Bess Truman Read online

  Dad was proud of his ability to talk to people like a Dutch uncle. Queen Juliana gave the isolationists and red-baiters the business, like a Dutch aunt. She told Congress that the United States was the leader of the free world whether they liked it or not, and it was up to them to face that responsibility.

  Mother sat in the gallery, beaming.

  The next important guest to arrive - not on a state visit basis, of course - was Eleanor Roosevelt. She came to Washington to report to Dad on a trip she had just made to the Middle East. The Trumans took her on a tour of the White House. She especially liked the way Mother had redecorated the battered old sun porch on the third floor. With a new tile floor and rattan furniture, it was a great place to relax, and it had a marvelous view of the city. Best of all, it was practically invisible from the street.

  Mrs. Roosevelt was also full of admiration for another item Mother had added to the family rooms: closets. No longer could the maids drive the First Lady crazy by putting her clothes away on the third floor before she could decide whether she wanted to wear them again.

  Official state dinners and luncheons now marched in a virtual procession through the State Dining Room. A diplomatic reception produced 1,500 hands to shake. To make it even more wearing, the new White House air-conditioning system failed.

  Dad, meanwhile, was up to his neck in another crisis, the steel strike of 1952. Although our young men were still dying in Korea, the patriots in the executive offices of the mills were unable to put their country ahead of a quick buck. The result was a shutdown that threatened to create dangerous shortages of ammunition and weapons. Dad was outraged and ordered the federal government to seize the mills.

  Before taking this step, he had conferred with Chief Justice Fred Vinson, who had assured him that the move was legal, and the Supreme Court would support him. When the case went to the court, the Big Judge turned out to be unable to persuade the rest of the Justices to agree with him. Dad was humiliated, and thenceforth I began to take a dim view of the Vinsons. I thought both Mother and Dad were too susceptible to their flattery. I never succeeded in changing their minds about them.

  The net effect of this national spasm was another outpouring of vitriol against Dad. He was called a Caesar, a Hitler, a Mussolini, a power-mad bully. Worse, from Mother’s point of view, the steel crisis, which included press conferences, a TV address to the nation, and endless meetings with advisers and lawyers from the Justice Department, produced the scariest bout of presidential exhaustion yet. Dad actually fell asleep in a chair while resting at Blair House, an unprecedented event. He put off signing important papers because he was too “shaky.” For Mother, this reaction only confirmed the wisdom of her opposition to another four years in the White House. After seven and a half years of crises. Dad was close to burnout.

  Instead of urging a retreat to Key West, Mother decided to issue an edict: no more night work. After dinner, the President of the United States would not go back to his office. Dad obeyed the order, most of the time.

  When he managed to forget the harassments of the Oval Office, Dad resumed one of his favorite pastimes - teasing “Miss Lizzie.” It was always a sign that things were going well between him and Mother. One of his better moments came on Good Friday, when Mother and I went to morning services at the Washington Cathedral. We returned to find Dad waiting to have lunch with us. Mother went on at some length about the beauty of the ritual at the Cathedral, the excellent music. “And what are you two good Episcopalians going to have for lunch on Good Friday?” Dad asked.

  At that moment, almost as if he had stage-managed it, lunch was served: hamburger. I laughed, and Mother looked sheepish. She had approved the menu, earlier in the week, without giving much thought to it.

  P.S. We ate it.

  Around this time, another trip to church produced some amusing dialogue and some serious thoughts about religion in one of Dad’s diary jottings. His opinions on this subject had not changed much from the days when he wrote his first letters to Bess Wallace.

  Jefferson’s birthday. Bess & I walk across Lafayette Square to St. John’s Church for 8 o’clock service. Mr Searles, one of the White House ushers, tells Mrs. T. she’s done a good deed - taking a Baptist to an Episcopal service! I’ve gone with her time and again to her service - and she has gone with me to the 1st Baptist Church.

