Bess Truman Read online

  As he prepared a radio speech to the nation, Dad filled in Bess on another day in the White House.

  I’ve had the usual day. The British ambassador brought in Admiral Tenney, who was with Roosevelt in the Red Sea when he met Ibn Saud. He said FDR. was in a heck of a fix for a smoke. And he couldn’t smoke or drink in the presence of the old Arab King. He said that when the luncheon was served Ibn and FDR. each had to go down to the “dining saloon” (as he called it) in an elevator. The King of Arabia went first. When FDR. went down he stopped the elevator halfway and smoked three cigarettes so he could stand the lunch. . . .

  Had Myron Taylor in too. Looks as if he and I may get the morals of the world on our side. We are talking to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop at the head of the Lutheran Church, the Metropolitan of the Greek Church at Istanbul, and the Pope. I may send him to see the top Buddhist and the Grand Lama of Tibet. If I can mobilize the people who believe in a moral world against the Bolshevik materialists, who believe as Henry Wallace does – “that the end justifies the means” - we may win this fight.

  Treaties, agreements, or a moral code mean nothing to Communists. So we’ve got to organize the people who do believe in honor and the Golden Rule to win the world back to peace and Christianity.

  Ain’t it hell!

  Dad’s radio speech rallied popular support for the Marshall Plan. “We’re putting it over,” he wrote exultantly to Mother. He dismissed as minor worries the overriding of his tax veto and political firestorms such as the wrath of the nation’s Catholics, who were mad at him for declaring Tuesday instead of Friday a meatless day to free up food for the starving Europeans. The Catholics did not like getting stuck with two meatless days. It was one of those vote-getting details that slipped by the president and his staff, because they were concentrating on trying to save Western civilization.

  Something else was visible in these late 1947 letters to Bess: a growing presidential confidence. Others saw it too. One of the closest and most astute observers was Charlie Ross.

  In the summer of 1947, Charlie’s two-year leave from his job at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch was up. Instead of going back to the paper, he resigned and enlisted for the duration of the Truman tenure. This was doubly remarkable because Charlie was troubled by agonizing bouts of arthritis. Worse, he had already suffered two mild heart attacks from working those eighteen-hour White House days. He concealed these danger signals from Dad and Mother - and perhaps from himself. He was equally debonair about a warning his doctor gave him early in 1948, that he had only four more years to live.

  On Christmas Day 1947, Charlie wrote Dad a memorable letter. He said that the past two-and-one-half years had been “the most rewarding years of my life.” He praised the “good team” that Dad had assembled for some of this feeling. “But the greatest inspiration, Mr. President, has been . . . you as President, you as a human being. . . . My admiration for you, and my deep affection, have grown steadily since the day you honored me with your trust.”

  I know Dad showed this letter to Mother. It made her doubly proud of having urged Dad to hire Charlie and eternally grateful to Mary Paxton Keeley for cheering her on. As this letter demonstrated, Charlie had become much more than a press secretary. He was a counselor, a friend. Only those who are close to a president understand how much he needs this kind of support.

  Unfortunately, Charlie Ross’ view of Harry Truman was not shared by a great many people, as 1948 dawned. Almost everyone assumed that Dad would not run for reelection. Seldom has a president sunk so low in the opinion polls. According to their statistics, only 36 percent of the population approved of the way Harry Truman was doing his job.

  As late as September 24, 1947, Dad himself seemed to share this low opinion. On that day, he wrote to Bess: “I’d be much better off if I were out or licked and I suspect you and Margie would be much more pleased.” But the support Bess gave him throughout the struggle for the Marshall Plan - and winning that fight - changed his attitude dramatically.

  I suspect that Dad also may have been thinking about one of the last conversations he had had with Mamma Truman, a month or two before she died. She asked him if Senator Robert Taft was going to be nominated for president by the Republicans in 1948. “He might be,” Dad said.

  He knew that among all the Republicans she disliked (and she definitely disliked all of them), Senator Taft was the most detested. “Harry, are you going to run?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, Mamma,” Dad replied.

