The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

  ///

  News from the Chicago convention sent shock waves through Washington, DC. Democrats were divided and upset. As the Senate reporter Allen Drury wrote in his diary post-convention, “Few people can hate one another with more cordial enthusiasm than a bunch of Democrats.” Republicans, meanwhile, were set to attack. With his Pendergast stain, Truman offered them endless ammunition.

  The night after the convention ended in Chicago, the Trumans received friends in Bess’s suite at the Morrison Hotel. Fred Canfil manned the door, and only those close to the family were allowed inside. The following morning Harry spoke to reporters briefly.

  “How does it feel to be Vice President?” he was asked.

  He laughed. There was still an election ahead, he said. “I’ll tell you when I’m elected.”

  Bess reluctantly held the first press conference of her life. She was introduced to the female political press corps, who fired questions and watched as she squirmed in discomfort. When asked her age, Bess said that no woman older than twenty should have to answer that question. When asked if she planned to become a public figure, Bess answered, “I never have and I never intend to make any speeches.”

  When the Trumans piled into Harry’s Chrysler and made for Independence, the mood in the car was ice cold. Harry knew what Bess was thinking: he should have said no.

  13

  TRUMAN CALLED HIS NATIONAL DEFENSE COMMITTEE together on the morning of August 8, 1944, in room 160 of the Senate building, where most of the staffers had their desks. He was resigning as chairman of the Truman Committee, he explained. The 1944 election would be all-consuming, and as VP nominee, he could not have his actions in committee work be construed as political, so he was stepping down. He was proud of the committee’s work. Their efforts had saved taxpayers $15 billion, he estimated.

  “It was obvious sincerity,” recalled committee investigator Walter Hehmeyer. “And when he got all through there was a sort of silence and everybody in the room stood at their desks.” Truman walked around and shook every hand, thanking every committee worker personally. “This is the kind of man that Truman was,” said Hehmeyer. “He clearly wasn’t looking for votes. I mean, there was no crowd, no reporters.”

  Truman’s name on the 1944 ticket predictably caused concern among party members. The press called him “the Missouri Compromise.” “He is no great campaigner, no sparkling public figure,” wrote one Christian Science Monitor political reporter. “Poor Harry Truman. And poor people of the United States,” wrote the political columnist Richard Strout in the New Republic, noting the rumors about Roosevelt’s health. “[Truman] will make a passable Vice President. But Truman as President of the United States in times like these?”

  Even Mamma Truman had something to say. “I would rather have had him stay in the Senate,” said the ninety-one-year-old. “He did not want it. They shoved him into it.”

  Ten days after resigning from his committee, Truman went to the White House as the vice presidential nominee for the first time. He arrived in a slightly off mood, because the night before, Bess, in Independence, had informed him over the phone that the sons of two of his friends had died in action overseas. The White House had a way of intimidating visitors, anyway. The president gave Truman a hero’s welcome.

  “You’d have thought I was the long lost brother,” he wrote Bess.

  Outside on the South Lawn the two men sat underneath a magnolia tree planted years earlier by Andrew Jackson. Servants brought tea and sardines on toast. It was hot, and they sat in shirtsleeves, Truman in a hanging tie, Roosevelt in a bow tie. When Roosevelt lifted the teapot, Truman’s eyes bulged. The president’s hands shook so much, he could barely pour a cup of tea. The conversation moved to the war, difficulties in China, and the upcoming campaign. Roosevelt was so busy with war business, he said, he would rely on Truman to carry the load. Truman suggested he use an airplane for easier travel, but Roosevelt did not like the idea.

  “One of us has to stay alive,” he said.

  The pair smiled for photographers—“the flash light newspaper picture boys,” as Truman called them. Then the VP nominee headed back to his office in the Senate building, where his friend Harry Vaughan was hanging around.

  “You know,” Truman said soberly, “I am concerned about the president’s health. I had no idea he was in such feeble condition. In pouring cream in his tea, he got more cream in the saucer than he did in the cup. His hands are shaking and he talks with considerable difficulty. It doesn’t seem to be any mental lapse of any kind, but physically, he’s just going to pieces.”

