To his surprise, however, he was enjoying himself. The round of social engagements not only didn’t bother him, he delighted in it. “The amiable Missourian with the touch of country in his voice and manner,” reported Time, “had conquered a schedule that had Mrs. Truman and Capitol society writers breathless.”
Perle Mesta, heir to Oklahoma oil money and the widow of a wealthy Pittsburgh toolmaker, gave a party in the Vice President’s honor that was described as “one of the most glittering in Washington’s long history of glittery parties.” Mrs. Mesta had come to Washington initially as a Republican, but “jumped the fence” to become a Democrat only the summer before, because the Republicans had refused to renominate Wendell Willkie. Now she had “taken up” Harry Truman.
[The party] had all the charm of an English court tea, the sparkle of a Viennese ball, and the razzle-dazzle of a Hollywood premiere. The best names in officialdom and society attended. Shirt fronts gleamed with star-ruby studs. Evening gowns fairly dripped with diamonds and pearls. Champagne, at $20 a bottle, flowed in cascades….
“He circulated around in as comfortable, unpretentious, and agreeable manner as could be,” wrote the author John Gunther, after seeing Truman at a dinner party given by the foreign affairs editor of the Washington Post. Truman had been the first to arrive, Gunther noted.
He was lively and animated…a guest among other guests.
I had the impression of what you might call bright grayness. Both the clothes and hair were neat and gray. The gray-framed spectacles magnified the gray-hazel eyes, but there was no grayness in the mind…. His conversational manner is alert and poised. He talks very swiftly, yet with concision. You have to listen hard to get it all.
Later, during an interview on the Hill, when Gunther asked him what he liked most, Truman answered, “People.”
Old friends on the Hill found him wholly unaffected by his new role, “homespun as ever.” He kept his same quarters in the Senate Office Building, Room 240, using the Vice President’s office in the Capitol mainly as a place to greet visitors, under the dazzle of a seven-tiered crystal chandelier.
For senators of both parties it became, as Charlie Ross wrote, “the most natural thing in the world” to drop in on Truman for a chat, or perhaps a nip of bourbon. “Many of them observed on these occasions that they had never been in the Vice President’s office when Henry Wallace was there. Wallace to them was otherworldly. He didn’t speak their language; Truman does.”
He, Bess, and Margaret were still living in the same five-room apartment at 4701 Connecticut Avenue at the same $120-a-month rent. The only difference was that his mother-in-law, Mrs. Wallace, had also moved in.
“Harry looks better than he has for ages—is really putting on weight,” Bess wrote to Ethel Noland. “Marg has gone to a picture show and Harry to a poker party,” she told Ethel in another letter. “Mother is practically asleep in her chair—so it’s very peaceful.”
The one new personal convenience with the job was an official car, a black Mercury limousine, and a driver, Tom Harty, who picked the Vice President up each morning and returned him home again at day’s end. En route to the Capitol, they would drop Margaret off at George Washington University, where she was in her junior year. Also, in the front seat rode a young man whom Truman at first assumed was a friend of Harty’s who needed a lift. He was George Drescher, the first Secret Service man to be assigned to a Vice President. The idea had been suggested by Harry Vaughan, who had returned from active duty with the Air Corps to become Truman’s military aide, another first for a Vice President. Appalled to find that no security arrangements had been made for Truman, Vaughan went to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and told him it seemed a bit incongruous to have seventy or a hundred people guarding the President and no one at all guarding the Vice President.
“I used to get down here to the office at 7 o’clock,” Truman wrote his mother and sister from his office.
But now I have to take Margaret to school every morning and I don’t get here until 8:30. Reathel Odum [who had replaced Mildred Dryden as his stenographer] is always here at that time and we wade through a stack of mail a foot high. By that time I have to see people—one at a time just as fast as they can go through the office without seeming to hurry them. Then I go over to the Capitol gold-plated office and see Senators and curiosity seekers for an hour and then the Senate meets and it’s my job to get ’em prayed for—and goodness knows they need it, and then get the business going by staying in the chair for an hour and then see more Senators and curiosity people who want to see what a V.P. looks like and if he walks and talks and has teeth.
What inner fear or concern Truman still felt over the President’s health, he seems to have kept to himself. Nor did he appear to be making any effort to prepare himself for Roosevelt’s death. It was as if all the dire speculation of the summer before, the nightmare he had had on the campaign train, were forgotten, locked away, now that the unthinkable was so much nearer at hand. The closest he came to open speculation on the future and its problems was an off-the-record conversation with a correspondent for Time, Frank McNaughton, who later wrote to his editor in New York:
Truman says simply that he hopes to be of value to the administration through his contacts in the Senate, and he conceives the VP’s job to be a sort of liaison between the executive and legislative branches. Truman is fervent in his declared hope that he can do this right up to the hilt.
“There is a difficult situation after every war, and disagreements and misunderstandings spring up between the executive and legislative,” Truman, an expert on history, says. “Madison encountered it, Andrew Jackson experienced it in an aggravated degree, and Woodrow Wilson had to struggle with it. There is always a tremendous reaction after every such emergency. I don’t think the human kind has changed so much, in that regard, but I have hopes that this will be a period in history when all will rise to the seriousness of the occasion and cooperate for the good of this country and the people.”
