Bess Truman Page 36

  The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other guardians of the republic castigated the president for “taking chances with his personal safety.” Bess’ comments when he got to 219 North Delaware Street were not much more cordial. In the privacy of their bedroom, the conversation went something like this.

  “So you’ve finally arrived,” Bess said. “I guess you couldn’t think of any more reasons to stay away. As far as I’m concerned, you might as well have stayed in Washington.”

  To ruin his Christmas completely, on December 27, Dad received an urgent call from Charlie Ross, informing him that Secretary of State Byrnes wanted to deliver a “fireside chat” to the nation on the Moscow conference before he said a word about it to President Truman. It was not the first time, but it was close to the last time that Mr. Byrnes revealed his inclination to treat Harry Truman like a puppet.

  Dad rushed back to Washington to deal with this crisis. But he was so furious with his wife, he could not think about anything else until he wrote her a letter, telling her exactly what he thought of her rotten temper and insulting words. He mailed it special delivery that night.

  The next day, I received a telephone call in Independence. “Margie,” Dad said, “I want you to do something very important for me. Go over to the post office and ask to see Edgar Hinde [the postmaster]. Tell him to give you a special delivery letter that I mailed to your mother, yesterday. It’s a very angry letter and I’ve decided I don’t want her to see it. Burn it.”

  I did as I was told. Postmaster Hinde naturally made no objection. He handed me the letter, which had just arrived. I took it home and burned it in the backyard incinerator. I felt terribly guilty. I had made such a fuss as a teenager about Mother’s tendency to read my mail. If Mother had ever looked out the window and asked me what I was doing, I would have had hysterics.

  That day, December 28, 1945, a calmer Harry Truman sat down at his desk in the Oval Office and wrote Bess one of his most important letters.

  Well I’m here in the White House, the great white sepulcher of ambitions and reputations. I feel like a last year’s bird’s nest which is on its second year. Not very often I admit I am not in shape. I think maybe that exasperates you, too, as a lot of other things I do and pretend to do exasperate you.

  You can never appreciate what it means to come home as I did the other evening after doing at least one hundred things I didn’t want to do and have the only person in the world whose approval and good opinion I value look at me like I’m something the cat dragged in. . . . I wonder why we are made so that what we really think and feel we cover up?

  With those latter words, Harry Truman was telling Bess that he had known since the day he became president eight months ago that this explosion was coming. Now at least her anger was out in the open, and they could begin to deal with it - and the presidency.

  This head of mine should have been bigger and better proportioned. There ought to have been more brain and a larger bump of ego or something to give me an idea that there can be a No. 1 man in the world. I didn’t want to be. But, in spite of opinions to the contrary, Life and Time say I am.

  If that is the case you, Margie and everyone else who may have any influence on my actions must give me help and assistance; because no one ever needed help and assistance as I do now. If I can get the use of the best brains in the country and a little bit of help from those I have on a pedestal at home, the job will be done. If I can’t . . . the country will know that Shoop, the Post-Dispatch, Hearst . . . were right.”

  Twenty-seven years later, when Harry Truman died, this letter was found in his desk at the Truman Library. It is the only one of the 1,600 surviving letters that he wrote to Bess that he kept there.

  After Christmas, Madge Wallace departed for Denver with her son Fred and his wife Christine. Mother and I and Vietta Garr returned to Washington on New Year’s Day. We had a private Pullman compartment, which Drew Pearson expanded into a private car. This viper in a reporter’s disguise (he made Duke Shoop look like St. Francis of Assisi) wrung his hands at the thought of “the Truman women” traveling like Vanderbilts while “GI’s had to travel in day coaches.” At his next press conference, Dad pulled Pearson aside as he was leaving and threatened to punch him in the nose if he wrote anything like that again.

  Next came an incident that takes on new depth and significance when told in the context of the troubled Truman partnership. Although Bess had canceled the formal White House occasions, Dad decided that it would be a good idea to have a diplomatic dinner. Americans would not object to seeing foreigners eating heartily at the White House, and the bonus in improved relations with the home countries might make it worth the time and trouble.

