The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

  Patton was more explicit, expressing in his diary his disgust with the idea of Truman as president, a feeling millions in America were experiencing too: “It seems very unfortunate that in order to secure political preference, people are made Vice President who are never intended, neither by Party nor by the Lord, to be President.”

  At the home where Truman’s mother and sister lived in Grandview, Missouri, reporters came calling in the dark of the night. This was perhaps what worried Harry Truman the most: that his family would suffer the consequences of his career. He had always looked after them with fierce devotion. “As long as he lived he always seemed to think that I was his special care,” his younger sister, Mary Jane, once said, “and no matter how busy he was he always had time to talk to me.” But Harry was not there to protect his sister and mother from the hungry reporters who would do anything for a story that night.

  “Mother is terribly, terribly distressed,” Mary Jane Truman told them. “The news came as such a shock; we have been unable to adjust ourselves to it.”

  Meanwhile, at a laboratory called Los Alamos, hidden in plain sight by the stark emptiness of the New Mexico desert, word spread around a collection of the world’s brightest scientists, who were at work on a project so secret, not even Harry Truman—now the president of the United States—had any in-depth knowledge of it. The chief scientist at this secret lab, forty-year-old J. Robert Oppenheimer, summoned his colleagues to a flagpole near the lab’s administrative building. In his high-pitched voice, the skeletal-thin Oppenheimer made a formal announcement of the death of Franklin Roosevelt. He too feared for the competence of the new president.

  “Roosevelt was a great architect,” Oppenheimer figured. “Perhaps Truman will be a good carpenter.”

  ///

  When Truman arrived at his apartment building that night it was after nine o’clock. Crowds had formed out front to glimpse the new president, who lived here in this humble, tree-lined neighborhood. Truman was able to enter once again the privacy of his quiet second-floor domicile. He felt as if the globe had flipped on its axis, but here at 4701 Connecticut Avenue everything was situated where it had been when he had left for work that morning—his reading chair and lamp, his phonograph and records.

  Some neighbors, the Davises, had come over and had brought cake and some turkey. “He did not say much to us,” Margaret said of her father. “I realize now that he did not feel he could talk freely with the Davises in the apartment.” Truman said he was hungry, that he had not eaten since noon, so his neighbor Mrs. Davis made the president of the United States a turkey sandwich. He ate it, then retired to a bedroom to call his mother, who was awake. He was going to be very busy for a while, he told her, so he would not be able to call her often in the next few days.

  “Be good, Harry,” ninety-two-year-old Mamma Truman said. “But be game, too.”

  Minutes later Truman was asleep. He had a peculiar talent in this regard, to sleep when he needed to, in moments of terrific emotional strain. In the middle of the night, however, he awoke to find his wife sobbing in the bed beside his. He tried to comfort her, but there was little chance of that. What could he say? So he went back to sleep, knowing that when he awoke, millions all over the world would be asking a single question. It was the same question FDR’s chief of staff, William Leahy, had asked less than nine months earlier, when Truman’s name had suddenly and inexplicably been placed on the 1944 presidential ticket as VP, beside Roosevelt’s own.

  “Who the hell is Harry Truman?”

  Part II

  * * *

  The Political Education of Harry S. Truman

  I’ve always had a sneakin’ notion that someday maybe I’d amount to something. I doubt it now though like everything.

  —Harry Truman, farmer, age twenty-seven, 1911

  5

  HARRY TRUMAN was born on May 8, 1884, in Lamar, Missouri, the first child of John Anderson Truman and Martha Ellen Truman, two not-so-young parents who had grown up under the grating realities of pioneering life in rural America. The doctor who delivered the boy was paid $15 for the job. The world Harry was born into made the year 1945 seem like the wildest imaginings of the most apocalyptic philosophers. There were no machines in 1884—no airplanes, no motorcars. When Harry was a child, the loudest noises he would hear were the occasional thunder crack and the smack of an ax blade.