  I’ve never been of the opinion that Almighty God cares for the building or the form that a believer approaches the Maker of Heaven and Earth. “When two or three are gathered together” or when one asks for help from God, he’ll get it just as surely as will panoplied occupants of any pulpit. Forms and ceremonies impress a lot of people, but I’ve never thought that The Almighty could be impressed by anything but the heart and soul of the individual. That’s why I’m a Baptist, whose church authority starts from the bottom - not the top. So much for churches.

  Early in June, Mother had a White House reception that meant more to her than any of the state dinners or diplomatic fol-de-rol. She invited 1,450 wounded veterans to the new White House. She marshaled a contingent of VIP’s, including the president, the cabinet members and their wives, Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, and a squad of generals and admirals to shake hands with them. Dad went back to work in a determined mood. He told Ethel Noland in a letter: “I spent the rest of the day discussing ways and means to keep the country and the world off the skids as a result of the awful [Supreme] court decision. But we’ll make it.”

  Shortly thereafter, I took off for another tour of Europe, this time with my best friend, Drucie Snyder Horton (Treasury Secretary John Snyder’s daughter). Drucie was married and the mother of a daughter, but I persuaded her to leave both husband and child for six weeks of high living. I don’t think Mother quite approved. No power on earth could tear her away from me during the early years of my existence. But she resigned herself to the deplorable habits of the younger generation and let us go without any particularly devastating comments.

  Mother came up to New York to see us off. We had tea at the Carlyle Hotel the day before we sailed. Drucie and I were in the highest imaginable spirits. We swigged our tea as if it were champagne. “Marg! Drucie!” Mother exclaimed, appalled at the way we were picking up our teacups. “Surely your mother, Drucie, taught you how a lady drinks tea. I know I’ve tried to teach this one,” she said, gesturing to me.

  “Try to pick up that cup with one finger,” I said.

  Mother tried - and failed. The cup weighed at least a pound. I think this was the day she gave up trying to make a lady out of me (and Drucie, whom she frequently treated as a second daughter). It was bad enough that I never listened to her anymore. Even technology was against her.

  Not long after I arrived in Europe, Mother requested me to refute a recurring rumor that she was the daughter of one Robert Wallace, who was still living in Ireland. I was on my way to Ireland, and she ordered me to “settle [it] once and for all” at a press conference in Dublin. Her father’s name, she told me, was “David Willock Wallace and he was born in Independence, Missouri.” She was “sick and tired” of the way the story kept popping up.

  It saddened me that Mother felt she had to tell me my grandfather’s name. It is an indication of how seldom he was mentioned at 219 North Delaware Street. Now that I understand how Mother coped with this burden, I can see this calm, almost offhand message as another example of her courage. In Ireland, I did as I was told, and David Willock Wallace’s real story remained where it belonged during Mother’s lifetime - buried.

  In London, I got an amusing letter from Mother, again demonstrating her marvelous ability to get even with Dad. Remember the Key West fishing expeditions? Writing on July 4, she serenely informed me that “Fred Vinson and Dad and I are going to the baseball game this afternoon. Double-header! I haven’t seen one in years. ‘Mamma’ Vinson said she wouldn’t sit on a hard seat that long.” How do you like that for sweet revenge? For teasing her about missing a baseball game the previous summer, she planned to make the Preside
nt of the United States sit through two games, knowing that he would prefer to be almost anywhere else.

  Unfortunately, it rained early in the second game. The First Couple stuck it out for an hour and finally went back to the White House. Undaunted, Mother demanded and got a presidential escort to a night game on July 5.

  These were straws in the wind, you might say, except that there is precious little wind in humid Washington during the summer, when Congress is seldom in session. Along with dutifully continuing her First Lady chores, Mother quietly began working into her schedule a lot of things that she wanted to do. Old Independence friends, such as Helen Souter and Arry Ellen Mayer Calhoun, were invited for weekends of reminiscence and gossip.

