The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

  A few minutes past noon Roosevelt’s motorcade pulled up to the Capitol. With his legs locked by steel braces so he could stand at the podium, he faced a crowd jammed shoulder to shoulder. Behind Roosevelt at the podium sat the vice president, Henry Wallace, and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. The president began.

  “Vice President . . . Mr. Speaker . . . members of the Senate . . . and the House of Representatives . . . Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy . . . the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked . . .”

  After Roosevelt left the Capitol, senators, in a roll call, voted unanimously for war. The House voted 388–1. The only negative came from Jeannette Rankin of Montana, a pacifist and the first female American congresswoman. Her vote sparked such fury, she had to take refuge from a mob by locking herself in a phone booth until police could escort her to her office. Due to the Tripartite Pact—which tied the Axis powers together—Germany and Italy declared war on the United States on December 11. The United States declared war on the Axis on the same day, at which point most of Europe’s nations chose sides. Britain declared war on Bulgaria. Holland declared war on Italy. Belgium declared war on Japan.

  Truman found himself in an extraordinary position. He knew how unprepared the nation was to face war against the Nazis and the Japanese simultaneously. His committee had investigations in progress all over the country, rooting out profiteers and inefficiencies in the national defense effort—an effort that would now take on incalculable importance.

  Soon after Pearl Harbor, the committee released its first wartime report—ten months’ worth of investigations into defense contracting inefficiencies. The report landed with a sonorous thud on desks all over the capital. “To thousands,” the Washington Post noted, “the first question after the shock of the Truman report must have been: ‘Who in the world is Truman?’”

  The Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program was now being called the Truman Committee, and the senator’s work hours knew no end. “My committee has had so much publicity in the last sixty days that its work is not nearly as efficient as it was before that time,” Truman wrote his daughter while on the road, two months after Pearl Harbor. “We are in a situation where the slightest mistake will cause us serious difficulty.” By the end of 1942 the Truman Committee had held some seventy hearings, resulting in more than three thousand pages of testimony, covering shortages of aluminum, copper, lead, zinc, and steel; bottlenecks in aviation production and shipbuilding; labor, transportation, and housing problems; and more. Every report reflected the unanimous opinions of all seven of the committee’s senators, Democrats and Republicans. The committee reports at times were highly critical of the Roosevelt administration. At one point the president refused to see Truman about a committee matter.

  “He’s so damn afraid that he won’t have all the power and glory that he won’t let his friends help as it should be done,” Truman wrote Bess. If the president wouldn’t see him, Truman told Bess, Roosevelt “could go to hell.”

  For the first time in his life, Truman was getting national publicity for something other than his Pendergast relationship. Among his staff he was deeply revered, though there were no illusions about him. “He had tremendous personal charm, and no airs,” recalled committee investigator Robert Irvin. “I don’t think anybody regarded him as a genius or a brilliant man . . . But they thought of him as a very, very able guy and a very honest guy, and a very dedicated guy. He was as patriotic as they come.”

  On March 8, 1943, Truman appeared on the cover of Time. The committee, according to the story, “had served as watchdog, conscience and spark plug to the economic war-behind-the-lines.” It was “one of the most useful Government agencies of World War II.” Truman himself was the “Billion Dollar Watchdog,” and it was all kind of bizarre, Time stated, because Truman’s seat in the Senate was itself the result of strange circumstances, involving a patron now at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. “Truman’s presence in the Senate,” Time noted, “is a queer accident of democracy.” Still, in the context of the war, Truman was only one of a myriad of politicians making news. He was still considered by many in the Senate a low-profile figure.

  The overwork and travel were taking its toll on Truman. In April 1943, the committee held a series of grueling hearings: on aircraft shortage (April 1–3), food waste (April 5), again on aviation (April 8), rubber tire shortage (April 9), aviation again (April 13–14), shipbuilding (April 16), and delays in barge and other oil shipments (April 17). Two days after that last hearing Truman checked himself into the U.S. Army and Navy General Hospital in Hot Springs, Arkansas, on the verge of nervous collapse.

