Harry Truman

by Margaret Truman

  Meanwhile, Dad, Mother, and I drove to Chicago totally oblivious to all this frantic backstage warfare. My father was convinced he had finally and totally squelched the attempt to make him vice president, and if he hadn’t, he intended to stamp out the last few flickers of it in Chicago. Just before we left Independence, he told my cousin Ethel Noland’s mother: “Aunt Ella, I’m going up there to defeat myself.”

  My personal feelings were rather mournful. Vice President Wallace’s daughter, Jean, was a personal friend of mine, and I knew she must feel hurt, as I would have been if my father was being jettisoned. But twenty-year-olds are not long on sympathy, and I must confess I was also looking forward eagerly to seeing a national convention, in which Dad would play a pretty big role. I had no idea - and neither did he - how big his role would become.

  So Dad could do his politicking without depriving us of sleep, he had reserved a suite on the seventeenth floor of the Stevens Hotel. Mother and I were installed in the Morrison Hotel and told to enjoy ourselves in the standard female style when visiting a big city - shopping. I had a Washington girlfriend with me, and we managed to inspect every department store in Chicago before the convention ended.

  Over in the Stevens Hotel, Bob Hannegan was working on Senator Truman and getting nowhere. He kept insisting he was not a candidate for vice president. He was for Byrnes. Not even the scribbled note Hannegan had obtained from FDR convinced Dad. He noted it had no date, and simply assumed that since it was written, Roosevelt had changed his mind and endorsed Jimmy Byrnes. At one point, Hannegan gave up in despair and informed an astonished Ed Flynn, as he arrived on the scene, “It’s all over, it’s Byrnes.” Flynn, who, more than anyone else, knew FDR’s choice was Truman, immediately put through a long-distance call to FDR, en route to California aboard his special train, while another conclave of party leaders gathered in the room. After listening to Flynn and Hillman tell him Jimmy Byrnes would bring political disaster to the party, the President reiterated Dad was his final choice.

  My father, meanwhile, was making even more desperate efforts to avoid the inevitable. He summoned his friend Tom Evans from Kansas City to Chicago and told him to go around and inform delegates that Senator Truman was not a candidate. He already had Eddie McKim and John Snyder doing the same thing. But all three friends soon found they were fighting a very strong tide flowing in the opposite direction. Eddie McKim decided Dad needed some straight-from-the-shoulder advice. Late Monday night, Dad reiterated to him and several friends that no one could persuade him to be vice president. As Eddie recalled it, he, Roy Roberts of the Kansas City Star, and John Snyder began disagreeing with Dad. They described the political situation and pointed out to him the many reasons why he was valuable to the Democratic ticket.

  Dad shook his head. “I’m still not going to do it.”

  “Senator,” Eddie said, “I think you’re going to do it.”

  “What makes you think I’m going to do it?” snapped Dad.

  “Because there’s a ninety-year-old mother down in Grandview, Missouri, that would like to see her son President of the United States.”

  Dad walked out of the room and refused to speak to Eddie for the next twenty-four hours. Late the following day, Eddie, irrepressible as ever, tackled him once more.

  “I don’t care whether you ever speak to me again or not,” he said. “I only told you what I believed. I think you should take this nomination.”

  Dad just looked at him.

  “Okay,” said Eddie. “Let’s call it quits right now.”

  “I apologize for my action,” Dad said. “I was mad at you. But I’m still not going to do it.”

  The following morning, Dad had breakfast with Sidney Hillman. He told the powerful labor leader he wanted his support for Byrnes. Hillman shook his head. “Labor’s first choice is Wallace. If it can’t be Wallace, we have a second choice, but it isn’t Byrnes.”

  “Who then?” Dad asked.

  “I’m looking at him,” said Hillman.

  This was the man my father had abused rather vehemently on the floor of the Senate, for playing labor politics with war contracts. But Sidney Hillman was not the kind of man who held a personal grudge. His first concern was a man’s position on labor’s rights, and he knew Dad was on the good side of that issue. My father got the same response from other labor leaders that day, particularly from his old Railroad Brotherhood supporters, A. F. Whitney and George Harrison. William Green, head of the American Federation of Labor, went even farther and told Dad bluntly, “The AFL’s for you and will support no one else.” By this time, Dad must have felt like a man running backwards on a platform that was moving ahead at about sixty miles an hour. He didn’t feel any better after he went before the Maryland delegation and asked them to support Jimmy Byrnes. Governor Herbert F. O’Connor of Maryland told him, “You’re crazy as hell!”

