by A. J. Baime
“I’m looking at the other one,” Hillman said.
The next conspirator was Roy Roberts, managing editor of the Kansas City Star, a man of 350 pounds who was reputed to drink one to two fifths of scotch a day and was known to order a steak dinner in restaurants immediately after already eating one. Roberts was in Truman’s hotel room doing his best to convince the senator to gun for the VP job, with no success. Another knock came on the door. Truman opened the door to find an old friend from Missouri—Tom Evans, a businessman who owned a Kansas City radio station—standing in the hallway.
“What are you doing here, Roy?” Evans asked Roberts.
“Well, I’m Harry’s campaign manager for Vice President,” Roberts joked.
“You’re fired,” said Evans.
Roberts asked if he had heard Evans correctly.
“Yeah, fired, get out.”
Roberts left the hotel room. Alone with his intimate friend Evans, Truman made his real argument. Campaigns were expensive, he began. “I just don’t have any money.”
“Your friends will take care of it,” Evans responded.
“Well, I don’t want to drag out a lot of skeletons out of the closet,” Truman said.
Then he began to explain—and the more he talked, the more his real fears poured out. For starters, Truman admitted, he had put his wife on the Senate office payroll. Bess was earning a $4,500 salary, and not working terribly hard. Truman’s entire reputation stood on honesty and integrity. That idealism was the driving force of the Truman Committee, and thus everything he represented in the eyes of his colleagues and constituents. If he ran for office, no doubt Republicans would attack him for misspending tax dollars on his wife’s paychecks. “The worst thing is that I’ve had the Boss [Mrs. Truman] on the payroll in my Senate office,” Truman said to his friend Tom Evans, “and I’m not going to have her name drug over the front pages of the papers and over the radio,” Truman said.
“Well, Lord,” said Evans, “that isn’t anything too great. I can think of a dozen senators and fifty congressmen that have their wives on the payroll.”
“Yes, but I don’t want them bringing her name up. I’m just not going through that.” Besides, Truman said, he was sixty, retirement age. “I’m satisfied being a senator and I think I’m doing a good job. I think I have done the country a great favor [with the Truman Committee] and I just want to stay there and be let alone.”
Most important, Truman did not want to be president of the United States. The rumors about FDR’s health were rampant.
“I’m satisfied where I am,” Truman said. “Just a heartbeat, this little,” he said, gesturing with his fingers, “separates the vice president and the president.”
It was clear to Evans: Truman was terrified.
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On July 15—the day Truman arrived in Chicago, and four days before the convention was to begin—a train pulled into the city’s Fifty-first Street rail yard shortly after noon, to be serviced. One of the cars was the Ferdinand Magellan. From the outside, it looked like any old train car, but a close look revealed it was not ordinary at all. The train car weighed about 285,000 pounds, far more than a regular Pullman, due to its bulletproof window glass and 5∕8-inch nickel-steel armor plate on the track. It had been purposely built with so much heft that a dynamite charge would not derail it. Aboard in his special train car was the president of the United States.
Roosevelt was bound for San Diego and a cruiser for Hawaii, where he would hold secret meetings with General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz regarding the Pacific war. In Chicago, Robert Hannegan, along with the city’s mayor, Edward Kelly, climbed aboard the Ferdinand Magellan to find the president huddled with Eleanor Roosevelt and Judge Sam Rosenman, speech writer and special White House counsel. Secret service men appeared especially nervous, as there was no security stationed at the rail yard. No one was supposed to know that the president was in Chicago.
The meeting aboard the train lasted fifty-two minutes. When Hannegan got off the train, he had with him a letter—a document that was about to set off a firestorm. It was dated July 19 (the first day of the convention, four days after this meeting). It read:
Dear Bob [Hannegan]:
You have written me about Harry Truman and [Supreme Court Justice] Bill Douglas. I should, of course, be very glad to run with either of them and believe that either of them would bring real strength to the ticket.
