In Paris in July, at another drawn-out, acrimonious session of the Council of Foreign Ministers, Secretary of State Byrnes was making little progress with Molotov in the peace treaty negotiations. In April, his relations with the President still strained, Byrnes had told Truman privately that he wished to resign, pleading health problems, but Truman had asked him to stay on at least until the end of the year. Confidentially, through General Eisenhower, Truman informed George Marshall in China that he wanted him to become the next Secretary of State, once Byrnes departed.
Senator Vandenberg, who was part of the American delegation in Paris, came home to report “appalling disagreement” over Germany, and “intense suspicions” between Russia and the West.
There were worries over Russia, worries over Europe, worries over China. In France and Italy, the Communists were emerging as the strongest single political units. In China, the Red Armies of Mao Tse-tung were making steady gains against the Nationalist government forces of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. To a group of editors and executives from the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company who met with him informally in his office, Truman conceded that the difficulties with China were “very, very bad.”
He was even having troubles back home in Jackson County. Infuriated by a congressman from his own district, Democrat Roger C. Slaughter, who, as a member of the House Rules Committee, had been stalling progress on the Fair Employment Practices bill, Truman decided not to support him for reelection and made a show of bringing Jim Pendergast to the White House to talk about it. “If Mr. Slaughter is right, I’m wrong,” Truman told reporters. He had Pendergast back another candidate in the primary, Enos Axtell, with the result that some in the old Kansas City organization began resorting to their former ways, causing a storm of outrage in the Kansas City Star. When Truman returned to Independence the first week in August to vote in the primary, he discovered that the Star had a reporter staked out with binoculars keeping watch on 219 North Delaware, to record his every move. Seeing the reporter early the next day, Truman made a point of telling him in detail exactly how he had spent the morning thus far, including certain acts performed in the bathroom.
Axtell’s victory in the primary was hailed by Bob Hannegan as a vote of confidence for the President. Reporters in Kansas City, however, turned up evidence of vote fraud, and though three federal judges found only minor violations in the election, Truman’s involvement looked none too good, reviving old stories of his own past connection to the Pendergast machine, not to say doubts about his sense of propriety.
Clark Clifford remembered it as a summer of “wallowing.” Even the President’s health declined. He suffered from an ear infection and a return of stomach pains such as he had not had in years, the result, said Wallace Graham, of “a nervous condition.”
“Obviously, he needs a rest from the strain he’s under,” noted Charlie Ross in his diary, “though he looks the picture of health.”
“Had the most awful day I’ve ever had Tuesday,” Truman wrote to his mother and sister on July 31, “saw somebody every fifteen minutes on a different subject, held a Cabinet luncheon and spent two solid hours discussing Palestine and got nowhere. Today’s been almost as bad but not quite. Got in a swim for the first time since February.”
He was distressed about his mother’s failing health. “She’s on the way out,” he wrote to Bess. “It can’t be helped…. She’s a trial to Mary, and that can’t be helped either.” He wished Bess would be more patient with them.
Bess and Margaret remained in Independence, Bess looking after her own mother, Margaret working with a voice teacher from Kansas City. “Be good and be tough,” she advised her father at the close of one chatty, affectionate letter.
“I still have a number of bills staring me in the face,” Truman wrote to Bess on August 10.
Byrnes called me from Paris this morning asking me not to veto a State Department reorganization bill, which I’d told Clark Clifford I was sure is a striped-pants boy’s bill to sidetrack the Secretary of State. Jimmy told me it wasn’t but I’m still not sure.
I have another one under consideration, which restores civil and military rights to a captain in the quartermaster department. He was court-martialed in 1926 in Panama for some seven or eight charges under the ninety-third and ninety-sixth articles of war. Dick Duncan [a federal district judge in Missouri and former congressman] is interested because the fellow’s from St. Joe and he put the bill through the House and I put it through the Senate on two occasions, and Roosevelt vetoed it both times.
When I read the record I’m not so sure Roosevelt wasn’t right! Ain’t it awful what a difference it makes where you sit! I gave the whole thing to Clifford and told him to give me a coldblooded report on it.
I have another one which is a pain in the neck. Hayden [Senator Carl Hayden], my good friend, and [Congressman Cecil Rhodes] King want it signed. [Clinton] Anderson wants it disapproved and it looks like Anderson is right. It sure is hell to be President.
Longing for a vacation, eager to get away from both Washington and Independence, he had thought first of going to Alaska—he had always wanted to see Alaska—but decided instead on a cruise on the Williamsburg to New England in August and invited his old friend and best man, Ted Marks, to join an all-male party that included Snyder, Ross, Clifford, Vaughan, George Allen, Matt Connelly, and Colonel Graham, enough for an eight-handed game of poker.
Truman loved the Williamsburg. “It’s just wonderful,” he often told its commander, Donald J. MacDonald. “In ten minutes I’m away from everything.” He loved cruising on the river, in placid waters, the green Virginia shoreline slipping by, other boats passing.