  “Don’t you think it’s about time you made up your mind?” she asked.

  Bess demonstrated what she was thinking by deciding to invite the Wallace family to join us for Christmas in the White House, instead of going home. She thought it might be the next to last Christmas of the Truman presidency, and she wanted her family to enjoy the White House without a smog of defeat dampening everyone’s spirits. Fred and Chris and their two children, Uncle George and Aunt May, and Uncle Frank and Aunt Natalie joined us for a pleasant holiday.

  Early in 1948, Bess wrote to Nellie Noland, Ethel’s sister, that “it just didn’t seem right, not to go home for the holidays, but after all the family arrived it didn’t seem to make any difference.” It was another glimpse of the intensity of her feelings for the Wallace family. No matter where they were geographically, when they were together, Mother felt at home.

  It was partly to make Mother feel more at home in the White House that Dad got involved in a pitched battle with Congress and the press in these first months of 1948. One of the chief pleasures of 219 North Delaware Street were its porches, particularly the back porches, where the family whiled away more than one summer afternoon or evening, secure from prying eyes. With the Truman partnership running smoothly again, Dad hoped Mother would spend more of her summers in Washington. He decided the White House ought to have a back porch and soon found the perfect place for it - on the second floor, behind the six columns of the south portico.

  You would have thought he had just announced he was going to replace the White House with a lean-to or a split-level bungalow, to hear the howls from Congress and the press. Representative Frederick A. Muhlenberg, a Pennsylvania Republican who claimed he was the only architect in Congress, declared the porch was “illegal” as well as aesthetically wrong. The Washington Post accused Dad of “meddling” with a building that did not belong to him. The Fine Arts Commission, composed exclusively of what Dad called “high-hats,” intoned that the porch would “permanently change the appearance of the south facade.”

  Dad ignored them and hired William Adams Delano, a former chairman of the Fine Arts Commission, to design the porch. Mr. Delano approved the idea heartily, which silenced the Fine Arts Commission. He agreed with Dad’s contention that the porch was a major improvement that was needed to complete the White House’s design, as well as to give the presidential family a place to relax outdoors in warm weather without 20,000 people staring at them. As Dad explained it, the porch “broke the skinny perpendicular lines” of those portico columns. It also eliminated the need for seven ugly awnings that jutted between the columns during the summer to keep the sun out of the Blue Room on the first floor.

  All these arguments made good sense, and every presidential family since the Truman days has used - and praised - the porch. But no one, as far as I know, has connected its creation to 219 North Delaware Street.

  Meanwhile, serious politics and incessant first ladying remained the order of the day. The major battle on the presidential front was persuading the Republican Congress to vote for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. By this time, the cold war had begun in earnest. Russia, as Dad wrote in a letter to Bess, “has at last shown her hand, and it contains the cards [Secretary of State] Marshall and I thought it would.” Few sensible Americans could think otherwise, after the Communist coup that seized Czechoslovakia at the end of February 1948.

  This turning point in Soviet-American relations put President Truman under terrific strain. Bess a
gain became alarmed at his exhaustion and insisted on another vacation at Key West. He went down there at the end of February 1948. The international situation did not improve, and he began to think we might be at war with Russia in thirty days. He told me this in a long, hair-raising letter on March 3. Whenever war threatened, Dad thought of its impact on my generation of Americans, who would have to fight it. He felt a need to explain to me how hard he had tried to avoid it.

  In this letter, he went all the way back to his Senate career and his achievements there, which led to the vice-presidential nomination. Then he turned to the years of his presidency.

  Well the catastrophe we all dreaded came on April 12 at 4:35 p.m. At 7:09 I was the President. . . . Then I had to start in reading memorandums, briefs, and volumes of correspondence on the World situation. Too bad I hadn’t been on the Foreign Affairs Committee or that FDR. hadn’t informed me on the situation. I had to find out about the Atlantic Charter, which by the way does not exist on paper, the Casablanca meeting, the Montreal meeting, Teheran meeting, “Yalta” . . . and other things too numerous to mention. . . .

