Harry Truman Read online

  To My Brethren and Fellow Doghouse Denizens:

  By virtue of the authority vested in me as Top Dog I require and charge that Front Admiral William D. Leahy and Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers, receive and accept the vestments and appurtenances of their respective positions, namely as personal snooper and as director of centralized snooping. . . . I charge that each of you not only seek to better our foreign relations through more intensive snooping but also keep me informed constantly of the movements and actions of the other, for without such coordination there can be no order and no aura of mutual trust.

  H.S.T.

  This refusal to let the seriousness of his work make him solemn was typical not only of Dad but of the men around him. Matt Connelly was one of the great all-time teasers. He loved to hang ridiculous nicknames on people and would solemnly introduce “Corporal” Vaughan and “Field Marshall” Canfil to befuddled visitors. Bill Hassett was known as the “Bishop” because he was a solemn, scholarly Catholic.

  In a letter to his mother in September 1946, Dad gives a good picture of the way the boys relaxed by tormenting each other: “Some Hearst columnist by the name of Tucker had called Harry Vaughan a fat, lazy major general who ought to be a corporal and they really made Vaughan believe that Tucker was right. I really felt sorry for both Vaughan and Graham [who was kidded for answering nut mail] before the raggers let up on them.”

  Dad played a delightful joke on Dr. Graham early in September 1946. Here is how he described it to his mother: “Made Doc Graham a brigadier general yesterday and nearly embarrassed him to death. I told him to come to the morning Secretaries Conference at nine o’clock. I had something I wanted to discuss with him. He came and I asked Vaughan if he had anything from the War Department and he said that General Ike wanted to promote one of the Missouri gang. I read the document and everybody objected. We had a lot of fun and I pinned the stars on him. He’s been walking on air ever since.”

  Down at Key West, the atmosphere was even more relaxed. Dad handed out cards to visitors that read: DON’T GO AWAY MAD . . . JUST GO AWAY. Ice water got poured on those who were unwary enough to lie on the beach with their eyes closed. Announcing a fishing expedition with Admiral Leahy, Dad said he was going along as the Admiral’s aide. “You know how these admirals are,” he said, “they get so they can’t do anything without an aide, even bait a hook.”

  Dad never liked to fish. Mother was the fisherman in the family. He went along just to be companionable. He was not a good fisherman, and he seldom caught more than one fish. Often he caught none. But one day off Bermuda he had a moment of glory. The President and his aides were using several thousand dollars’ worth of equipment supplied to them by friends on the island. They were catching nothing with their high-powered reels and poles. Dad became impatient and announced he was going to show everyone how they caught fish in Missouri. He baited a hook at the end of a line that he was holding in his hand and dropped it over the side. Like Babe Ruth when he pointed to the fence, he made good. In less than a minute, he had landed the biggest fish of the day.

  At the White House, Dad superintended a running battle between Alonzo Fields, the head butler, and John Pye, who used to prepare lunches for some of the staff in the executive wing. Charlie Ross, Bill Hassett, Matt Connelly, General Vaughan, and others dined there, largely because it was convenient and quick. Pye never ceased trying to persuade Dad to join them, and when he yielded, Pye strutted around the White House, about ten feet tall. Fields, of course, would be preparing to serve lunch in the main house, so Dad would have Matt Connelly call and ask if it was all right if the President ate in Pye’s dining room. The conversation would then go something like this:

  “Is Dr. Graham nearby?”

  “Oh yes, he’s right here on duty.”

  “Then I guess it would be safe for the President to take a chance. But if he wants good food - and safety - he ought to come over here.”

  Pye, of course, would be vastly indignant and swear by all the angels in heaven that his food was untainted and just as good as the food Fields was serving. Sometimes Reathel Odum, Mother’s secretary, and I would join the staff in Pye’s dining room and then Fields would grow indignant and condemn Pye as an interloper who was taking his customers away. One day my low resistance to germs supplied Fields with unique ammunition. Pye baked a cake for me, and it was a very good cake. I ate a lot of it. A few hours later, I came down with the flu and was flat on my back for several days. Fields told everyone he met that Pye had poisoned me. Actually he and Pye were good friends, and the barrage of insults they exchanged was part of the usual kidding atmosphere around the Truman White House.