  America was still an agrarian experiment. The nation was a loose partnership of thirty-eight states (six more would join by the time Harry was six). The population of New York City had just surpassed 1 million when Harry was born, with Chicago and Philadelphia soon to follow. The rest of the country’s 50-plus million citizens (compared with 325 million today) lived rurally, as the Trumans did.

  By the time he could recall, his family had moved to a farm of many hundreds of acres in Grandview, the family plot where his mother, Martha Ellen Truman, had grown up. He had a little brother (John Vivian, born April 25, 1886) and a sister (Mary Jane, August 12, 1889). The farm was a whole world unto itself. Kids were free to roam, often followed by a gray Maltese cat named Bob and a dog named Tandy. “We would hunt birds’ nests in the tall prairie grass,” Truman recalled, “and gather daisies, prairie wild flowers, and wild strawberries.”

  Almost all the resources needed were reachable upon horseback, which made faraway places seem like fantastical lands that would never be seen, only imagined. Life moved in a cadence, according to the seasons. Autumn brought harvest, when work hours knew no end. Winter meant “hog-killing time”; slabs of meat were kept cool using blocks of ice sawed out of riverbeds. The farmhouse had no electricity, nor running water, and cooking was done over a wood-fired stove, as in all the other homes in rural Jackson County.

  The family was far from rich. “You know,” said a Grandview neighbor, Stephen Slaughter, “they didn’t have much spare money. The Trumans were always strapped.” They were “light-foot Baptist,” in Harry’s words—not terribly religious. Politically, the Trumans considered themselves “Rebel Democrats.” Their party affiliation had come about during the Civil War. Missouri had been a hotbed of secessionist violence; families supported both sides, sometimes neighbors against one another, to the death. Both of Harry’s parents came from slave-owning families that sided with the South, in bitter opposition to Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party and its Union Army. As Rebel Democrats, they thought of themselves as Confederate soldiers, politically. It was not simply a party affiliation but a deep passion born from the bruises of a lost war.

  Harry’s father, John Anderson Truman, was a reticent and diminutive man with a dangerous temper, who had no education beyond rural elementary school. He taught his children the only way he could, by example. First, women were sacrosanct. “No one could make remarks about my aunts or my mother in my father’s presence without getting into serious trouble,” Harry later wrote. And then there was work and honor. “He was one of the hardest working men that ever lived,” Harry said of his father. “He raised my brother and myself to believe that honor is worth more than money. And that’s the reason we never got rich.”

  Mamma Truman was the more influential parent in Harry’s case. She was no ordinary Jackson County woman. At five feet six, she was taller than her husband, and skilled with a shotgun. She had spent two years at Lexington Baptist Female College, where she studied poetry and piano, which made her remarkably educated for a farm woman. She taught Harry to read by the time he was five. When she noticed Harry having trouble with small print, she took him to a Chinese doctor in Kansas City (an all-day horse-and-buggy round trip), who diagnosed him with “flat eyeballs” and fitted him with glasses. The spectacles were expensive, so Harry was forbidden from playing sports.

  “It was very unusual for children to wear glasses then,” recalled Mize Peters, a schoolmate of Harry’s. “Kids had a tendency to make fun of people who wore glasses. They’d call him four-eyes. But it didn’t seem to bother him to be called that.”

  Martha Ellen w
as also the driving force behind moving the family off the farm and into town—so Harry, her oldest, could get a good education. In December 1890, when Harry was six, the Trumans relocated to a house on South Crysler Avenue in Independence, Missouri. A Missouri Pacific depot stood a couple hundred yards behind the house, close enough that the floor rattled every time a steam train chugged by.

  Independence was a different world, and an extraordinary one. Ten miles outside Kansas City, the town was known as “the Queen City of the Trails,” as it was the point of departure for the Santa Fe, Oregon, and California Trails. For much of the nineteenth century, pioneers heading west gathered in the spring in Independence to prepare for their journeys. All were seeking a better life in an untamed land, the West offering “a new consciousness of the country,” as Willa Cather wrote in her novel O Pioneers! Independence was the last stop before “the jumping off.” Even the town’s name embodied the spirit of a youthful America.

