Bess Truman Read online

  During the 48 campaign, Mother had met and liked Florence Mahoney, a lively woman who was married to a relative of James A. Cox. He was the newspaper publisher whom Dad had met in Florida in 1947 and persuaded to back his policies. Mrs. Mahoney had become interested in the politics of the nation’s health through her friendship with Mary Lasker, the philanthropist widow of a public relations executive who had contributed millions to medical research. Mrs. Mahoney suggested to Mother that the National Institutes of Health could become the center of a massive effort to conquer major diseases such as cancer. Mother found this a fascinating idea and went to work on making it a reality.

  For the next four years at budget time, Mother urged Dad to increase the NIH funding. The result of her quiet advocacy is visible in the dollars and cents record. By the time Harry Truman left the presidency in 1952, the NIH was getting $46 million from the federal government, a twenty-fold increase. It obviously helps to have the First Lady for a lobbyist.

  Florence Mahoney told me that for three decades she had yearned to tell this story, but she abided by Mother’s unwavering refusal to give her permission. With a shrewdness that goes back to her first interview after Dad was nominated for vice president, Mother never wanted anyone but Dad to get credit for the achievements of his administration. She never forgot the way the newspapers had tried to make Harry Truman look like a Pendergast yes-man, then a cheap imitation of Franklin Roosevelt. She never wanted anyone to be able to say that Harry Truman got his ideas from his wife.

  During these first happy months of the second term, I spent most of my time in New York, practicing hard. I was getting pretty independent, and Mother acknowledged this in small ways. When my friend Jane Watson, daughter of IBM’s president, became engaged to Jack Irwin and asked me to be a bridesmaid, Mother agreed to give a small dinner and dancing party at Blair House for them in May. She sent me the menu she had worked out and asked for my approval. This almost convinced me, at the age of twenty-four, that I was an adult at last.

  Mother came up to New York for the wedding, which was at Brick Presbyterian Church. Lawrence Tibbett, the Metropolitan Opera’s first American-born star, who sang at the ceremony, greeted her in the vestibule. “I just saw Margaret. She’s in the wings,” he said.

  Mother was somewhat startled by this casual transformation of a church into a theater. “If I told that to your Grandmother,” she said, as we discussed the wedding the next morning, “she’d go into shock.” Mother’s eyes twinkled. I realized that she thought it was funny.

  That year, Harry Truman wrote Bess another memorable anniversary letter. She had gone home to Independence early in June to supervise the continuing repairs on the house.

  Thirty years ago I hoped to make you a happy wife and a happy mother. Did I? I don’t know. All I can say [is] I’ve tried. There is no one in the world anyway who can look down on you or your daughter. That means much to me, but I’ve never cared for social position or rank for myself except to see that those dear to me were not made to suffer for my shortcomings. . . . I’m very sure that if you’d been able to see into the future . . . you’d have very definitely turned your back on what was coming.

  Business failure, with extra responsibility coming [he’s referring to my birth), political defeat at the same time. Almost starvation in Washington those first ten years and then hell and repeat from 1944 to date. But I wouldn’t change it and I hope you wouldn’t. . . . Remember the Blackstone, Port Huron, Detroit Statler, the trip home? Maybe in 1953 we will be able to take that trip over again.

  Dad was really ebullient that year. He even had the nerve to revive a custom he had dropped somewhere around 1913, calling Mother “Miss Lizzie,” when he wanted to make her mad. The man just liked to live dangerously. That June, when Mother went home, he wrote to Ethel Noland: “Hope you’ve seen Miss Lizzie by this time.” He speculated about what would have happened to him if “Miss Lizzie” had “gone off” with one of her early beaus. “Harry . . . probably would have been either a prominent farmer in Jackson County or a Major General in the regular army and not have been half so much trouble and worry to his ‘sisters and his cousins and his aunts.’”

