Finishing the call, Byrnes went directly down the corridor to Hopkins’s office and repeated what the President had said. If anyone knew Roosevelt’s mind supposedly it was Hopkins, who now told Byrnes the President was sure that if Byrnes entered the race he would win, he would be nominated.
According to Byrnes, it was then that he phoned Harry Truman in Missouri, though Truman would remember the call coming early in the morning, as he was about to leave for Chicago. Whether this was Friday morning or Saturday morning is not clear, nor important. But presumably Byrnes would not have called Truman until after he had talked with the President, so most likely it was Saturday morning.
Truman was staying at the President Hotel in Kansas City. Bess, Margaret, and Madge Wallace were visiting Fred Wallace at his new home in Denver.
Byrnes asked if Truman was serious when he told the newspapers he did not want the vice-presidential nomination. Yes, Truman replied, absolutely. He was not a candidate. Byrnes said he had been given the “go sign” from Roosevelt and would like nothing better than to have Truman make the nominating speech for him at Chicago. Truman accepted at once, saying he would be delighted and would do all he could to line up the Missouri delegation. Clearly he, too, was convinced by this time that Byrnes was both the President’s choice and the best one, and his source for such confidence must have been Bob Hannegan. Otherwise, he would never have responded so affirmatively and without hesitation.
Again by Truman’s recollection, he had no sooner put down the phone than it rang a second time. Alben Barkley now wanted him to make his nominating speech at Chicago. He was sorry, Truman replied, but he had just said yes to Jimmy Byrnes.
II
The turmoil at the Chicago convention was entirely over the vice presidency and at no time did the outcome appear inevitable. Ambitions were too large, the opportunities for deceit and maneuver and the play of emotion too plentiful, the dictates of Franklin Roosevelt too capricious and uncertain for there to have been even a momentary sense of events moving as if on a track. Things could have gone differently at any of several points, and with the most far-reaching consequences. As Alben Barkley would write, the denouement in Chicago of all the plotting that had gone on in Washington was a fascinating political drama. It was politics for the highest stakes, politics at its slipperiest, and the only real drama of either national convention that summer.
A few weeks before, when the Republicans filled the same hotels and picked their nominees in the same steaming hall, there had been no contest and no surprises. Thomas E. Dewey was smoothly nominated on the first ballot and his only near rival, Senator John W. Bricker, was the choice for running mate. Now the assembling Democrats were to be denied the chance even to see their standardbearer, their hero, whose overwhelming endorsement for yet another term was a foregone conclusion. Roosevelt had declined to appear before the convention because of his duties as Commander in Chief, he said, just as he had agreed to run again because he saw it as his duty as a “good soldier” in time of war. His acceptance speech was to be delivered by radio hookup from some undisclosed location on the West Coast.
But as so many of the Democrats who converged on Chicago understood, the task of choosing a Vice President had unique importance this time. The common, realistic, and not unspoken view was that they were there to pick not one, but two presidents, and if the identity of the first was clear, that of the second was not.
Had there been a poll of the delegates as they checked in at the hotels, the choice of the majority would have been Henry Wallace. I. F. Stone, writing in The Nation, said that on the basis of his inside sources he could report for certain it would be Wallace. Yet the eminent radio commentator H. V. Kaltenborn virtually announced the nomination of Alben Barkley, while Arthur Krock of The New York Times said the prime contenders, after Wallace, were Byrnes, Barkley, and Douglas, in that order, and made no mention of Harry Truman. Speaking for the Democratic National Committee, George Allen thought it would be Truman but he couldn’t be sure. Hannegan and Mayor Kelly, meantime, two of the most powerful figures on the committee, had concluded it would be Byrnes.
But, of course, nobody really knew, since so much depended on Franklin Roosevelt, and as George Allen also aptly observed, “Roosevelt could, of course, have named anybody.”
Privately, and as he would tell no one until much later, Truman thought it would be Wallace.
Looking back on what happened, Alben Barkley would conclude that he had been sadly naive about the whole business. He had been in politics nearly forty years, this was his eleventh national convention, but he had never seen anything like what went on.
