The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

  “Airplanes! Airplanes! Airplanes!” Knudsen reported back to his colleagues in the United States. “That is all they think about, and bombs go with them.” In the United Kingdom, children were being evacuated from cities. Gas masks were being handed out by the thousands. “It was really bad,” Knudsen said. “They were just hysterical.”

  Hitler’s blitzkrieg—“lightning war”—was something the world had never seen. Hermann Göring, the Nazis’ number two in command, defined blitzkrieg in an interview: “aerial attacks, stupendous in their mass effect, surprise, terror, sabotage, assassination from within, the murder of leading men, overwhelming attacks on all weak points in the enemy’s defense, sudden attacks, all in the same second, without regard for reserves or losses.”

  In the United States, “war preparedness” became the nation’s catchphrase, and the debate between interventionism and isolationism divided the political landscape. The questions on every citizen’s lips: What role, if any, should the United States play in this conflagration abroad?

  On a Saturday in St. Louis, in 1940, Truman gathered his closest friends in the Statler Hotel’s lobby to discuss his political future, for he had a more immediate and personal confrontation ahead of him. Truman’s friends leveled with the junior senator: He was washed up. Governor Stark had announced his candidacy for Truman’s seat, and once again the battle would be for the Democratic primary, as whichever candidate won would skate past the Republicans in left-leaning Missouri. Already the papers had pointed out that Truman had “little chance of renomination.” Truman had told the Washington Post what he thought about Stark: “I’ll beat the hell out of him.” Now he had gathered his friends to see who could help. The Pendergast team was gone. Truman had this bunch of Missourians in his corner—mostly poker buddies. Not one had any real national political experience.

  “Harry, I don’t think you can win,” said Roger Sermon, an Independence grocer who also served as the town’s mayor. “And that’s not merely my personal opinion but after inquiry around.”

  “He had very little backing or encouragement at that meeting,” noted John Snyder, a St. Louis banker. “As I recall it, there were only two or three that even suggested that he should run for a second term.”

  Truman said, “I’m going to file. I wouldn’t have the guts to go home and face my people if I ran out.” At the Statler that afternoon he outlined a platform for a campaign. According to the minutes of that meeting:

  The Senator will not engage in personalities and asks his friends to do the same. Avoid mentioning the Senator’s opponents in any way.

  Avoid getting into controversial issues [ie, Pendergast]. Stick to Truman—his record as a judge, as a Senator, as a military man.

  While others discuss issues not involved in the primary, each worker will carefully avoid getting into those traps.

  The press is a function of our free institutions. If they are wrong in their attitude, try to make them see the true light, but under no circumstances attack them.

  Political parties are essential to our republic, our nation, and we must not attack them. What we’re doing is to show by our actions what we think our Party is destined to do: Provide basic laws for a more abundant life and the happiness and security of our people.

  Truman’s friends did not respond positively. “We didn’t give him a chance,” recalled A. J. Granoff, a Kansas City lawyer. “We expected him to be beaten badly.”

  At 7:30 p.m. on June 15, Truman appeared in front of the Pettis County Courthouse in Sedalia, Missouri, to kick off his campaign. He had promoted a secretary in his Senate office named Victor Messall to be his campaign manager. The treasurer was Harry Vaughan, a former tie salesman who would be no help financially. (“I had a bank balance of three dollars and a quarter,” Vaughan said.) Before the opening party in Sedalia, Messall had sent out campaign “Bulletin #1” advising all friends of Truman’s to show up.

  “An effort should be made to get as many cars as possible to come out to Sedalia on that night. All cars should be properly decorated with American flags, red and white streamers and carrying signs bearing catchy phrases such as ‘Make Government Human with Men like Truman.’”