  During these first sunny months of the new term, Bess was also cheered by her mother’s surprising return to good health. After seeming to be in an inexorable decline, Grandmother Wallace’s Christmas rally continued, and by the time she went back to Independence in June, Dr. Wallace Graham, the White House physician, told Dad she was in better health than at any time in the previous two years.

  Among the presidential political family, however, a tragic situation developed with Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. He was the last holdover from FDR’s cabinet, but he had given unstinting loyalty to Harry Truman. He had been savagely battered in two big political brawls, the unification of the armed services into the Department of Defense and the recognition of Israel. He had backed the president in the teeth of the quarreling generals and admirals in the first one but had made no secret of his disagreement with Dad’s decision to recognize Israel. It was an honest difference of opinion, but Drew Pearson and his ilk declined to admit such a possibility. They smeared Mr. Forrestal at every opportunity.

  A sensitive, emotional man, he simply broke down under the beating. He became more and more mentally disturbed, and Dad finally had to ask him to resign. He entered Bethesda Naval Hospital for treatment for severe depression. Bess was deeply affected by this political agony - it stirred her deepest sympathies. On Easter Saturday, she sent Mr. Forrestal a bouquet of roses. He wrote her a touching reply.

  “My dear Mrs. Truman: The flowers you sent are beautiful and have helped brighten a bleak day. I am moved that you should trouble to send me a token but it’s typical of your thoughtfulness. A Happy Easter to you and the President and Miss Truman. You all deserve it.”

  He signed it: “Faithfully.” A few days later, his faith, whether in himself or his country, ran out. He leaped to his death from his hospital room.

  Mother was terribly shaken. Dad was enraged. He considered Drew Pearson the murderer of James Forrestal and said so. Some people thought this was an extreme statement. Perhaps it was, in a literal sense of the word. But in the emotional context of his marriage, as I have explained it in this book, it is easy to see why Dad’s anger was intensified by his knowledge of the impact of Mr. Forrestal’s suicide on Mother.

  That summer in Independence, Mother went on a diet to reduce her weight as well as to control her blood pressure. Serious dieting while on Washington’s merry-go-round of official lunches and dinners was difficult. She cut down drastically on her calories and rigorously banned all salt and salted meats from her menus. The result was impressive. Her blood pressure came down, and she lost twenty pounds. Later in the year, she sat for one of her best photographs, in the living room of 219 North Delaware. Here was proof positive of her change of heart about being First Lady – she let a photographer inside her sanctuary, not to win an election, but just to take her picture.

  Back in Washington at the end of the summer, Bess found herself and our house in the political headlines. A favorite congressional tactic when a president is riding high is an investigation that smears innuendos all over his administration. A classic of this brand of capital throat-cutting was launched in August, when Senator Clyde R. Hoey of North Carolina began an investigation of so-called five-percenters in the Truman White House. It would be a waste of time even to try to summarize this tangle of allegation and rumor about favors done and presents given in return for them. But Mother was amazed to discover that she had been one of the recipients of a deep freeze, given by one of the favor seekers back in 1945.

  After four years of living at a White House pace, that date seemed almost prehistoric. But the statement was true, as far as it went. In 1945, Mother had remarked while talking on the phone to General Harry Vaughan, Dad’s military aide, that neighbors were sending her gifts of food that had overflowed the old icebox. One of the favor seekers was in Gen
eral Vaughan’s office and overheard the conversation. He offered to get Mother a deep freeze and, for good measure, sent one to each of a half dozen other members of the administration.

  Mother sent a thank-you note to the man who shipped the freezer - and thought no more about it until a few weeks later, when the smell of rotting food filled the kitchen. The freezer was a lemon. She had the Secret Service cart it away to the dump and went out and bought her own freezer. Throughout the mudslinging session about these gifts, Mother never said a word to a reporter or anyone else. It was not her style to respond to smears. This whole disgraceful episode, which ended without a single member of the administration even being accused of breaking a law, only confirmed her opinion of the press.

