Bess Truman Read online

  She took Dad by complete surprise with the announcement that she thought it would be a good idea to accept oilman Ed Pauley’s invitation to vacation on his estate on Coconut Island in Hawaii. She maneuvered me into joining them for this trip. “I hate leaving the house looking as it does,” she told Mary Paxton Keeley, as a gesture of appeasement to her housewife’s conscience. In other eras, that would have been a prelude to not leaving it. But this time she left it without a qualm, as far as I could see.

  It was one of the best vacations we ever had. We started off in a style that we never achieved before (or since). Averell Harriman loaned us his private railroad car. It had everything from a chef to a wood-burning fireplace. To keep the flying to a minimum - or maybe to stretch out the vacation - Mother insisted on going by ship from California. Hawaii was at its lushest. We drove to Honolulu through the Pali Pass with Mother exclaiming at the beauty of the tropical flowers. We all oohed and aahed at the spectacular view from the Pali Lookout. Mostly we lazed on the beach, and Mother did a little fishing with her partner, who kept feeling sorry for the fish, as usual. Mother went right on hauling them in, also as usual.

  Dad kept a diary for part of the trip, which included an expedition to the “Big Island” of Hawaii. Notice his fascination with the new facts he was learning. At the age of sixty-nine, he still found the world a fascinating place.

  After we had been on [Coconut] island a few days I sent word to Admiral Radford [commander in chief of the Pacific] that [I] would like to visit the Island of Hawaii and see the great volcano Mauna Loa. The Admiral sent me a C-47 in charge of two fine Navy Commanders and we were airborne at 7 a.m. It is a 200 mile flight from Oahu to Hawaii. The weather was perfect. I had a good view of Molokai the leper island and at an elevation of 11,200 feet saw the Island of Maui with its 10,500 foot extinct volcano. The Navy men told me that we had the first clear day in two years at that time of day. The weather was perfect when we arrived in Hawaii. We flew over the saddle between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa. These volcanoes are snow-capped and rise to heights above the sea level of 13,800 and 13,700 feet respectively. The sea at a distance of 3 miles out is 18,000 feet deep so that from base to top these volcanoes are more than 32,000 feet high.

  We landed at Hilo [capital of Hawaii] at about 10:30 and they gave us the usual all out reception. We drove around the city and then to the interior Dept’s building in Volcano Park where Dr. Macdonald [director of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory] showed some pictures of the eruptions of Mauna Loa in 1949 and 1950. . . . He told me that more than 600 million cubic yards of lava had overflown the side of the volcano and gone down to the ocean in a molten river. Thousands of fish were killed and a great many new varieties from the depths came to the surface. . . .

  When we arrived at the air field [for the trip back] it was raining and I mean it was pouring down. A couple of native ladies thanked me for the rain, They said that Peli the Goddess of the Great Volcano was weeping because I was leaving! But they surely needed the rain. They said that Peli was happy when I came and gave us clear weather and sorry when I left, hence the rain.

  On the flight back . . . we took off in the terrific rain and in ten minutes were in sunshine. We saw a school of whales below us off Maui. The navy men said that meant good luck. Well we landed safely in time for dinner.

  With his usual confidence in his indestructibility, Dad was un-bothered by that harrowing takeoff. Mother was terrified, but she did not show it. She had decided that if the Trumans were going to keep traveling, she had to overcome her fear of flying. With some help from her remarkable will power, she soon had it licked. That trip to Hawaii was only the beginning of the Trumans’ trips, almost all by air.

  In the summer of 1953, they went to Washington by car. The motive was nostalgia, not fear of flying. “Isn’t it great to be on our own again, doing as we please as we did in the old Senate days?” Mother said as they rolled along.

  They stopped for lunch in Hannibal, Missouri, and were promptly recognized by a couple of former county judges. Every waitress and all the customers in the restaurant had to shake hands and get autographs. In Decatur, Illinois they asked a gas station attendant for directions to a good motel. He recognized them and notified the chief of police and everyone else in town. They were soon being guarded by two detectives and four policemen, with whom, out of politeness, they had to have supper.

