Bess Truman Read online

  He was looking history in its ambiguous, treacherous face now. Bess had helped him do that. During these same months, she drew him slowly back into the personal dimension of their lives. She also reached out to him from a need of her own. About three weeks after the election, Grandmother Wallace had a stroke. There was no longer any doubt that she was dying. Mother scarcely left her bedside, except for a cabinet dinner on the night of December 4, at which Adlai Stevenson was the guest of honor. Day by day, Grandmother grew weaker. Then came pneumonia. She slipped into a coma and died quietly at a little past noon on December 5, 1952.

  For forty-nine years, Mother had struggled to surround Madge Gates Wallace with a healing love. At times, it had been a burden that would have destroyed a woman who lacked Bess Wallace Truman’s inner strength. Now, at last, she could feel she had triumphed over the blow that fate had struck in 1903. Although Grandmother never had been able to resume a normal life, her daughter’s devotion had enabled her to live with dignity and grace. In spite of her limitations, she remained an essentially loving and lovable woman.

  Dad sat with Mother as Madge Gates Wallace died. Then he took charge and summoned the White House usher, J. B. West, Mother’s best friend on the staff. He made arrangements for us to take Grandmother Wallace to Independence. The next day, in one of his diary jottings, Dad showed that he had long since forgiven his mother-in-law for her early hostility to his courtship of Bess Wallace.

  Yesterday at 12:30 my mother-in-law passed away. She was a grand lady. When I hear these mother-in-law jokes I don’t laugh. They are not funny to me, because I’ve had a good one. So has my brother. My mother was a good mother-in-law to Vivian’s and my wife. It gives me a pain in the neck to read the awful jokes that the so-called humorists crack about mother-in-laws.

  Today we go to Missouri to bury her. Four years ago, 1946, I was on the same errand for my mother. [Dad was off by a year; it was 1947.] The sabotage press . . . made it appear that I was wasting public money to be decent to my mother. May God forgive them. I can’t and won’t.

  The same lice will do the same publicity job when I take Mrs. Wallace, Bess, and Margaret home to bury the mother-in-law.

  To hell with them. When history is written, they will be the sons of bitches - not I.

  In accordance with Grandmother’s wishes, her funeral was simple. To avoid the inevitable hordes of curiosity seekers, Mother decided to have the service at 219 North Delaware. Madge Gates Wallace was buried in the Gates family plot - not with her husband, who lay in the Wallace family plot. In death, as in life, the tragedy that ended their marriage and marked their children continued to sunder them.

  Mary Paxton Keeley came to the funeral to say farewell to her substitute mother. Not once but three times in the next few months, Bess mentioned in her letters how much this meant to her. “I don’t know when I have been so touched, that you came all the way up from Columbia for Mother’s services,” she wrote in one of her last letters from the White House. “And you know what it would have meant to her.”

  Grandmother’s death drew dozens of letters of sympathy from Mother’s Washington and Independence friends. Many of the latter recalled happy times on Delaware Street. For Mother, the death must have accentuated the sense of things coming to a dose. But it also removed a burden that she had borne without complaining to anyone for five decades.

  For the first time in her life, Bess was not obligated to live at 219 North Delaware Street. To Dad’s amazement, she proposed that they take an apartment in Washington, D.C., and live there most of the time. I think she may have been motivated in part by her opposition to his idea of returning to Missouri and running for the Senate. She did not want to see him go back into politics under any circumstances. But she was also influenced by her genuine fondness for life in the nation’s capital, where she had acquired so many lively friends.

  How serious Mother was about this is visible in a letter she received from Arry Calhoun, telling her how much she enjoyed her farewell visit in the White House. “When you really get settled in your Washington apartment, do let me hear from you and have your address,” Arry wrote. “I do hope you find one you like and a good servant to go with it.”

  If the Democrats had won the election, I think Mother might have persuaded Dad to try this idea. But the hostility and downright meanness with which the Republicans greeted Dad’s attempt to make an orderly turnover of the government made him dubious. Already, triumphant right-wing senators and congressmen were talking about hearings that would put half the Truman administration in jail for treason or corruption or both. Harry Truman decided it would be bad for his mental health and his blood pressure to live in a Washington, D.C., run by Republicans. It would be far better for his dignity and his peace of mind if he went home to Independence.

  In contrast to the bristling communications between the president and president-elect, Bess invited Mamie Eisenhower for a tour of the White House on December 1. They had a pleasant visit, and Mrs. Eisenhower wrote Mother a note the day after she returned to New York, thanking her for her “graciousness.” She added a sweet comment on Grandmother Wallace. “I know your heart must be heavy with sorrow.”

  It was a time of farewells. The newspaperwomen held a luncheon for Mother and demonstrated that they held no grudges for all those “no comments.” On the contrary, her steadfast determination to be herself had obviously won their hearts. At the luncheon, one of the members read a long poem in praise of her - as far as I know the only First Lady so honored. The opening stanzas declared that for them, Bess Truman would always be “far more than a figure in history.”

  We will think of you, rather, as a friend,

  Whose kindnesses never seemed to end

  The appreciative little longhand note

  For something nice that somebody wrote,

  Or the flowers when somebody was sad or ill,

  With a card that is surely treasured still.

