The longer people knew her, the more they appreciated her quiet strength and quality. Among her greatest admirers were Robert A. Lovett and his wife. Lovett, who, at the end of June 1947 replaced Dean Acheson as Under Secretary of State, was a suave, urbane New York investment banker, a partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, and a Yale graduate like Harriman and Acheson. To Lovett there was no question about the importance of Bess Truman. She was “one of the finest women I ever saw in my life,” Lovett remembered. And, “of course,” she helped Truman “immeasurably”: “My wife and I absolutely loved her. She was simply superb….”
Clark Clifford would later describe her as “a pillar of strength to her husband” and credit her with “better insight than her husband into the quality and trustworthiness of people who had gathered around him….”
But if Truman relied on her, as he himself also attested, she clearly was extremely dependent on him. Years later, when asked by a friend what she considered the most memorable aspect of her life, Bess answered at once: “Harry and I have been sweethearts and married more than 40 years—and no matter where I was, when I put out my hand Harry’s was there to grasp it.”
Five foot four and stout, Bess Truman stood as straight as a drum major, head up, shoulders squared. She dressed simply and conservatively. There was nothing ever in any way mannered or pretentious about her. (Throughout her years in Washington, as Jonathan Daniels reported, she laughed at nothing so heartily as the sudden pretensions of some officials’ wives.) She was exactly as she had always been and saw no reason to change because she had become First Lady. Some guests at the White House found her so natural and unprepossessing they had to remind themselves to whom they were speaking. Time said somewhat condescendingly that with her neatly waved gray hair and unobtrusive clothes she would have blended perfectly with the crowd at an A&P.
Asked once by reporters for his view of her appearance, Truman said he thought she looked exactly as a woman her age ought to look.
Many people, meeting Bess Truman for the first time, were surprised by how much younger and more attractive she appeared than in photographs, where her expression was often somber, even disapproving. Something seemed to come over her in public, and particularly when photographers pressed in on her. In receiving lines she often looked bored, even pained, as if her feet hurt—a very different person from the one her friends knew. A Louisiana congressman’s wife, Lindy Boggs, would remember how vivacious the First Lady could be while arranging things for a reception, what delightful company she was behind the scenes. “And then…the minute the doors would open and all those people would begin to come in, she would freeze, and she looked like old stone face. Instead of being the outgoing, warm and lovely woman that she had been previously, the huge crowds simply made her sort of pull up into herself.”
Where Eleanor Roosevelt had seen her role as public and complementary to that of her husband, Bess insisted on remaining in the background. “Propriety was a much stronger influence in her life than in Mrs. Roosevelt’s,” remembered Alice Acheson, the wife of Dean Acheson. It was widely known that Bess played cards—her bridge club from Independence had made a trip to Washington in the spring of 1946, stayed several days at the White House, and was the subject of much attention in the papers—and that she and Margaret, unlike the President, were movie fans. Bess also loved reading mysteries and was “wild” about baseball, going to every Senators game she could fit into her schedule. But she had no interesting hobbies for reporters to write about, no winsome pets, no social causes to champion or opinions on issues she wished to voice publicly. Her distaste for publicity was plain and to many, endearing. She refused repeatedly to make speeches or give private interviews or to hold a press conference, no matter how often reporters protested. “Just keep on smiling and tell ‘them’ nothing,” she advised Reathel Odum. “She didn’t want to discuss her life,” Margaret remembered.
Two early public appearances had turned into embarrassments. She had been asked to christen an Army plane, but no one had bothered to score the champagne bottle in advance, so it would break easily. She swung it against the plane with no result, then kept trying again and again, her face a study in crimson determination. The crowd roared with laughter, until finally a mechanic stepped in and broke the bottle for her. Truman, too, had been amused, as was the country when the newsreel played in the movie theaters, but not Bess, who reportedly told him later she was sorry she hadn’t swung that bottle at him.
The other episode concerned her acceptance, in the fall of 1945, of an invitation to tea from the Daughters of the American Revolution at Constitution Hall, a decision protested vehemently by Adam Clayton Powell, the flamboyant black congressman and minister of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, whose wife, the pianist Hazel Scott, had been denied permission to perform at Constitution Hall because of her race. Bess, however, refused to change her mind. The invitation, as she wrote to Powell, had come before “the unfortunate controversy,” and her acceptance of such hospitality was “not related to the merits of the issue.” She deplored, she said, any action that denied artistic opportunity because of race prejudice. She was not a segregationist, but she was not a crusader either. Powell responded by referring to her publicly as “The Last Lady of the Land,” which caused Truman to explode over “that damn nigger preacher” at a staff meeting, and like Clare Boothe Luce, Powell would never be invited to the White House.
When at last in the fall of 1947 Bess agreed to respond to a questionnaire from reporters, her answers were characteristically definite and memorable:
What qualities did she think would be the greatest asset to the wife of a President?
Good health and a well-developed sense of humor.
Truman, President in his own right, and Vice President Alben Barkley on the reviewing stand, Inauguration Day, January 20, 1949.