  By the time the Trumans showed up, Independence had become a thriving town, with a southern air. Electricity had arrived three years before the Trumans. Downtown, wooden ramps formed sidewalks around rows of storefront businesses: H. W. Rummel’s harness and saddle shop, the Hotel Metropolitan, Bundschu’s Dry Goods, a Western Union office, banks and saloons. (“There were quite a few saloons,” remembered Harry’s sister, Mary Jane.) Harry’s father opened a business trading horses and mules. “Work Mules for Sale!” read his advertisement. “Parties Wanting Teams! I have 20 Head! Of Work Mules. Go to the White Barn, on Kentucky Ave., near Missouri Pacific Depot, see my stock and get prices.”

  One morning Harry’s mother took him to a new church school. “When I was about six or seven years old,” he later wrote in a diary, “my mother took me to Sunday School and I saw there the prettiest sweetheart little girl I’d ever seen . . . She had tanned skin, blond hair, golden as sunshine, and the most beautiful blue eyes.”

  Her name was Elizabeth “Bess” Wallace. Her family lived at 608 North Delaware, in a fashionable house with a cupola and a broad porch. The Wallaces were different from the Trumans, who were farm people. Bess Wallace’s father, David, was a prominent town figure, “the most popular man in the county at that time,” according to a schoolmate of Harry and Bess’s, Henry Chiles. David Wallace had a dark secret, one that would soon become known in the most horrific way. But at the time he was a man who commanded respect in town.

  Bess Wallace was everything Harry was not. She was fashionable, athletic, and popular. Harry, in his own words, “was never popular. The popular boys were the ones who were good at games and had big, tight fists. I was never like that. Without my glasses I was blind as a bat, and to tell the truth, I was kind of a sissy. If there was any danger of getting into a fight, I always ran.”

  Harry sat next to Bess Wallace in church school. Somehow he knew already that he would devote his whole life to this one person. It took him five years to get up the courage to say hello.

  ///

  While in first grade, Harry came down with a high fever. “At one time,” according to his cousin Ethel Noland, “he was so low that they thought he might not live.” The family physician, Dr. G. T. Twyman, diagnosed him with the infectious disease diphtheria. In the days before aspirin, children with high fevers were placed in ice to cool them, but the family had no ice. It was winter, so Harry’s mother packed him in snow. “He ended up being paralyzed for about a year,” recalled Harry’s younger sister, Mary Jane. “So, that’s when he started reading so much. He couldn’t do anything else and he couldn’t get up without help, and so he’d lie on the floor and put the books down on the floor in front of him and read the book that way.”

  Harry had begun his political education, without knowing it.

  His mother had purchased a set of books for him called Heroes of History, and he also liked to read the Bible, particularly Exodus and Matthew’s Gospel. He consumed the stories of Moses, Cyrus the Great, Cincinnatus, and Hannibal. There was the Duke of Wellington, and Ulysses S. Grant. In the stories of great men and women lay the answers to all the questions that were forming in the young boy’s mind, and as he learned, their triumphs and mistakes had shaped history’s path.

  “In reading the lives of great men,” he later wrote in a diary, “I found that the first victory they won was over themselves . . . Self-discipline with all of them came first.” On another occasion, he wrote of his early reading:

  History showed me that Greece, which was not as big as the state of Missouri, left us ideas of government that are imperishable and fundamental to any society of people living together and governing themselves. It revealed to me that what came about in Philadelphia in 1776 really had its beginnings in Hebrew times. In other words, I began to see that the history of the world has moved in cycles and that very often we find ourselves in the midst of political circumstances which appear to be new but which might have existed in almost identical form at various times during the past six thousand years.

  When Harry recovered from diphtheria, he returned to school in summertime to catch up. The town of Independence had built a new school called Columbian—for Caucasian children, as the schools were segregated—and it was here where he continued his education. He was a natural lefty trained to write with his right hand. He was a good student but not extraordinary, his focus often drifting from his work to the girl who sat near him, Bess Wallace. “If I succeeded in carrying her books to school or back home for her, I had a big day,” he recorded.

  On August 23, 1898, upon Mamma Truman’s suggestion, Harry’s father made his first fifty-dollar payment on a piano. It was a W. W. Kimball purchased on credit from a music store in Kansas City, and getting it home to Independence was a chore. Harry was drawn to the instrument. He began traveling into Kansas City twice a week for lessons. Most days his brother and sister would awake before sunrise to the sound of his fingers on the keys.

  He had become something of an oddball teenager, with thick spectacles, an obsession for a girl who paid him no attention, and dreams of a future regaling crowds with his music. There was an air of loneliness about him, but an affability too that drew his teachers to him. “He didn’t get to play and have games with the other boys because he wore such heavy glasses,” recalled one of his teachers, W.L.C. Palmer. “I can remember going through [the library], and many times I would see Harry in there reading.” He was “a very, very genteel and polite human being,” recalled family friend Pansy Perkins. “He was the type of person that you just felt so at ease when you met him. He was so down-to-earth, and yet he was something else, too, even then.”

  Harry ended his high school education at the turn of the new century. He had already lived through economic turmoil (the Panic of 1893) and war (the Spanish-American War had been fought and won). And yet, world events seemed to exist only in the form of newspaper ink. Citizens of Independence felt the tug of modernity from nearby Kansas City, but most were focused on their everyday commerce. The century was ending on a drumbeat of optimism—a high point to the Gilded Age (a term of slight sarcasm coined by Missouri’s own Mark Twain). The nation was still young, not yet 150 years old, self-sufficient and full of promise.

  On graduation day at Independence High School, Harry’s fellow student Charlie Ross was named valedictorian. Ross had a gifted pen, and had proclaimed a future as a journalist. Onstage at the graduation ceremony, Harry watched as English teacher Matilda Brown gave Charlie Ross a kiss and congratulated him. Standing next to Charlie, Harry asked his teacher, “Well, don’t I get one, too?”

  “Not until you have done something worthwhile,” she answered.

  Decades later, Truman would sit with Charlie Ross remembering this moment poignantly, in the White House.

  When Independence High School’s graduating class of 1901 posed for a picture, twenty-four girls and nine boys stared into the camera lens, all gathered on the stairs in front of the school’s doors. Among these students was a future president, a First Lady, and a presidential press
secretary. Behind the group, looming above, was a stained glass window with a Latin phrase displayed prominently: JUVENTUS SPES MUNDI.

  “Youth, the hope of the world.”

  6

  FINANCIAL TRAGEDY STRUCK the Trumans just after Harry’s graduation. “My father’s finances became entangled,” as he put it. John Anderson Truman gambled on wheat futures, and the market bit him. At fifty-one years of age, he was wiped out. Harry had dreamed of West Point, of becoming a professional soldier like the heroes in his books, but his eyes were so bad, the school would not have him, and he could not afford regular college. As many of his schoolmates went off to the University of Missouri, seventeen-year-old Harry began working his way through a series of jobs. “It took all I received to help pay family expenses,” he later wrote, “and keep my brother and sister in school.”

  He worked as a timekeeper on the Santa Fe Railroad, sleeping at night in makeshift camps along the tracks with the itinerant men who did odd jobs on the trains. “I became very familiar with hobos and their viewpoints,” he recalled. “I learned what it meant to work ten hours a day for $1.50.” He got a job in the mailroom at the Kansas City Star, then moved to a Kansas City bank as a clerk. In 1906, at his father’s request, Truman moved back to the Grandview farm. He was twenty-two years old, and family members wagered how long he would stay. The six-hundred-acre plot in Grandview became “J. A. Truman & Son,” and Harry was strapped with long days, which turned into weeks and months, and then years.