Harry Truman Read online

  If Vinson could have been launched on his mission immediately, a great initiative toward world peace might have been created. But my father felt that it was important to explain the government’s intentions to the American people. So he asked Charlie Ross to get him a half hour of network time to make this explanation. In the course of negotiating with the networks, Charlie had to explain the purpose of this speech.

  Charlie was fond of picturing the White House as a gigantic sieve and this time the metaphor was all too exact. In a matter of hours, the Vinson mission was leaked to the newspapers and flung into the political arena, before my father could even begin to defend it. The opposition denounced it as a political gesture, and Secretary of State Marshall, in Paris, was more than a little unsettled to discover that Dad was making such a major departure in foreign policy without consulting him. Of course, he had no intention of doing any such thing. He had planned to brief General Marshall thoroughly on the mission, before announcing it to the public. But now he had to consider the General’s feelings, and the allegations floating around Washington that the President had lost confidence in him. So he summoned General Marshall home for a personal conference and then, with deep regret, announced to the nation that the Vinson mission was canceled.

  The decision was in line with my father’s fundamental philosophy of the presidency. He never undercut a subordinate or let one down. He always backed the man he had chosen to perform an important job (unless of course he failed to perform it). He considered General Marshall one of the greatest men in American history, and so he deliberately chose, at the height of this searing campaign, to accept what seemed at the time the public humiliation of withdrawing the Vinson proposal rather than embarrass his Secretary of State.

  Throughout October, the crowds continued to grow in size. A few of the reporters began to comment on this fact. Charles T. Lucey of the Scripps-Howard chain wrote on October 15: “The polls and the pundits say Harry Truman hasn’t a chance to be returned to the White House, but you’d never guess it from the way people come out to see him. . . .” Like most of the reporters, however, Lucey attributed this phenomenon to the President’s high office, and his “entertainment value.”

  By now, we had gone back and forth across the country once and were in the midst of our second swing. Dad had spoken to almost 4 million people. He had talked with politicians and plain citizens just about everywhere. On October 13, as the “Truman Special” was thundering from Duluth to St. Paul, he gave George Elsey, one of his aides, a state-by-state breakdown of the results as he now saw them. He predicted he would win with 340 electoral votes, 108 for Dewey, and forty-two for Thurmond. The prediction was amazingly accurate - and it was done without the aid of a single pollster. He even went through the nation, state by state, predicting how each one would go. He was right on eight out of ten. But he did not reveal this detailed bit of prophecy to the press. In their mood, it would have only made him the butt of more ridicule. When the reporters asked him if he thought he was winning, he would reply, “That’s your job. That’s what you’re along for. I am the candidate. The candidate is not going to comment. He’s optimistic.”

  In the closing days of the campaign, the crowds grew from large to stupendous. In Chicago, they swarmed around our motorcade, slowing it to a crawl and almost giving the Secret Service men apoplexy. The Chicago Democratic organization pulled out every political stop known to man. The coup de grâce, as far as I was concerned, was a fireworks display which went off just as we were crossing a bridge. I hate noises. I thought the bridge was coming down. Above us, a tremendous series of explosions created a fiery image of the candidate. As an old artillery captain from World War I, Dad was not bothered in the least - in fact, he loved every bang.

  From the Blackstone Hotel Dad told his sister Mary that “former Mayor Kelly and the present Mayor Kennelly . . . both said that the demonstration was better than any ever held here. . . .”

  In Boston, the crowds literally engulfed us. Police estimated that 250,000 people stormed the parade route. Crowds were equally - or proportionately - huge along the line of a motor tour we took of the Bay State’s industrial cities. In Albany, New York, thousands stood in the pouring rain to hear Dad speak.