Truman drove to Chicago from Kansas City on Saturday, July 15, four days before the convention was officially to open, and the same day the President’s westbound train made an unscheduled stop at Chicago.
As later disclosed, Roosevelt was en route to San Diego, where a cruiser would take him to Hawaii for meetings with General Douglas MacArthur. But at three that afternoon his train was shunted onto a siding so that Bob Hannegan could come aboard for a private talk in the President’s new armor-plated private railroad car, the Ferdinand Magellan, another innovation resulting from the war. They were together approximately half an hour. “The train stood in the Chicago yards during this conference and none of us showed ourselves outside,” wrote the President’s secretary, Grace Tully. Though nearly everything said between Roosevelt and Hannegan was kept secret, one request by Roosevelt would become the best-known line of the convention. Whatever was decided, said the President, Hannegan must first “Clear it with Sidney,” meaning that Sidney Hillman was to have the final say—Hillman, who now ran the CIO’s well-heeled Political Action Committee, or PAC, which was something new in American politics.
Hannegan also came off the train with a letter on White House stationery, which, in lieu of a briefcase, he carried inside a copy of the National Geographic Magazine. The letter was postdated July 19:
Dear Bob:
You have written me about Harry Truman and Bill Douglas. I should, of course, be very glad to run with either of them and believe that either one of them would bring real strength to the ticket.
Always sincerely,
Franklin Roosevelt
Whether it had been written earlier in Washington or was produced to order that day is not certain. Grace Tully, however, said Hannegan had come out of the President’s sitting room with a letter in his hand naming two acceptable running mates, William O. Douglas first, Harry Truman second, and that Hannegan told her the President wanted it retyped with the order of the names reversed. To her, the reason for the switch seemed obvious. “By naming Truman first it plainly implied…that he was the preferred choice of the President.” Hannegan would later deny making any such switch, and since the first copy of the letter was thrown away by another secretary who did the actual typing, there was no way to confirm or disprove the story. Ed Pauley, who claimed to have been with Hannegan when he went to see Roosevelt, said later that Hannegan was back at his hotel before he discovered to his horror that Douglas was even mentioned. Also a note dated July 19 in Roosevelt’s hand, as well as a typewritten duplicate on White House stationery, have survived with Truman’s name listed first. But Grace Tully was not known for fabricating stories, nor was there any reason why she should have done so in this instance.
In any event, the handsome, gregarious Hannegan—Mr. Busyman Bob, as he would be remembered—was playing an extremely deceitful game at this his first national convention, possibly at Roosevelt’s direction, and possibly not. For his next move was to call Jimmy Byrnes in Washington, a second call to Byrnes that day. The first, made by Mayor Ed Kelly in the morning, had been to tell Byrnes that he, Kelly, and Hannegan were no longer worried about losing the Negro vote if Byrnes were on the ticket, and that this was the message Hannegan would take to Roosevelt when the presidential train came in. Now, in the second call, Hannegan told Byrnes that the vice presidency was all set. Byrnes was the one. “The P
resident has given us the green light to support you and he wants you in Chicago.”
Byrnes left Washington for Chicago at once and, seeing Tom Connally on the train, confided triumphantly that the nomination was his. Roosevelt himself had passed the word. “Harry Truman will nominate me,” Byrnes said.
Arriving in Chicago the morning of Sunday the 16th, Byrnes found a bright red fire chief’s car and driver waiting at the station for him, courtesy of Mayor Kelly. He was taken directly to the mayor’s apartment on Lake Shore Drive for a breakfast meeting with Kelly and Hannegan, who assured him he was the chosen man. “Well, you know Jimmy has been my choice from the very first. Go ahead and nominate him,” they quoted Roosevelt as having instructed. A little afterward, Alben Barkley, too, was told by Kelly that “it was in the bag for Jimmy.”
Hannegan and company spent most of the day with Byrnes mapping out strategy. Hannegan even ordered “Roosevelt and Byrnes” placards printed. By late afternoon, the word had spread among the delegates and reporters milling about in the hotel lobbies.
