The Accidental President

by A. J. Baime

  Regarding Poland, Churchill had transmitted another stern cable to Stalin calling for a new Democratic regime in Warsaw. Stalin had written back, and this communiqué was forwarded to Truman. Stalin indicated that Churchill’s attitude “excludes the possibility of an agreed solution of the Polish question.” Stalin admitted that the Soviets had arrested the sixteen members of the Polish underground. They were “undergoing investigation” for “planning and carrying out diversionary acts” and “maintaining illegal wireless transmitting stations.” Their safety could not be assured.

  The dark shadow of Stalinist communism was cast across eastern Europe. It appeared that Ambassador Harriman’s fear—that the Russians were planning “a barbarian invasion of Europe”—was becoming fact.

  Truman agreed with the prime minister: correspondence could only go so far. It was imperative that the three leaders meet in person. “There should now be no valid excuse for Stalin’s refusing to come west toward us,” Truman wrote Churchill. With regard to timing, the president noted that he would not be able to leave the country “before the end of the fiscal year (June 30).”

  Churchill urged Truman to plan this tripartite meeting sooner. “Mr. President,” he cabled on May 11, “in these next two months the gravest matters in the world will be decided.” The next day Churchill cabled again:

  I am profoundly concerned about the European situation. I learn that half the American Air Force in Europe has already begun to move to the Pacific theatre. The newspapers are full of the great movements of the American armies out of Europe . . . Anyone can see that in a very short space of time our armed power on the Continent will have vanished, except for moderate forces to hold down Germany. Meanwhile, what is to happen about Russia? . . . I feel deep anxiety because of their misinterpretation of the Yalta decisions, their attitude towards Poland, their overwhelming influence in the Balkans, excepting Greece, the difficulties they make about Vienna, the combination of Russian power and the territories under their control or occupied, coupled with the Communist technique in so many other countries and above all, their power to maintain very large armies in the field for a long time.

  “An iron curtain is drawn down upon their front,” Churchill wrote, using the term iron curtain for the first time. “We do not know what is going on behind.”

  22

  ON SATURDAY, MAY 11, Truman stood at an army airstrip outside Washington as the Sacred Cow—Roosevelt’s specially outfitted airplane—descended from a clear blue sky and touched down, with Truman’s mother and sister aboard. The first aircraft built to fly a president, the Sacred Cow was a Douglas VC-54C Skymaster with a quartet of 1,450-horsepower engines and a long, gleaming silver fuselage. It had an elevator built in to lift FDR’s wheelchair into the cabin, and a top speed of roughly 300 miles per hour. Roosevelt’s circle had christened this airplane the Flying White House, but the press had renamed it the Sacred Cow, and that name had stuck. It was an idiom meaning above criticism, and while the name referred to the high security surrounding this aircraft, reporters joked that the moniker referred more to FDR than to the vehicle itself.

  After the Sacred Cow taxied, its hatch opened and Truman went aboard to fetch his mother and sister, who had flown in from Missouri. When frontier-bred Mamma Truman emerged from the president’s plane with her son’s arm in one hand and a cane in the other, she scowled at the crowd of photographers and newsmen awaiting.

  “Oh, fiddlesticks!” said Mamma Truman. “If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have come.”

  “And how are all at home?” Truman asked his mother.

  “Oh, fine, just fine.”

  Next Truman fetched his sister, Mary Jane, and the three stood for photographers, Harry waving his gray hat in the air, his face “wreathed in smiles,” as one reporter chronicled. Mamma Truman stole the show. She looked like what she was: a ninety-two-year-old farm woman walking right out of the nineteenth century, in her best Sunday clothes—a long and simple dark-blue dress and a blue straw hat with a gardenia on it nearly as big as her head. “She’s certainly a grand old lady,” the Sacred Cow’s pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Harry T. Myers, said. It was Mamma Truman’s first airplane ride, her first visit to Washington, and her first time seeing her son since he had become president of the United States.