  The morning of the campaign kickoff, eighty-seven-year-old Mamma Truman sat in the front row to cheer on her son. Bess and Margaret sat on the speaking platform. Remembered Margaret: “At 16, I was able to feel for the first time the essential excitement of American politics.” The speech was another Truman special, embracing FDR’s New Deal. “I believe in the brotherhood of man,” he said. “Not merely the brotherhood of white men but the brotherhood of all men before the law.” Soon after, Truman and Fred Canfil took to the road again. Truman’s focus: the New Deal, the importance of the farmer in America, the emergency in Europe, and military preparedness.

  He had a habit of clapping his hands when he wanted to make a point onstage, which created a horrible bark from the electric speaker system. A campaign aide had to instruct him: “You could refrain from slapping your hands together in front of the microphone.” Compared with his opponent, Lloyd Stark, who was fabulously wealthy, Truman struggled with his campaign budget as usual. “I think that was the all-time low for a senatorial campaign,” recalled treasurer Vaughan. Truman pulled $3,000 out of a life insurance policy to pay expenses. At one point he hadn’t enough funds for a hotel room, so he slept in his car.

  Newspapers called the candidate “a dead cock in the pit.” “Without fraudulent votes from Jackson County,” Truman’s hometown paper, the Kansas City Star, claimed, “he could not have been elected” as a judge in the first place. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “Truman is through in Missouri. He may as well fold up and accept a nice lucrative Federal post if he can get it—and if he does get it, it’s a travesty of democracy.”

  Truman sought Roosevelt’s endorsement, but his campaign office received a polite telegram in reply on July 30, 1940, one week before the primary, from FDR’s press secretary, Steve Early: “The President asks me to explain to you personally that while Senator Truman is an old and trusted friend the president’s invariable practice has been not to take part in primary contests.” Stark, meanwhile, was talking up his close relationship with the president to the press. He visited Roosevelt in April 1940 and bragged about his personal role in putting Tom Pendergast behind bars. Stark was so confident of his victory, he declared his candidacy for vice president at the 1940 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, handing out Stark Delicious apples to the crowds.

  With time running out, Truman called on his only power base: his friends in the Senate. Burton Wheeler of Montana endorsed Truman on June 28, 1940. Two days later Tom Connally of Texas did the same. Alben Barkley of Kentucky flew to St. Louis to stump for Truman. Only three hundred people showed up in a space with a three thousand capacity, and Barkley was criticized afterward for throwing his weight behind a candidate who “owes his place to the notorious Pendergast machine.”

  On August 6, 1940, Harry and Bess cast their votes in the primary, in Independence. By this time, the whole Truman team was suffering exhaustion. Campaign manager Messall had ulcers so bad, he could not stomach a whiskey to settle his nerves. Truman had been traveling back and forth to Washington throughout the campaign, due to the war crisis, but on primary election night, he stayed at home in Independence. Friends and neighbors dropped by to pay respects, and as the sun set, the Trumans huddled by their radio. During the early returns, the contest appeared lost, and Harry told his wife: “I’m going to bed.” She was astonished, and remained in front of the radio. At midnight Bess and Margaret retired feeling “very weepy and depressed,” as Margaret recalled.

  At 3:30 a.m., Bess was awoken by a phone call. She picked up to find a stranger on the line. “This is Dave Berenstein in St. Louis,” the man said. “I’d like to congratulate the wife of the senator from Missouri.”

  “I don’t think that’s funny,” Bess barked, and slammed the phone down. She was going back to bed when she remembered who
Dave Berenstein was—one of Harry’s campaign workers in St. Louis.

  The state of Missouri had more faith in Truman than all the election experts expected, but still, the contest was so tight, he was not declared the winner until 11 a.m. the next day. By that time he was already rushing to catch a flight back to Washington. He slipped through the back door of the Senate Chamber the following day while Hiram Johnson of California was making a speech. At the sight of Truman, the chamber fell silent. One senator stood up and began to applaud, then another, and soon the entire Senate floor exploded in acclamation for Harry Truman. He felt hands slapping his back and saw toothy smiles on the faces of men who so rarely showed any emotion. “I thought Wheeler and Jim Byrnes were going to kiss me,” he wrote Bess.