When he wasn’t napping or playing cards [MacDonald remembered years later], President Truman was often up on the bridge with us, or sitting on deck. Boats would come alongside and [people] wave to him, which he seemed to enjoy. The boaters were just thrilled to see him. It was a different time, and no one thought of taking a potshot at him. In fact, I think the Secret Service thoroughly enjoyed whenever he went on the Williamsburg, because he became my responsibility. They just went along for the ride. I think often of this….
The first few days, Truman gave up shaving and dipped into Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s, The Age of Jackson. But the poker and the comradeship were, as so often, what he obviously liked best and needed most. “Getting together with his old friends with whom he was completely comfortable was the greatest relaxation he had,” remembered Clifford.
See, he had no airs. He never put on airs of any kind. He was much more relaxed with them. He didn’t have to be careful with them. And if he wanted to have a couple [of drinks], why he felt perfectly at ease…nobody ever did it to excess, but that was part of the relaxation. And some of the jokes would be of the type that would not have been told in the White House, and they’d be awfully funny. And perhaps Missouri rural jokes of one kind, and then he had a wonderfully expansive, expressive laugh.
They were important [such times on the Williamsburg]—more important than most people might know because he felt the strains very, very much. He liked to pretend a little that he didn’t. He’d say, “Oh, I sleep fine at night.”
Asked once by a reporter what his attitude was toward card games, Truman replied with a twinkle in his eye, “Card games? The only game I know anything about is that game—let me see—I don’t know what the name is, but you put one card down on the table and four face up, and you bet.”
His enjoyment of poker came mainly from the companionship it provided. He was considered a “fairly good” player, but by no means exceptional.
He was what was called a “loose” player, rarely staying out of a pot and often betting freely with an occasional bluff. He was “full of mischief” at the table. Dealing left-handed, he loved to taunt anyone needing a particular card. Sometimes, after taking a poll of what the others wanted to play, he would deal something else. He liked games with wild cards, and especially a version of ordinary stud poker that he c
alled “Papa Vinson,” after Fred Vinson, who was a particularly skillful player.
“He always plays a close hand, I’ll say that,” Ted Marks remembered. “You can tell when he’s winning, because there’s a kind of smile on his face….” As Truman himself conceded, poker was by far his favorite relaxation, “my favorite form of paper work.” It took his mind off other things more than anything else. It made no difference to him if the stakes were nickels and dimes, and no apparent difference to his enjoyment of the game if he won or lost. Wallace Graham thought the President played poker as much for what it revealed about the other players at the table as for the pleasure of the game itself. The fact that Vinson, for example, was an expert player was not incidental to Truman’s high regard for Vinson.
Clifford, who had played little until coming to the White House, but had bought a book on the game and studied. “assiduously,” would remember that on this and other trips on the yacht, poker, except for meals, took up the better part of most days, but that lunch often lasted two hours or more, because of all the talk, Truman obviously enjoying every moment and contributing more than his share. “I will bet that the subject of his selection as Roosevelt’s running mate in Chicago must have come up forty times…[all the] different facets about it.”
The President’s drinking, widespread stories notwithstanding, was moderate. Some mornings on deck, he might squint at the sky and comment that it must be noon somewhere in the world, and ask for a bourbon. On occasion he would show the effects of several drinks, expressing himself, as Clifford later wrote, “in language less restrained and more colorful than he would otherwise use,” and especially if he had had a particularly vexing week. But he could also nurse a single drink through a whole evening of talk and poker.
“The Williamsburg, being a commissioned vessel, was not supposed to serve liquor,” recalled MacDonald, but as Commander in Chief it was, “of course,” Truman’s prerogative to drink on board if he so wished. “I made no issue of that…. Old Grandad was his favorite.”
When, at Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, they hit cold winds, rain, and fog, Truman ordered a change in plans. They turned and headed south to Bermuda, which, he knew, had been Woodrow Wilson’s favorite retreat, and where finally, in ideal weather, he enjoyed a few days of peace and uninterrupted sunshine. “This is a paradise you dream about but hardly ever see,” he wrote to Margaret on August 23.
But in Hampton Roads on the return to Washington, they sailed straight into a storm. The 244-foot Williamsburg, built in 1930 as a private yacht and purchased by the Navy at the outset of the war, had never been a particularly good seagoing vessel, even after several hundred tons of pig iron were put down in the bilges to improve stability. Now the ship “did all sorts of antics,” as Truman would tell his mother. Violently ill, he took to his bed. “The furniture was taking headers in every direction,” he told Bess, “and it was necessary to stay in bed to keep your legs on.” His stateroom was a shambles. “Papers, books, chairs, clothing, yours, Margaret’s, and Mamma’s pictures mixed up with Time, Newsweek, Reader’s Digest, Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, luggage, pillows. Looked as if it never would be in shape again….”
The summer heat of Washington held, and again he was alone in the great white jail, as he had begun calling the White House. Some of the servants had been telling him how the ghost of Abraham Lincoln had appeared over the years. Truman became convinced the house was haunted:
Night before last [he reported to Bess] I went to bed at nine o’clock after shutting my doors. At four o’clock I was awakened by three distinct knocks on my bedroom door. I jumped up and put on my bathrobe, opened the door, and no one there. Went out and looked up and down the hall, looked into your room and Margie’s. Still no one. Went back to bed after locking the doors and there were footsteps in your room whose door I’d left open. Jumped up and looked and no one there! Damn place is haunted sure as shootin’. Secret service said not even a watchman was up here at that hour.
