Bess Truman Read online

  Dad wrote me an emotional letter from Key West. It is an interesting comment on his eighteen-month struggle to reach an understanding with Moscow for the sake of world peace.

  We had a pleasant flight from Washington. Your old dad slept for 750 or 800 miles - three hours - and we were making from 250 to 300 miles an hour. No one not even me (your mother would say) knew how . . . worn to a frazzle the chief executive had become. The terrible decision I had to make had been over my head for about six weeks. Although I knew at Potsdam that there is no difference in totalitarian or police states, call them what you will, Nazi, Fascist, Communist or Argentine Republics. . . .

  Your pop had to tell the world just that in polite language.

  The submarine base at Key West was becoming a favorite presidential refuge, but Dad had yet to persuade Mother to join him. She saw it as an all-male setup (which it was) and thought Dad would have a better time horsing around with Charlie Ross and Admiral Leahy, playing poker and drinking a little bourbon beyond the range of her critical eye. But he wanted her near him more and more as the presidency gathered momentum, and he went to work in his usual shrewd fashion to tempt her southward. He described a fishing trip that he and Admiral Leahy had taken, praised the sunshine, and assured her that she and her mother would enjoy it.

  The president’s confidence in Bess’ support continued to grow, even though, according to the pollsters, his popularity with the voters was sinking so fast it would take one of the submarines from Key West to locate it. At the end of June in 1947, when Bess took her mother home to 219 North Delaware, he wrote her a teasing letter that recalled all the shows they had seen together, in particular, The Girl from Utah, with its hit song, “They’ll Never Believe Me.” “You’d just said you’d take a chance on me,” he wrote. “Wasn’t it a terrible chance? Never did I think I’d get you into all the trouble you’re in now. Well you didn’t have to take the chance, did you?”

  Less than two months after he wrote that letter to Bess, Harry Truman’s mother died at the age of ninety-four. He had been prepared for it ever since another fall had left Mamma Truman bedridden. In the spring of 1947, while he was pushing the Greek-Turkish aid bill through Congress, she had come so close to death, Dad flew to Missouri to be at her side. He signed the historic aid bill in his Muehlebach Hotel office on May 22.

  Two days later, Mamma Truman amazed the doctors by awakening and demanding a slice of watermelon. For the next two months, she seemed to be recovering. Dad went back to work in the Great White Jail, as he called the White House. He wrote Mother a wry account of a typical day in the summer of 1947.

  Had . . . a hell of a day. Had a long meeting with the secretaries at nine o’clock. Admiral Leahy 9:45 to 10:10, Steelman and Jacob S. Potofsky at 10:15. Potofsky is Sidney Hillman’s successor and he wanted to reassure me that the [CIO] Political Action Committee is 100 percent for me. Adolf Berle, Jr. came in yesterday to assure me that the New York Liberal Party is 100 percent for me. “Ain’t that funny.” Neither of ‘em is for anybody but themselves and their own special interests.

  Had to listen to Burt Wheeler [Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana] for one whole hour tell me all about South America. He went down there on a special mission ($10,000 fee and expenses) but he knows all about Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile. Another funny one. Senators and ex-Senators go to S.A., Germany, Japan, China, spend two or three days and know all about the countries and know all the answers. Guess I’m dumb.

  The foreign minister of Peru came in and gave me a beautiful silver tray. . . . Then I had to receive forty-two Democratic national committeemen and women from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia.

  Had a good time with them and told them a lot, as they did me.

  Then to top off the morning had to listen to Mrs. Ogden Reid [owner of the New York Herald Tribune] for twenty minutes. She didn’t take a long breath!

  On July 26, he was in a Missouri-ish mood.

  This is turnip day and Nellie Noland’s birthday. I sent her a telegram - did not refer to turnip day. My old baldheaded uncle, Harrison Young, told me that July 26 was the day to sow turnips - sow them “wet or dry, twenty-sixth of July.” In 1901 he went to the seed and hardware store in Belton and stated to the proprietor, Old Man Mosely, a North Carolinian, that he wanted six bushels of turnips seed - enough to sow the whole county to turnips. Mosely asked him what he expected to do with so much seed. My old uncle told him that it was his understanding that turnips are 90 percent water. Nineteen hundred one was the terribly dry year. Therefore if the whole farm were planted to turnips maybe the drought would be broken.