  Once again, a political campaign had left Truman further in debt, and days after the primary, a bank foreclosed on the family farm in Grandview. Mamma Truman and Truman’s sister, Mary Jane, were forced to move out of the home they had lived in almost all their days. Friends of Truman’s said they had never seen him so furious, for Truman believed the foreclosure was a political stab in the back. Nevertheless, in Democratic-leaning Missouri, he won the general election in November, defeating his Republican opponent easily.

  Harry Truman was the senator from Pendergast no more.

  ///

  In the winter months of 1941, Truman took a road trip. He was suffering from exhaustion, and the highway called for him. Long drives were his preferred method of decompressing. Aiming to inspect new army camps, he motored thousands of miles in his old Dodge to Florida, up to Michigan, and through the flatlands of Missouri, living out of his suitcase. What he saw disturbed him, and so on February 10, 1941, he made a speech on the Senate floor. His daughter later referred to this speech as “fateful,” for it was “to change the course of all our lives.”

  “I am introducing a Resolution,” Truman began that Monday morning on the Senate floor, “asking for an investigation of the National Defense Program and the handling of contracts. I feel that it is my duty at this time to place before the Senate certain information which I have, and which I am sure is of vital importance to the success of the National Defense Program.”

  Less than five weeks earlier, Roosevelt had delivered his “Arsenal of Democracy” fireside chat, which drew the largest radio audience of all time. Roosevelt was calling for an unprecedented spending campaign. “Guns, planes, ships and many other things have to be built in the factories and arsenals of America,” Roosevelt told his audience. Referring to Hitler’s conquering armies, the president said: “Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now.” Due to the Depression and the neutrality acts signed by the president during the 1930s, the American military had grown anemic. The army ranked eighteenth in the world in size at the beginning of 1940 (smaller than Belgium’s, Portugal’s, even Switzerland’s), with fewer than 200,000 men, compared with nearly 7 million trained Nazi soldiers. Roosevelt was demanding a modern military equipped with cutting-edge machinery. The president had recently received $10.5 billion in appropriations for emergency defense programs.

  The spending, Truman told his fellow senators, “probably signifies the entry of our nation on a totally different path of destiny than it has ever trod before.”

  Construction of new factories was under way—“aircraft factories in San Diego, Columbus, St. Louis, Buffalo, Dallas,” Truman said, “shipyards in Oakland and Houghton (Washington); munitions plants in Chicago and Omaha; and engine works in Cincinnati and Paterson.” In every one of those federally funded projects, Truman explained, there was ample chance of inefficiency and graft. “I have had considerable experience in letting public contracts,” Truman said, referring to his days as a Jackson County judge. “And I have never yet found a contractor who, if not watched, would not leave the Government holding the bag.”

  Truman’s idea was to set up a Senate committee to police this government spending. On March 1, 1941, the Senate passed Resolution 71, to create the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program, with a budget of $15,000. It was barely enough to pay for secretaries and stenographers. Truman’s first move was to set up a bipartisan team of senators—five Democrats and two Republicans—so no barbs of party politics could be hurled at him. For staff, he wanted investigators who had no allegiances to the military or anyone else. For his first hire, he set his sights on Matthew J. Connelly, a well-dressed thirty-three-year-old Irish American who had experience as a congressional staffer with the Appropriations Committee. Connelly knew how things worked on the inside. The day he showed up at suite 248 in the Senate office building for his interview, he got his first taste of Truman’s way of doing things.

  “Come in,” Truman said. “We have a very peculiar situation here.” He gave Connelly his committee’s pitch. “I don’t know what I can pay you,” he said, “but I will say this to you: If you go along with me you will never have any reason to regret it.”