  And your wonderful way with a White House guest,

  Who might be nervous at such a test,

  And who probably never even knew

  That the feeling of ease was due to you -

  To your tact and kindness and savoir-faire

  Which made hard things easy when you were there.

  Apropos of that thoughtfulness, Mother called in Mr. West as we began packing and asked him if I could take the furniture in my White House suite with me if she replaced it. “I don’t see why not,” Mr. West said. He and I and the First Lady drove to a local department store and bought an identical set on the spot. What’s more, Mother paid for it. That impressed me.

  Another more serious example of her thoughtfulness is a letter Mother wrote to the head of the Secret Service, praising William Shields, the agent who had had the difficult task of guarding her. “He has been unfailingly efficient and courteous and untiring,” Mother wrote. “No one could have done a better job.” This was true Christian charity, considering how much Mother abhorred the whole idea of anyone watching her.

  In these final weeks, Dad had the last laugh on Mother and me about the White House ghosts. We still tended to pooh-pooh the whole idea. No one had knocked on our doors in the middle of the night. I will let Dad’s diary tell the rest of the story.

  . . . I went to bed and read a hair-raiser in Adventure. Just as I arrived at a bloody incident, the Madam bursts into my bedroom through the hall door and shouted, “Did you hear that awful noise?”

  I hadn’t and said so - not a popular statement. So I put on my bathrobe and made an investigation.

  What do you think I found after looking all around? Why that Margie’s bridge table had fallen from in front of the fireplace in her bedroom and knocked over the fireguard! [I used the bridge table to keep out the winter wind.]

  It must have made a grand ghost sound where Margie and her mamma were sitting in Mrs. T.’s sitting room.

  It sure did. Mother and I were scared silly.

  So we arrived at that farewell day, Janua
ry 20, 1953. President-elect Eisenhower managed to be unpleasant right up to the last minute, refusing the traditional pre-inaugural lunch at the White House and at first insisting that Dad should pick him up at the Hotel Statler instead of paying the outgoing president the final courtesy of picking him up at the executive mansion. When Ike finally yielded on that point, he proceeded to hit a new low in pettiness by refusing to get out of the car to greet Dad on the White House steps.

  All this unpleasantness only made Mother realize that Dad was right; they would be miserable living in Washington, D.C., with this sort of president in the White House.

  If the Republicans had hoped to end the Truman presidency on the sourest possible note, they failed. There were still a lot of people in Washington who remembered the good and the great days of the past eight years. They swarmed into Union Station to give the Trumans the most amazing send-off any outgoing presidential couple ever got from the jaded, jaundiced reporters and politicians of the District of Columbia.

  You could have sworn that they had overheard Bess Truman’s acid comments about the forlorn little band who saw the Trumans off on the final whistle-stop tour in the fall of 1948 and were determined to erase that bitter memory. You could almost think, if you were in a positive frame of mind, that they were trying to prove that Washingtonians could, once every century or so, see beyond winning and losing elections to such human values as integrity and courage and kindness.

  Never mind my sarcasm. Dad loved the send-off - and Mother loved it even more. It was the tribute she felt Dad deserved; the one that seemed to have eluded him in the bitterness and frustration of the losing campaign.

  The trip home almost turned into a whistle-stop tour. In town after town through West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, delegations of Democrats came down to the train to pay homage to the Trumans. As a result, the train was an hour late when they pulled into the familiar Missouri Pacific depot at Independence at 8:30 on the night of January 21, 1953. There they got the warmest tribute yet. The Kansas City American Legion Band was blasting out “The Missouri Waltz” and a crowd of at least 10,000 people roared welcome home. Dad’s voice was choked with emotion as he thanked them. Another 1,500 people waited in the streets around 219 North Delaware Street to repeat the welcome in a more neighborly accent. “This is the climax,” Dad said.

  A week later, as they settled into being private citizens again, Dad wrote a letter to one of his old Washington friends, revealing how Mother felt about this triumphant homeward journey. “Bess and I were talking of our thirty years experience in elective office, our trials and tribulations, our ups and downs and she remarked that our send-off from Washington and our reception at home and along the way made it all worthwhile.”

  One of the first things Mother had said she planned to do when she returned home was take down the iron fence that the Secret Service had put up around 219 North Delaware Street. The Trumans were not in residence long before she saw that this was not a good idea. At least 5,000 people a week walked or drove past the house. The fence was the main protection from souvenir hunters, who would have stolen every flower in the gardens and pried every clapboard off the first floor.

  The Secret Service had said goodbye to Mr. and Mrs. Truman in Union Station in Washington, D.C. At that time, the United States did not give much thought to the welfare of its ex-presidents. The town of Independence contributed a lone policeman, but he could not be on duty all day and all night.

  There was someone peering at Mother and Dad every time they came out the front door. Sometimes they did more than peer. While I was home for a visit, a man stood at the gate looking and acting strange. The local policeman was nowhere to be seen. I came out on the porch and yelled, “Go away.” When he did not depart, Mother called the police. They took him into custody and found out he was an escaped mental patient carrying a loaded .45 pistol.