  Mother was far more concerned about the terrible beating Dad’s military aide, General Harry Vaughan, took in this affair. She backed Dad’s refusal to accept his resignation, which he offered because he thought he had become a liability to the president. “Harry,” Dad said, “we came in here together and we’re going out of here together. Those so-and-so’s are trying to get me through you.” Mother was fond of Margaret Vaughan, the general’s wife. She also was fond of him.

  Mother’s straitlaced public image gave rise to a lot of rumors that she disapproved of General Vaughan and Fred Canfil and other rowdy characters whose company Dad enjoyed in his off-duty hours. Nothing could be further from the truth – as long as they kept their antics out of the newspapers. She recognized that these men gave Dad some badly needed relaxation. I sometimes suspect that she wished her mother had not made her so much a lady that she did not feel free to join them. As I have said earlier, she liked a hearty laugh as much as Harry Truman.

  General Vaughan and Mother had some amusing correspondence in which he sensed, I think, this conflict. He addressed her as “My Dear Lady” and wrote in the most elaborate style, as if he were a courtier addressing a queen. He was the only member of the president’s inner circle who had the nerve to tease mother. She let him get away with it because he also told her a lot of funny stories. This was his forte in the Oval Office and more often than not Dad would say: “Tell that one to Bess.”

  One of Mother’s favorites concerned a faithful member of the Methodist church who missed three services in a row. The minister called on him to ask why. “Parson,” the man said. “My clothes are so shabby I’m ashamed to go.”

  “We’ll take care of that,” the minister said. He collected a complete new outfit for him from charitable parishioners and delivered it forthwith. The next Sunday the old boy still did not show. A little peeved, the minister paid him a visit. He found him sitting on the front porch all dressed up. “What’s the matter, Joe?” he asked. “I expected to see you at the services today.”

  “Well I’ll tell you, Parson,” Joe said. “When I got dressed up in these new clothes I looked so prosperous that I went to the Episcopal Church.”

  While General Vaughan writhed, and Dad angrily defended him, Mother worked incredibly hard at Blair House, with its triple and quadruple entertaining requirements. A random two-week sample of her schedule in 1949 shows no less than thirteen major engagements, ranging from a Congressional Club breakfast to a musical luncheon given by the Democratic Women’s National Council to a handshaking marathon with a group of Home Demonstration Agents from Vermont. She opened the National Flower Mart on the Pilgrim Steps of Washington Cathedral and received the Society of Sponsors of the U.S. Navy. “So went the busy days,” wrote Edith Helm in her memoir of her White House years, which blissfully ignored the brutal politics that swirled around her polite social world.

  Mother did not have that privilege. She had to smile her way through these wearying chores and sit down with the exasperated president in his study that night and discuss what could – and could not - be done.

  One topic they discussed surprisingly early in this second term was whether Harry Truman would run for president again. The Republican Eightieth Congress had rammed through the Twenty-second Amendment in 1947, barring a president from serving more than two terms. The wording of the measure exempted the incumbent president from the prohibition, so Dad was eligible to run in 1952.

  Mother made it clear that she was opposed to the idea. That led to the problem of finding a successor who would and could carry on the Democratic Party’s policies abroad and at home. This was, in Dad’s mind, an absolutely vital task. Looking over the potential candidates, he did not find many promising names. Some lacked stature, others experience in national and international affairs. Only one man seemed to combine both: Fred Vinson, whom he had first appointed secretary of the treasury, then chief justice. Mr. Vinson had been a popular congressman, a successful executive in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations and a chief justice who was often praised for the smooth operation of the highest court. This experience in the three branches of government made him, in Dad’s opinion, uniquely qualified to be president.

  As early as March 1949, on a visit to Key West, Dad wrote to Mother that “the Big Judge,” as he called Mr. Vinson, was coming to see him. “I have to talk to him on some very important things, which affect the future of the nation.” He urged Mother and me to join them. “You’ll have a wonderful weekend and I’ll be able to tell you what I have in mind as a result of my talk with Vinson.”

