Harry Truman

by Margaret Truman

  That same day, he wrote one of his interesting letters to his mother and sister. It is a good glimpse of the constant mixture of domestic and international politics in Dad’s mind.

  Dear Mamma & Mary:

  Well I had a press conference this morning and I think I took all the fire out of the Republican victory. Then I went out to the Arlington Memorial to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, laid a wreath and made a speech to the National Guard of the United States. The Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy were with me at Arlington.

  It is an impressive ceremony. I have been officially present three times. In 1944, I was there as V.P. elect while Mrs. Roosevelt laid the flowers - and was not so cordial to me as she would have been to Henry Wallace under the same circumstances. But she has reformed I think. Because I had a very cordial letter from her on the election, in which she said she was sure I would have no more - and maybe not as much trouble with the Congress coming up than I had with the supposedly Democratic Congress I had had for the last two years. She may be right. Anyway Henry Wallace and Claude Pepper will be in the minority and that is helpful.

  Last year Mr. Attlee, the British Prime Minister and Mr. MacKenzie King, the Canadian Prime Minister were present with me when I laid the wreath. Mr. King was here last week and we had a most pleasant visit. He is an honest man. I can always get along with an honest man.

  Mr. Molotov was here a couple of days ago and I smiled at him and had the usual pictures taken. But - I’m sure Mr. Molotov is not so honest! He represents a totalitarian state - a police government. Really there is no difference between the government which Mr. Molotov represents and the one the Czar represented - or the one Hitler spoke for. I’m told that there are more than fifteen millions of people in concentration camps and at slave labor in Russia today; and I’m inclined to believe it. They are kidnapping Germans, they have Japanese, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, Poles, Finns, they are making to work against their wills. How can I deal with such terrible conditions? I don’t want to go to war with them. I hope we don’t have to go to war again for six hundred years. Maybe we won’t have to!

  Meanwhile, Dad’s cold persisted, and he developed a most annoying cough. Dr. Graham began to worry about him and decreed a vacation was in order. Where does a President vacation? It was no small task to find a place that could accommodate twenty or thirty reporters, a staff of sixteen, and another fifteen or sixteen Secret Service men. After some investigation, Dad made a choice which he never regretted - the submarine base at Key West, Florida. On November 18, he wrote his mother and sister from there, obviously delighted with the place:

  Dear Mamma & Mary: - It was nice to talk with you even if they did cut us off at the end. I hope you are both in health and that you are having nice weather as we are here.

  I left Washington yesterday morning in a rain and a fog with the temperature at 40°. Arrived here at 3 p.m. in sunshine and 80°. They put me up in a southern built house with “galleries” all around, upstairs and down. It is the commandant’s house - and at present there is no commandant - so I did not “rank” anyone out of his house.

  I have arranged a schedule so that I get up at 7:30 (two hours later than I usually do), go over and have a swim, have breakfast at nine and then go to a nice sand beach a half mile away and get sun and sea water. Come back at noon, have lunch at one and then a nap and sit around and talk until dinner at seven, go to bed when I get ready and then do it over. I’ve just returned from the beach after trying out the schedule and my cough and cold are nearly gone already.

  I am seeing no outsiders. From now on I’m going to do as I please and let ‘em all go to hell. At least for two years they can do nothing to me and after that it doesn’t matter.

  Refreshed by five days of sun and thoroughly imbued with the determination expressed in the last line of this letter, my father flew home to do battle with John L. Lewis. He had kept in close touch with the efforts to head off the strike, which Lewis had set for November 20. In a memorandum he wrote on December 11, Dad described the strategy which he had outlined: “I discussed the situation with the secretaries in the White House at the morning meeting after the strike call, and informed them it was a fight to the finish. At the Cabinet meeting on Friday, before the election, the Attorney General was instructed to take such legal steps as would protect the government. Discussions were held with the Cabinet and special meetings were called. . . . The instructions were fight to the finish.”