Always sincerely,
Franklin Roosevelt
According to Roosevelt’s secretary, Grace Tully, Hannegan came out of the president’s study on the train car with a handwritten note, and he asked her to type it up for him. He also asked, according to Tully, that she reverse the names of Truman and Douglas as they originally appeared in Roosevelt’s note, so that Truman’s would come first, and thus appear as if he was the preferred candidate. Hannegan later insisted this part of the story was apocryphal. Nevertheless, the train pulling the Ferdinand Magellan left Chicago with the president aboard. Hannegan kept the letter a secret.
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Two nights before the convention opened, Senator Samuel Jackson of Indiana, the convention’s chairman, released to the press a different document—also, apparently, a letter from Franklin Roosevelt addressing the mystery around 1944 ticket. This was the so-called “Wallace letter.” It read: “I have been associated with Henry Wallace during his past four years as Vice President . . . I like him and I respect him, and he is my personal friend. For these reasons, I personally would vote for his renomination if I were a delegate to the convention. At the same time, I do not wish to appear in any way as dictating to the convention. Obviously the convention must do the deciding.”
The letter caused chaos. Wallace now seemed the front-runner. And yet, powerful party officials were insisting Roosevelt was for Byrnes; they had even ordered Roosevelt and Byrnes signs from a print shop.
Truman was campaigning hard for Byrnes.
The Washington Post was saying the job was Wallace’s.
The Los Angeles Times was saying Wallace was “out.”
According to the Post, two others were still “prominently in the advance speculation”: Alben Barkley and Senator Sherman Minton of Indiana.
In a last-ditch effort to get the president to make his own decision, a party leader in Chicago named Frank Walker called Roosevelt, managing to make the connection while the president was aboard his private train car. Roosevelt reportedly barked into the telephone: “Frank, go all out for Truman.”
12
ON WEDNESDAY, JULY 19, 1944, at 12:04 p.m., with the words “Call to Convention” by a Democratic committee secretary, a hush fell over a crowded Chicago Stadium. Flags festooned the railings. Cigar smoke flavored the arena’s stale air. Each state’s delegation sat in a group with a stick rising up, bearing a sign with that state’s name on it. Truman sat with the Missouri delegation; Bess and Margaret had arrived in Chicago, and they were with him. For hours the convention moved through a litany of speeches as the temperature rose steadily.
At one point on this day, likely in the afternoon after the convention had opened, Truman was summoned to a meeting at Robert Hannegan’s suite at the Blackstone Hotel. He arrived with his friend Tom Evans of Kansas City. “In the room was a number of people,” Evans later recalled. “It seems to me like a dozen or fifteen.” Hannegan was clearly under strain; his eyes appeared reddened and he was sweating through his open-collar shirt. He called the president, who was in San Diego by this point. “Whenever Roosevelt used the telephone,” Truman later recalled, “he always talked in such a strong voice that it was necessary for the listener to hold the receiver away from his ear to avoid being deafened, so I found it possible to hear both ends of the conversation.”
“Bob,” Roosevelt said to Hannegan, “have you got that fellow lined up yet?”
“No,” said Hannegan. “He is the contrariest goddamn mule from Missouri I ever dealt with.”
“Well, you tell the Senato
r that if he wants to break up the Democratic party in the middle of the war, that’s his responsibility.”
According to Tom Evans, Truman took the phone and spoke to Roosevelt. Evans remembered Truman saying these words: “Well, I just think, Mr. President, that I’ve done a good job where I am and I’m happy, and I want to stay there. Yes, sir, I know you’re Commander-in-Chief. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Well, if that’s what you want, that’s what I’ll do. I have always taken orders from the Commander-in-Chief.”
Finally, Truman said into the phone: “I’ll do it.”
When he hung up, he turned to those dozen or fifteen people in the room. “I’ve just told the president that I would be a candidate and I don’t want to lose,” Truman said. “Now go out and work your heads off.”