  When the Trumans arrived at the White House, Bess, Margaret, and Mrs. Wallace were there to meet them. For the first time since April 12, Truman had no official appointments on his calendar. His Saturday was free, and his mother’s visit coincided with Mother’s Day weekend. He played a joke on his mother, escorting her into the Lincoln Bedroom, with the family in tow.

  “Mamma,” Truman said, “if you’ve a mind to, you may use this bed while you’re here.”

  “What?” she cried. “Sleep in the bed THAT MAN used?”

  She still had not gotten over the South’s losing the Civil War, and she certainly would not be sleeping in any bed of Abraham Lincoln’s. She chose a less heralded spot down the hall, much to the amusement of the whole Truman family.

  White House staffers were surprised to see Mamma Truman wandering the mansion’s hallways during her visit, engaging surprised strangers in conversation. She liked to tell anyone who would listen: “When he was a boy, Harry could plow the straightest furrow in Jackson County.” Truman introduced his mother to the State Department’s Joseph Davies at a dinner in the White House. “She is a dear little old lady . . . bright as a squirrel, and ‘All American,’” Davies wrote in his diary. She told Davies she had come “to see that Harry was started right.” During the conversation, the name of a certain politician from a northern state was mentioned.

  “Isn’t he a Yankee?” Mamma Truman asked.

  “Yes, Mamma,” Harry said, “but you know there are good Yankees as well as bad and good Rebels.”

  “Well,” she said, “if there are any good Yankees, I haven’t seen one yet.”

  Truman knew his family had suffered through his unlikely rise, and their discomfort grated on him. He liked to think that it no longer mattered what the press said about him. “Nothing they can say about me that hasn’t been said,” he wrote in the summer of 1945. “They can’t do me any harm now. As Ed McKim says, there is no promotion to this job.” But his family was not used to the spotlight. “It is a terrible, and I mean terrible nuisance to be kin to the president of the United States,” he wrote in one letter. “Reporters have been haunting every relative and purported relative I ever heard of and they’ve probably made life miserable for my mother, brother and sister. I am sorry for it, but it can’t be helped.”

  Now Mamma and Mary Jane were in the White House, and Truman was hoping they would find some fun in it.

  On Sunday morning the Trumans went to services in the chapel of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Truman had, by presidential proclamation, made this a national day of prayer in lieu of VE-day, and because it was Mother’s Day. After the service, the Trumans headed to the Washington Navy Yard to board the USS Potomac—which Roosevelt had christened the presidential yacht. A cruise aboard “the Floating White House” offered views of the banks of the Potomac River, which had played such an important role in the war that Mamma Truman could never let go of, the war lost by the Confederacy in the days of Lincoln.

  All over the country on this weekend, newspapers chronicled the story of the end of the president’s first month in office. It was also the end of the official mourning period for Roosevelt, so flags could be raised to the top of their masts on the following Monday morning, all over the United States and at embassies from Moscow to Mexico City. The month had flown by in a montage of historic events. The Axis surrender in Italy, the execution of Mussolini, the suicide of Hitler, the Russian capture of Berlin, Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender, the liberation of death camps, the firebombings of Japan. The United Nations Conference was under way in San Francisco, and the president had been briefed on the most startling secret in human history.

  Truman wa
s a man who knew how to savor the finer moments, and his family’s visit surely must have felt like one of them. He was surrounded by the four most important people in his life—his mother, his sister, his wife, and his daughter—on the first Sunday after the end of the European war. They could remember not long ago when his political career seemed sure to end, after the Pendergast imprisonment just before Truman’s 1940 Senate reelection campaign. By all odds, he should have celebrated his sixty-first birthday quietly in Independence, awaiting his Senate pension check in the mail. All of this would be a dream to awaken from. But it was real.