  Connelly answered, “Senator, I came in here to say no, but the way you talk is refreshing in Washington and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

  Truman hired lawyers—notably Hugh Fulton, a bulldog prosecutor whom Truman described as “a big fat fellow with a squeaky voice.” There was an FBI investigator named H. G. Robinson—“a man who could look at a person that he wasn’t fond of with the fishiest coldest stare,” according to one committee staffer. Truman added old friends such as Fred Canfil and, a little later, Harry Vaughan as errand runners, stretching the budget by putting certain committee members on the payrolls of other departments that had surpluses (Connelly’s idea). The staff spread out around available desks in the Senate building, with headquarters in suite 449, where hearings would be held. The committee’s most important space became known as “the Doghouse”—a small office attached to Truman’s own, where he conducted confidential meetings and always kept the bar stocked. The senator’s motto was “There is no substitute for a fact. When the facts are known, reasonable men do not disagree with respect to them.”

  The committee set out on its first series of investigations at army construction sites and quickly uncovered shocking inefficiencies. Some construction sites were costing the federal government as much as ten times the original estimates. One camp in Texas was supposed to have cost the army less than $500,000; the bill would eventually hit $2.54 million. “If our plans for military campaigns are no more extensive and no better than those for construction,” Truman concluded, “we are indeed in a deplorable situation.”On April 15, 1941, less than two months after the committee was born, Truman conducted a hearing in Washington with the secretary of war, Henry Stimson, and army chief of staff General George C. Marshall, two of the nation’s most high-profile defense figures. The committee grilled Stimson and Marshall in front of reporters, with chief counsel Hugh Fulton doing most of the talking. (“Hugh was a brilliant attorney,” committee staffer Robert Irvin later said. “He had a tremendous, tremendous capacity to see the big picture and to see how all the pieces fit together.”)

  The following day the New York Times ran large pieces of testimony verbatim, with a big photo of Truman and the secretary of war together. “It was very widely seized upon by the press,” Connelly recorded. “They realized that this was going somewhere . . . This would be news.”

  ///

  The afternoon of December 7, 1941, found Truman resting alone in a room at the Sinclair Pennant Hotel in Columbia, Missouri. He had stayed in bed for twelve hours the night before, had breakfasted at 8 a.m., and had retired back to bed because it was Sunday and he was suffering work exhaustion. His phone rang and he picked up to find a deputy U.S. marshal on the line.

  “This is Roy Webb,” the marshal said breathlessly. “Have you heard the radio?”

  “No,” Truman said.

  “The Japs are bombing Pearl Harbor.”

  “Are you sure you know what you’re talking about, Roy?”

  “It’s on the radi
o.”

  “My goodness, man,” Truman said. “I’ve got to get to Washington.”

  Truman hung up the phone and dialed the St. Louis office of the airline TWA. He explained it was imperative that he be in the nation’s capital the following morning. Shortly after hanging up, the phone rang again; Bess was calling from their Washington apartment to let him know that the secretary of the Senate had called to say there would be a joint session of Congress the following afternoon—Monday, December 8. In short time Truman was at the airport. He ended up in Pittsburgh at 3:30 a.m., then landed in Washington at 5:30 a.m., where his friend and secretary Harry Vaughan was waiting with a car. Truman got to his apartment in Washington at 6 a.m., where Bess made him breakfast, then he made it to the House Chamber, in time to hear Roosevelt deliver one of the most memorable pieces of rhetoric in American history.

  The air in the vast room where presidents had given State of the Union speeches for years had never felt more electric with anticipation. The international situation had seemed foggy for months, but now, in retrospect, things seemed more clear. In May, six months earlier, Roosevelt had called for “an unlimited national emergency,” in response to Nazi threats of world domination. In July, in response to Japan’s occupation of Indochina, the president had frozen Japan’s assets in America and had slapped Japan with an oil embargo. Japan was getting 88 percent of its oil from the United States. After the embargo took effect, many in Washington, including Truman, believed Japan would be left with no course of action except attack. And now it had come, a sucker punch at Pearl Harbor. Close to twenty-five hundred Americans had been killed, with nearly twenty naval vessels and more than three hundred airplanes damaged or destroyed—a devastating percentage of the Pacific Fleet.