Secretary of State Dean Acheson, by far the strongest, most brilliant, and most controversial member of Truman’s Cabinet through all of the second term. “Do you suppose any President ever had two such men with him as you and the General [Marshall]?” Truman would later write to Acheson.
Truman’s World War I pal and presidential military aide, General Harry Vaughan, who was seen as the ultimate White House “crony.”
Alger Hiss, symbol of Republican charges that the administration was “soft on communism.”
Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom Truman loathed and mistakenly believed time and the truth would soon destroy.
Opposite: At midday, June 27, 1950, having announced that Amercian forces would intervene in Korea, Truman, accompanied by Attorney General J. Howard McGrath (left) and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, heads from the White House to his temporary residence across Pennsylvania Avenue at Blair House (above). It was at Blair House, after meeting there with his advisers the two previous nights, that Truman reached his fateful decision on Korea—the most difficult and important decision of his presidency, he felt.
On October 15, 1950, a month after the stunning success of General Douglas MacArthur’s surprise assault at Inchon (above), Truman and MacArthur met at Wake Island in the Pacific, driving off for a first private talk in a battered Chevrolet (below). By all signs the Korean War, Truman’s “police action,” was nearly over.
On his return from Wake, Truman is met at the airport by his Washington high command (from left to right): Special Assistant Averell Harriman, Secretary of Defense Marshall, Secretary of State Acheson, Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder, Secretary of the Army Frank Pace, Jr., and General Omar Bradley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
In late 1950, as the Korean War entered its darkest time, Truman had also to oversee the complete reconstruction of the White House within the gutted shell of the old exterior walls (opposite). And on November 1, two fanatical Puerto Rican nationalists attempted to assassinate him (right, one lies wounded at the Blair House front steps).
On December 6 (left), a Washington Post music critic roundly panned his d
aughter Margaret’s singing, eliciting from her father the most stinging letter of his presidency.
Pages from Truman’s diary, April 6 and 7, 1951.
General MacArthur addresses Congress, April 19, 1951.
MacArthur’s replacement as Far East Commander, General Matthew B. Ridgway (with hand grenades strapped to his chest).
Though often called one of Truman’s most courageous decisions as President, the firing of MacArthur was to Truman simply something that had to be done to keep control of the military where it belonged, in the Oval Office. Left: The outlook from the seat of responsibility and (below) a cartoon from the time by Herblock.
Chicago, July 26, 1952: Truman introduces to the Democratic National Convention the new, somewhat reluctant standard-bearer, Governor Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois.
Oxford, England, June 20, 1956: The former President is congratulated by Lord Halifax, Chancellor of Oxford University, after receiving the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Laws.
Florence, Italy, May 27, 1956: Truman chats with Renaissance art authority Bernard Berenson, who found him very unlike the “Give ’Em Hell Harry” of the cartoon at left.
Washington, November 1, 1961: To the delight of President John F. Kennedy, the First Lady, and guests, Truman plays a bit of Paderewski’s Minuet in the East Room, after an absence from the White House of eight years. The principal performer of the evening, Truman’s favorite concert pianist, Eugene List, stands at right.
Margaret and Clifton Daniel on their wedding day, April 21, 1956.
From the window of the Daniels’ New York apartment, Truman greets reporters with grandsons Clifton and William.
A resident of Independence for the last twenty years of his life, Truman said of his time as President, “I tried never to forget who I was and where I’d come from and where I was going back to.”
Did she think there would ever be a woman President of the United States?
No.
Would she want to be President?
No.
Would she want Margaret ever to be First Lady?
No.
If she had a son, would she try to bring him up to be President?
No.
If it had been left to her own free choice, would she have gone into the White House in the first place?
Most definitely would not have.
What was her reaction to musical criticism of Margaret’s singing?
No comment.
Did any of the demands of her role as First Lady ever give her stage fright?
No comment.
What would you like to do and have your husband do when he is no longer President?
Return to Independence.
“She seems to think Harry ought to run the country, not her,” a Washington cab driver was quoted as saying. It was a sentiment widely shared, and according to Jonathan Daniels, Truman “conspired willingly” with her to protect her privacy.
Asked once if she was interested in any particular period of White House history, Bess said the Monroe years—an interesting observation that the press passed by. James Monroe’s wife, another Elizabeth—Elizabeth Kortright Monroe—had followed the gregarious Dolley Madison, who had been as much the center of attention in her time as had Eleanor Roosevelt. A quiet aristocrat, Elizabeth Monroe married a hard-drinking politician and made a good marriage. In the White House, she had insisted on keeping her life a private matter.
As manager of household expenses, Bess was extremely frugal. She cut back on the size of the White House staff. Mrs. Nesbitt, the elderly housekeeper responsible for years of dreary food on the Roosevelt table, had been sent packing, with the result that both the cooking and the housekeeping improved. Most objectionable had been the cold, hard, dinner rolls, long a White House staple, but which to anyone raised as Bess had been on traditional hot southern biscuits—biscuits baked with Waggoner-Gates “Queen of the Pantry Flour”—were altogether inedible. “It was only on the command of President Truman,” wrote the American correspondent for the BBC, Alistair Cooke, “that her recipe was passed on to the chef and the Trumans reverted to breaking the bread of their fathers.”