  In New York City, the crowds were huge but the Democratic Party was practically inert. It did not have enough money to rent Madison Square Garden, and the tiny Liberal party had to bail them out. Even with this help, the Wallace influence was still so strong among the liberals that they were able to sell only 10 percent of the tickets for Dad’s Garden appearance. So they threw the doors open and let anyone who followed our motorcade inside, ticket-holder or not. A crowd of about 16,000 cheered when Dad came out for “a strong, prosperous, free, and independent” Israel and roared with laughter when he told them how he had complained to Dr. Graham that he had the constant feeling somebody was following him. Dr. Graham told him not to worry about it. “There is one place where that fellow is not going to follow you - and that’s in the White House.”

  By now, more than a few New Dealers were returning to the fold, just as my father had predicted they would. Harold Ickes, whom my father had fired as Secretary of the Interior in 1946, endorsed him and described Dewey as “the candidate in sneakers. . . . For unity, Alice in Wonderland and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, to say nothing of home and mother.” Hollywood, where Wallace influence had been strong, suddenly produced and distributed for free a campaign film urging voters to support the President. They charged the Republicans $30,000 to make a similar film.

  Eleanor Roosevelt made a six-minute pro-Truman address from Paris via shortwave radio. Mrs. Roosevelt, after some early hesitation - she conspicuously declined to support Dad during the draft-Eisenhower embroglio - became a staunch pro-Truman Democrat once she saw Dad’s fighting campaign. She did her utmost to persuade her sons to join her, in vain. At one point, she had a meeting with Jimmy, Franklin, and Elliott, and they had a long telephone talk with Dad. With great exasperation, she told him that she could not do anything with her three sons - but she was ready to go all out for a Truman victory.

  We ended the campaign in St. Louis. En route from New York, all of the speechwriters got together and pooled what they called “their gems” - their best and brightest phrases - and poured them into a speech that they considered the campaign’s masterpiece. Meanwhile my father, for the first time, showed he was at least capable of getting tired, and took a long afternoon nap before this climactic performance. When he woke up, the train was almost in St. Louis. Only then did the writers present him with their wit-encrusted, diamond-bright, verbal tour de force. Dad glanced through it, and then said, “I’m sorry, boys, but I just haven’t got time to get all this into my head.” He threw it aside and went out on the platform in St. Louis’s Kiel Auditorium to give a completely extemporaneous address.

  Of all the fake campaigns, this one is the tops so far as the Republican candidate for President is concerned. He has been following me up and down this country making speeches about home, mother, unity and efficiency. . . . He won’t talk about the issues, but he did let his foot slip when he endorsed the Eightieth Congress.

  Then he spoke to them as one Missourian to another:

  I have been all over these United States from one end to another, and when I started out the song was - Well, you can’t win, the Democrats can’t win. Ninety percent of the press is against us, but that didn’t discourage me one little bit. You know, I had four campaigns here in the great state of Missouri, and I never had a metropolitan paper for me the whole time. And I licked them every time!

  People are waking up to the fact that this is their government, and that they can control their government if they get out and vote on election day. That is all they need to do. . . .

  People are waking up, that the tide is beginning to roll, and I am here to tell you that if you do your duty as citizens of the greatest Republic the sun has ever shone on, we will have a government that will be for your interests, that w
ill be for peace in the world, and for the welfare of all the people, and not just a few.

  Everyone, including the White House writers whose pearls had been tossed aside, agreed it was one of his greatest speeches of the campaign. A reporter for the Washington Post said that if the election was close, and Harry Truman won, he would give the credit to his performance that night in Kiel Auditorium.

  So we came home to Independence, to our familiar and much- loved house on North Delaware Street. We had traveled 31,700 miles, and Dad had given 356 speeches - an average of ten a day. Between 12 and 15 million people had cheered or at least seen us.

  We three Trumans voted at 10:00 a.m. on November 2, in Independence’s Memorial Hall. It was my first vote for a President, and it pleased me enormously that I was able to mark my ballot for Harry S. Truman. Reporters asked Dad for a final prediction, and he said, “It can’t be anything but a victory.”

  “Are you going to sit up for the returns, Mr. President?” someone asked.

  “No,” he said, “I think I’ll go to bed. I don’t expect final results until tomorrow.”