  You and I graduated that year and I spent quite some time on the farm, then Tasker Taylor [a classmate] was drowned in the Mo. River just above the Independence pumping station and I became a timekeeper for L. J. Smith’s railroad construction outfit. That experience was very useful to me when those R.R. hearings were going on.

  You see age is creeping up on me. Mamma is ninety-four and a half because she never lived in the past. I’ll never be ninety-four and a half but I’m not going to live in yesterday either.

  Dr. Graham went out today [to see Mamma Truman] and is to call me tonight. . . .

  Dad barely finished that letter when he got a phone call from his sister Mary. Mamma Truman had contracted pneumonia and wasn’t expected to live. Dad rushed to his plane. About an hour after they took off, he was dozing in his cabin when his mother’s face suddenly appeared before him with amazing clarity. A few minutes later, Dr. Wallace Graham, the White House physician, told Dad they had just received word that Mamma Truman was dead. “I knew she was gone when I saw her in that dream,” Dad said. “She was saying goodbye to me.”

  Two days after her funeral, Dad was back in the White House, still grief-stricken. He wrote me the following letter.

  Someday you’ll be an orphan just as your dad is now. I am going up to Shangri-la today and will meet your ma at Silver Spring on Monday as I return to town. Wish you were coming back with her. This place is a tomb without you and your mother.

  I have been looking over the thousands of letters, cards & telegrams about your old grandmother. They come from every state and every country and are very kind. Have heard from the Pope, King George, Chiang Kai-shek, the Queen of Holland and every president in the Western Hemisphere.

  But the ones I appreciate most come from home. Heard from men and women your mother and I went to school with - some I hadn’t heard from in forty years. Got one from the colored man who always waits on me at the Kansas City Club and one signed Fields [White House head butler] . . . one signed by all the sergeants who guard my plane. I like them more than all the topnotchers. . . .

  Mamma Truman’s death removed from Dad’s life the other woman to whom he had turned again and again for the emotional support he needed to maintain his balance in the presidency.

  If anything confirms the truth of my analysis of Harry Truman’s motives in 1944, when Eddie McKim brought Mamma Truman into Dad’s presidential thoughts, it is the incredible number of letters he began writing to his mother from the moment he entered the White House. As a senator, he had written to her no more often than a dutiful, busy son might be expected to correspond. In the White House, his letters multiplied incredibly; often he wrote every day - with the same candor and wealth of detail he put into his letters to Bess.

  Now Martha Ellen Truman was gone, and that meant Harry Truman’s need for Bess’ support intensified. I am referring here to emotional support, not to any advice he might get from her on the blizzard of problems he faced. His daughter, yours truly the biographer, was out of the picture, crisscrossing the continent on concert tours. I am not sure if Bess was aware of this deepened need. She was not given to analyzing anyone, including herself, psychologically. But I think she sensed it on an intuitive level.

  The best piece of evidence was her willingness to join him and me on a diplomatic mission to Brazil in Septe
mber 1947. Persuading Mother was a feat in itself, because the trip involved flying across thousands of miles of sea and jungle. Even a flight to Missouri was torture to her. Dad made the decision almost on the spur of the moment, another obstacle. Mother usually did not like to be taken by surprise.

  Twenty nations had been meeting in Rio de Janeiro to discuss inter-American security. They startled everyone, including themselves, by coming up with a treaty that banned aggression in the Western Hemisphere. Brazil was also celebrating the 125th anniversary of its independence. President Truman decided to go down there, sign the treaty personally, and help the Brazilians celebrate. Bess succumbed, I think, for a special reason.