Soon after this conversation, Robert Hannegan shocked the convention by releasing the letter he claimed Roosevelt had given him aboard the Ferdinand Magellan days earlier. (“You have written me about Harry Truman and Bill Douglas . . .”) The letter sparked a feeding frenzy among the press. Justice Douglas was not at the convention; he was hiking in the Wallowa Mountains of Oregon and had no idea what was happening in Chicago. More important, the authenticity of the letter was instantly attacked by Wallace supporters, who questioned among other things the date (the letter was dated the nineteenth, the first day of the convention, though Hannegan had admitted that he had obtained the letter from the president on the fifteenth). By this time, Jimmy Byrnes and Alben Barkley had been told that the president was backing Truman. Both were dumbstruck and furious; they had been betrayed by Roosevelt, and their shot at the White House had just vanished.
The contest was now between Truman and current vice president Henry Wallace. And Wallace was not planning on losing.
Delegates were scheduled to vote on the VP nominee on the convention’s second day. Truman took his seat next to Bess in the sweaty hall. His friends had now been working furiously to obtain the confidence of the forty-eight delegations, to vote for Truman. He had the backing of the Democratic National Committee, which he believed would be enough to topple Wallace.
In the late afternoon hours, Alben Barkley stood at the podium in a crisp white suit and delivered a nomination speech for America’s first three-term president to run for a fourth, calling Roosevelt “one who is endowed with the intellectual boldness of Thomas Jefferson, the indomitable courage of Andrew Jackson, the faith and patience of Abraham Lincoln.” When the roll call began, the delegations threw their power behind Roosevelt in a foregone conclusion: 1,086 delegates went to FDR, against 90 for others. From a secret location, Roosevelt delivered a short speech broadcast via radio and over the convention’s loudspeaker system. As soon as it was over, the highly anticipated roll call for VP began to electrify the crowd. Truman was all smiles.
“You seem to be in good humor,” a New York Times reporter said to him.
“Yes, I am going to be nominated for Vice President,” he answered.
“You seem to be pretty certain of it.”
“You don’t think I’d make a statement of that kind unless I knew what I was talking about.”
The crowd, however, was suddenly booming with Wallace support. Chants could be heard in the arena’s farthest corners, growing louder by the minute.
“We want Wallace!”
“The people want Wallace!”
Henry Wallace himself stood among the Iowa delegation shaking hands, his tall body capped by his trademark swoosh of gray hair. Looking around, Truman saw the arena had suddenly grown remarkably overcrowded. “To say the place became overcrowded is a mild statement,” remembered the Democratic National Committee’s Ed Pauley. “It was one of the world’s catastrophes.” Pauley remembers canvassing his assistants trying to find out what was going on. Where were all these people coming from? It turned out that Wallace supporters had flooded the arena bearing counterfeit entrance tickets. “No delegate can sit in his own seat,” Pauley was told. “The Wallace people have taken the whole thing over.”
By the time the roll call began, the arena had grown unbearably hot. From the stage, organizers called one state after the next, and with each, the arena roared in support of Wallace. When the Iowa delegation voted for their homegrown son, “bedlam broke out in the entire Chicago Stadium,” recalled Neale Roach, the convention’s assistant director. “[Wallace supporters] had planned their demonstration very well even to the point of seeing to it that the organist and the band played the Iowa corn song as long and as loud as they possibly could.”
Realizing that Wallace was running away with the vote, Democratic National Committee members panicked. And yet, the organist kept playing the “Iowa Corn Song,” in support of Wallace. Pauley turned to Neale Roach and said, “Stop that organ!” He pointed to a fire ax. “Neale,” he said, “do you see that ax up there above the organ? Go up there, get that ax and chop every goddamn cable there is, every one. That’s the only thing that will stop [the organist]. We’re going to call off the convention tonight.”
Minutes later the organ music suddenly stopped. Democratic Party leaders scrambled to end the proceedings, which they managed to do, claiming that overcrowding had caused a fire hazard. Mayor Kelly took the stage and declared, “By the authority of the Mayor of the City of Chicago, we herewith declare the hall be vacated, immediately.”