We can’t attribute it to Truman, but he is tremendously afraid that there will be a postwar struggle between executive and legislative, and between the Allied powers, that will wreck the peace once and for all. He believes it is going to take the greatest sagacity and diplomacy to prevent postwar national and international struggles for power and prestige, and he conceives it to be his job to effect, to the best of his ability, a smooth cooperation and liaison between the Senate and the President….
His more immediate task was to help get Henry Wallace approved by the Senate as the new Secretary of Commerce. However, it was his part in two other events, both occurring in Roosevelt’s absence, that drew the greatest attention.
In Kansas City, on January 26, less than a week after the inauguration, Tom Pendergast died at the age of seventy-two. Since his return from prison nearly five years before, Pendergast had been living in the big red brick house on Ward Parkway, where, in steadily declining health, he was seen by few outside his immediate family. His name rarely appeared in the papers any longer. His political influence was entirely gone. By court ruling, he was even restricted from setting foot ever again at 1908 Main Street. Truman is not known to have called on him from the time Pendergast left prison, but then to have done so would have been extremely difficult.
But on hearing of T.J.’s death, Truman decided at once that he would attend the funeral. He took off for Kansas City in an Army bomber and was among the several thousand mourners who filed past the bier at Visitation Catholic Church. He was photographed coming and going and paying his respects to the family, all of which struck large numbers of people everywhere as outrageous behavior for a Vice President—to be seen honoring the memory of a convicted criminal. Yet many, possibly a larger number, saw something admirable and courageous in a man risen so high who still knew who he was and refused to forget a friend.
Two weeks later he was back in the news, with more pictures, and again, to some, as a figure of ridicule. He had agree
d to take part in a stage show for servicemen held at the Washington Press Club’s canteen. He was playing an upright piano, to an audience of about eight hundred men in uniform, when actress Lauren Bacall, also part of the entertainment, was boosted on top of the piano to strike a leggy pose as the delighted crowd cheered and flashbulbs popped. “I was just a kid,” she would remember. “My press agent made me do it.” “Anything can happen in this country,” a soldier was quoted at the time. The photographs of the Vice President serenading the glamorous Hollywood star were an instant sensation. What disturbed many people was that Truman appeared to be having such a good time, which he was. Bess was furious. She told him he should play the piano in public no more.
On March 1, in the House Chamber, at a solemn joint session of Congress, with Majority Leader John McCormack beside him, Vice President Truman sat on the dais behind the President as in slow, often rambling fashion Franklin Roosevelt reported on some of what had happened at Yalta. He read the speech sitting down, explaining it was easier not to carry 10 pounds of steel on his legs, which was the first time he had made public mention of his physical disability.
He appeared more pale and drawn than ever. His left hand trembled noticeably as he turned the pages. “It has been a long journey. I hope you will also agree it has been so far, a fruitful one.” At times, losing his place, he ad-libbed. “Of course there were a few other little matters, but I won’t go into them here.” At times, his voice seemed to give out and his hand shook again as he reached for a glass of water. “Twenty-five years ago, American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered. We failed—we failed them then. We cannot fail them again, and expect the world to survive again.”
Here and there in the chamber, listening to him speak, were more than a few who knew enough to have sensed what meaning could lie in these last words—John McCormack, Minority Leader Martin, Secretary Stimson, General Marshall, Henry Wallace, Jimmy Byrnes, Sam Rosenman, who had written much of the speech, Steve Early, the President’s press secretary, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who was watching from the gallery, perhaps a dozen in total who knew the great secret about which the Vice President had been told nothing.
“I saw the President immediately after his speech had been concluded,” Truman wrote. “Plainly, he was a very weary man.” Roosevelt, as he told Truman, was leaving as soon as possible for Warm Springs, Georgia and a rest.
In the stack of mail on his desk to be answered the morning of Thursday, April 12, was a letter from Jim Pendergast, who needed his old friend Harry’s help. “For about a year,” Jim wrote, “the Pendergast Wholesale Liquor Company has been trying to get bottles and cartons in order to carry on their business. They have made three applications and these applications have all been approved by the local office of the War Production Board but when they get to Washington they have all been rejected.” The company, Jim explained, had over eleven thousand barrels of straight bourbon whiskey stored in Kentucky but no bottles or cartons. The situation was serious.
“We will see what we can do right away,” Truman dictated to Miss Odum.
He had dressed for the day with customary care, in a double-breasted gray suit with a white handkerchief in the breast pocket neatly folded so that three corners were showing, a white shirt, and a dark blue polka-dot bow tie. He looked scrubbed and well barbered, the picture of health and self-possession. In the Senate Chamber later in the day, reporters in the press gallery would comment on his obvious enjoyment of people as he moved among different groups of senators on the floor. “It’s wonderful, this Senate,” he had said in a press conference only the day before. “It’s the greatest place on earth…. The grandest bunch of fellows you could ever find anywhere.”