  Mother decided she preferred a weekend with me in Manhattan. So Dad talked with Mr. Vinson without her. The discussion was maddeningly inconclusive. Mr. Vinson was like the girl in the song. He would not say yes, but he would not say no. He was happy on the Supreme Court and obviously reluctant to leave it. But he insisted he was ready to do whatever Harry Truman thought he should do for the good of the country.

  As the year 1949 ended, the sunny political skies began to darken in ways far more serious than the attempt to smear General Vaughan. In September, U.S. intelligence discovered that Soviet Russia had exploded an atomic bomb, breaking America’s nuclear monopoly. Next came the dismaying news that much of the breakthrough had been achieved by stealing atomic secrets with the help of various espionage rings in Great Britain and the United States. The media already had echoed with allegations about Communist influences in the government, thanks to a much-publicized confrontation between a former State Department official, Alger Hiss, and a former Communist, Whittaker Chambers, before a hearing of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. When Mr. Hiss denied knowing Mr. Chambers and insisted he had never given him secret State Department documents, he was indicted for perjury.

  In China, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime collapsed under a final Communist onslaught, and he fled to Taiwan with the remnants of his army and government. This too produced fodder for the anti-Communist witch-hunters, who tried to pin the “loss of China” on the Truman administration. Dad responded to all these challenges. After weeks of thought and analysis, he released the news of the Russian bomb in a way that minimized a panicky response. After more study of intelligence reports and the best scientific advice, he decided that the Russians were capable of building a hydrogen bomb and ordered the United States to begin construction of that terrifying weapon. Dean Acheson released a white paper that made it clear Chiang Kai-shek, not the United States, had lost China.

  But politicians - and reporters - are not satisfied by a calm statement of the facts once they sense the possibility of creating a sensation. Early in February 1950, the greatest sensation monger of the era, Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, stepped onstage with a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, accusing Dean Acheson of harboring 205 Communists in the State Department. Dad contemptuously dismissed the telegram the senator sent to him demanding action.

  But McCarthy soon was joined by a host of unsavory allies, such as Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska. They concentrated most of their venom on Dean Acheson for losing China and declaring that he would still consider Alger Hiss a friend, even after he had been convicted of lying under oath about being a Communist. But they also flung accusations at John Snyder, who had succe
eded Fred Vinson as Secretary of the Treasury, and at any other department where dissatisfied bureaucrats or out-and-out nuts told them that Communists were employed.

  Although Dad did not give the public a hint that he took the witch-hunters seriously, their assaults and the enormous responsibility involved in the decisions on atomic weapons took a toll on his nerves and energy. McCarthy and his allies were undermining the keystone of his presidency, a bipartisan foreign policy. In a letter to his cousin, Ralph Truman, Dad wrote that he was in the midst of “the most terrible struggle any president ever had.” In mid-March 1950, headaches began to torment him for the first time in years.

  Alarmed, Mother urged a retreat to Key West to regain his strength and equilibrium. As usual on such matters, he took her advice. But the worries did not go away in the Florida sunshine. From there he wrote her one of the most anguished letters of his presidency.

  After reporting the good news that his head had stopped hurting, he turned to the political situation. “You see everybody shoots at me, if not directly, then at some of the staff closest to me. I’d much rather they’d pound me directly. The general trend of the pieces is that I’m a very small man in a very large place and when some one I trust joins the critical side - well it hurts. I’m much older and very tired and I need support as no man ever did.”

  Earlier in the letter, he mentioned that Chief Justice Fred Vinson had paid him another visit. “The Chief Justice is one man in high place who still believes in me, trusts me and supports me. . . . What has made me so jittery - they started on Snyder and have almost broken him, then Vaughan, whose mental condition is very bad. Now they are after the top brain man in the Cabinet [Dean Acheson]. The whole foreign policy is at stake just as we are on the road to a possible solution. . . . I’m telling you so you may understand how badly I need your help and support now.”