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By noon the next day—July 21, decision day for VP—the arena was once again jammed. Even before the convention chairman could call for order (which he did at 12:12 p.m.), the place was in a “high pitch of excitement,” according to one New York Times reporter, “aroused by the imminence of nomination of a Vice President.”
Truman was no longer on the floor with the Missouri delegation. He had moved with Bess and Margaret behind the stage, as he was now a candidate and was likely to be on the stage at some point. All over the arena, feet trampled over balled-up newspapers, and much talk that afternoon was dedicated to a stunning development in Germany. A plot to kill Hitler with a bomb had badly bruised the Nazi leader, and he had reacted with vengeance. HITLER EXECUTES PLOTTERS! read the top headline in the Chicago Tribune.
From his seat, Truman could see a sea of people, and innumerable Wallace and Truman banners. He had stayed up all night trying to sway delegates from Wallace to Truman. At 6:30 a.m. he was to be found in a room in the Drake Hotel trying to get the senior senator from Missouri, Champ Clark, to agree to give the nomination speech for him. Clark was drunk. Truman forces served him coffee and set him to work. Clark delivered his speech for Truman “extemporaneously,” according to one reporter, around 1 p.m.; Truman had “all the qualities and all the qualifications” for the job “in this year of destiny.”
The roll call began at 4:52 p.m. It took hours, and at the end, Truman had 319½ votes to Wallace’s 429½. Fifteen other candidates had gotten votes, and no one man had a majority. Two things became clear: There would have to be a second ballot, and those who had voted for anyone other than Wallace or Truman would have to choose from one of those two, in order for one to achieve a majority—589 votes. Democratic committee members scrambled to sway the vote in Truman’s favor. The final ballot kicked off around 7 p.m. Halfway through, no clear winner had emerged—until, that is, the roll call reached Maryland. Governor Herbert O’Conor, who had himself received his state’s 18 votes in the first ballot, switched all his delegation’s votes to Truman. Maryland’s choice started a chain reaction, and one by one, other delegations followed: Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia. The stampede for Senator Truman was on.
In their seats, Harry and his daughter were awed by the scene. “I reveled in the pandemonium,” recalled Margaret. Bess had never wanted any of this to happen. “Mother was barely able to muster a smile,” Margaret recalled. At 7:37 the Iowa delegation—Wallace’s home state—moved that the nomination of Harry Truman be made unanimous, and at 8:13 the convention’s chairman, Samuel Jackson, cut through the crowd to the stage. At this moment Truman was at a concession counter ordering
a hot dog and a Coca-Cola. Jackson formally made the announcement.
“There being 1,176 qualified votes of which Senator Harry Truman has received more than the majority, I do now declare him to be the nominee of the Democratic Party for vice president and the next vice president of the United States.”
The roar of the crowd was so loud, Truman heard none of this. He was standing behind the stage with a hot dog and a Coke in his hands as Jackson yelled into the microphone: “Will the next Vice President of the United States come to the rostrum? . . . Will the next Vice President come to the rostrum?” Finally, Truman heard the call.
“By golly,” he said aloud. “That’s me!”
With the help of a police escort on each arm, he moved through the crowd. He stood before a phalanx of microphones and made the shortest acceptance speech any politician in the hall had ever heard. It lasted roughly one minute. Through history’s looking glass, however, his words were uncannily prescient. He would dedicate his work to “help shorten the war and win the peace,” he said.
“I don’t know what else I can say,” Truman finished, “except that I accept this great honor with all humility. Thank you.”
Immediately following Truman’s acceptance, the convention chairman hurried through perfunctory resolutions, and the crowds made for the doors. Thousands poured out into the Chicago streets on the hot July night. The Trumans were bombarded with well-wishers and hand shakers. “We were blinded by the flashbulbs of a hundred photographers,” recalled Margaret. “Women wept and flung their arms around us, all but fracturing our spines.”
Truman could see his wife was not enjoying the attention. He asked some police officers to help get them out of there as quickly as possible. As they climbed into the back of a limousine, Bess leaned to Harry’s ear and said, “Are we going to have to go through this all the rest of our lives?”