  ///

  Now in Truman’s second month in office, the White House had taken on his personality. At some point during those early days, a sign appeared on his desk displaying a motto borrowed from Missouri’s own Mark Twain: ALWAYS DO RIGHT. THIS WILL GRATIFY SOME PEOPLE AND ASTONISH THE REST.

  He liked the business of government to run efficiently—as crisp as the folds in his pocket square. When he learned that the average White House lunch for employees cost the government $2.50, he wanted to know why, since the army fed its men at 50 cents. He agreed with many of his cabinet officers who had criticized Roosevelt for his disorganized administrative style. Roosevelt, as summed up succinctly by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “deliberately organized—or disorganized—his system of command to insure that important decisions were passed on to the top. His favorite technique was to keep grants of authority incomplete, jurisdictions uncertain, charters overlapping.” The new president wanted teamwork and loyalty as unifying principles, an organized chain of command, and trustworthy heads of departments who could make wise decisions on their own.

  Truman also stressed the kind of work ethic he had learned from his father—a farmer’s work ethic. “You have no idea how hard he worked,” recalled Roberta Barrows, Matthew Connelly’s assistant.

  The president’s egalitarianism caught the White House staff off guard. Unlike the Roosevelts, who were accustomed to ignoring hovering servants, Truman insisted on addressing the kitchen staff by first name. His driver, secret service man Floyd Boring, recalled his first conversations with Truman while at the wheel. “By the way,” Truman said to him, “I see you are driving most of the time. How are you connected with me?”

  “Well, Mr. President,” said Boring, “I’ve been assigned to drive you.”

  “Well, could you tell me your name?” It was Floyd Boring. “You don’t mind if I call you Floyd, do you?”

  Recalled Boring: “So that’s the kind of guy he was.”*

  Fueled by restless energy, Truman darted from office to office between his appointments, rather than remaining behind his closed door, as Roosevelt did. Roberta Barrows, whose desk was near the Oval Office door, jumped to her feet each time the president stepped out, and she curtsied. The curtsying struck Truman as odd; why would anyone curtsy for him, Harry Truman? One day he emerged from his office, saw Barrows curtsy, and said, “Now look, I know you respect the office of the president of the United States, but I cannot sit in that office by myself, between appointments, all day long. I want to know what is going on. I’m used to the Capitol. And you’ll see me every day, in and out of other people’s offices, so I want you from here on in not to rise.”

  “I appreciate that,” she said. “Thank you, sir.” The curtsying stopped.

  The president could inspire laughter, sometimes in spite of himself. People enjoyed poking fun at his attire. He wore “matching combinations of socks, tie, and handkerchief for his breast pocket,” assistant press secretary Eben Ayers wrote in his diary. “Perhaps it’s a hangover from the days when he was in the clothing business.” The British fashion writers in particular picked apart Truman’s wardrobe. (He responded that it was none of their business.) His sense of humor many found startling in its impropriety. At one dinner in the White House, Truman told a group of cabinet officers that he should never have been president but rather a piano player in a whorehouse.

  “That would have been too bad,” responded Lewis Schwellenbach (whom Truman appointed secretary of labor in 1945), “because then we never would have known you!”

  “Why be so high and mighty,” Truman came back, “as though you had never been in a whorehouse!?” (Commerce secretary Wallace wrote in his diary that Schwellenbach “seemed to be genuinely shocked.”)

  The men in the pressroom roared with laughter over another Truman story. “Just a few days after Truman became President,” recalled correspondent Robert Nixon, “without any notice to anybody, [he] suddenly walked to the front door of the White House (he was a very rapid walker), went bouncing down the stairs, down the driveway and out through the gate. The astonished Secret Service did a double take . . . He took them completely by surprise. Finally they went running after him.” Truman needed some pocket change, so he was headed to his bank. “People were turning around, staring at this man walking briskly down the street. They remarked, ‘You know, that looks like President Truman.’ Which it was, but they wouldn’t believe their eyes.”