  The trip was a sentimental journey for Mr. and Mrs. Truman. A number of times in his early letters, Dad had mentioned his desire to take Mother - or send her - on a tour of South America. Every woman has, I think, a romantic place she has longed to visit. For Mother, it was the Latin half of the New World. Harry Truman knew this, and I think it played no small part in his decision to go to Brazil.

  It also made good political sense, I should add. It was part of a program Dad had launched earlier in the year to build solidarity between the United States and the countries of our hemisphere. Already he had visited Mexico and Canada with tremendous success.

  In a long letter to her mother from Rio de Janeiro, Bess made no attempt to conceal her nervousness about flying. “The heavy clouds & fog lifted from the city just before we came in yesterday. . . . When we circled the bay (it’s perfectly enormous) we were flying with one wing down towards the water & it looked as if we were going right into it, which I didn’t enjoy.”

  She also disliked the ride from our embassy to the site of the conference, the Hotel Quitandinha in the resort city of Petropolis, in the mountains about thirty-eight miles north of Rio. The only approach to the site was up a steep, curving two-lane road, with a sheer drop of 1,500 feet only inches from our tires and not a guardrail in sight. In spite of a heavy rain, Bess told her mother that we “went at a very lively gait and took the hairpin turns at a terrible speed.” I don’t remember being that scared, but it was not the most enjoyable car ride I have had.

  Bess also found fault with her daughter’s antics in Rio. One night, I went partying with several members of the staff. No one, including me, seems to have remembered to tell the president and First Lady where we were going. When we got back at 2:00 a.m., they were both pacing the floor. Mother gave me hell right on the spot, and Dad gave the staff more of the same the next morning.

  What Bess loved most about Rio were the gardens. “The flowers and shrubs are out of this world,” she told her mother, from whom she had inherited her love of growing things. “The gardens in front of the embassy are gorgeous. The hibiscus are all double & a brilliant red. There are a lot of other flowers and flowering shrubs that are like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

  The Brazilians could not have been more hospitable and enthusiastic. But for the Trumans, the high point of the trip was our voyage back aboard the USS Missouri. For twelve days, we were more or less insulated from nasty columnists, international crises, and critical congressmen. Best of all, we had to shed all pretensions to being VIP’s when the ship crossed the equator. That was when King Neptune came aboard to initiate all pollywogs [first-time crossers] into his domain.

  The more ridiculous the costume in which a pollywog greets the king, the better. The goal is to amuse him and make the initiation less rigorous. Mother donned a sport shirt and a baker’s hat. It is a sight I will never forget. I did not look much better in a raincoat, boots, and sou’wester hat, all three sizes too big for me.

  After greeting his majesty (actually a chief petty officer wearing dungarees and a cockeyed cardboard crown), we retired for the night to await our punishment. The next morning the “No. 1 pollywog,” the President of the United States, was the first to approach Davy’s throne and beg for mercy. He got off by promising to sign autographs for Davy and his pirate escorts and to supply them with Corona cigars for the rest of the voyage.

  Mother seemed to be in trouble for a while. Davy accused her of sowing “typical feminine disregard of our royal whim” by having “so cozened and comforted our No. 1 pollywog and otherwise made home so delightful for him that you have delayed for many years this long-sought audience with Harry S. Truman.” However, the No. 1 shellback aboard, Admiral Leahy (he had crossed the equator aboard the battleship Oregon in 1898), interceded for her, and Davy decided to grant his first amnesty in several centuries.

  The rest of us were not so lucky. I had to bow down six times before his majesty and lead six ensigns in singing “Anchors Aweigh.” Charlie Ross and the other members of the presidential party took even worse punishment. They got clamped to an operating table and had some royal medicine - a mixture of alum, mustard, quinine, and epsom salts - poured down their throats. Then they got ducked in the royal tank and ran a gauntlet of electrically charged pitchforks. I began to dislike the rough stuff but Mother, having dealt with an unruly mob of Delaware Street males, loved every minute of it. She laughed hardest when the reporters got the business.