  In Pennsylvania, a state trooper pulled them over, not because they were speeding, but because he wanted to shake hands. The newspapers promptly reported Harry Truman had gotten a ticket. Telling all this to a friend from Arizona, who had invited them for a visit, Dad concluded he and Mother could not go anywhere as just plain folks “until the glamour wears off.”

  Speaking of cars, since Mother would not let him or anyone else, including her daughter, drive her Chrysler, Dad bought himself a two-tone-green Dodge coupe. One day, he tried to negotiate the narrow back gate of the house and scraped all the chrome off it. Mother was triumphant. That proved her contention that he was not qualified to drive her car.

  About two weeks later, Dad got a call at the office. It was Mother, sounding glum. “I missed the turn at that darn gate and scraped all the chrome off my Chrysler,” she said. I would never have let her forget it. But Dad just dropped the subject.

  The Trumans had a wonderful time in Washington that summer, getting the lowdown on President Ike’s headaches with Senator McCarthy and other political problems, foreign and domestic. But they came away still convinced that they could not spend as much time in the capital as they would have preferred. A few years later, in an interview in This Week, Mother said that ideally, she would have liked to spend six months in Washington and six months in Independence each year.

  But it was not an ideal world. Before the first year of their retirement was over, Dad was forced to go on the radio to defend himself against slanderous statements by Richard Nixon and other Republicans about Communists in his administration. The last straw was a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee, which Dad scornfully rejected, citing a half dozen other presidents who had done likewise when Congress tried to breach the separation of powers between the branches of the government.

  Mother was less than pleased by this return to the political wars. She did her best to play peacemaker. In October 1953, Ike came to Kansas City to make a speech. Mother suggested it might be nice if Dad telephoned him and said he wanted to welcome the president to Jackson County. The call was not returned, and an even deeper chill descended on the Eisenhower-Truman relationship. In May 1954, when Mother and Dad paid another visit to Washington, Dad announced he was not going to ask for an appointment to see the president because of the previous snub.

  Politics temporarily vanished in June 1954. While attending an outdoor performance of Call Me Madam, which Mother wanted to see because it was about her old friend Perle Mesta, Dad became violently ill. The chest pains and nausea could have meant a heart attack, and Mother rushed him back to Delaware Street, where Dr. Wallace Graham, who had left the White House to practice medicine in Kansas City, diagnosed a more familiar ailment, a cranky gallbladder. Tests revealed it was infected, and Dr. Graham decided to remove it.

  For a while, Mother spent most of the day and half the night in the hospital. The seventy-year-old patient recovered from the surgery nicely, but a bad reaction to some antibiotics made him a sick man again. When he came home, Bess revealed the full extent of her worries by installing an air conditioner in the downstairs bedroom where Dad convalesced. Not only did it blow a big hole in her budget, she had to convince the convalescent to let her turn it on. Dad always maintained that he liked his air pure, and he did not care whether it was hot or cold.

  What got Dad back on his feet faster than the air conditioner was the offer by the city of Independence of a large chunk of Slover Park, only a few blocks from 219 North Delaware Street, as a site for his library. He accepted a startup check from the Independence Chamber of Commerce on the bac
k porch on July 22, 1954, while Bess smiled proudly in the background.

  Mother had pushed quietly but firmly for an Independence site from the moment they came home, although attractive offers had come from the University of Missouri and others. Her sister-in-law’s father, Colonel William S. Southern, had supported the idea enthusiastically in the Examiner. I suspect Mother had passed the word to him, subtly or openly, as she did when trying to fight off the vice presidential nomination in 1944.

  A year later, on Dad’s seventy-first birthday, Mother was host to 150 people at the ground-breaking ceremony. To an old White House pro, 150 visitors were hardly more than a warmup in the handshaking department, but Mother also undertook to feed this small horde a first-class Missouri country dinner - at 219 North Delaware Street. It was a sight I thought I would never see if Mother lived to be 1,000 - there she stood at the door of her sanctuary, greeting each guest as he or she entered the vestibule. Dad was the next greeter inside the foyer, and I played traffic cop in the hallway, steering everyone into the dining room, where country ham, smoked turkey, and hot biscuits awaited them.