  The modern presidency is such a demanding, enervating job that it is absolutely necessary for the President to have periods, however brief, for complete escape from the pressures of the office. Along with Key West, Dad and Mother sometimes used a retreat which President Roosevelt had created on the site of a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp in the Catoctin Mountains about sixty-five miles from Washington, near Thurmont, Maryland. FDR had called the camp Shangri-la, and Dad let the name stand. Later, President Eisenhower changed it to Camp David.

  The main building was a nine-room, one-story lodge, paneled inside in natural oak. There was a floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace in the living room, and each of the four bedrooms had smaller fireplaces. The extra warmth was badly needed. Deep in the woods, Shangri-la was damp and cold most of the time. I thought it was a terrible place and went there as little as possible.

  Earlier in 1946, before he found Key West, Dad had tried to arrange a cruise aboard the Williamsburg along the Maine coast. On August 22, 1946, he told his mother why he gave it up: “The Maine coast cruise ended in a blowup. Everybody and his brother whom I didn’t want to see tried by every hook or crook to rope me into letting him come aboard or having me be seen with him. So I just cancelled the trip.”

  Dad had solved the problem, then, by sailing to Woodrow Wilson’s favorite retreat, Bermuda. Dad had a pleasant time - he called the island a paradise - but he decided he did not like to be so far away from the White House, without adequate communications. He told his mother: “We’ll be here for a week and then go back to the White House and stay there from now until the end of the term. It is the only place I should be. It took me a long time to find it out. But it is the fact.”

  Another reason why he decided the Williamsburg was not the answer to his vacation problems was described in the following letter to his mother:

  Off the Va. Capes, 9/2/46 Dear Mamma & Mary: - We are just coming to Hampton Roads on a beautiful calm, cool sunny Sunday morning after a rather stormy passage from Bermuda. We left there Friday morning early. It was sunny and the sea was calm. But by dinner time we’d run into rain squalls and a rough sea. The Williamsburg being a pleasure craft did all sorts of antics in the heavy seas. I became seasick at the dinner table and rushed to my quarters and to bed. Stayed there most of yesterday. Ate no breakfast or lunch but did manage a cup of tea and two sandwiches about eight o’clock last night.

  Saturday morning it was so rough that furniture, paper, ink bottles, magazines, clothing and pillows got completely mixed on my floor. . . .

  It looked as if the place never would look the same again, but it does and you’d never know anything had happened.

  After that experience on the high seas, Dad used the Williamsburg only for weekend getaways, on the calmer waters of the Potomac or Chesapeake Bay. Dad followed a policy of working a seventeen or eighteen-hour day in the White House for five or six days, and then taking a complete break and sleeping most of the time. He was particularly fond of doing this aboard the Williamsburg, and his letters to me and to his mother and sister are studded with remarks about the yacht which ended with “I expect to do nothing but sleep,” or “I hope I can get some sleep.” While I have said Dad’s health was good, it was not perfect. Moreover, he had a tendency to ignore his illnesses until they either went away or floored him. For instance, o
n July 16, 1946, he wrote to his mother: “Early last week after our trip to Shangri-la I cultivated a sore throat and an infected ear but both are all right now. That’s the first time I ever had a bad ear. But couldn’t let up. Things had to go on as usual or they’d have said I was physically incompetent. No one ever knew the difference.”

  From this point of view, Dr. Graham was the perfect physician for Dad. He had a lot of common sense and was not an alarmist. But he could also be very firm about taking a vacation or doing something about a cold or sore throat. Firmness helps when you are dealing with someone as stubborn as Harry S. Truman. Dad had always admired and respected Dr. Graham’s father, and this personal link added a certain indefinable something to his son’s authority.