  There was a new sense of solidarity - and not a trace of self-pity - in Dad’s letters to Mother that fall. She returned to Missouri for a few weeks to close the house for the winter and bring her mother to Washington. During this period, Harry Truman pushed through the Republican Congress one of the great foreign policy initiatives of our time, the Marshall Plan.

  Earlier in 1947, the president had responded with both his heart and his head to the description Undersecretary of State Will Clayton had brought back from a tour of Europe. The center of Western civilization was close to collapse, harried by food shortages, industrial stagnation, and Communist threats from without and within its national borders. The $12 billion Harry Truman eventually persuaded Congress to appropriate transformed Western Europeans from a people without hope to a strong, prosperous community again.

  Bess played a part in this struggle, which was fought both in the press and among the public as well as in Congress. Rather than present the spectacle of VIP’s feasting while Europe was starving, she canceled all the state dinners for the 1947 social season. To prove she was not shirking her job, however, she continued the receptions, which involved the really herculean handshaking. The receptions did not require any serious outlay of food - and incidentally, no liquor was served at them. This was not Bess’ idea. It was a White House tradition.

  Hindsight makes it sound easy, but the letters President Truman and Bess exchanged reveal how tough it was to get the Marshall Plan through Congress. He rehearsed with Bess many of the arguments he used to rally support for the program. “To feed France and Italy this year [1948] will cost 580 million, the Marshall Plan 16.5 billion. But you know in October and November 1945 I cancelled 63 billion in appropriations - 55 billion at one crack. Our war cost that year was set at 105 billion. The 16.5 billion is for a five year period and is for peace.”

  A Russian war, which he saw as a strong possibility, “would cost us $400 billion and untold lives, mostly civilian. So I must do what I can. I shouldn’t write you this stuff but you should know what I’ve been facing.”

  What tormented Dad was the attitude of the Republican and southern conservative “squirrelheads” (his term), who were living in 1890. They were more interested in overriding President Truman’s veto of their giveaway tax bill than in the crisis of western civilization.

  Not all the Republicans were squirrelheads, of course. The key to reaching the thoughtful moderates was Arthur Vandenberg, the earnest, idealistic senator from Michigan who had become a good friend of Harry Truman during their years together in the Senate. Dad worked tirelessly to convert Senator Vandenberg into an internationalist and succeeded magnificently. Bess played a part in this campaign, too, doing everything in her power to charm the senator’s wife. In late September, Dad wrote to her: “Sen. Vandenberg was highly pleased at the flowers we sent his wife in the Detroit Ho
spital.”

  Not to be discounted in the subtleties of the legislative process is Bess’ influence with other senator’s wives. Early in 1947, she wrote to me: “The Senate women’s luncheon today was something! The nicest one they have ever had, they said.”

  The president shared with Bess the climax of his struggle with Congress - the meeting with the Democratic and Republican leaders in the Cabinet Room on September 29. He listed each of them by name, including Vandenberg. The list filled half of one page of the letter. Most of them are forgotten now, but Bess had met all of them and had a good grasp of their personalities. First Robert Lovett, the Undersecretary of State, and then Secretary of State Marshall spoke and answered questions. “After everyone had had his say, I stated the case categorically and told them what we faced and what in my opinion we had to do,” Dad wrote. “There was no objection!”

  Bess was pessimistic about her man’s chances, as usual She thought the Republican and southern negativists would override the tax veto and sink the Marshall Plan too. This is an interesting glimpse of how “support” worked in the Truman partnership. It did not mean that Bess was always a cheering section. As Dad wrote in an earlier letter, “I’m happier when I can see you - even when you give me hell.” Basic to the partnership was the principle that Bess would express her own opinions. Even if they disagreed, the important thing was that she was there, caring.

  There were ample grounds for pessimism on the eve of the Marshall Plan vote. Bess remembered what had happened when Congress ran amok against President Roosevelt in 1937. “You are right about what I’m facing,” Dad wrote. “But I’ve got to meet it with all I have. It may not be enough but if the Almighty didn’t make my brain container as big as it should be, I’ll have to use what he gave me. Congress will get its share of the responsibility but I can’t and won’t shirk mine.”