  Then came Potsdam. . . . I felt that agreements made in the war to keep Russia fighting should be kept and I kept them to the letter. Perhaps they should not have been adhered to so quickly because later I found the only way to make Russia keep agreements. I did not know that then. Perhaps if we had been slower moving back [our troops] we could have forced the Russians, Poles, Bulgars, Yugos etc to behave. But all of us wanted Russia in the Japanese War. Had we known what the Atomic Bomb would do we’d never have wanted the Bear in the picture. You must remember no tests had been made until several days after I arrived in Berlin.

  Adm. Leahy told me that he was an explosives expert and Roosevelt had just thrown $2,600,000,000 away for nothing. He was wrong. But his guess was as good as any. Byrnes thought it might work but he wasn’t sure. He thought if it did we would win the Japanese War without much more losses but we still needed the Russians. . . . We entered into agreements for the Government of Germany - not one of which has Russia kept. We made agreements on China, Korea and other places, none of which has Russia kept. So that now we are faced with exactly the same situation with which Britain + France were faced in 1938/9 with Hitler. A totalitarian state is no different whether you call it Nazi, Fascist, Communist or Franco Spain.

  Things look black. We’ve offered control and disarmament through the U.N. giving up our one most powerful weapon for the world to control. The Soviets won’t agree. They’re upsetting things in Korea, in China, in Persia (Iran) and in the Near East.

  A decision will have to be made. I am going to make it. . . . I just wanted you to know your dad as President asked for no territory, no reparations, no slave laborers - only Peace in the World. We may have to fight for it. The oligarchy in Russia is no different from the Czars, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Charles I and Cromwell. It is a Frankenstein dictatorship worse than any of the others, Hitler included.

  I hope it will end in peace.

  In his letters to Mother while on this vacation, Dad concentrated on domestic matters. She was well-briefed on the international situation, thanks to her nightly conferences with the number one expert on it, the President of the United States. In this letter, he discussed his struggle to reach the American people to counter the misrepresentation of his efforts for peace by left-wing Democrats and right-wing Republicans.

  The weather here is ideal. It is hell to have to go back to slavery and the lickings that I’ll have to face from now on. But it must be done.

  The meeting with Gov. Cox [newspaper publisher James A. Cox] the other day is bearing fruit. I sent Clifford [Clark Clifford, White House counsel] to Miami yesterday to meet with Cox and his five managing editors. He has a paper in Miami, one in Atlanta, one in Dayton and two in Springfield Ohio. Clark said that the Governor was enthusiastic over his meeting with me and that he is working out a plan to support the Democratic program as set out by me as President. So that time is not wasted. Whenever I can meet these people and tell them personally what I’m trying to do they always come in to camp, because I’m only trying to do what’s best for the country and to obtain a just peace in the world. It’s very discouraging however when your best efforts are misrepresented and distorted by deliberate lies - and by people who surprise by their maliciousness. . . .

  I sent Margie a fat historical letter for her future use.

  Dad returned from Key West to give another historic speech before Congress, calling for a renewal of the draft and swift passage of the money for the Marshall Plan. He urged Congress to support the treaty of alliance recently signed by the nations of Western Europe - the first step to NATO - and condemned the Soviet Union for having “destroyed the independence and democratic character of a whole series of nations in Eastern and Central Europe.” He bluntly accused them of planning to export the same brand of tyranny to the rest of Europe.

  It seems strange, now, with our old friend hindsight smiling beside us, that Americans could not recognize Harry Truman as the man who was rallying the free world at a crucial turning point in history. But the people who were supposed to care most about that sort of thing, the Democratic Party’s liberals, the supposed heirs of that destroyer of isolationism, Franklin D. Roosevelt, were a lot more worried about losing the election to the Republicans. Personifying this desertion of the president were FDR’s sons, Elliott and Franklin, who issued statements urging the Democrats to draft General Eisenhower.