  Dad’s thirst for good music sometimes drew him out of the White House in the evening. In the summer, he often drove down to Watergate to listen to the outdoor concerts there. He would arrive late and sit in his car on a road above the amphitheater, and then send me the concert program with comments on the performances.

  Occasionally, he was not above using his presidential power to get the music he wanted. One night he went to an indoor concert to hear Oscar Straus and his orchestra. Pictures were taken before the concert started. At intermission, Dad sent Secret Service man Jim Rowley around with a request for the “Blue Danube” waltz. Straus, who was a crotchety old character, told Jim he couldn’t play it because the orchestra hadn’t rehearsed it.

  “I told Jim to tell him all right, but we’d have the pictures we’d made before his appearance torn up,” Dad told us in a letter. “He played the waltz and needed no rehearsal!”

  In the fall of 1946, Dad revived the regular White House social program. In one sense, he hated to do it. It put additional strain on him, and he already had too much to do. It also put a tremendous strain on Mother, since she had to superintend the preparations. She had plenty of help, of course, but she still felt responsible. Moreover, with sixty-two heads of diplomatic missions and their wives, it was necessary to divide the traditional diplomatic dinner in two. Here is the schedule for our first full winter in Washington.

  November 26, Tuesday, Diplomatic Dinner, 8 p.m.

  December 3, Tuesday, Diplomatic Dinner, 8 p.m.

  December 10, Tuesday, Judicial Reception, 9 p.m.

  December 17, Tuesday, Cabinet Dinner, 8 p.m.

  January 7, Tuesday, Diplomatic Reception, 9 p.m.

  January 14, Tuesday, Dinner to the Chief Justice and the Supreme Court, 8 p.m.

  January 21, Tuesday, Reception to the Officials of the Treasury, Post Office, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce and Labor Departments and Federal Agencies, 9 p.m.

  January 28, Tuesday, Dinner to the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, 8 p.m.

  February 4, Tuesday, Army and Navy Reception, 9 p.m.

  February 11, Tuesday, Speaker’s Dinner, 8 p.m.

  February 18, Tuesday, Congressional Reception, 9 p.m.

  From another point of view, Dad liked these dinners because the traditional ceremony was a dramatic statement of the power and prestige of the presidency. With his enormous respect for the great office, he was always eager to enhance it, no matter how much of a drain the effort made on his energies. The big moment at these affairs was the “Little Procession.” It is a really splendid ceremony. The members of the Cabinet and their wives would meet in Dad’s study. At 8:45, four husky young men, one sailor, one soldier, one airman, and one marine, commanded by an officer, would arrive and request permission to take the colors. Dad would grant the permission, and the color guard in precise military formation would pick up the American flag and the President’s flag and march to the head of the stairs, practically banging their feet through the old White House floorboards.

  Meanwhile, downstairs, the diplomats were arriving, their full evening dress ablaze with decorations. The two color bearers would station themselves at the door to the Blue Room. Precisely on the stroke of nine, Dad and Mother would lead the Cabinet members and their wives in order of precedence down the stairs and into the Blue Room where they received the diplomats beneath the big chandelier. The Cabinet members received the guests in the Red Room. Then everyone went to the State Dining Room where tea, coffee, sandwiches, and cake were served. Liquor was never served at diplomatic receptions in the White House. Meanwhile, in the East Room, the Marine Band would begin playing and would continue to make music for dancing until midnight. Usually, a noted singer would also be on hand to perform. Commenting on the Cabinet dinner to his mother, Dad wrote, “It was a beautiful affair. It looked like the pictures in the books about the White House. . . . Everybody seemed to enjoy it and we got upstairs (a most important item) at 10:40.”

  The signal that the reception was officially over was the departure of the color guard. When they carried the two flags back to Dad’s office, he and Mother usually beat a hasty retreat to the elevator and upstairs.

  Because President Roosevelt had been confined to a wheelchair, the Little Procession had been abandoned during his three administrations. Old Washington hands were enormously pleased to see Dad restore it. Edith Helm, the social secretary, wrote in her memoirs: “The receptions, especially, of the Truman period marked the very peak of official entertaining in the old White House - and spectacular events they were.” That is the voice of authority and experience speaking. Mrs. Helm’s White House memories went back to Woodrow Wilson’s day.