The rest of the mail took longer than usual, so that he was late getting over to the Senate Chamber, where the day’s work had already begun, Alben Barkley substituting for him on the dais. The time of Truman’s arrival was approximately 11:30 A.M.
Senator Willis of Indiana was just relinquishing the floor. Truman and Barkley shook hands and Truman, taking his seat, handed a few official communications to the reading clerk, who announced them to the Senate. One concerned plans being made by the town of Patton, Pennsylvania, for a welcome-home celebration in honor of General George S. Patton. Another was a request from the legislature of Alaska to increase the reindeer herds in Alaska’s national parks by declaring open season on wolves and coyotes.
Many of those in the chamber were people Truman had known since he first came to the Senate ten years earlier. And for all that the world had changed, all the tumult and tragedy of the war, the old room itself looked much the same, except for a mass of ugly steel girders overhead, supports put up in 1940 to hold an old ceiling that had been on the verge of collapse. They had been installed as a temporary expedient only, but then, because of the war, the restoration work had to be postponed, and so there they remained, “barn rafters,” beneath which the business of the Senate continued.
Senator Hawkes of New Jersey asked for printing in the Congressional Record of a petition from the Order of the Sons of Italy to invite Italy to the forthcoming San Francisco Conference to organize the United Nations. Senator Reed of Kansas asked that nineteen letters and telegrams be printed in the Record, all describing the critical shortage of boxcars for grain shipments. The boxcar situation, said the senator, was the worst he had ever seen; wheat was spoiling on the ground.
The main business before the Senate was the ratification of a water treaty with Mexico, affecting use of the Colorado and Rio Grande. As chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Connally spoke first, followed by Ernest McFarland of Arizona. Both urged ratification. Truman had a page deliver a note to Republican Senator Saltonstall of Massachusetts, asking Saltonstall to come up and take his place. “I have a Missouri soldier boy in my office,” explained Truman, who promised to be back in no more than an hour. Noticing an apple on the dais, Saltonstall asked what would happen if he ate it.
“You will take the consequences,” Truman said.
Truman had always been a man of his word, Saltonstall would remember, telling the story years later. “He was back in an hour.”
At another point, the Vice President was seen in a friendly huddle with Republicans Wiley of Wisconsin and Wherry of Nebraska. Allen Drury, watching from the press gallery, remarked to Tony Vaccaro of the United Press that Roosevelt was fortunate to have so good a man as Truman to deal with the Senate. Vaccaro, frowning, said Roosevelt would make no use of him. Vaccaro, who had lately been spending time with the Vice President, said, “Truman doesn’t know what’s going on. Roosevelt won’t tell him anything.”
As the record would show, Truman had met with the President exactly twice, except for Cabinet meetings, since becoming Vice President—once on March 8 and again on March 19, ten days before Roosevelt left for Warm Springs—and neither time was anything of consequence discussed.
About midway through the afternoon Senator Alexander Wiley, Republican of Wisconsin, commenced his remarks on the Mexican water issue, speaking not always to the point and in numbing detail when he did:
It may be noted that the report of the Bureau of Reclamation of the problems of the Imperial Valley and vicinity considered that 800,000 acres ultimately would be irrigated in Mexico, and that some storage would be required for this purpose. Under the present duty of water in the Mexico area, the 800,000 acres of land would require a diversion from the river of 4,800,000 acre-feet of water. The aggregate acreage under the two items to which the footnote in the above table applies is…
Truman decided to make other use of his time by writing a letter to his mother and sister, even though he had little news to report:
Dear Mamma and Mary—I am trying to write you a letter today from the desk of the President of the Senate while a windy Senator from Wisconsin is making a speech on a subject with which he is in no way familiar….
Hope you are h
aving a nice spell of weather. We’ve had a week of beautiful weather but it is raining and misting today. I don’t think it’s going to last long. Hope not, for I must fly to Providence, R.I., Sunday morning.
Turn on your radio tomorrow night at 9:30 your time and you’ll hear Harry make a Jefferson Day address to the nation. I think I’ll be on all the networks so it ought not to be hard to get me. It will be followed by the President, whom I’ll introduce.
Hope you are both well and stay that way.
Love to you both.
Write when you can.
Harry
At the conclusion of Wiley’s speech, Barkley moved for a recess. It was four minutes to five by the clock over the main lobby entrance.
Truman came down from the dais, went out through the swinging doors on his left, crossed the Senators’ Private Lobby, and stepped into the Vice President’s office to tell Harry Vaughan that he would be with Sam Rayburn should anybody want him.
Then, eluding his Secret Service guard, the Vice President walked the length of the Capitol, cutting through the Senate Reception Room, out past the eight-foot white marble statue of Benjamin Franklin, down the long, tiled corridor, around “Mark Twain’s Cuspidor” (the columned well of the Senate Rotunda, so named by Twain because of the tobacco leaves on its columns), on through the main rotunda under the dome, through Statuary Hall (the old House Chamber), and briefly along another corridor to a stairway; down the stairs to the ground floor, left down one hall, right down another to Room 9, Sam Rayburn’s private hideaway, known unofficially as “the Board of Education.”
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