  11

  LYING IN A HOSPITAL BED, Truman feared for his life. Bess rushed to Arkansas to be by his side. His heart was “beating too fast,” he told his doctors, and he suffered bouts of vomiting. The doctors ran tests on his heart and lungs. They fed him a foul-tasting barium solution, then x-rayed his stomach. His blood pressure was not bad for a man his age: 126/86.

  “He works under a great deal of pressure most of the time,” a physician wrote in Truman’s file, “and it seems likely his symptoms are largely associated with nervous tension and strain.”

  Truman was nearing his fifty-ninth birthday, and here in the hospital he had time to think. The pace of history had left him in a world he struggled to recognize. No generation had ever lived through such leaps of innovation so ruthlessly squeezed into a lifetime. The ubiquity of telephones, movies with sound, paved streets roaring with motorcar traffic, the rise of the supermarket with branded products such as Post Toasties cereal and Hellmann’s Blue Ribbon mayonnaise—none of this had existed thirty years earlier. The war had accelerated the speed of modernization. Truman could recall as a young man of nineteen reading about the Wright Brothers’ first controlled flights. Now the U.S. Army Air Forces were flying thousands of 56,000-pound B-24 bombers, equipped with radar and gyrocompasses that enabled the dropping of bombs on precision targets. Racial integration, women on assembly lines—it all felt like an H. G. Wells novel.

  In the previous eighteen months the nation had been reborn, not just economically but psychologically. It was often said during this war that “America has come of age.” Americans—especially in Washington—felt the pull of destiny, that their country had become the world’s moral arbiter.

  Despite the radical shifts in daily life, one thing for Truman had not changed. He was still smitten by his wife, whom he proudly called “the Boss.” (“I just always had the impression that Mrs. Truman came first and her happiness was very important to him,” one Truman Committee staffer said. “That wasn’t true of all of the senators on the Hill.”)

  Truman left the hospital with a clean bill of health. Bess wrote Margaret, “Dad has been through the gov’t clinic & they found nothing wrong but advised an honest-to-goodness rest.” But Truman had no time for rest. He jumped back into his committee work.

  In the summer of 1943 he received a mysterious communiqué from his old friend Fred Canfil. There had been rumors about huge expenditures going toward a secret factory outside Pasco, Washington. Canfil had called the Truman Committee office from Pasco: “Something’s going on up here,” he said. “I’m going to find out what it is.” Soon afterward, Truman got a call from the secretary of war, Henry Stimson. A transcript of this phone call exists.

  SECRETARY OF WAR: Hello, is this Senator Truman?

  TRUMAN: Yes, this is Senator Truman.

  SECRETARY: Senator, I have been trying to get at you for two purposes.

  [The two discuss a matter regarding the Moral Rearmament Group.]

  SECRETARY: The other matter is a very different matter. It’s connected with the plant at Pasco, Washington.

  TRUMAN: That’s right

  SECRETARY: Now that’s a matter which I know all about personally, and I am one of the group of two or three men in the whole world who know about it.

 
TRUMAN: I see.

  SECRETARY: It’s part of a very important secret development.

  TRUMAN: Well, all right then.

  SECRETARY: And I—

  TRUMAN: I herewith see the situation, Mr. Secretary, and you won’t have to say another word to me. Whenever you say that to me, that’s all I want to hear . . . You assure that this is for a specific purpose and you think it’s all right. That’s all I need to know.

  SECRETARY: Not only for a specific purpose, but a unique purpose.

  TRUMAN: All right, then.

  Canfil was told to leave the matter alone. Two more years would pass before Truman would find out the truth about this secret project outside Pasco, and by that time he would be president of the United States. It was the world’s first ever full-scale plutonium production reactor.

  ///

  One morning in mid-July 1944, Truman was at home in Independence when his phone rang. It was about eight o’clock Missouri time, and he was preparing to leave for Chicago for the 1944 Democratic National Convention. He picked up the phone.