  At the last moment, the Russian ambassador, Nicolai V. Novikov, had someone call and say he was ill. An investigation revealed he was healthy and happy in New York. The cause of his illness, it soon became apparent, was his proximity at the White House table to the envoys of Estonia and Latvia, two countries that the Soviet Union had swallowed at the end of the war, although their governments in exile were still recognized by the United States.

  The dinner went off smoothly enough, but the next day Dad stormed into his oval office breathing fire. He summoned Dean Acheson, the undersecretary of state who was running the State Department while Jimmy Byrnes was in Moscow, and informed him that he wanted Novikov declared persona non grata and thrown out of the country.

  “Why?” asked the aghast Acheson, who could see the headlines blossoming, the army and navy going to full alert.

  “He insulted Mrs. Truman by turning down that invitation at the last second.” Dad stormed. “I’m not going to let anyone in the world do that.”

  Outside the Oval Office, Matt Connelly put through a hurried phone call to Bess and told her what was about to happen. Was she as angry as the president? he asked. Matt, a shrewd Irishman, was pretty sure she was not.

  “Let me talk to him,” Bess said.

  Matt connected the call to Dad’s telephone, and Mother told him to calm down. She urged him to discuss the matter with Dean Acheson, whom she had already met and liked.

  “I’m talking with him now. He agrees with you,” the president said.

  He handed the telephone to Mr. Acheson, and Bess expressed her abhorrence of the move. “His critics will have a field day,” she said. “We’ve already given them too much ammunition.”

  “What do you - er - suggest,” Mr. Acheson said. He was only a foot or so from the steaming president.

  “Tell him you can’t do anything for twenty-four hours, something like that,” she said. “By that time he’ll be ready to laugh about it.”

  At this point, Mr. Acheson did something clever. He put words in Bess’ mouth. He repeated aloud things she was not saying. “Above himself - yes. Too big for his britches - I agree with you. Delusions of grandeur.”

  Dad snatched the phone away from him. “All right, all right,” he said to Bess. “When you gang up on me I know I’m licked. Let’s forget all about it.”

  He hung up and reached for the photograph Bess had given him when he left for France. He kept it on his desk in a gold filigree frame. “I guess you think I’m an old fool,” he said, “and I probably am. But look on the back.”

  The acting secretary of state read the inscription Bess had written there so many years ago. “Dear Harry, May this photograph bring you safely home again from France - Bess.” He understood a little of what Dad was feeling.

  But Dean Acheson could not know the deeper levels of emotion that were swirling around the photograph during those early months of 1946. In my biography of my father, I have written whole chapters of solid evidence that Harry Truman was not, normally, a hotheaded, hair-trigger man. On the contrary, he rarely lost his temper and preferred to give his decisions long, cool, analytical thought before making them. His behavior in the Novikov incident only revealed how profoundly his quarrel with Bess was disturbing him.

  Meanwhile, up on Capitol Hil
l, it was politics of the nastiest kind. Harry Truman took on the whole industrial establishment by demanding another year of price controls to beat back inflation until the servicemen came home, and the economy returned to a peacetime footing. The National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and every other spokesman for business in the country deluged Congress with a demand to “strike the shackles” from the American economy. Congress, caught between a hard rock and campaign donations, waffled, and the Office of Price Administration went down in flames, along with a good chunk of the Truman administration’s credibility. When a president is repudiated by Congress, tie down your hat. Everyone starts running amok.

  Meanwhile, on the First Lady’s side of the White House, the job continued to be done with a minimum of enthusiasm. I was now twenty-two - old enough to sense that something was wrong even if I did not know exactly what. We were not the same relaxed family at dinner. For a while I thought it was the upper-class style in which we dined, with a butler and servants hovering around us. They were Mother’s bailiwick. And I noticed something else. She did not seem to be coping, or trying to cope, with our housekeeper, Mrs. Nesbitt, who planned the White House menus, supposedly in consultation with the First Lady.