  My father knew exactly what Lewis had in mind. The Secretary of the Interior, Julius Krug, told him Lewis was boasting he would “get Krug first . . . and then he would wait until 1948 to get the President.” In a meeting at Key West, Dad and his aides hammered out the final strategy. Two days before Lewis’s strike call date, Attorney General Tom Clark served an injunction on Lewis, issued by Federal District Judge T. Allen Goldsborough. Lewis defied it, and his miners struck. The government’s lawyers argued it was a strike against the government, and hence the injunction was legal. The court found in favor of this argument, and Lewis was ordered to stand trial for contempt. On December 4, 1946, he was fined $10,000 personally, and the union was fined $3,500,000.

  “Bushy-browed John L.,” as Dad called him in one of his letters around this time, announced he would appeal to the Supreme Court. Charlie Ross announced the President was going on the air that night to make a direct appeal to the miners to go back to work. Faced with the threat of annihilation of his prestige and authority as a union leader, Lewis capitulated. On December 7, he ordered his miners back to work “immediately, under the wages and conditions of employment in existence on and before November 20, 1946.” Two days later, Dad wrote to his mother and sister: “Well, John L. had to fold up. He couldn’t take the gaff. No bully can. Now I have the auto workers, steel workers and RR men to look forward to. They’ll get the same treatment if they act the same way.”

  From now on there would be no doubt in anyone’s mind about who was in charge of the White House.

  Dear Daddy,

  Please sign your John Hancock on these 11 dollar bills for Rosalind. Thank you. (Don’t you have a single pen that works?)

  Sistie

  You didn’t try all of them.

  Dad

  AS YOU CAN see from the preceding exchange, the Trumans did not let John L. Lewis, Stalin, Molotov, Henry Wallace, et al., ruin their high spirits. When we were together as a family, we acted pretty much as we always did, constantly teasing each other and playing jokes at every opportunity. Dad’s favorite sport was selecting the most outrageous tie he could find - I sometimes think he sent General Vaughan or one of his other pals out on special expeditions to find some of his worst horrors - and wearing it to breakfast. He would sit there with great aplomb, ignoring insults about his color blindness and bad taste from Mother and me.

  One night, early in our White House sojourn, I invited two friends to spend the night with me in Lincoln’s bed. Dad heard about it and conjured up a fiendish plan to scare the life out of us. Mayes, one of the White House butlers, was a tall, rather cadaverous man who resembled Old Abe. Dad decided to put his presidential high hat on Mayes’s head and pop him in the doorway of our room at the stroke of midnight. Mr. President rushed downstairs in search of his accomplice and discovered to his chagrin Mayes was not on duty. Mayes later confided to me he had no desire whatsoever to play an apparition and was glad he was not working that night.

  Although he treated the subject lightly, Dad sometimes liked to think the White House was haunted. Early in September 1946, he sent Mother a letter describing how he woke up in the middle of the night, distinctly hearing a knock on the door of his bedroom. He listened, and the sound was repeated. He got up and went to the door, opened it, and nothing was there. But he heard the sound of footsteps moving down the hall. In a letter to me, written around the same time, he said: “I told your mother a “hant” story which you’d better have her read to you. This old place cracks and pops all night long and you can
very well imagine that old Jackson or Andy Johnson or some other ghost is walking. Why they’d want to come back here I could never understand. It’s a nice prison but a prison nevertheless. No man in his right mind would want to come here of his own accord.”

  A few days later, he commented again about visiting spirits: “Now about those ghosts. I’m sure they’re here and I’m not half so alarmed at meeting up with any of them as I am at having to meet the live nuts I have to see every day. I am sure old Andy could give me some good advice and probably teach me some good swear words to use on Molotov and de Gaulle. And I am sure old Grover Cleveland could tell me some choice remarks to make to some political leaders . . . I know. So I won’t lock my doors or bar them either if any of the old coots in the pictures out in the hall want to come out of their frames for a friendly chat.”