  This astonished everyone - except Mother and me - almost as much as his prediction of a victory. Most of the reporters simply did not understand that my father believed there was no point in worrying about whether you succeeded or failed at a job, as long as you were sure that you had done your best.

  Meanwhile, back in Washington, Drew Pearson was writing that Dewey had “conducted one of the most astute and skillful campaigns in recent history.” In the column which Pearson filed for the day after the election, he surveyed for his readers the “closely knit group around Tom Dewey who will take over the White House eighty-six days from now.” Walter Lippmann, the Alsop brothers, and Marquis Childs saw a Democratic disaster of such staggering proportions that we were in danger of becoming a one-party (Republican) country. The New York Times gave Dewey 345 electoral votes. Life’s November 1 issue carried a picture of Dewey and his wife which was captioned, “The next President travels by ferry boat over the broad waters of San Francisco Bay.” Messrs. Gallup and Crossley continued to insist that there was no contest.

  That afternoon, my father pulled his neatest trick of the campaign. He went to lunch at the Rockwood Country Club, where he was the guest of honor at a party given by the mayor of Independence, Roger Sermon. There were about thirty old friends at this hoedown, and they gleefully connived in his plan. While the hapless reporters lurked outside, Dad excused himself, supposedly to go to the men’s room. Then, with three Secret Service men in tow, he went out the back door and drove to the Elms Hotel at Excelsior Springs, about twenty-five miles from Independence. There he had a Turkish bath, ate a ham sandwich, drank a glass of milk, and proceeded to do exactly what he had predicted he was going to do that morning - go to bed.

  This was very shrewd from his point of view, but it left Mother and me alone to cope with squadrons of frantic reporters. I am not using that word “frantic” loosely either. It became more and more apropos as the votes began to come in. At first, everyone was told that there would be a Dewey victory message at 9:00 p.m. But Harry Truman seemed to be winning at 9:00 p.m. - as a matter of fact, Dad never was behind - and this historic Republican event was postponed. By midnight, we were 1.2 million votes ahead. But commentator Η. V. Kaltenborn kept insisting that there was nothing to worry about, the Democratic candidate was a sure loser. At the Elms Hotel, Dad woke up and heard this prediction, couched in Kaltenborn’s slightly Germanic tones. The candidate chuckled and went back to sleep.

  On Delaware Street, meanwhile, reporters were practically storming the house. Again and again, I was forced to go out on the porch in my best black dress and ballet slippers (great for weary feet) to assure them that my father was not in the house. When they finally believed me, they began trying to wheedle out of me exactly where he was. That was one night when I was grateful for my native Missouri stubbornness. I sometimes wonder if I could have resisted the terrific pressure those reporters put on me without it.

  As the night wore on, Dad continued to hold that million-vote lead. I began getting calls from various members of the Cabinet. They were stunned to discover that the President was not home and that he was not available to talk with them. I did arrange for Alben Barkley, our vice presidential candidate, to get through to him. My mother went to sleep, and so did my grandmother, but I stayed up, knowing that sleep was impossible for me anyway.

  Long before the night was over, I knew that we had won. I was in constant touch with Bill Bray in Washington. He had handled a lot of the advance planning on our trips and was a shrewd, canny politician and public relations man. I would call him up, and he would say, “Okay, now we’ll go to Ohio,” and we’d go through all the districts. In five minutes, we could see which way the state was going. We didn’t bother to listen to the radio or television. My mother turned on the radio for a few moments, but they were so far behind the data we were getting from Washington, D.C., that we soon saw it was a waste of time.

  At 4:00 a.m., down in Excelsior Springs, Jim Rowley, one of the Secret Service men who was guarding my father, could not stand the suspense any longer. He woke Dad up. Kaltenborn was still predicting Truman’s defeat, although he was 2 million votes ahead. “I don’t see how he can be elected. The election will be decided in the House,” said Kaltenborn. Dad listened to this nonsense with Rowley and the two of them laughed. At 4:30, Matt Connelly called from the penthouse at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City, where most of the campaign staff and friends from Independence were already celebrating well past the point of sobriety. Dad told them he would join the party around 6:00 a.m.