“Mrs. Truman was no fussier than her predecessor…. It was just that she had been brought up to be house proud,” recorded J.B. West. She kept close watch on the cost of food, kept her own books, went over all the household bills “with a fine tooth comb,” and wrote every check herself.
According to West and Lillian Parks, both of whom later wrote books about their years of service in the White House, the staff felt closer to the Trumans than to any of the other presidents and their wives, which was saying a great deal, considering how long some of the staff had been employed. John Mays, a doorman who also cut Truman’s hair every two weeks, had been on duty at the White House since the time of Woodrow Wilson. The way the Trumans lived, remembered West, the White House “might as well have been in Independence. As far as everyday living goes, they were no different.” And for all the President’s talk of not liking life in the White House, said West, “He liked living there better than living in his mother-in-law’s house in Independence.”
Truman’s salary in his last years in the Senate, plus what Bess had earned, came to $14,500. As Vice President, his pay was $20,000; as President, it was $75,000. But nearly half of that would go to taxes, and while the government paid for the White House servants, Bess had to pay for their food, plus all meals for the family and guests. In Roosevelt’s time, monthly food bills alone sometimes reached $7,000. Bess had been able to cut that back to about $2,000. In their twelve years in the White House the Roosevelts had never lived within the President’s salary, but the Trumans had no family fortune to fall back on. Margaret would later describe her mother as a chronic penny pincher, of necessity. Still, she was able to save very little year to year. After expenses and taxes on his $75,000 salary, it was reported, the President had about $4,200 left.
In a smart Washington dress shop, browsing one day with Mrs. John Snyder, Bess told the sales clerk mildly but firmly there was no use for her to try on anything, since she couldn’t afford the prices.
According to J.B. West, Bess guarded her privacy like a precious jewel, yet within that privacy played a role far exceeding what any but a few suspected. She did indeed advise Truman on decisions. “And he listened to her.”
Margaret would later write that in her father’s first months in office, Bess had felt shut out of his life, “more and more superfluous,” and especially after the realization that he had not discussed with her his decision on the atomic bomb. The feeling of being left out, wrote Margaret, combined with Bess’s original opposition to Truman’s ever becoming President “to build a smoldering anger that was tantamount to an emotional separation,” which may explain some of her long absences from Washington. Still, Margaret, too, would stress her mother’s influence on her father, saying he constantly talked things over with Bess and would often do as she said. He was “very, very conscious” of her views and needed her approval. “Have you ever noticed Father when he’s with Mother at any sort of public gathering?” Margaret remarked to a reporter at the time. “He’s always trying to catch her glance to see if she approves of what he is saying or doing.”
She remained, as she had been for more than thirty years, the most important person in his life.
Among family and old friends, he freely acknowledged the difference “Miss Lizzie” had made to the course of his life. “Suppose Miss Lizzie had gone off with Mr. Young, Julian Harvey or Harris,” he wrote to Ethel Noland from the White House, recalling old suitors from days long past. “What would have been the result? For Harry I mean. He probably would have been either a prominent farmer in Jackson County or a Major General in the regular army….”
To judge by the letters he wrote to Bess in the fall of 1947, while she was with her mother in Independence, he did indeed want her to know his mind and the details of the problems he faced in a “topsy-turvy world.”
He
was preoccupied with the immense projected cost of the Marshall Plan.
Marshall and Lovett were in yesterday and went over the European situation from soup to nuts with me. If it works out as planned it will cost us about 16 billion over a four-year period…. This amount of 16 billion is just the amount of the national debt when Franklin took over. He ran it up to 40 odd and then the war came along and it is 257 but we can’t understand those figures anyway.
A few days later, on September 30, he went on, telling her more:
Yesterday was one of the most hectic of days…. I’m not sure what has been my worst day. But here is the situation fraught with terrible consequences. Suppose, for instance, that Italy should fold up and that Tito then would march into the Po Valley. All the Mediterranean coast of France then is open to Russian occupation and the iron curtain comes to Bordeaux, Calais, Antwerp, and The Hague. We withdraw from Greece and Turkey and prepare for war. It just must not happen. But here I am confronted with a violently opposition Congress whose committees with few exceptions are living in 1890; it is not representative of the country’s thinking at all. But I’ve got a job and it must be done—win, lose, or draw.
Sent letters to Taber, Bridges, Vandenberg, and Eaton requesting them to call their committees together as soon as possible. Had my food committee together and will make a radio speech Sunday. To feed France and Italy this winter will cost 580 million, the Marshall Plan 16.5 billion. But you know in October and November of 1945 I cancelled 63 billion in appropriations—55 billion at one crack. Our war cost that year was set at 105 billion. The 16.5 is for a four-year period and is for peace. A Russian war would cost us 400 billion and untold lives, mostly civilian. So I must do what I can. I shouldn’t write you this stuff but you should know what I’ve been facing…. I haven’t resumed my walks yet but will in a day or two. Too much to read. General Bradley made a report to me today on his European trip and he remarked on my having had to make more momentous decisions than nearly any other President. He’s right, and I hope most of ‘em have been right….
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