  “Harry,” he heard, quickly recognizing the southern drawl of James F. Byrnes, a former senator from South Carolina now serving as director of the Office of War Mobilization, the most powerful of Roosevelt’s domestic war policy offices. Byrnes said, “The President has given me the go sign for the Vice Presidency and I am calling up to ask if you will nominate me.”

  This was big news but not unexpected, as Byrnes was a towering figure in Washington. He was often called “the Assistant President.” Truman accepted the offer to give Byrnes a nomination speech in Chicago. On that same morning, however, Senate majority leader Alben Barkley called Truman in Independence. Barkley was asking if Truman would make his nomination speech for VP in Chicago. Apparently, Barkley had reason to believe he was the president’s choice for number two. Truman explained that he had already given Byrnes his word, so he could not.

  In the sultry July heat, Truman went out behind his house and pulled his 1941 Chrysler Royal club coupe out of the garage. Bess and Margie were in Denver, visiting Bess’s brother, so they would meet Truman at the convention. With his suitcase packed, he pulled out of his driveway, bound for the Windy City.

  The vice presidency had become the focus of the hottest gossip in Washington. The current VP, Henry Wallace, was rumored to be out of Roosevelt’s favor. Wallace had proven himself so far to the left, Democratic Party officials referred to his supporters as “the lunatic fringe.” The question was: Who could take Wallace’s place? Truman had no intentions of gunning for the job, and neither did America have such intentions for him. According to a Gallup poll in July 1944, only one in fifty Democratic voters thought Truman should be the vice presidential candidate on the 1944 ticket. The great majority was focused on two others: Henry Wallace (65 percent) and Alben Barkley of Kentucky (17 percent). Byrnes, Virginia senator Harry Byrd, and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn each had 3 percent.

  Roosevelt had informed party officials that he would run for an unprecedented fourth term due to the wartime emergency, but that he would leave it up to the delegates at the Democratic National Convention to choose a vice presidential candidate. His specific reasoning would soon become apparent. The president himself would not attend the convention; he was too busy with war business, he said, though it was rumored that the real reason was because he was a severely ill man. An oft-spoken pre-convention slogan was “You are not nominating a Vice President of the United States, but a President.” The convention would take place at the Chicago Stadium, an indoor arena where the city’s hockey team played. Stadium officials had stocked up with 30,000 hot dogs, 125,000 soft drinks, 96,000 bottles of beer, and rivers of bourbon and rye. The Republicans had held their convention in the same hall three weeks earlier—having nominated Thomas Dewey of New York as their candidate.

  James Byrnes checked into the Royal Skyway suite at Chicago’s Stevens Hotel, an especially large room, believing he would need the space to hold meetings, as he was expecting to get the VP nomination. Roosevelt had told Byrnes to his face that he, Byrnes, was the smartest choice. Upon arrival in Chicago, Byrnes told Senator Tom Connally of Texas, “Truman will nominate me.”

  The current VP Henry Wallace was staying at the Sherman Hotel. Wallace believed he was FDR’s choice for number two. He had it in writing from the president, and was planning to release this document at the opportune moment.

  Alben Barkley, senator from Kentucky, appeared in Chicago with a twinkle in his eye. Days earlier, a rumor had swept through Washington that “the ‘White House’ has decided on Barkley,” according to the diary of Senate reporter Allen Drury. Barkley believed he had a strong shot at making the 1944 ticket.

  Truman stepped through the busy lobby of the Stevens Hotel on Michigan Avenue on Saturday, July 15. His room was on the seventeenth floor, offering a sprawling view of sapphire Lake Michigan. He was working on his speech to nominate Byrnes, unaware that forces were already at work to thrust the junior senator from Missouri into the VP slot.