  Early on, I had met one of the Roosevelt sons, and he had asked me: “Has Mrs. Nesbitt begun starving you yet?” I shook my head, and he laughed and said, “Don’t worry, she will.”

  Mrs. Nesbitt’s ideas on food reflected Eleanor Roosevelt’s, which can be summed up in one word: awful. I could not understand why Mother did not take charge of the situation. Then, suddenly, I was in charge of the situation. In mid-March, Mother received a frantic phone call from Denver. Fred Wallace had begun to drink in a desperate, self-destructive way. He was hiding bottles all over the house, behind books, in closets. Chris could not deal with him. Grandmother Wallace was frantic.

  Although Mother had barely recovered from a bout with the flu, she departed for Denver. A day or two later, Mrs. Nesbitt served brussel sprouts for dinner. Dad pushed them aside, and I informed Mrs. Nesbitt that my father did not like brussel sprouts. The next night, we got them again. Somewhat tensely, I informed Mrs. Nesbitt again that the president did not like that vegetable. The next night, we got them again. I exploded and put through a long-distance telephone call to Denver. “If you don’t come back here and do something about that woman, I’m going to throw a bowl of brussel sprouts in her face!” I raged, displaying a combination Truman-Wallace temper that I scarcely knew I possessed at that point.

  “Don’t do anything until I get there,” Mother replied.

  I believe that contretemps was a turning point in Mother’s feelings about the White House and the presidency. Out in Denver, she faced the sad fact that Fred Wallace was forty-six years old, no longer her baby brother, but a sick man whom she could not cure. Her real task was back in Washington, where her daughter and her husband needed her.

  Bess brought her mother back to the White House and dealt with Mrs. Nesbitt in short order. She vanished from the scene, and on May 2, the rest of the staff learned that our beloved housekeeper was retiring. Her successor was a pleasant woman who quickly grasped the Trumans’ likes and dislikes. Bess seldom had to revise the menus that were submitted for her approval each week.

  Before this happy announcement, Mother had done something else that helped her view the White House in a more positive light. She invited her entire Independence bridge club for a four-day weekend. The ten ladies, including her two sisters-in-law and old friends such as Mary Shaw, arrived on April 12. Mother had a schedule lined up for them that would have wilted the iron campaigner, Harry S. Truman himself.

  They raced from Congress to the Smithsonian to a luncheon in the State Dining Room to the circus. They had dinner each night at the White House, with Dad presiding, and played bridge aboard the Williamsburg as it cruised the Potomac. When the yacht rounded the bend at Mount Vernon, the ship’s bell tolled, and the crew and passengers came to attention as taps were sounded in honor of George Washington.

  At the circus occurred the only sour note in the whole weekend - although even Mother laughed about it eventually. A clown figured out that Bess was the First Lady and proceeded to sit in her lap. The look he got froze his funny bone. A Secret Service man went backstage and told the joker not to do that again.

  The ladies had a spectacular time, and Bess, watching their wide-eyed enjoyment of it all, began to get a little perspective on the life she was leading. Maybe there was something wonderful as well as something awful about it. She was also discovering that the life of a First Lady was not necessarily all ceremonial chores. She could do a few things in the White House that pleased her first.

  Coincidentally, Bess’ bridge club weekend was manna to the ever more desperate women reporters. In fact, it was a media coup. “The girls,” as they called themselves, got the kind of press coverage that movie stars and politicians would kill to achieve. They were photographed and interviewed from the moment they stepped off the plane. Life magazine did a six-or eight-page spread on them. It was one of the few positive stories the press wrote about the Trumans in 1946, although Bess did not have an iota of politics in mind when she issued the invitation.