  The dinner, which was cooked in our home kitchen by Vietta Garr and a few temporary assistants, was served buffet style, and the guests ate at tables in the yard. For a final touch, the dessert was a birthday cake in the shape of the yet to be built library. The highest-priced public relations wizard in the country could not have done a better job of kicking off the campaign to raise the $1.75 million needed for the building.

  That day demonstrated how completely Bess Wallace had become Harry Truman’s political partner. History was on both their minds in 1955. Dad published the first volume of his memoirs, Year of Decisions. In the preface, he paid tribute to Mother’s share in the history he was writing, as well as in the preparation of the book. “I owe a great debt of gratitude to Mrs. Truman, on whose counsel and judgment I frequently called.” I can assure you that Mother read every word of every draft of that book.

  Around Christmastime that year, Dad walked into the living room and found Mother sitting before the fireplace, in which a brisk blaze was crackling. All around her were piles of letters. As she finished one, she tossed it into the fire. “Bess,” Dad said. “What are you doing?”

  “Burning our letters,” she said.

  “Bess,” Dad said. “Think of history.”

  “I have,” Mother said and tossed another letter on the fire.

  We now know that she spared most of Dad’s letters. Instead, with that determination to stay in the background that was the essence of her role in their partnership, she burned almost all of her letters to Dad.

  I wish I could tell you there was no more pain involved in the political side of the Truman partnership. But the following year, when the Democrats convened in that fateful city, Chicago, there were a few final pangs. After the 1952 disaster, Dad had had a reconciliation of sorts with Adlai Stevenson. But it was neither profound nor lasting. Dad tried to prod Mr. Stevenson into assuming the leadership of the Democratic Party but he did little or nothing to create a meaningful opposition to the Republicans. In 1955, Dad urged him to announce he was a candidate for the nomination, but Mr. Stevenson preferred to play Hamlet again.

  More than a little angry, Dad turned to Averell Harriman as his candidate. He had been elected governor of New York and was doing a good job. He was thoroughly qualified in the foreign policy field, having been a top troubleshooter for FDR and Dad in dealing with Moscow. At the convention, however, it soon became apparent that Mr. Stevenson’s friends had control of the party machinery, and Mr. Harriman did not have a chance. Dad proceeded to show his stubborn side. He decided to call a press conference and announce that he was backing his man, anyway.

  Mother was upset. She sought out Tom Evans, the owner of KMOC in Kansas City, one of the two friends who had been on the inside of the nomination for vice president in 1944. When Dad announced he was not going to run again in 1952, Tom had sent him a telegram warmly approving the decision. Mother later said it was “the nicest wire she had ever received.” Tom understood how she felt about Dad, and she had no hesitation about speaking frankly to him. “Tom,” she said. “Can’t you do something to stop Harry? He’s making a fool of himself.”

  Tom was shocked to see tears on Mother’s face. It was the only time he had ever seen her weep.

  For me, that is one of the most painful scenes in this book. But I am afraid Mother was right. In spite of telling himself and others that it was a mistake to try to exercise political power too long, Dad’s passionate involvement in the Democratic Party made it difficult for him to take his own advice. The 1956 Chicago Convention taught him that lesson, the hard way. With the help of Tom Evans, Mother persuaded him to withdraw his support of Averell Harriman and endorse Mr. Stevenson. Alas, President Eisenhower trounced our Democratic Hamlet again, leaving Dad totally frustrated.

  In between these political spasms, Mother found herself managing a wedding - at last. In the closing months of his presidency, Dad had remarked that the only thing he now wanted out of life was a grandson. When reporters asked me if I planned to do anything about that, I froze them and the president by replying that the chief executive must have been short on things to talk about that day. I am convinced that Mother put him up to that reminder that I was still single. Mary Paxton Keeley had not one, but two grandchildren whom she brought to Independence for several visits. There was also a steady stream of “kodaks,” as Mother called them, in Mary’s letters.

