess maintained she would be there to supervise the work. I suppose there was some truth to that, but the job was being done by a good Independence contractor, and the U.S. government, which was paying the bills, would have been happy to send a team of army engineers to supervise things, if she had requested it.

  My point is, Harry Truman needed her a lot more in the real White House. But Bess was reverting to those early Senate years when she yielded to the impulse to retreat to 219 North Delaware Street, that original refuge from life’s harsh blows. I am sure that she also told herself that I would be better off out of the glare of the White House’s publicity for a few months. Her mother had even more to do with this decision. Grandmother Wallace was not happy in the White House, and a summer in her own house would, Bess hoped, cheer her up. But these reasons were essentially rationalizations for Bess’ retreat from the White House, the presidency, the role of First Lady.

  Without Bess and his daughter, Harry Truman found the White House a “lonesome place.” At night, he sat up reading cables and memos and reports until he was too tired to focus his eyes. He fretted over the Roosevelt loyalists still in various government posts. He called them “the palace guard.” He tried to assure Bess that he was mastering the job. Early in June, he told her he was getting a grip on the various government departments. “There’ll be no more to this job than there was to running Jackson County,” he wrote.

  But when he cited the “big headaches” - foreign relations, national finances, postwar military pol
icy, reconverting the wartime economy - he obviously was asking for support. “Things get tougher and tougher,” he wrote a few weeks later after a meeting with General Eisenhower and other military advisers. The soldiers told him, as they had told FDR, that they needed the cooperation of the Russians in the final assault on Japan. A Russian attack would tie down millions of Japanese soldiers in Manchuria. Without it, the Americans would have to fight the entire 5-million-man Japanese Army on its home islands. That meant the United States had to keep trying to deal with Joseph Stalin, who was becoming more and more brazen in his determination to impose communism on everyone within range of a Russian gun.

  There were times when the president sounded more than a little discouraged. In this letter, he sees himself competing for a place in history with previous White House winners and losers.

  Just two months ago today, I was a reasonably happy and contented Vice president. Maybe you can remember that far back too. But things have changed so much it hardly seems real.

  I sit here in this old house and work on foreign affairs, read reports and work on speeches - all the while listening to the ghosts walk up and down the hallway and even right in here in the study. The floors pop and the drapes move back and forth - I can just imagine old Andy and Teddy having an argument over Franklin. Or James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce deciding which was the more useless to the country. And when Millard Fillmore and Chester Arthur join in for place and show the din is almost unbearable. But I still get some work done. . . .

  Write me when you can - I hope every day.

  In Independence, Bess soon discovered that she could not escape the public. A crowd of 200 people greeted us at the depot. A traffic jam soon developed on Delaware Street, and the Independence police department had to put a man on duty full time to deal with the hundreds of cars that drove slowly by the house. More hundreds of well-wishers and curious trooped past on foot, making the Secret Service jittery.