  He was there, fresh and smiling, to face the haggard reporters when Dewey finally conceded at 11:14 a.m. (10:14 Missouri time). By then, we knew that we had carried California, Illinois, and Ohio, giving us 304 electoral votes (one elector later defected, giving us 303). This was only thirty-six (or thirty-seven) votes away from Dad’s October prediction. When the word reached Independence, every whistle, siren, and automobile horn in the city seemed to go off simultaneously and then they added the air-raid alarm to the pandemonium. By this time, of course, I had long since known we had won, and, in my semi-comatose, sleepless state, I was shopping for stockings to wear back to Washington. My brain was so numb, for a moment I wondered what in the world all the noise was about.

  The victory took Independence completely by surprise. There was no planning for a possible celebration. Talk about a prophet not being honored in his own country. Or county. Everyone scrambled around frantically, and some 40,000 people showed up in the main square that night to congratulate their native son.

  Dad responded with humility. “I thank you very much indeed for this celebration, which is not for me. It is for the whole country. It is for the whole world.”

  The next morning, we boarded our train, now being called the “Victory Special,” to return to Washington. I collapsed into my berth, not having slept for something close to thirty-six hours. I was fast asleep when the train pulled into St. Louis, where somebody gave my father a copy of the Chicago Tribune with the huge black headline, DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. I managed to wake up by the time we reached Washington, but I did not escape the usual paternal needling for my inability to get up on time and stay awake when important things were happening. Along the route to Washington, wherever the train stopped, we were invaded by people that we soon began calling “Wednesday Democrats.” They were party leaders and big businessmen who had sat on their hands or checkbooks, but now wanted to make it clear that “We were with ya, Harry,” all the time. In Washington, our money man, Louis Johnson, was sitting under a blizzard of backdated checks - some $750,000 worth - attributable to the same get-on-the-bandwagon set.

  In Washington, at Union Station, the crowd was so enormous they couldn’t have squeezed in another human being, if it had been Tom Thumb. My mother and I, who are inclined to hold grudges, could only think about the loyal handful who had come down to see us
off on the first campaign swing in September.

  At 3:00 a.m. the next morning, my father wrote his sister Mary the following description of our welcome:

  The reception here was the greatest in the history of this old capital. When the train backed into the station, the police band played the ruffles and “Hail to the Chief” and then people began piling on the train. Barkley and I must have shaken hands with at least five or six hundred - some of them johnnie come lately boys. I finally put a stop to the handshaking. Barkley, Bess, Margaret and Barkley’s daughter, Mrs. Max Truitt, stepped into the big open seven-passenger car which belongs to the White House fleet. McGrath tucked himself between Barkley & me. The seat’s rather narrow for three - especially three with Barkley. So Barkley and I sat up on the back of the back seat.

  There were about 800,000 people on the street between the station and the White House. Said to be the biggest crowd ever out in Washington. Barkley and I made speeches from the front steps of the great white jail and then went to a Cabinet meeting to decide on the first message to Congress.

  I will never forget that ride to the White House. Every band in the world seemed to be playing “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” On the front of the Washington Post building was a huge sign which read: MR. PRESIDENT, WE ARE READY TO EAT CROW WHENEVER YOU ARE READY TO SERVE IT.

  Dad quickly made it clear that he had no desire to make the Post or anyone else eat crow. Nor did he pay the slightest attention to the endless analyses of his victory. I have never heard him even take satisfaction in what must have pleased him as a professional politician - he had held Dewey to a smaller proportion of the total vote, 45.1 percent, than Dewey got running against Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944 (45.8 percent). And Dad carried a Democratic Congress with him, in the bargain. But it would no more occur to him to gloat in victory than it would to gloom in defeat. He expected Mother and me to act the same way.