  Nevertheless, Harry had an election to plan for. It would be America’s first wartime presidential election since Lincoln beat George McClellan in 1864.

  ///

  In early October 1944, Truman kissed his wife and daughter good-bye and set off on a 7,500-mile nationwide campaign tour. Aboard his train car were Matthew Connelly, who would work on speeches (“What do I know about politics?” Connelly asked before their departure, to which Truman responded, “Nevermind that, you’ve got a pretty good teacher”), and Eddie McKim, who would serve as security. McKim would stand next to Truman during speeches and rallies, pretending to have a gun. “Nobody knew whether or not I was a Secret Service man,” McKim noted. The candidate had worked through hard-fought Missouri elections before, but this was a national campaign. The Democratic National Committee called the shots and covered the bills. The committee’s secretary, George Allen, was the “advance man,” going from town to town to drum up a crowd so when Truman arrived on his train, he could step out onto a platform on the back, where a loudspeaker system was set up. He would give a speech—sometimes to hundreds, other times to a dozen people—then head to the next town.

  At Madison Square Garden a young crooner named Frank Sinatra introduced Truman. In Pittsburgh, the Truman entourage enjoyed a twenty-six-motorcycle police escort to a speaking hall, where the film star Orson Welles turned up to campaign for the ticket. Truman’s speeches were still awkward and devoid of charisma. “His voice is good but his delivery . . . gallops,” one reporter wrote that summer. “It sounds like ‘Oh-God-when-will-I-be-finished’ while he’s talking and ‘Thank-God-I-am-finished’ when he hits the last sentence.”

  The candidate’s appeal was his everyman persona. He was your neighbor, or the guy standing on line at the pharmacy, who just happened to be running for VP. Truman was “one of the most amazing stories in American democracy,” wrote one Boston Globe reporter. “It is the story of an average man, swept to dizzy heights against his will, a little bewildered by it all and doubting whether it is really true.” His message was a simple one: Now, in the climactic moments of the world war, was not the time to change chief executives.

  “There will be no time [for a new president] to learn,” Truman told a group of three thousand in Lamar, Missouri—unable at the time to pick up on the extraordinary irony of this statement. “And mistakes once made cannot be unmade . . . At no time in history has a President possessed such knowledge of foreign leaders and their problems.”

  He knew he would be attacked for his Pendergast connection, and he weathered the storm. As he had anticipated, the story of his wife on the payroll played big. The prominent writer and congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce taunted Mrs. Truman, calling her “Payroll Bess.” The Chicago Tribune published the most vitriolic anti-Truman columns, with titles such as “Meet Truman, Pendergast’s Oiler of Roads,” and “Truman Reign in County an Epic of Waste.”

  One night Truman was asleep aboard his train in Peoria, Illinois, when reporters suddenly mobbed his car. The Hearst press, he learned, was about to print a story saying Truman had once been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, back in his early days in Jackson County. In the middle of the night the White House’s press secretary, Jonathan Daniels, called Democratic National Committee secretary George Allen, who was in a hotel room in Peoria.

  “Jonathan was worried,” Allen recalled. “And so was I.”

  E
arly the next morning Allen boarded the Truman train. He pushed Truman into a bathroom—the only place they could talk alone. If the story was true, Allen said, it would be a disaster to Roosevelt’s candidacy. If it was not, they would sue Hearst. Truman insisted it was a lie, but he did not want any lawsuit. He would deny the story and let it go. His associates would never forget Truman’s composure. “It shook the whole universe except one man,” recalled Tom Evans, the candidate’s hometown friend, who was aboard the Truman train at the time. “Mr. Truman wasn’t a bit worried.”

  The KKK story splashed across newspapers all over the country. Truman issued calm denials, and a crafty researcher was able to find a Kansas City Star article showing that the Klan had opposed Truman in a 1926 Jackson County election. (“We are unalterably opposed to Harry Truman,” the story quoted Klan officials saying.) The scandal blew over, as Truman said it would.