  The next day, the various state delegations caucused to name vice presidential candidates. Dad was still backpedaling, but the Missouri delegation simply refused to let him get away with it. A resolution was introduced endorsing him as their candidate. As the chairman of the delegation, Dad immediately ruled it out of order. Sam Wear, one of the faithful few who had supported him in the 1940 primary campaign, shouted, “There is no one out of order here but the chairman of this delegation.” Another plotter asked Dad to come to the door, to rule on whether a non-delegate could be admitted to the room. While Dad was distracted with this minor bit of business, Sam Wear reintroduced the resolution, and it was voted unanimously.

  That afternoon, Bob Hannegan administered the coup de grâce. He summoned Dad to his hotel room and sat him down on the bed while he put through a call to President Roosevelt in San Diego. He wanted my father to speak to the President personally. Dad, whose Missouri dander was way up by now, refused. But he sat there, listening with astonishment while FDR’s always formidable telephone voice came clearly into the room.

  “Bob, have you got that fellow lined up yet?”

  “No,” said Hannegan. “He is the contrariest Missouri mule I’ve ever dealt with.”

  “Well, you tell him if he wants to break up the Democratic Party in the middle of a war, that’s his responsibility.”

  There was a click and the phone was dead. My father got up, walked back and forth for a moment, and then said, “Well, if that is the situation, I’ll have to say yes. But why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place?”

  It was the first, but by no means the last, indication of the radically different political styles of the two men. In politics, and in every other kind of relationship, Dad believed in dealing straight from the shoulder whenever possible. Roosevelt obviously enjoyed juggling friends and potential enemies, to keep them all within the charmed political circle on which he rested his power.

  While this conversation was taking place, Henry Wallace’s backers were making a major effort to win the nomination for him in the convention hall. They had adopted the daring strategy of attempting to stampede the convention. Wallace himself had made a brilliant, rousing speech, seconding FDR’s nomination for the Iowa delegation. It was unprecedented for a candidate for either the presidency or vice presidency to address a convention before the voting began. But breaking precedents often pays off in politics, and the party leaders became very alarmed by Wallace’s tactics. They told Dad they wanted to nominate him that very night - Thursday, the twentieth - immediately after Roosevelt made his acceptance speech by radio from the West Coast.

  Dad decided there was really only one man who should do the nominating job for him - his fellow senator from Missouri, Bennett Clark. While Bob Hannegan, Ed Pauley, and the others departed for the convention hall, Dad went searching for Senator Clark. He was not in the room assigned to him at his hotel, and it took several frantic hours of scurrying around to discover he was hiding out, for some unknown reason, in another hotel. There my father found him fast asleep. He pounded desperately on the door, with absolutely no success. Then a valet ar
rived delivering a suit. Dad walked into the room behind him, awoke Senator Clark, and asked him to nominate him. Of course, he said yes, but he was a little panicky at the thought of getting together a speech on about an hour’s notice.

  Meanwhile, Mother and I had been told what was happening - or more correctly, I had been told. Mother and Dad had discussed the topic of his nomination exhaustively, and she had helped him decide against it. I later found out a large part of their reason was me. They dreaded the thought of what might happen to an already skittish and rather independent twenty-year-old suddenly catapulted into the dazzling glare of White House publicity. They had seen the unhappiness it had caused in President Roosevelt’s children. I don’t claim to have been the main reason for their reluctance, of course. But I was another negative factor, in the many other negatives that added up to their original no.

  Soon after we arrived at the convention hall, it became obvious my father was not going to be nominated that night. The Wallaceites were in charge. Ed Kelly, the boss of Chicago, was, I have since been told, playing his own shrewd political game. He had allowed the Wallace supporters to pour into the convention hall in staggering numbers, to create a stampede for their candidate. Kelly’s secret hope was a deadlock between Wallace and Truman, which might have resulted in the choice of an alternate candidate. The one he had in mind was Senator Scott Lucas of Illinois. Isn’t politics wonderful?