The Roosevelt letter to Hannegan was kept secret. Hannegan was showing it to no one, because of its mention of Douglas, he later said. And no one apparently had said anything about it as yet to Senator Truman, who by now had his nominating speech for Byrnes all prepared.
Sitting beside an open window in his hotel room that evening, the flat, gray-blue panorama of Lake Michigan in the distance, Truman talked at length to a St. Louis reporter, with the understanding that most of what he said was off the record. Although Bess and Margaret, due to arrive from Denver on Tuesday, would be staying at the Morrison Hotel, the senator had taken a suite in the Stevens, across the street from the venerable Blackstone, so that his “politicking” would not disturb their sleep. Jimmy Byrnes, his candidate, was also in the Stevens, six flights up on the twenty-third floor, in the hotel’s plush Royal Skyway, the same rooms occupied a few weeks earlier by Thomas E. Dewey.
He was determined to stay out of the running, Truman said. He knew his Pendergast background would be dragged out again and he wished none of that. He had worked too hard to build a good name in the Senate. The reporter remarked that as Vice President he might “succeed to the throne.” Truman shook his head. “Hell, I don’t want to be president.” He then described the failures and scorn experienced by every Vice President who had succeeded to the highest office, beginning with John Tyler and overlooking the most obvious example to the contrary, Theodore Roosevelt.
To another reporter that same evening Truman repeated much the same thing. Those who had succeeded dead presidents were ridiculed in office, had their hearts broken, and lost any vestige of respect they had before. “I don’t want that to happen to me.”
Nobody, it would seem, was avoiding the central issue of Roosevelt’s health and what the vice-presidential nomination really meant. Truman’s Kansas City friend Tom Evans later said Truman knew perfectly well that Roosevelt’s days were numbered and this was precisely why he had no desire to be on the ticket. “I’m satisfied with where I am,” Evans remembered him saying. “Just a heartbeat, this little,” said Truman, making a tiny space between forefinger and thumb, “separates the Vice President and the President.”
Since arriving in Chicago, he had hardly been able to sleep at night. He hated the thought of intrusions on his family’s privacy, and what so much notoriety might do to Margaret at such an important stage in her life. He was worried about skeletons in the closet, he told Evans—about Bess being on the office payroll in Washington and what the papers would make of that. Writing years later, Margaret would say that most of all he feared what a disclosure and retelling of David Wallace’s suicide would do to Bess and her mother.
Evans, an old Pendergast loyalist who had grown rich with a chain of drugstores that also sold quantities of Pendergast beer and whiskey, had come to Chicago at Truman’s request for the supposed purpose of helping him fend off the nomination, as had Eddie McKim and John Snyder. Scowling, heavy-handed Fred Canfil, too, was on hand in his role as general factotum and looking, noted one reporter, “as if he could throw a bull in two falls out of three.” (Canfil would later complain of missing much of the drama on the convention floor because “somebody else wanted some booze and I had to help him.”) Yet they all seem to have spent most of their time talking Truman up as the ideal choice—McKim liked to say it was a question of destiny—and trying to persuade Truman to change his mind.
Roy Roberts, the fat, hard-drinking, opinionated editor of the Kansas City Star, who was a Republican and a man Truman loathed, also came and went, perspiring heavily and acting like a kingmaker, which aggravated Truman greatly.
None of them lost sight of the point that it was really the presidency at stake. As McKim remembered, they “got Truman in a room and…explained the situation to him.” After much talk, McKim told him, “I think, Senator, that you’re going to do it.” What gave him that idea, Truman snapped. “Because,” said McKim, “there’s a little, old ninety-year-old mother down in Grandview, Missouri, that would like to see her son President of the United States.” Truman, in tears, stomped out of the room.
Bess, Margaret, Mildred Dryden, his little band of Missouri friends, as well as his brother Vivian, who was in Chicago to see his first national convention, were all sure he did not want the nomination and would all later stress how extremely stubborn he grew as pressures on him increased. Only Vic Messall, who was still out of favor but on hand as a spectator, thought differently. Truman was always politically ambitious, Messall said. “I’m sure he wanted to be Vice President. But he had to pretend he didn’t.”