  ///

  On July 11, eight days before the Chicago convention kicked off, Roosevelt had held a meeting in the White House with party officials, to discuss the 1944 ticket. The night began at 7:30 p.m. with presidential martinis. The sun had beaten down on Washington on this day, and FDR appeared tired and listless, his focus wandering. After dinner, the group moved to the president’s second-floor study for coffee and drinks, and conversation turned to the vice presidency. Present were Edwin Pauley, a California oilman and treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, and Robert Hannegan, the committee’s chairman, among others.

  Names bounced around the room, but each potential VP candidate posed a problem. The current vice president, Henry Wallace, was out, all agreed. Sam Rayburn, the Speaker of the House, was not popular anymore in his home state of Texas. Any potential candidate had to guarantee victory in his home state, if nothing else. Senator Barkley of Kentucky would be a popular choice, but the president had recently clashed with him on a political matter, and there was bad blood there. Jimmy Byrnes—though probably best qualified—was from the South and would alienate black voters. And he had abandoned the Catholic Church when he married a Protestant, so Catholics would not vote for him. The president favored William O. Douglas, a Supreme Court justice, but Judge Douglas had no political experience, and he was rumored to have a weakness for alcohol, which could make him a liability.

  Robert Hannegan, who happened to be from Missouri, brought up Truman’s name. Hannegan’s opinions held a lot of weight in this room. Not only was he chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he was known for his incisive political mind. (He would later become president of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team.)

  Roosevelt admitted: he was not overly familiar with the senator from Missouri. The president knew of Truman as the man “in charge of that war investigating committee.” “I hardly know Truman,” Roosevelt had said on another occasion. “He has been over here a few times, but he made no particular impression on me.”

  The more the conversation focused on Truman, the more clear it became: Truman was not a strong candidate—in fact, he was quite obscure in comparison with men such as Byrnes and Barkley. Also, there was concern about Truman’s age, that he was too old. But Truman had no enemies. He would not alienate any section of the electorate. Even with his Pendergast past, he seemed the least problematic choice. Roosevelt leaned forward in his wheelchair and placed his hand on Robert Hannegan’s leg.

  “Now, Bob,” the president said, “you want Truman.”

  “Yes,” came the answer. “I do.”

  Roosevelt turned to the committee treasurer, Edwin Pauley. “Ed, do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do all the rest of you?” asked Roosevelt.

  All said yes.

  Exactly what Roosevelt said at this point has been debated, but sources present at this meeting have him saying something very similar: “Boys, I guess it’s Truman.
”

  “Truman just dropped into the slot,” recalled Ed Flynn, a powerful Democratic figure from the Bronx, who was there that night. “It was agreed that Truman was the man who would hurt [the ticket] least,” said Flynn.

  Still, Roosevelt refused to make any commitment. Party officials realized that he could not choose any candidate without offending other party members. Instead, he would mollify the ambitious contenders by leading them all on, then he would make no final choice at all, leaving it up to the convention in Chicago. As Pauley later recalled: “Roosevelt was ducking the whole thing.”

  ///

  Two days before the convention was to open, Truman was resting in his room at the Stevens Hotel when a knock came on the door. It was Robert Hannegan. The two men knew each other well; Hannegan was from St. Louis, and Truman had helped get him his job as Democratic National Committee chairman. Hannegan gave the senator the hard sell: he should campaign to become vice president.

  “Harry,” said Hannegan, “the president wants you to be his running mate.”

  “Tell him to go to hell,” Truman said. “I’m for Jimmy Byrnes.” Then: “Bob, I don’t want to be Vice President. I bet I can go down the street and stop the first ten men I see and that they can’t tell me the names of the last ten vice presidents of the United States. I bet you can’t tell me who was McKinley’s vice president.”

  Hannegan could not.

  As the day wore on, however, Truman realized that there was more to this situation than it appeared. Elements were conspiring. He met with Sidney Hillman, a powerful labor leader and Roosevelt advisor, the next morning in Hillman’s suite at the Ambassador East. Truman asked Hillman to endorse Byrnes for VP. Hillman said he was for Henry Wallace, but if not Wallace, the labor faction of the Democratic Party could get behind another candidate. Truman asked whom.