  In early November the train pulled into Kansas City. In front of his hometown crowd, Truman delivered the most ironic sentence of his life: “Ask yourself if you want a man with no experience to sit at the peace table with Churchill, Stalin, and Chiang Kai-shek.” The irony was apparent to no one at the time.

  ///

  On election night—Tuesday, November 7, 1944—the extended Truman family rallied around Mamma Truman in Grandview, while Harry, Bess, and Margaret stayed at the Muehlebach in Kansas City, in the hotel’s penthouse suite, not far from where the Truman & Jacobson haberdashery once stood. Truman paced through the crowd of guests, saying, “Everybody around here is nervous but me.” He loved bourbon, but he was an expert at nursing a drink; others were not so skilled. Bess and Margaret were appalled by the evening’s drunkenness. At one point a radio announcer reported that Truman’s home state of Missouri might tilt Republican.

  “Wow,” Truman said, “I think this calls for a concert.” News photographers snapped away as he sat at a piano and regaled guests with Paderewski’s Minuet in G.

  All night the race rocked back and forth, and the clock read 3:45 a.m. in Washington when Dewey conceded. Franklin Roosevelt would be the first fourth-term president, and Harry Truman his number two. That night, after the guests had gone, Truman eased himself onto a bed in his suite at the Muehlebach Hotel. No longer in the public eye, he felt the impact of what was about to happen. A friend named Harry Easley was with him. “[Truman] told me that the last time that he saw Mr. Roosevelt he had the pallor of death on his face and he knew that he would be President before the term was out,” Easley recalled. “He said he was going to have to depend on his friends.”

  It seemed only yesterday that Truman was plowing fields in Grandview, daydreaming about the adventures of Andrew Jackson. At so many points over the previous twenty years, it appeared his career in politics would not survive. Now he had been elected Missouri’s first vice president. Roosevelt cabled Truman directly the next morning.

  Hon. Harry S. Truman

  Hotel Muehlbach [sic]

  Kansas City, Missouri

  I am very happy that things have gone so well. My thanks and congratulations for your splendid campaign. I will see you very soon in Washington.

  Roosevelt

  Thousands shuffled through a thin layer of snow onto the White House lawn on the morning of January 20, 1945, to see the president’s fourth inauguration. The ceremony was held on the White House’s South Portico rather than at the Capitol. It would be the smallest and soberest inauguration on record, out of deference to soldiers fighting overseas. The Marine Band played “Hail to the Chief”; the Episcopal bishop of Washington, Reverend Angus Dun, offered a prayer; then Chief Justice Harlan Stone approached the speaker’s platform. In the crowd were Eddie Jacobson, Truman’s old haberdashery partner, and Ted Marks, the best man at Truman’s wedding. So too was Jim Pendergast, the nephew of Tom Pendergast.

  The incoming VP was the first to take the oath, and Bess and Margaret watched from nearby. Flanked by American flags, he spoke the historic words; it was so cold, his frozen breath could be seen from a distance. In seconds it was done, and he retreated to his chair.

  Roosevelt was next. With legs locked straight by steel braces, Roosevelt stood coatless and hatless in a bitter wind; his speech was brief—barely longer than Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The world had changed so much in recent times, he told his audience. “We have learned to be citizens of the world,” he said. “We have learned the simple truth, as Emerson said, that ‘the only way to have a friend is to be one.’” Roosevelt looked so weak at this moment, his jaw dangled open, as if he was too weary to pull it closed. Many would recount their shock at his appearance. Recalled Margaret: “I suddenly found myself feeling depressed at the climax of a day that I had thought was going to be one of the high points of my life.”

  As Truman greeted well-wishers outside, a dramatic scene unfolded in private inside the White House. The president went to the Green Room to rest, where he was seized suddenly by stabbing chest pains. He grabbed his son James’s arm and said, “Jimmy, I can’t take this unless you get me a stiff drink. You’d better make it straight.” A minute later, Roosevelt was pouring whiskey into his mouth, fortifying himself for the reception.