  One night early in 1946, as we were getting ready for a big reception at the White House, Dad remarked that Senator Bricker was among the invited guests. This led to some rather acid comments about the senator’s failure to send him a congratulatory telegram after the 1944 elections.

  Only a day or two earlier, King Ibn Saud of Arabia had sent Dad a magnificent gold scimitar with a priceless diamond in the handle surrounded by emeralds and rubies. “If you trip old Bricker when he comes down the receiving line,” Dad said to Mother, “I’ll give you the diamond out of old Saud’s sword.”

  “Why don’t you ask me?” I said. I had already spent several hours mentally wearing that diamond.

  “I wouldn’t ask you. You’d do it,” Dad said.

  “I’ll do it even for one of the smaller stones in the setting.”

  At this point, Mother ordered both of us to behave. But I kept right on offering to do the dirty deed. By the time Senator Bricker appeared for his ceremonial handshake, Dad was thoroughly unnerved and kept eyeing me as he and Mother shook hands with the guests. He really thought I was going to upend the old reactionary.

  When Dad is in a sarcastic mood, he can be deliciously wry. His mother was upset by a local newspaper attack on him. He told her: “They can’t do me any harm now. As Ed McKim says, there’s no promotion in this job.” Early in June 1946, Mother and I made our annual retreat to Independence. In one of his first letters to us, he described some emergency repairs on the White House:

  They are fixing the hole in the middle of the hallway, opposite my study door. All the rugs are rolled back and a great scaffold has been constructed under the hole. Looks like they intend to hang a murderer in the White House hallway. There are some gentlemen in Congress - and out of it - who would take great pleasure in hoisting your Dad on that scaffold! But they’ll have to catch him first. I hope to dry some of their political hides on a frame before I’m through.

  He then discussed some of our touchy relatives and said: “I don’t know what the Trumans and the Wallaces and the Campbells and the Gates and the others of the clan will do for a clearing house when your Dad’s gone. I don’t suppose you’d take over? It’s a lot of fun making prima donnas happy - male and female. . . . Look at the Supreme Court - and my Cabinet.”

  In the middle of July 1946, Dad enjoyed his first break in his crisis-filled schedule. For the better part of two weeks, nothing really worth mentioning happened. In an ironic mood, he told his mother: “The foreign affairs and even domestic affairs have been so quiet and as they should be that I have had to start a political fight to give me a chance to do something. Had the tamest Cabinet Meeting today I’ve had since April 12, 1945. The Secretary of Labor said he hadn’t had a major strike to deal with since June 10th and that it looked as if he and Dr. Steelman would have to stir up some trouble so that they would have something to do. The Secretary of State opined that foreign affairs were in such a state that there were no waves not even in Trieste or Nanking. I’ve had the stomachache because things are so quiet. Haven’t had a crisis for two weeks. Looks like the country is going to hell or Republican.”

  The political fight Dad mentioned was a battle between him and Congressman Roger C. Slaughter of the 5th Missouri Congressional District. Dad had always had a very strong personal interest in this district. It was the one he had helped to create in the early 1930s by lobbying in the Missouri State House - and then had taken away from him by Tom Pendergast. Slaughter had cast one of the key votes in the House Rules Committee that blocked the creation of the Fair Employment Practices Committee. At his news conference on July 18, Dad said Slaughter should not be renominated because he had opposed every bit of legislation the President of his own party had sent to Congress. “If Mr. Slaughter is right, I am wrong.”

  To his mother, Dad wrote: “I gave Mr. Smart Alec Slaughter a kick in the pants yesterday and maybe I can find some more entertainment of the same kind. Suppose the K.C. Star and Indp. Examiner had a nice fit over it. Now we must beat him.”

  Slaughter was defeated in the primary, but to Dad’s chagrin, a Republican beat the Democratic candidate in the fall election, and the 5th Missouri was in the hands of the enemy. This was mortifying. Privately, Dad told his mother he had been given very misleading advice about the strength of the local Democratic organization. The American presidency may be the most powerful office in the world, but it is not infinitely powerful, not in our rough and tumble American democracy.