Reflecting on Truman’s frame of mind years later, John Snyder would say that it wasn’t so much that Truman didn’t want to be President but that he didn’t want to succeed Franklin Roosevelt, which was different.
For Truman, in memory, the convention would always be “that miserable time” in Chicago, the most exasperating experience of his life. Marquis Childs, a practiced Truman observer, described him as plainly “scared to death.”
The sensation of Monday, July 17, was the release by convention chairman Samuel Jackson of Roosevelt’s letter about Wallace. A hundred reporters or more fought for the mimeographed copies. It had been written at Hyde Park on Friday, the same day as Roosevelt’s reassuring telephone conversation with Jimmy Byrnes:
I have been associated with Henry Wallace during his past four years as Vice President [read the key paragraph of the instantly famous document], for eight years earlier while he was Secretary of Agriculture, and well before that. I like him and I respect him and he is my personal friend. For these reasons I personally would vote for his nomination if I were a delegate to the convention.
To many it seemed a kiss of death for Wallace—“the coolest and cruelest brushoff in all the long Roosevelt career,” in the words of one account. Unquestionably, it threw the choice of a running mate wide open. He did not “wish to appear to be in any way dictating to the convention,” Roosevelt had also written. If anybody benefited, said several papers, it was Jimmy Byrnes. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called the letter a spur to the “already soaring campaign stock of energetic little Jimmy Byrnes.” But the Wallace forces, including Sidney Hillman and Phil Murray of the CIO, took the announcement as a sign of hope, since theirs was the only candidate who now had something in writing from the President. “It was generally regarded as a Roosevelt endorsement,” remembered Senator Claude Pepper of Florida, a Wallace floor leader, who, from his conversations with Roosevelt in Washington, was certain Roosevelt wanted Wallace.
It was only now, in response, that Hannegan began saying he, too, had a letter from the President, which named Truman. But no one was allowed to see it.
Hannegan’s corner suite on the seventh floor of the Blackstone, Rooms 708–709, had become the convention nerve center, since Hannegan alone claimed direct telephone contact with the President. In the red-carpeted hall outside, reporters and photographers set up a round-the-clock vi
gil to see who came and went. At first Hannegan tried to discourage them, insisting that nothing was happening there. Mayor Kelly, who was in and out “continually,” kept mentioning the Roosevelt letter. “Do you want to see it?” he asked a skeptical representative of the United Auto Workers. Indeed yes, said the man. “I haven’t got it with me,” Kelly replied, “but I’ll show it to you tomorrow.”
At a dinner that night arranged by Kelly in a private apartment on Chicago’s North Side, a location kept secret from the press, Byrnes was man of the hour. It was only when everybody was about to leave that Hannegan mentioned one further detail, the need, as required by the President, to “Clear it with Sidney,” a point Hannegan seemed to regard as only a formality.
On Tuesday morning Senator Truman and Sidney Hillman had orange juice, eggs, and bacon sent up by room service to Hillman’s suite at the Ambassador East, “the fancy hotel,” as Truman called it. Born in Lithuania, educated to be a rabbi, Hillman had been an eight-dollar-a-week apprentice pants cutter in the garment district of New York when Truman was still riding a plow on the farm. He had led his first strike at twenty-three and founded the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America by the time he was thirty. He had also joined the Socialist Party and still spoke with a slight accent, which would have been more than enough in places like Grandview, Missouri, to have made him seem a dangerous radical. To party chiefs like Hannegan and Kelly, he was an amateur and therefore not wholly trustworthy, whatever the power of his PAC or his allegiance to the President. Hillman wasn’t even a registered Democrat. In addition, as co-director of the former Office of Production Management in Washington, he had come under heavy fire from the Truman Committee, which had been mainly responsible for his removal. And so Truman had no reason to expect much from him in the way of cooperation or favors.
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