  Eventually, toward the end of the reception season, the down-to-earth Missouri side of Dad’s nature overcame his love of presidential panoply. In a letter to his mother on February 13, he wrote: “This is the first time I’ve been glad to have Lent come. I’m sick and tired of smirking at people I don’t like. So a rest will come in handy.”

  Mother felt pretty much the same way. Toward the close of the social season, she wrote to me: “These two weeks are really going to be a handshaking two weeks - conservative estimate forty-one hundred - I’ll be plenty glad when February 19th arrives!”

  Those words remind me of a lesson I learned in this, my first social season in the White House. No rings. At one of my first receptions, I stood in line shaking hand after hand and suddenly felt a vague pain. I looked down and saw that my ring had been pressed into my flesh.

  Even though he was surrounded by aides, servants, and Secret Service men, Dad went into his usual decline when Mother and I left him to spend the summer in Independence. I scarcely reached home when he was writing: “Your Pop has missed you and your Mamma very much.” When I failed to write regularly, as usual, I got queries such as, “Is your arm paralyzed?” The next time around, he would try to lure me to the writing table with sentiment. For example:

  Dear Sistie: I am lonesome this morning - thought maybe I might get a letter from my little girl. But I suppose she’s busy with breathing exercises, vocal gymnastics and young gentlemen and so hasn’t had the time.

  As these words indicate, I had definitely made up my mind to become a professional singer and was spending the summer (of 1946) working on my technique. My decision to pursue my singing career was not made without a lot of soul-searching. I knew I was exposing myself to some malicious criticism. I knew political hatchetmen would make my ambition the target for sneak attacks on the White House. These headaches and heartaches, which Dad calmly pointed out to me, only aroused the Truman determination in my blood. I could see no reason why my father becoming President meant I should be denied the chance to become an individual capable of standing on my merit, to experience the satisfaction of achievement. Dad wholeheartedly concurred. But that did not stop him from worrying about me: “I am glad you are working hard at your music. If you love it enough to give it all you have, nothing can stop you [he wrote to me on August 23, 1946]. There is only one thing I ask - please don’t become a temperamental case. It is hard to keep from it I know - and no one knows better than I. But it is not necessary nor does it help in your public relations. It makes no friends and to succeed at anything you must have friends on w
hom you can rely. That is just as true of a musical career as it is of a political one or a business career.”

  Along with affairs of state and the danger of me becoming a prima donna, Dad fretted over picking out a stage name for me. At this point, I was determined to use one of these artificial monikers because I was determined to succeed on my own merits as a singer, with no help from the name Truman. I later abandoned this idea as totally unrealistic. Waitresses from Keokuk can change their names and identities and make it big on the stage or screen, but it is a vain hope for a President’s daughter. I am sure Dad knew this from the start, but he went along with my inclination, and managed to have a lot of fun suggesting alternatives. “There are a lot of good names in the family on both sides. For instance, Mary Jane Holmes, your great-grandmother, Harriet Louisa Gregg, another great-grandmother, Matilda Middleton, a great-aunt, Peggy Seton, another great-aunt. Susan Shippe, a great-grandmother . . . Mary Margaret Gates would look good in headlines, and Peggy Gates would probably catch ‘em.

  “I also have some partiality for Mary Margaret Truman. Mr. Dooley in his column some years ago said safe crackers and stage stars were the only great professions which required assumed names. He may have something there.”

  A few days later, he sent me the following letter on the same topic:

  Here is a telegram from a nut over in Connecticut who admits it! The only reason I’m sending it to you is because it is signed by a very euphonious name. . . . What a stage name that would make - and you might see visions too! And you have to see visions to get real headlines. Look at Henry Wallace, Pepper, Huey Long, Bilbo, Talmadge of Georgia - and remember Joe Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Porfirio Diaz and a dozen others.