  Truman left the proceedings forty minutes before it was over, catching a ride with a friend back to the Senate building. When he got to his office (he chose to keep the same one, suite 240, which he had recently moved into), a custodian was painting a new sign on the door: THE VICE PRESIDENT. He took the opportunity to call his mother.

  “Now you behave yourself,” Mamma Truman told him.

  With correspondence piled on his desk, Truman began his new job—what little of it there was.

  ///

  Two days after the inauguration, Truman presided over the Senate for the first time. He received an ovation, and when the moment was right, he smacked a gavel to begin the proceedings. The gavel was said to be carved from a tree planted on the Capitol grounds by George Washington. One day later, January 23, Roosevelt left for Yalta with his entourage, where the group would meet with the Soviets and the British in what would turn out to be the most controversial of the secret Grand Alliance conferences. All of Roosevelt’s trusted advisors would attend, from Jimmy Byrnes to Harry Hopkins, Admiral Leahy to George C. Marshall. Truman remained behind in Washington.

  The same week that Roosevelt left for Yalta, Truman arrived in his office one morning, and Matthew Connelly—who was now his confidential secretary—approached him with a strained look on his face. The conversation, as Connelly recalled it:

  “I’ve got some bad news for you,” Connelly said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Tom Pendergast died.”

  Truman understood: this would be a major issue. If he went to the funeral, he would be bitterly criticized. If he did not, he would disappoint himself. Crook or not, Pendergast had given Truman more political opportunities than any other figure by far.

  “Tom died?” Truman said. “What do you think I should do?”

  “I know what you’re going to do,” said Connelly. “You’re going to his funeral.”

  “That’s right.”

  With Connelly’s help, Truman commandeered a military plane and took off. His presence at Pendergast’s funeral was the talk of the town in Washington; even Truman’s political opponents had to admit, it was a gutsy move. “That was one of the greatest things he ever did in the minds of the political public,” Connelly said. “It was awfully popular.”

  Roosevelt was still aboard the ship Quincy steaming home when news of the secret, historic Yalta conference was published around the globe. Plans for a joint occupation of a defeated Germany, for the future of former Nazi-occupied nations such as Poland, for the foundation of the United Nations, were now all in place. The war was reaching its climax. In Europe, Allied forces had stormed the beaches at Normandy and had defeated the Nazis in the Battle of the Bulge. Russia’s Red Army was preparing a major offensive from the east toward Berlin. In the Pacific, U.S. forces under General M
acArthur and Admiral Nimitz had pushed from one atoll to the next, turning sparsely populated, jungle-thick islands into roaring airports where bombers could strike at mainland Japan. The Japanese had proved fanatical in their resistance. Upon losing the struggle for Saipan, Japanese citizens had committed mass suicide—mothers with their children, hurling themselves from cliffs. Time magazine put a prescient question to readers: “Do the suicides mean that the whole Japanese race will choose death before surrender?”

  Over the next weeks, secluded from the public, Roosevelt engaged with Stalin in secret via transatlantic cable, as the diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the United States took a frightening turn. Ambassador Averell Harriman’s communiqués from Moscow sounded the alarm; the mood in Moscow had suddenly turned paranoiac and sinister. “We now have ample proof that the Soviet government views all matters from the standpoint of their own selfish interests,” Harriman cabled the State Department in early April, just days before Roosevelt’s death. “We must clearly realize that the Soviet program is the establishment of totalitarianism, ending personal liberty and democracy as we know and respect it.”

  Truman had almost no more knowledge of the international situation than the average American who studied the newspapers. Privately, the president disparaged Truman. “He never regarded the new Vice President as part of his operational relationships,” said Thomas Blaisdell, who worked in Washington’s Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion. “I was custodian of the President’s secret war files,” recalled White House assistant naval aide William Rigdon. “But not once had I been instructed to show any document to the vice president. He simply had not been worked into the Roosevelt administration.”

  Then came April 12, the day of Roosevelt’s death, and the day when Truman’s presidential odyssey began. When Truman drifted off to sleep on the night of April 12 after taking the presidential oath, he knew that the following day was likely to be the hardest day of his life. And it would only be day one of his administration, with nearly four years left to go.