  As far as the President of the United States could see, everything in the world seemed to be going wrong at once. Half the labor unions in the country were out on strike, and the other half were threatening to join them. The Russians were becoming more and more impossible. Agitators in the armed forces stirred “I wanna go home” riots from Manila to Berlin. Naturally, the press and public were blaming the president for everything. Americans have always expected their presidents to be combination uplifters, hard-boiled politicians, and miracle men.

  Although the world was definitely out of joint, something important was happening at the White House that made the mess a lot easier for the president to bear. Around this time, Bess began joining Harry Truman in his upstairs study each night for a long, quiet discussion of the issues, the problems, the personalities with which he was grappling,

  Bess had returned to the Truman partnership.

  That summer, Bess left me and her mother at 219 North Delaware Street and spent the entire month of July in the White House. To help her tolerate the Washington humidity, Dad had air conditioners installed in her suite. They spent the Fourth of July at Shangri-La, the presidential retreat in Maryland, now called Camp David. She wrote me a cheerful letter, describing “the most peaceful Fourth I have any recollection of.” Dad had gone for a long walk and a swim in the pool, “But [it’s] not for me! I’ve been reading or just sittin’.” During the afternoon, they were going to explore the place in a jeep. “Won’t we be sore tomorrow?”

  She teased me about the movies I was missing, especially Anna and the King of Siam. But the Marx Brothers’ Casablanca drew a negative comment. “That will be the night I go to bed early.” Although Bess loved a good laugh, the Marx Brothers never amused her. I think she identified with Margaret Dumont, that dignified matron they were always tormenting.

  Bess lured the chief executive home for a brief vacation in August, one that actually achieved some of the quiet that she thought they were still entitled to enjoy, even if they were Mr. and Mrs. President. With all the Wallaces, including Fred and Christine, on hand, we had a lovely family picnic in the backyard, beyond the scrutiny of the public.

  On this visit, they also enjoyed a foray into local politicking. Roger Slaughter, a Jackson County congressman, had voted against, and loudly criticized, almost every proposal President Truman had sent to Congress. Dad decided to put this ornery Democrat out of action in the August primary. Bess bet him $10 that he could not do it. That aroused the shrewd Missouri politician still alive inside the President of the United States.

  He invited Jim Pendergast, now the leader of the county’s Democrats, to the White House to discuss Mr. Slaughter. How the conversation went can be glimpsed from a paragraph in a letter Dad wrote to Jim before the vis
it. “If the home county organization slaps the President of the United States in the face by supporting a renegade Congressman, it will not be happy for the President of the United States or for the political organization.”

  Mr. Slaughter lost, surprise, surprise. Dad’s first letter to Mother, when he returned to Washington, began: “Where’s my ten dollars? You just can’t believe in your old man’s luck and judgment, can you?” The best part of the whole thing, he added, knowing Bess would love it, “is that Mr. Roberts [managing editor of the Kansas City Star] is very much put out.”

  That casual remark reveals another aspect of Bess’ feelings about Harry Truman becoming president. She was not sure he could do the job. That was partly Dad’s fault. He shared so many of his moments of doubt and discouragement with her. This frankness combined with her natural pessimism to produce a lack of confidence. But this feeling too was abating, as the Indianapolis Speedway version of the presidency subsided into the politics that we post-World War II Americans have come to accept as usual.

  Bess sent the $10 and not one but two warm letters. The president was ecstatic at this evidence that they were in basic harmony again. He told her the letters had made the day “bright and happy.” Perhaps pushing a little too hard, he continued: “You know that there is no busier person than your old man - but he’s never too busy or too rushed to let his lady love, the only one he ever had, hear from him every day no matter what portends. It hurts just a tiny bit when he finds that trips uptown, time to dress etc. interfere with letters from his lady love.”

  Dad thanked her for sending the Wallace family doctor to examine Mamma Truman, who was ninety-three and beginning to fail rapidly. “She is on her way out,” he wrote. “It can’t be helped but I wish it could. She’s a trial to Mary and that can’t be helped either. Wish you could be more patient with both. But I can’t ask too much I guess.”