  For Mother, those first six months of 1948 were not all politics. I had sort of returned to the fold and was having severe doubts about my singing career. My first concert tour had been a financial success, but I had begun to question the kind of coaching I was getting and the direction in which I was being steered by my advisers. While I mulled, Mother (with Dad’s collaboration) lured me back into the presidential orbit. Mother tempted me with invitations that few twenty-four-year-olds could resist, such as a chance to go to the Mardi Gras in New Orleans and, incidentally, to christen a Mississippi River tugboat named after Dad.

  We traveled to the Queen City of the South by train. I marveled at the way Mother was so agreeable about getting off at every city on our route to greet reporters and photographers and delegations of women who filled our arms with flowers. Atlanta, Montgomery, Mobile, Biloxi, we smiled through them all. It only dawned on me as we got to New Orleans that my supposedly nonpolitical Mother was campaigning. And Harry Truman had not yet even announced he was going to run for a second term.

  That announcement came a few months later, in a speech Dad made to the Young Democrats Dinner at the Mayflower Hotel. With Mother and me sitting in the audience, Dad condemned the liberal “calamity howlers” who were wailing that Truman could not win. “I want to say to you that for the next four years there will be a Democrat in the White House and you are looking at him.”

  Mother was pessimistic about his chances. Not once throughout the spring or summer of 1948, or even in the fall when the campaign was picking up steam, did I hear her express any confidence in Harry Truman’s reelection. When I or anyone else among the tiny band of true believers told Dad he was going to win in spite of the polls or the newspapers or the empty campaign chest, Mother remained silent.

  India Edwards, the Democratic National Committeewoman, had breakfast with Dad and Mother in the fall. India had remained staunchly behind the Truman candidacy, ignoring the panicky liberals. “India,” Dad said in his teasing way, “sometimes I think there are only two people in the whole United States who really believe I am going to be elected. But the Boss here is not one of them.”

  That negative opinion did not stop Bess from rooting fiercely for the candidate - and working long hours on his behalf. That spring of 1948 was the most exhausting time Bess spent in the White House. A glance at her schedule would daunt an Olympic decathlon winner. Take April 13, for instance. That day four separate groups of women came to the White House, and Bess literally shook hands from morning until nig
ht.

  Early in May, one of the White House women reporters noted Bess’ pace. “After shaking hands with 1,800 guests Tuesday afternoon, Mrs. Truman began another two weeks of luncheons, teas, receptions,” she wrote. There was the picnic for the Senate Ladies’ Luncheon Club and a reception for the members of the American Law Institute and a garden party for veterans in Washington hospitals and a luncheon given by the B’nai B’rith and a reception for the National League of American Pen Women. The topper was a reception on May 4 for 3,000 government women.

  On May 12, Mother walked into my bedroom with an almost berserk smile on her face. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Tomorrow there’s absolutely nothing on my calendar. Let’s celebrate.”

  We went to lunch with Mrs. Davis, our neighbor at 4701 Connecticut Avenue in 1945. We talked and talked but not about politics. “Now what would you like to do?” I asked.

  “Go for a ride in the convertible,” Bess said. The Secret Service men were aghast at the idea of the First Lady and First Daughter in an open car, as Mother knew they would be. But they learned to keep their alarums to themselves most of the time. So we cruised around Washington in the May sunshine, with three or four agents gnawing their fingernails in a car behind us. “Go slow so I can window-shop,” Mother said. The driver obeyed, and we had a wonderful time.

  While Bess toiled on the social front, President Truman was not exactly idle on the political front. In Germany, the Russians were becoming nastier about permitting the western Allies access to the city of Berlin. A blockade was in the making and with it the threat of war.

  In Washington, the Eightieth Congress was heading for adjournment, having contemptuously refused to pass a single piece of legislation Harry Truman had submitted to them. The liberals were still trying to draft Eisenhower, and Henry Wallace had announced that he was going to run for president as the candidate of the Progressive Party. The southern Democrats were in virtual revolt because the president had ordered the end of racial segregation in the armed forces.