  Dad did not let this incident deter him from strolling around his home town. One of his diary notes from the spring of 1953 gives a good picture of him “at large.”

  This morning at 7 a.m. I took off for my morning walk. I’d just had the Dodge car washed a day or two ago and it looked as if it had never been used.

  The weather man had said it would rain so I decided to put the washed car in the garage and use the black car which was already spotted and dusty. My sister-in-law, watching me make the change, which required some maneuvering due to the location of several cars in the drive way, wanted to know if I might be practicing for a job in a parking station!

  I went on down Van Horn Road (some call it Truman Road now) and took a look at the work progressing on the widening for a two way traffic line through the county seat. A shovel (automatic) and a drag line were working as well as some laboring men digging in the old fashioned way. The boss or the contractor was looking on and I asked him if he didn’t need a good strawboss. He took a look at me and then watched the work a while and took another look and broke out in a broad smile and said “Oh yes! You are out of a job aren’t you.”

  A day or two ago I was walking down Farmer Street about 7:30 a.m. when a nice old lady and a gentleman standing in a door way that opens directly on the sidewalk asked me if I would please cross the street as they wanted to talk to me. I crossed over and the nice grey haired lady said to the man, “You tell him, I’m shaking so I can hardly talk.” The old man told me that his wife wanted me to write my name in their granddaughter’s note book. The granddaughter lived in Detroit and was very sure that anybody in Independence [could] get me to do whatever was wanted. I’d never seen the old people before but I signed the granddaughter’s autograph book.

  A day or two before that I was walking up the hill at Union and Maple and was stopped by a bunch of boys and girls for the purpose of having a picture made with a young man named Adams who was running for President of the Student Council. I wonder how he came out. That stunt may have beaten him.

  With no pension from his grateful (that’s sarcasm) country, Dad might have been justified in taking one of the hundreds of lucrative job offers that were showered on him during these first months of retirement. But he steadfastly maintained that he was not going to sell the prestige of the presidency to anybody, no matter how high the bids went. If he made any money, he would do it by the sweat of his brow and brain, writing his memoirs. Mother, ever practical, decided this meant they had better economize and that henceforth the ex-president would cut the grass at 219 North Delaware Street.

  Dad just smiled and said he would get around to it as soon as possible. The grass continued to grow. Mother began wondering aloud what the neighbors thought of the lawn. If the grass got any higher, it would look as if Harry Truman had gone back to farming and was raising a wheat crop in the front yard. (You can see where I got my sarcastic streak.) Mother seemed to have forgotten she was dealing with a man who had outwitted Stalin and Churchill and de Gaulle, not to mention Franklin Roosevelt and Jimmy Byrnes when they tried to order him around.

  One Sunday morning, as Mother was getting ready for church, she heard the brisk rattle of a lawn mower beneath her window. She looked out and saw the ex-president cutting the grass and cheerfully greeting neighbors who were on their way to church. It was pretty obvious to the whole town that its most famous citizen was skipping divine services that morning.

  From a religious point of view, this did not bother Mother in the least. But she believed in keeping up appearances - especially in Independence. “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked her Sunday grass cutter.

  “What you asked me to do,” Dad said, with a fiendishly innocent smile.

  The next day, Mother hired a man to mow the lawn.

  The biggest problem the former first couple encountered in their first year of retirement was the mail. A literal avalanche of letters, some 70,000, arrived in their first two weeks in Missouri. It was obviously impossible to deal with this problem at home, and Dad set up an office in Kansas City and hired a staff to get things organized. Meanwhile,
Bess had some organizing of her own to do. On January 27, a tractor trailer and an army truck deposited my grand piano and all my White House furniture, plus boxes full of mementos, gifts from heads of state, her official papers, making an obstacle course out of the interior of 219 North Delaware. Almost the same day, Mother had a carpenter at work inside the house, making the attic airtight so she could store some of these things up there. She also had storage closets built for her White House wardrobe, which was much too extensive for Independence.

  Dad was soon commuting to Kansas City every day, like a regular working man. Retirement was simply not in his vocabulary. Aside from that, he had some work to do. He needed to organize his papers to write his memoirs, whereby to skewer a few Republicans and leave a record for historians to ponder. He was also anxious to get to work on deciding where and how to build the Harry S. Truman Library to store the 3.5 million official documents from his administration.

  That left Mother at home staring at unpacked crates and more furniture than she knew what to do with. “I don’t think we’ll ever get straightened out in this house,” she told Mary Paxton Keeley early in February. To complicate matters, the arthritis in her hands suddenly worsened. In a March letter to Mary Paxton Keeley, she admitted: “[I] am somewhat handicapped in doing things with my hands.”

  Fortunately, Vietta Garr was on hand to do the cooking -Mother never did acquire any enthusiasm for that line of work. She promptly rejoined the Bridge Club, of course, but that only met once a week. That left her alone a lot of the time in 219 North Delaware. It was an eerie experience. For the first time in the fifty years she had spent in that house, her mother was no longer there. It was this mixture of loneliness and boredom that turned my stay-at-home mother into a world-class traveler.