  Truman’s favorite leisure activity was poker. He liked an eight-card hand and he dealt left-handed, and by May 1945, some notable players had sniffed out his Friday-night games in the White House, which were a regular release from the relentless pressure of politics. “You know, I’m almost like a kid,” he once said of his poker outings. “I can hardly wait to start.” These were never big money games, for Truman did not have big money. When reporters asked what the beverage of choice was, he answered: “Kentucky bourbon.” Old friends Harry Vaughan and federal loan administrator John Snyder had played with Truman for years. But new faces appeared, such as ambassador to the Soviet Union Harriman, who, although rich beyond most people’s ability to fathom, “guarded his chips as though he were on relief,” as White House legal counsel Clark Clifford recalled. A young congressman from Texas named Lyndon Baines Johnson also found his way to Truman’s poker table, where he was particularly cunning and aggressive.

  Insiders had thus far one major criticism of Truman: his friends. Harry Vaughan—the White House jester and military aide to the president (Truman would make him a general in the army before the end of the summer)—walked around in an ill-fitting uniform. As Truman Committee investigator Walter Hehmeyer put it: “Harry Vaughan was as out of place in the White House as a hippopotamus in a bird bath.” Truman’s crony Eddie McKim, now a White House administrative assistant, had a tendency to embarrass the president with an ill-founded sense of power, a strange condition the Truman family had begun to call “Potomac fever.” McKim enjoyed telling people in the executive mansion what to do, though he had no authority to do so. At one point, McKim ordered staffers to stop responding to Eleanor Roosevelt’s condolence letters, noting that “Mrs. Roosevelt is no longer riding the gravy train.” Then McKim took twenty-one-year-old Margaret out on the town, not bringing her home until past midnight, without informing either the president or secret service. Truman was forced to fire McKim. “I just can’t have him around anymore,” he told a Missouri friend, Harry Easley. “That’s all there is to it. So he’s gone.”

  “Truman brought in a bunch of incompetents down to the White House,” noted Nixon, the White House correspondent. “They didn’t know first base from breakfast.” When asked about this matter, the president responded: “How can I bring big people into government when I don’t even know who they are, and they don’t know me?”

  America was getting to know the new First Family too. When Truman’s sister, Mary Jane, took a trip to see a cousin in Texas in May 1945, she was surprised by a welcoming ceremony with photographers and the mayor of Dallas bearing a dozen roses. Reporters followed her all over town. One concluded, “The more we see and hear of these Trumans, the better we like them.”

  Margaret enjoyed the perks of being the president’s daughter. She had her own car and driver, and she had a library of films to choose from in the White House movie theater. But the job of First Daughter came with difficulties. “I had to learn to sa
y as little as possible when reporters were around,” she recalled. “And most annoying of all, I had to accept the fact that I was a public property. Not only did everyone in the world feel entitled to know all the details of my life, but there were any number of people, both in and out of the media, who felt free to comment on my appearance. My nose was ‘crooked’ and ought to be ‘fixed.’ I had ‘heavy’ legs . . . I was ‘immature.’ I was too ‘mature.’” Margaret’s new companion lightened the emotional load—Mike, an Irish setter puppy given to her in May 1945 by Robert Hannegan, whom Truman had just appointed postmaster general.

  Bess, meanwhile, was counting the days until June, when she could leave Washington for Independence, where she planned to spend the summer months. The North Delaware Street house offered a respite from the caginess of Washington, which she despised. She had released a statement saying that she never would hold any press conferences, and had managed to keep her name out of the news. She did, however, host her first White House tea, at 5 p.m. on May 24. Bess Truman had never imagined any party quite like this one. Dozens of women—the wives of diplomats—converged, representing thirty-nine nations, including Bolivia, Cuba, Iran, Latvia, Paraguay, Thailand, and Russia.

  When Bess went to her bridge club to play cards with her friends for the first time since she had become First Lady, all the women rose and applauded when she entered the room. She felt humiliated.