  Lest you think the presidency is nothing but frustration piled on frustration, this might be the place to let Dad tell the story of one of his most satisfying appointments - Fred Vinson as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

  I was on the Williamsburg when Chief Justice Stone died. We were in the lower Chesapeake Bay. I ordered an immediate return to Washington and began a study of the office of Chief Justice.

  There had been only twelve appointments up to that time. Mine would be No. 13. So I began to canvas the background and records of the members of the high court. No conclusion was reached.

  One day I had an inspiration and called the retired former Chief Justice, Charles Evans Hughes. I told him I would like to come out to see him on a matter of business. He told me that I could not do that but that he would come to see me immediately.

  He arrived at the Presidential office in a short time and I told him I wanted to discuss with him eligibles for Chief Justice.

  He told me that he suspected that was what I wanted and he pulled a piece of old fashioned yellow foolscap from his pocket with names of the Justices of the Supreme Court and Judges of the various Courts of Appeals and State Courts on it.

  We discussed them one by one, or he did. Finally when we came to the end of the list he told me that the Chief Justice of the United States should not only know the law but that he should understand politics and government. Then he said, “You have a Secretary of the Treasury who has been a Congressman, a Judge of the Court of Appeals, and an executive officer in President Roosevelt’s and your cabinets.” He thought that Fred Vinson was fully qualified for Chief Justice.

  I called Justice Owen Roberts in Philadelphia and asked him to come and see me. I told him what I wanted to talk about.

  He came and when we were seated he came forth with the same sort of yellow foolscap with a red line down the left hand side that Mr. Hughes had used. We went over very nearly the same list that Mr. Hughes and I had used and Justice Roberts came up with exactly the same recommendation as Justice Hughes had made.

  The President-elect of Colombia was at the White House for a luncheon a short time after that and I talked with Secretary of the Treasury Vinson about the Supreme Court and asked him if he’d accept an appointment as Chief Justice if it were offered to him. I told him that I was not offering the appointment but that I’d like to know his attitude.

  He said that any man who had been in the law would jump at such an offer and of course he’d take it if he had the chance. No further conversation took place.

  I went back to the Presidential office and at 4 o’clock at the press conference announced the appointment of Fred M. Vinson as Chief Justice of the United States and John W. Snyder
as Secretary of the Treasury. Mr. Snyder had not been told what would happen and Sec. Vinson had only received a feeler. Both were agreeably and very much surprised.

  Among the minor pleasures of Dad’s off hours was reading letters from crackpots - what we all called nut mail. “There are immense numbers of nuts in the USA,” Dad remarked to his mother, after she had shipped him a batch of screwball letters. One day in the summer of 1946, while Dad was aboard the Williamsburg off Bermuda, he heard Dr. Graham say he always answered every letter he got, no matter how nutty it was. “I asked him to let me see some of them,” Dad told his mother in a letter a few days later. “He brought me about two dozen and I gave them one tear across the middle and threw them in the ocean. He almost wept because he thought I’d lose some prospective votes by his not answering their letters. He’s the most conscientious boy I ever saw. Just like his Dad.”

  Earlier in 1946, an oddball broke into the National Gallery and cut a hole in Dad’s portrait. His comment on it, in a letter to me, was a little more serious: “Somebody went to the National Gallery and cut a hole in my picture last night. It is one the young Virginia painter made and a very good one. He evidently thought well of it because he was insuring it for $10,000. Somebody had gotten left out on meat [these were rationing days] or something like that. It is funny how human beings react. They always want more from their leaders than they can give them and they always like to put mud on their Presidents. That’s bad for the Presidents!”

  Dad was even able to joke about serious things. One of his proudest accomplishments as President was the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency. Before it was established, intelligence was gathered by a half dozen agencies, and very little of it reached the President. One day, he sent the following memorandum to Admiral Leahy and Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers, the first CIA chief: