by A. J. Baime
“Judge,” Aylward said, “Jim Pendergast and I are in Jefferson City, and it’s very important and imperative that we see you almost immediately.”
Truman smelled trouble. “Why do you want to see me?”
“We can’t discuss it on the phone.”
Truman, Aylward, and Jim Pendergast—Boss Tom Pendergast’s nephew and Harry’s war buddy—met that night in the lobby of the Terry Hotel in the small farming town of Sedalia. Pendergast laid it on the line: the boss wanted to run Truman for senator.
“I can’t win as a candidate for the United States Senate,” Truman argued. “Nobody knows me and I haven’t got any money. I’m not equipped to make a campaign.”
Aylward said, “We’ll help you financially . . . We’re in a position to have all of the politicians—Democrats of any influence throughout this state—to support you, but we’ve got to do something now. We’ve got to start a campaign.”
Truman knew a Senate campaign would hurl his life into chaos. He also knew that, with Pendergast behind him, he did have a shot at winning, no matter how obscure he was, or how ill-equipped he would be to perform in Washington. In fact, the story of the 1934 senatorial election was about to become, in the words of Tom Pendergast biographer Lyle W. Dorsett, “one of the most fascinating in the annals of Missouri politics.”
On the night of May 14, 1934, Truman booked his familiar room at the Pickwick Hotel. It was 4 a.m. as he sat at a desk writing on hotel stationery. “Tomorrow I am to make the most momentous announcement of my life. I have come to the place where all men strive to be at my age and I thought two weeks ago that retirement on a virtual pension in some minor county office was all that was in store for me . . . Now I am candidate for the United States Senate. If the Almighty God decides that I go there, I am going to pray as King Solomon did, for wisdom to do the job.”
A few hours later, sleepless Harry Truman stood among a crowd of four thousand in front of the Boone County Courthouse in Columbia, Missouri, a 125-mile drive from the Pickwick Hotel. The machine was showing its muscle. Buses full of state workers—Pendergast backers—had made the journey to Columbia. An American Legion band honked out crowd pleasers as a Harry Truman sound truck made rounds. Speakers warmed up the crowd, then Truman took the stage, delivering a speech short on words and even shorter on charisma. He could sum up his campaign in two words: “Back Roosevelt.”
“Two words are all any Democratic candidate for the Senate or Congress needs,” Truman said.
Franklin Roosevelt had been in office for less than two years, and for Democratic voters, his New Deal politics had proved a beacon in the Depression’s storm. Truman promised, if he were senator, to vote as Roosevelt would vote.
By the next morning, Truman knew he had a fight on his hands. His rival in the primary, Jacob “Tuck” Milligan, announced his candidacy on the same day. Milligan had more than ten years of experience in Washington as a U.S. congressman from Missouri, and he was backed by the state’s senior U.S. senator, Champ Clark. Clark had the St. Louis newspapers behind Tuck Milligan. Thus the Senate seat would pit Kansas City against the larger metropolis of St. Louis, and Harry Truman against a significantly more qualified candidate. To complicate matters, a third candidate joined the race—John J. Cochran, a St. Louis lawyer who had nine years’ experience as a congressman in Washington. Whichever Democrat won the primary was almost sure to win the general election.
Truman set off on a Missouri odyssey, making between six and sixteen speeches a day. Trusty Fred Canfil did much of the driving. A historic heat wave baked Missouri in the summer of 1934; the mercury shot past 100 degrees F. for twenty-one days in a row, while a drought desiccated the Midwest. Truman and Canfil drove through the dust bowl from town to town, meeting voters hard hit by the Depression and thirsty for hope. In July 1934, at the height of Harry’s campaign, six more Missouri banks were liquidated.
The opposition brutalized Truman, who was an easy target. “For this bellhop of Pendergast’s to aspire to make a jump from the obscure bench of a county judge to the United States Senate is without precedent,” one Cochran campaigner said. “When one contemplates the giants of the past who have represented Missouri, this spectacle is not only grotesque, it is sheer buffoonery.” Even the New York Times pointed out that “Truman is little known and his only strength is that given him by Pendergast in Kansas City.”
Money was tight. “I’ll tell you we had plenty of trouble keeping the contest moving,” James Aylward admitted. But the machine brought voters in line.
That summer, another killing shocked the state and drew more national attention to the brutality of Kansas City politics. “Brother John” Lazia, the Kansas City–born son of an Italian immigrant family, emerged as a power player in the city’s Democratic machine—“the swarthy, right-hand man of Tom Pendergast,” according to the Washington Post. Lazia was also an underground mobster who controlled gambling rackets run out of Kansas City hotels. On July 10, 1934, at 4 a.m., two gunmen shot him at close range as he exited a car on a city street. A rival gangster was fingered for the murder—Michael “Jimmy Needles” LaCapra, later assassinated in retaliation. Before his killing, Lazia had told an associate: “If anything happens, notify Pendergast . . . my best friend, and tell him I love him.”
On election day, nervous voters headed to their polling stations. No violence was reported. Pendergast’s man pulled off a stunning victory: Truman (276,850), then Cochran (236,105), then Milligan (147,614). The reaction from St. Louis was predictable: Truman was “Boss Pendergast’s Errand Boy,” according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Even Truman’s hometown papers could not hide from the truth. The Kansas City Star: “County Judge Truman is the nominee of the Democratic Party because Tom Pendergast willed it so.”
In November, Truman won the general election; no Republican stood a chance against Tom Pendergast in Depression-era Missouri. Throughout Truman’s campaign, his reputation banked on his road program, miles of weaving Jackson County pavement. “He pulled Jackson County out of the mud,” one of Harry’s old teachers from grade school said. Now Truman’s roads were going to lead him out of the county, all the way to Washington, DC.
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“What’s a senator?” little Margie Truman asked her father, when she learned the family would be moving to the nation’s capital. Both Bess and ten-year-old Margaret were devastated, having to leave their friends, family, and home in Independence. Margaret would remember “wailing dramatically.”
Truman drove the family a thousand miles straight east to Washington. “I was nearly 51 years old at the time, [and] I was as timid as a country boy arriving on the campus of a great university for the first year,” he later wrote. Bess picked out a furnished apartment in a red brick building at 3016 Tilden Street, about five miles from where Truman’s office would be. The four-room apartment was not much bigger than their garage in Independence. The $150 rent made Truman’s eyes bulge; he borrowed money from a local bank and filled the little home with furniture. The new job would raise his salary to $10,000, but that would still make Harry “undoubtedly the poorest Senator financially in Washington,” as he said. As a consolation to Margie, he rented a piano from a local shop.
On January 3, 1935, Truman entered the Senate gallery for the first time, prepared to take the oath. Before the ceremony, he was called into the vice president’s office down a corridor, where Vice President John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas awaited him. Other freshman senators gathered, all strangers to Truman. “Men,” Garner said, “before we enter into these ceremonies I’d like to have you all join me in striking a blow for liberty.” Garner pulled out a bottle “that looked like corn liquor,” according to one man present, and poured shots. Minutes later, well fortified, Harry was back in the Senate gallery. Seated in the audience were his wife and his daughter, and Jim Pendergast. Cactus Jack Garner banged an ivory gavel and “the teeming galleries were hushed, as though a curtain were being raised on a great drama,” a reporter
described the scene. Along with the other freshmen, Truman took the oath.
The Seventy-Fourth Congress was a boost for Roosevelt, now midway through his first term. The midterm 1934 election had been one of history’s great landslides, the nation voting overwhelmingly Democratic, a clear mandate that the populace had embraced FDR’s New Deal policies. Truman was assigned suite 248 in the Senate Office Building, the words MR. TRUMAN, MISSOURI painted on the door. In the Senate gallery he took seat 94, in the back row, with Sherman Minton of Indiana on his right and Rush Holt of West Virginia on his left. The Senate was known as “the Most Exclusive Club in the World.” There was but one woman: Hattie Caraway, Democrat from Arkansas. Truman was instantly a curiosity in Washington, because he had arrived under dubious circumstances. He was called “the Senator from Pendergast,” and many of his colleagues refused to speak to him.
“If you had seen Harry Truman . . . in the freshman row in the Senate, you would hardly have picked him as a future leader,” an early Truman biographer wrote. “He seemed to be one of those inconspicuous political accidents—a nice fellow cast up by the workings of machine politics.” According to a short Washington Post profile (commonplace for freshman senators), Truman was “not considered brilliant, either as an orator or as a scholar.” Ignored by many, he got one good piece of advice from J. Hamilton Lewis, Democrat of Illinois.
“Don’t start out with an inferiority complex,” Lewis said. “For the first six months you’ll wonder how you got here, and after that you’ll wonder how the rest of us got here.”
On the morning of February 14, 1935, Harry Truman crossed the White House threshold for the first time. He walked through the front door and down a hallway past bored newspapermen fingering cigarettes. Franklin Roosevelt’s appointments secretary had written Truman’s name in the president’s calendar as “Sen. Thomas Truman” with the Thomas crossed out. Harry’s appointment with the president was at 11:15.
“No one who hasn’t had the experience can realize what it was like to enter the Oval Room and see Franklin Roosevelt behind that fabulous desk,” Washington insider Donald Nelson once wrote. “There is no experience in the world quite like it.” Inside the Oval Office, the walls were crammed frame to frame with pictures of ships, celebrating Roo-sevelt’s love of sailing and his days as assistant secretary of the navy. His desk teemed with objects of curiosity, given to him by foreign leaders and baseball stars alike. The president smiled while receiving guests, but the cigarette in his black cigarette holder was the giveaway. If it was pointed up, he was in a good mood. Down—bad mood. On this day Truman would remember nothing of FDR’s mood. He would only recall feeling terribly nervous.
“I was practically tongue-tied,” he later said. It wasn’t the president who made him so timorous, but rather the presidency. “I was before the greatest office in the world.”
The meeting was short and inconsequential, a formality for a freshman senator.
Truman was now fully in the throes of his political education. He routinely was up at five and arrived at his office at seven in the morning. “That man was there earlier than everybody,” recalled one of his secretaries, Edgar Faris. “I don’t care if he went to bed at 2 a.m., he was up at five and he was down at that office. This man really worked.” He learned the ins and outs of Congress. It was essentially a bill-generating machine. Members drummed up new laws or ways to alter existing ones. These ideas were put on paper, considered, argued, revised, passed on to the president, sometimes vetoed, sometimes not, and often hurled into history’s dustbin along with the ambitions of the men whose name was on them. Committees tackled essential issues from commerce to foreign affairs. The Senate Chamber where the ninety-six gathered was a boxing ring where intellects sparred, hurling ideas, audacity, and at times inscrutable ideology at one another through a haze of tobacco smoke.
Truman had read bios of all the players, and now here they were in flesh and blood: Arthur Vandenberg, the Republican stalwart from Michigan, opinionated and irritable. Guy Gillette of Iowa, white-haired and dignified, the prototypical glamorous statesman. Huey Long of Louisiana, bombastic and radical, who would soon be felled by an assassin’s bullet. Of the bunch, Truman remained one of the most reticent, content to study the mechanics of government and to vote when bills were called up for action.
He established himself as a firm New Deal Democrat, supporting the president at almost every turn. He supported the farmer, labor, and what he called “the average man for a happier and more abundant life”—people, that is, like himself, and most Missourians. A widely respected senator from Montana named Burton Wheeler took Truman under his wing and appointed him to the Interstate Commerce Committee, where he would do his most important work in this term, formulating new regulations to aid railroad companies that had crumbled due to the Depression (nearly a million railroad men were out of work, and some ten thousand miles of track had been abandoned).
Truman wasn’t surprised when the press and fellow senators accused him of voting according to Tom Pendergast’s wishes. The boss in Kansas City did ask Harry to vote certain ways. Truman followed orders on inconsequential matters, but his voting record on legislation sided with FDR almost every time—even when Roosevelt sparked controversy by trying to “pack” the Supreme Court by adding justices who would vote for his New Deal policies in 1937, a move that historians consider one of FDR’s most embarrassing mistakes.
Meanwhile, Truman settled into the “Washington Merry-Go-Round.” He learned that while much of the business of the Senate occurred on the Senate Chamber floor, more of it was accomplished over cocktails in offices and at Washington watering holes. “Kind of hard . . . to attend a dry lunch in this town,” Harry told Bess. Margaret enrolled at a local girls’ school, and she was now old enough to ride a streetcar alone to the Senate offices in the afternoons. “She would drop paper clips down my neck,” recalled Truman’s secretary, Reathel Odum. “Our desk chairs were on wheels and she’d roll me around.” In summer, the Trumans headed back to Independence for the recess.
Gradually, Truman worked his way off the bottom of “the club” hierarchy. He earned a reputation as a hard worker and a deeply ethical thinker. As he told Bess, “There’s a driving force inside me that makes me get into things.” Still, he could not get the president’s secretaries to return his phone calls.
Truman introduced the most important work of his first term, the Truman-Wheeler bill, in 1939. By the time it came up for argument on the Senate floor, however, his reputation had suffered a stiff blow. He was sitting in his office one day early in 1939 when he got a phone call. He was told that his mentor, some would even say his “boss,” had been indicted on federal charges. Pendergast was going to prison. Truman—facing an election year in 1940—knew that this was not going to go well for him.
Pendergast, now sixty-seven, pleaded guilty to evading income tax on more than $300,000, money collected illegally while “arranging a compromise” in a fraudulent insurance deal. Other Pendergast operatives had already been jailed for fixing elections in Kansas City. Whether any fraud ever occurred in an election won by Harry Truman has never been proven.
On May 29, Pendergast arrived at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, driven by his nephew Jim Pendergast, Harry Truman’s close friend and war buddy. By lunchtime the man who had run the Kansas City Democratic machine for twenty years had heard the soul-shattering sound of iron prison doors slamming shut. Reporters and photographers appeared at Truman’s office door in April 1939 for comment. Truman said, “Pendergast has been a good friend to me when I needed it. I am not one to desert a sinking ship when it starts down.” To Bess, Harry was more honest: “The terrible things done by the high ups in K.C. will be a lead weight to me from now on.”
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Nearing the end of his Senate term, Truman was in trouble. “Never before or since,” his daughter later wrote, “can I recall my father being so gloomy as he was in those latter months in 1939, after Tom Pendergast went to priso
n.” The Truman-Wheeler bill—the most important work of his life so far—was being blocked on the Senate floor. “I feel as if my four years and a half hard work has been practically wasted,” he wrote a friend. Truman had little money, and few prospects of a job if he was not able to win reelection in 1940, and given the Pendergast stain, few gave him any shot at all. As one Washington insider said of the nation’s capital: “There is nothing more pitiful in this town than an ‘ex.’ A general without an army or a post, [or] a Senator who has been defeated.”
One day the governor of Missouri, Lloyd Stark, paid Truman a visit in Washington. Like Truman, Stark faced the end of his term. Two years younger than Harry, the governor was a graduate of Annapolis who had also commanded an artillery outfit in World War I. He had made a fortune in his family business—Stark Nurseries—filling Missouri’s grocery stores with Stark apples. The governor had been instrumental in bringing down the Pendergast machine, and had taken much credit for it, which infuriated Truman, who knew what other political insiders in Missouri knew: that Stark had made use of Pendergast’s services earlier in his own career when he needed them.
Relaxing in Truman’s office, Stark said, “Everybody keeps telling me that I ought to run for the Senate.” He chuckled. “But don’t worry about it, Harry. I wouldn’t dream of running against you.”
Stark made an exit, leaving Truman to think. He turned to one of his secretaries, Victor Messall, and said, “That S.O.B. is going to run against me.”
10
WHILE AMERICA GEARED UP for the 1940 elections, the nation was falling into the grip of war paranoia. Stories of domestic contests were pushed off the front page for more pressing news from across the Atlantic. On May 10, 1940, the Nazis invaded Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, and parts of France. One by one, Hitler’s highly mechanized armies devastated their enemies. The French had the finest army of the European Allies; their forces surrendered within six weeks. The British knew they were next. When William Knudsen, president of General Motors (the world’s largest corporation), visited London to check on his company’s interests there, he found the population “scared stiff.”