  Dad also decided to enjoy himself a little in the closing months of his presidency. You will recall that he turned down with great regret an invitation to attend a reunion of the Thirty-fifth Division shortly after the assassination attempt in 1950. In June 1952, he accepted another invitation and flew to Springfield, Missouri, for a delightful celebration, which brought him and a future President of the United States together. Here is the story in Dad’s own words.

  Drove into Springfield in an open car with Vivian & Mary [his brother and sister] in the back seat. It was like 1948. There were at least too thousand people on the streets yelling as usual “Hello Harry,” “There he is,” and “We want you again.” But, I am sorry to write, “They can’t have me again.”

  At the Colonial Hotel, the streets were jammed in every direction with enthusiastic fans.

  Had dinner with the family in a room next door to my suite. . . . Soon as dinner was over we went to the Shrine Mosque where a wonderful entertainment was given by the 35th Division Committee. The winners of the Square Dance contest danced for us. . . . Then Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy Davis with Gene Nelson, Virginia Gibson and Mrs. Grover Cleveland Alexander came over from the premiere of “The Winning Team,” and gave us a half hour of grand entertainment.

  I would not want to have been within earshot if someone with a crystal ball had told Dad he was applauding a future Republican president. In those days, Ronald Reagan was a Democrat.

  Later in July, Dad and Mother flew to Chicago for the Democratic Convention. It is interesting how many conflicting emotions Mother had when that city was mentioned. It was the first stop on her honeymoon and the place where, in 1944, her presidential tribulations began. Now she could think - with some justification - that things had come full circle, as she attended a Chicago convention that did not nominate Harry Truman for anything. Instead, she watched Dad as he performed like the master politician that he was, maneuvering his influence around the convention to win the nomination for Adlai Stevenson.

  When Dad arrived in Chicago, the convention had recessed. Senator Estes Kefauver, whom Dad preferred to call “Cowfever,” had some 360 votes, and Governor Stevenson had about 330. The rest of the votes were being held by favorite sons. Without Dad’s intervention, there was a good chance that Kefauver, a man with no loyalty to anyone, but himself, would have gotten the nomination. Dad ordered Averell Harriman of New York and Joseph Dever, the governor of Massachusetts to release their delegations. They obeyed, and Mr. Stevenson was promptly nominated. That was the beginning, not the end, of the Trumans’ tribulations.

  Dad never really warmed to Adlai Stevenson, although he tried hard to like and understand him. Mother liked him. She almost always liked born gentlemen, men with courtly manners and debonair wit. But she agreed with the politician she had married that Mr. Stevenson behaved deplorably as a presidential candidate.

  By playing Hamlet until the last moment, he forfeited the opportunity to build him up as the Democratic Party’s wholehearted choice. In the campaign that followed his nomination, he betrayed a lack of judgment that dismayed Mother and infuriated Dad. Bess wanted to see her man get the credit that was coming to him for his eight grueling years in the White House. Instead, Adlai Stevenson decided he had to run against Harry Truman’s record. He was intimidated by Republican outcries about the mess in Washington, McCarthy’s red-baiting, and the protracted struggle in Korea, which we were winning on our terms.

  Several times Dad became so infuriated, he wrote letters to Mr. Stevenson that would have blown him and the Democratic Party apart if he had mailed them. Here are the explosive opening lines of one he dashed off in early August of 1952.

  Dear Governor:

  I have come to the conclusion that you are embarrassed by having the President of the United States in your corner in this campaign.

  Therefore I shall remain silent and stay in Washington until Nov. 4.

  Dad then recounted the story of Mr. Stevenson’s coyness about the nomination and the way Dad had rescued him from rejection in Chicago. He then described what Mr. Stevenson had done to the Democratic Party thereafter.

  Then you proceeded to break up the Democratic National Committee, which I had spent years in organizing, you call in the former mayor of Louisville [Wilson Wyatt] as your personal chairman and fired [Frank] McKinney, the best chairman of the National Committee in my recollection.

  Since the convention you have treated the President as a liability. . . . I have tried to make it plain to you that I want you elected - in fact I want you to win this time more than I wanted to win in 1948.