  To give her credit, Mother did her best to stay out of my love life. To give me credit, I tried even harder to keep her out, knowing her penchant for taking charge of things. On a Christmas visit in 1955, I received a number of telegrams and a couple of bouquets from an editor at The New York Times named Clifton Daniel. I had met him several months earlier but neglected to give him our unlisted Independence telephone number. Being an ingenious newspaperman, he decided to communicate with me via Western Union and the local florist.

  “Who is this?” Mother asked.

  “A man I met,” I replied, and that was pretty much all she heard until I called her in January 1956 to tell her that Clifton and I were engaged, and I wanted to be married in Independence on April 21. Mother and Dad promptly came to New York to meet Clifton and were charmed by him in about ten minutes. We had no difficulty swearing them to secrecy about our engagement until March 15, when Mother and Dad would announce it in Independence.

  Everything seemed settled on that front until I received a call on or about March 10. The famous bridge club was meeting on March 12, and Mother said that they would never forgive her if she did not tell them. I told her it was a good thing she was no longer in the White House, with all sorts of state secrets in her head, it that was the best she could do with my secret. I was only teasing, of course, and agreed to let her move the announcement up three days and go to the bridge club free to tell all.

  On other fronts, things did not go so smoothly. Mother drew up a guest list for me, half of whom I rejected. I did not want swarms of politicians at my wedding, and I also wanted to eliminate several friends who had acquired the unfortunate habit of using my name to get publicity for themselves. One in particular went back to my Gunston Hall days, and Mother was genuinely shocked that I would not invite her and her mother. It was a clash between a lady of the previous generation and a woman who felt sincerity was more important than propriety.

  Several times the wires between Independence and New York grew more than a little overheated. In the end, I won most of the battles, but Mother could claim a few victories too. One of hers was somewhat pyrrhic, although she never knew it. Because Clifton was a Baptist, and we were being married in an Episcopal church, the rector in Independence announced that regulations required Mr. Daniel to take an hour’s instruction in his wife’s faith. I exploded and threatened to get married in City Hall. Mother said she was tempted to tell me to make it New York’s City Hall.

  In a fury, I called Dr. Kinsolving,
rector of St. James Church in New York and an old friend. He suggested Clifton and I pay him a visit. I agreed with some trepidation. When we were settled in his study, Dr. Kinsolving leaned back in his chair and asked Clifton what he thought of the Yankee’s chances that year. For the next hour, they proceeded to talk baseball. I learned enough lingo to become a sportscaster if worse ever came to worst. Finally, Dr. Kinsolving glanced at his watch and said: “Well, now you can tell your man in Independence that you have spent a very educational hour with a learned Episcopalian cleric.”

  I never told Mother what we really talked about.

  The wedding went beautifully. We kept the guest list small enough to have the reception at 219 North Delaware Street, not too dissimilar from Mother’s reception in 1919 - except for the army of photographers and reporters outside the iron fence. They never let me forget my name was Margaret Truman, even though I was doing my best to change it.

  Clifton and I were scarcely back from our honeymoon when the ex-president wafted Mother off on a sort of second honeymoon of their own. A year before, Dad had written confidentially to me, “Your mother is moaning that she sits at home so much but I’ll remedy that!” In mid-May 1956, they took off for six marvelous weeks in Europe with Stanley Woodward, chief of protocol while they were in the White House, and his delightful wife. They had a good time, in spite of coping with swarms of newsmen and mobs of curious citizens. “The jam at the Paris, Rome and Naples stations was like Washington in 1948 after the election,” Dad wrote to Tom Evans.

  There was only one bad moment on the trip, as far as Mother was concerned. That came at Chartwell, Winston Churchill’s estate, in the midst of an otherwise happy visit with the former prime minister and his family. Mr. Churchill told Dad that nothing could make him happier than seeing Harry Truman become President of the United States again. The great Englishman seemed to think that Dad could make a comeback, as the prime minister did after being ousted in 1945. Mother said nothing, and Dad quietly told him, “There was no chance of that.”