  Even the convention hall organist capitulated to the Wallace crowd and played “Iowa, That’s Where the Tall Corn Grows,” the Iowa state song, so many times it’s a wonder his fingers didn’t sprout kernels. Ed Pauley became so infuriated that he ordered Neale Roach, another Democratic Party official, to chop the wires leading to the organ’s amplifiers unless the keyboard virtuoso came up with another song immediately. Meanwhile, Bob Hannegan threw open the outer doors of the stadium, and more people poured into the arena. It was already about 120 degrees on the floor of the hall. People began to collapse from lack of oxygen, and a panicky Ed Kelly, realizing he had helped to create a monster demonstration that was in danger of devouring him, screamed that there was a fire hazard. Chairman Jackson gaveled the convention into recess, and the Wallace stampede collapsed.

  The rest of the night was devoted to intensive politicking. At least a dozen state delegations lined up behind favorite sons. There was a very real chance that Dad and Wallace might deadlock now. A number of prominent New Dealers were working for Wallace. Part of the New York delegation split away from Ed Flynn’s control. When the convention reassembled on Friday, July 21, there was tension in the air. Mother, beside me, looked exhausted. She was probably the only person (from Missouri anyway) in the convention hall who wouldn’t have been brokenhearted if Dad lost. Oblivious to the problems ahead, I had no such inclination. I wanted my father to win, and I writhed through the long afternoon.

  Nothing seemed to go right at first. Bennett Clark gave a very brief, limp, nominating speech, and response from the delegates was tepid. Then a delegate from Iowa was on his feet and California yielded to him. In an exciting speech, Wallace was called the personification of Democratic vision. There were five seconding speeches, all equally ecstatic, and the galleries, well packed with CIO-led Wallace supporters, whooped and screamed after every one of them. Ten other candidates were nominated and seconded - a total of twenty speeches that consumed the better part of three hours. Ed Kelly put his man, Senator Scott Lucas, into contention and gave the Wallace-packed gallery a chance to shout him down.

  “We want harmony at this convention,” Kelly said.

  “We want Wallace,” screamed the galleries.

  “We want a ticket,” Kelly said.

  “We want Wallace.”

  Until this point, my father had been in Bob Hannegan’s private Room H, under the speaker’s stand, talking to delegates and state leaders. He had not had anything to eat all day. Since he is a very light breakfast man, he was hungry, and as the chairman intoned, “The clerk will call the roll of votes,” Dad emerged from his underground headquarters and bought a hot dog, which proved he was starving, because he normally loathes hot dogs. He sat down with the Missouri delegation. I kept my eyes on him as the count began.

  Alabama gave its twenty-four votes to its favorite son, Senator John Bankhead.

  Arizona and Arkansas went for Truman.

  California’s delegation said it would like to wait.

  Then, to everyone’s amazement, nine of Florida’s eighteen votes went to Wallace and all of Georgia’s twenty-six. The South was supposed to be solidly against the vice president. But Ellis Arnall of Georgia was not a typical Southern governor. In the Midwest, Wallace did well, taking his home state of Iowa and also Kansas, likewise expected. Nobody from Kansas votes for anybody from Missouri if he can help it. Thanks to his labor backing, the vice president also swept Michigan and Minnesota. Suddenly, at the one-third mark, Wallace was 100 votes ahead.

  Missouri remained faithful to Dad, but other states began dividing in weird ways. New York couldn’t even agree on who was voting for whom. Ohio went in six different directions. Pennsylvania gave forty-six and a half to the vice president and only twenty-three and a half to Dad. The Wallace-weighted galleries were going wild. By the time the vice president had swept Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, the clamor was close to the stampede proportions of the previous night.

  At the end of the roll call, two of the biggest states, California and New York, had not yet announced their totals. The Golden State came first, and my heart sank at the count: Wallace, thirty; Truman, twenty-two. The vice president was ahead, 406 1/2 to 244. The galleries stamped and screamed.