More and more he disliked living there. Better it be made a museum, he thought, and give the President a rent allowance. That way, he told Bess, they could move back to the apartment on Connecticut Avenue, an idea he knew she would welcome.
“You better lock your door and prop up some chairs and next time you hear knocks, don’t answer,” Margaret advised him. “It’ll probably be A. Jackson in person.”
The little oak-paneled elevator that had carried him to the second floor the afternoon of Franklin Roosevelt’s death was being replaced with new equipment. (The old elevator, dating from Theodore Roosevelt’s day, had moved too slowly for Truman and on one occasion broke down, leaving him stranded between floors. He had to ring a gong and wait for the workmen to hurry to the basement and jiggle the apparatus back into motion.) New chandeliers were being installed, his bathtub fitted with a glass shower stall. But he had little faith in the old house.
The stock market was falling. A maritime strike that had begun on the West Coast was rapidly spreading. Next thing, he thought, the White House roof would cave in.
“I’m in the middle no matter what happens,” he wrote mournfully the second week of September, on the eve of the Wallace fiasco.
At a press conference in his office the afternoon of Thursday, September 12, the President was asked by a reporter to comment on a speech scheduled to be given by the Secretary of Commerce at a political rally in New York at Madison Square Garden that evening, copies of which had already been distributed to the press. Truman said he couldn’t answer questions about a speech that had not yet been delivered, at which Charlie Ross and others of the staff standing by appeared to breathe a sigh of relief. “If the President had only stopped there!” Ross later wrote.
The reporter, William Mylander of the Cowles newspapers, pressed on, saying Secretary Wallace referred in the speech to the President himself, which was why he had asked. There was laughter and Truman good-naturedly said that being the case perhaps he should hear the question.
Mylander, who held a copy of the speech in his hand, said it contained a sentence asserting that the President had “read these words” and that they represented administration policy.
That was correct, said Truman.
Was he endorsing a particular paragraph or the whole speech?
He had approved the whole speech, Truman said breezily. Reporters looked at one another.
“Mr. President,” asked Raymond Brandt of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “do you regard Wallace’s speech a departure from Byrnes’ policy…”
“I do not,” Truman snapped back, before Brandt could finish his sentence.
“…toward Russia?”
“They are exactly in line,” said Truman, in a manner implying the question was frivolous, and that he wished reporters would ask something harder.
In truth, he hadn’t read all the speech—or hadn’t been paying attention when Wallace went over it with him—and had given it no thought since. The President, noted Charlie Ross in his diary, had now been “betrayed by his own amiability.”
According to Wallace’s diary account, he and Truman had run through the speech together “page by page,” and Truman agreed with everything in it. “He didn’t have a single change to suggest,” Wallace wrote. Clark Clifford, too, would remember Wallace reading through the speech for the President. But Truman, in his own diary, said he had been able to give Wallace only ten or fifteen minutes, most of which had been taken up with other matters. He had tried to skim through it, Truman wrote, assuming that Wallace was cooperating in all phases of administration policy, including foreign policy. “One paragraph caught my eye. It said that we held no special friendship for Russia, Britain or any other country, that we wanted to see all the world at peace on an equal basis. I said that is, of course, what we want.” It was on the basis of this single paragraph only, according to Truman, that he gave his approval, “trusting to Henry to play square with me.” In private conversation with Charlie Ross, he also admitted that he
had looked at only parts of the speech, relying on Wallace’s assurance that the rest was all right.
And most of the speech was indeed “in line” with administration policy. Wallace urged support for the United Nations, called for increased international trade and international control of atomic weapons. But he also condemned British “imperialism” and appeared to be advocating American and Russian spheres of interest in the world, a concept strongly opposed by Byrnes. The United States, Wallace said, had “no more business in the political affairs of Eastern Europe than Russia has in the political affairs of Latin America….” Any “Get Tough” policy was foolhardy. “‘Get Tough’ never brought anything real and lasting—whether for schoolyard bullies or businessmen or world power,” Wallace said. “The tougher we get, the tougher the Russians will get.”
At Madison Square Garden, departing from his prepared text, Wallace told an audience of twenty thousand—an audience, in part, vociferously pro-Soviet—“I realize that the danger of war is much less from Communism than it is from imperialism….”
As James Reston wrote in The New York Times the following day, Truman appeared to be the only person in Washington who saw no difference between what Wallace had said and his own policy, or that of his Secretary of State in Paris, who, reportedly, was outraged. An angry Arthur Vandenberg declared there could be only one Secretary of State at a time.
Saturday morning, the 14th, his immediate staff gathered about his desk, Truman openly berated himself for having made so grave a “blunder.” At a press conference that afternoon, he read a carefully prepared statement, and this time no questions were permitted. There had been “a natural misunderstanding,” Truman said. His answer to Mr. Mylander’s question had not conveyed the thought intended. It had been his wish only to express approval of Secretary Wallace’s right to deliver the speech, Truman insisted, not approval of the speech itself.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 479