  But I can’t stand snub after snub by you and Mr. Wyatt.

  On August 16, 1952, Governor Stevenson allowed himself to get mousetrapped by one of the oldest dodges in the newspaper business. The Oregon Journal asked him if he could “clean up the mess in Washington.” Mr. Stevenson fell for it, replying solemnly that he had cleaned up a big mess in Illinois and thought he could clean up Washington. At the White House, an exploding president again reached for his pen.

  Dear Governor:

  Your letter to Oregon is a surprising document. It makes the campaign rather ridiculous. It seems to me that the Presidential Nominee and his running-mate are trying to beat the Democratic President instead of the Republicans and the General of the Army who heads their ticket.

  There is no mess in Washington. . . . The Dixiecrats and the Taft Republicans along with Nixon, Knowland, Harry Byrd, and the seniority chairman of the Key Committees of the House and Senate make the only mess in the national scene.

  I was not in the White House when these letters were written, but I know Mother - and his own common sense - stopped Dad from mailing them. By and large, Bess believed it was better to suffer fools and foolishness in silence than run the risk of making yourself sound foolish by attacking them.

  Mother also regretted the antagonism that developed between Dad and the Republican Party’s candidate, Dwight Eisenhower, during the campaign. Ike’s military skin was thin, and when Dad went after him for duplicity and his nonexistent political experience, the general took it personally. Mother liked Ike and was even fonder of his wife, Mamie, whom she had gotten to know fairly well during the year of the White House Spanish class.

  Bess stayed out of the 1952 campaign. Dad went whistle-stopping, with me for family. Mother’s ostensible reason was Grandmother Wallace’s health. After celebrating her ninetieth birthday on August 4, she became feeble and almost completely bedridden. But I think Mother’s withdrawal said something about the campaign, too. She felt Harry Truman had had enough political combat to last two lifetimes. She would have preferred to see him make a dignified withdrawal from the presidency.

  Dad was too much a fighter, too much a Democrat to the marrow of his bones, to accept this idea. He was also too deeply involved in the ongoing momentum of the presidency. For instance, he might have turned the campaign around if he had agreed in October to the Communist demand to forcibly repatriate the 132,000 Chinese and Korean prisoners in UN hands. Dad refused. “We will not buy an armistice by turning over human beings to slaughter or slavery,” he said. The Communists replied by launching a series of attacks on the UN Army that inflicted heavy casualties, and cost the Democrats millions of votes.

  Dad
took the catastrophic Democratic defeat of 1952 personally at first. No one seemed to appreciate the principles for which he had tried to stand. “For seven years the country had faced the Soviet threat - in Iran, in Greece and Turkey, in Berlin, and in Korea and Indochina - and faced it successfully. Yet one demagogic statement made the people forget!” he all but cried out in one of his diary notes. He was referring to Ike’s declaration that he would “go to Korea” and end the war with some unspecified (and, as it turned out, nonexistent) wizardry.

  To the crestfallen president, the people seemed to have repudiated the party to which he had given his heartfelt allegiance all his life. Having semi-withdrawn from the battle, Mother was able to take a calmer, longer view. She reminded Dad that the Democratic Party had been trounced in the past. It did not mean the end of the world or the ruin of a president’s reputation. She recalled Woodrow Wilson’s exit from the presidency after World War I, broken in health and spirit. Harry Truman was a long way from either fate.

  Gradually - it took about two months - Dad began to see the defeat differently. He realized that the war and the character-assassination tactics of McCarthy and his imitators, whom Ike never repudiated, had stampeded many voters. Even more decisive was the power of Ike’s World War II reputation. Nothing else explained the 6-million-vote Republican majority. “The country from an economic standpoint was never in better condition,” Dad wrote in one of his diary jottings. “There are 63,000,000 employed . . . and only 1.4 million out of work. More farmers own farms . . . than ever before in this or any other country. Wages for all workers are at an all time high. Business profits are at record rates. Yet propaganda, character assassination, and glamour overshadowed these hard facts.”