  Now New York with ninety-two and a half votes was the only state left. There was plenty of Wallace support in New York, we knew. A furious argument was raging inside the New York delegation. Someone challenged the figures that the chairman, Senator Jackson, was about to announce; he ordered the delegation to be polled. This took thirty-five minutes - but the final count stopped the slide to Wallace. It was sixty-nine and a half for Truman, twenty-three for the vice president. Puerto Rico gave its six votes to Dad, and the final count, at the end of the first ballot, was: Wallace, 429 1/2; Truman, 3l9 ½; Bankhead, ninety-eight; Lucas, sixty-one; and Barkley forty-nine and half. Eleven other favorite sons also held handfuls of votes.

  The chairman asked the required question: “Does any delegation wish to alter its vote?” There were no takers. Most of the favorite sons were still hoping for a deadlock. By now, it was about six o’clock. The convention had been in session over six hours, and several delegations were screaming they were famished. I remember feeling a few pangs of hunger myself. I started to envy my father, who had found himself another hot dog, somewhere down on the convention floor and was cheerfully munching it and chatting with his fellow Missourians.

  Normally, the convention would have adjourned at this point and resumed balloting in the evening. But Bob Hannegan, with unerring tactical instinct, decided this would be a mistake. Aides had told him there were huge crowds of Wallace supporters outside waiting eagerly to grab a majority of the seats for the evening session. Inevitably they would make another attempt at a stampede, in the style of the previous night. Ignoring the cries of the hungry delegates, Hannegan ordered Chairman Jackson to start a second ballot.

  It was a terrific gamble. If this ballot ended with Dad still behind, chances of a Wallace victory or a deadlock and a bolt to a favorite son were very strong.

  At first the vice president was ahead, but so many delegations were splitting and passing it was hard to tell what was happening for a while. The big disappointment among Dad’s supporters was Alabama’s refusal to switch from Senator Bankhead. That had been the original plan, but Senator Bankhead was sniffing the wind, and he thought it was starting to blow in his direction. Illinois and Kentucky also stayed with their favorite sons, Lucas and Barkley.

  Then came the first switch. Maryland’s Governor O’Connor, who had told Dad he was crazy
on Monday, threw his eighteen votes to Truman. Michigan and the CIO remained loyal to Wallace, but New York did not hesitate this time. They delivered seventy-four and half for Truman and only eighteen for Wallace. Dad was now ahead, 246 to 187.

  Now came the swing vote, the one that started the Truman landslide. Governor Robert Kerr, on direct orders from Democratic Party treasurer Ed Pauley, switched Oklahoma’s twenty-two votes to Dad. Ed Pauley later recalled that Bob Kerr paled when he pointed his finger at him. Bob had been the keynote speaker of the convention and had given a magnificent talk. He would have made an ideal compromise candidate. But he was a good Democrat, and he sacrificed his personal ambitions without a moment’s hesitation, when he got the signal.

  But in the W’s, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, the vice president rallied amazingly. He cut Dad’s lead to a half vote, and then with six votes from Indiana and sixteen from Kansas, both of whom had passed, Wallace edged ahead by twenty and a half. But Massachusetts, Mississippi, and Montana came through for Dad, and the count finally stood at 477 1/2 for Truman and 473 for Wallace.

  There was a pause. Thousands of voices rose and fell, some murmuring, some shouting. The chairman asked the delegates if the count was to be made official. Before a motion could be made, Senator Bankhead rose and swung Alabama’s twenty-two votes to Dad. South Carolina boosted him to 501. Then Indiana and Illinois announced they were caucusing to change their votes. In a moment, Indiana was declaring twenty-two votes for Truman, and Illinois, New York, and a dozen other states were screaming for recognition. I can’t believe anybody really knows who voted what in the ensuing pandemonium. But when I heard Kansas swinging sixteen votes to Truman, I knew it was all over. By the time the final tally was announced by the befuddled clerks, at least forty-four state delegations had changed their votes, and Truman was the winner, 1,031 to 105.

  A phalanx of policemen seized my father and fought their way through the roaring crowd to the platform. Bob Hannegan held up Dad’s arm while the convention hall went insane. They seemed ready to scream all night, and Dad finally seized the chairman’s gavel and banged for order. “Give me a chance, will you please?” he begged them. Then he delivered one of the shortest acceptance speeches on record.