Bess Truman

by Margaret Truman

  But politics remained at the center of their lives. Bess continued to report the newspapers’ exaltation of Maurice Milligan. Dad used this fact for a mordant reflection on the press. “He’s a drunkard, libertine and a grafter but he’s helping them now so he is a great man.” Then he added, with that indestructible optimism which Bess did not share. “But it will work out in the end.”

  Meanwhile, his railroad committee hearings roared to a climax, in which he uncovered skulduggery between the Wall Street looters and a federal judge. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who had dug up a fair amount of financial dirt in his time, was so impressed, he invited the senator to tea and spent most of the afternoon talking with him. To Bess, Dad dismissed it with his usual modesty. “It was a rather exclusive and brainy party,” he wrote. “I didn’t exactly belong but they made me think I did.” Dad ended his investigation with a speech that more than lived up to the advance billing he gave Bess. He said it would “blister some very outstanding lawyers.” It parboiled them and their financier clients for legally looting a long list of railroads with complete indifference to the public’s safety or the nation’s needs.

  A few days before Christmas 1937, Harry Truman strode through the door of 219 North Delaware into Bess’ arms. Within moments, he stirred an echo of the surprise she had felt in 1910 when she encountered the husky, wind-burned farmer who had replaced the bookish boy she had known in school. There was new confidence in his voice, new pride in his eyes. He had proved to himself and to a watching world that he belonged in the United States Senate. At least as important, he had a wife who was growing more eager to help him play that great American game, politics, in Washington, D.C.

  The Washington to which we Trumans returned in January 1938 was a troubled city. In the White House, the president sulked and fumed over the defeat of the Supreme Court bill. FDR’s massive spending had failed to end the Depression. In fact, unemployment had soared to a new record - 19 percent. In Congress, the split between Democratic liberals and conservatives remained unhealed. The conservatives teamed up with the Republicans to reject one Roosevelt measure after another. It was an alliance that would torment Democratic presidents for the next thirty years.

  Even more alarming, in some ways, was a bloc of congressmen who thought Americans should isolate themselves from a world that was growing uglier and uglier. Over in Europe, a man named Adolf Hitler was rearming Germany and persecuting Jews and bullying English and French politicians into letting him do as he pleased. On the other side of the world, the Japanese were repudiating the rule of law and adopting a mixture of totalitarian state worship and militarism that inspired them to attack China and cast greedy eyes on other nations in Asia.

  President Roosevelt announced that we needed a strong, national-defense program to cope with these clear and present dangers. The isolationists responded by tightening the neutrality laws, and for a topper, proposed the Ludlow Resolution, which called for an amendment to the Constitution requiring a national referendum before Congress could vote the United States into a war. A poll purportedly showed 73 percent support for this crackpot idea. President Roosevelt denounced it, but, grim evidence of his declining popularity, it almost passed the House of Representatives (where the Democrats had a 328 to 107 majority), losing by only twenty-one votes.

  Harry Truman continued to support the president, especially on the issue of national defense. But isolationism, combined with the conservative revolt, made it clear that the Democrats were in trouble as 1938 began, and nowhere more so than in Missouri, where they continued to inflict awful wounds on themselves. Federal Attorney Maurice Milligan was still putting Kansas City Democrats in jail for padding the voting rolls. Governor Stark was gleefully collaborating in the assault on the Pendergast machine.

  A glimpse of Mother’s state of mind is visible in a letter she wrote to Dad when he was at reserve officers’ camp in the summer of 1938. She was awakened in the middle of the night by a man who sounded drunk. He berated Harry Truman for failing to go to the wake of one John Maloney’s wife. Bess tried to explain that Senator Truman was out of town. The caller demanded a telegram from her to that effect to show the grieving husband. Bess decided not to send it, fearing, as she said, that there was a “catch” in it somewhere. The tireless attempts to link her husband to the Pendergast machine made her justifiably wary.

  In this same letter, Bess also enclosed a clipping from the Independence Examiner, endorsing Judge James M. Douglas for renomination to the state Supreme Court and Bennett Clark for the U.S. Senate. She referred to them wryly as two “touching” editorials. The Bennett Clark endorsement was proof of Colonel Southern’s by now inveterate opposition to President Roosevelt. But in many ways, the praise for Douglas was more significant.

  Judge Douglas was being backed by Governor Stark. Tom Pendergast and the Kansas City Democracy were backing Judge James Billings from southeast Missouri. It was a test of strength and loyalty within the party, and Democrats like Colonel Southern were deserting Tom Pendergast left and right. Stark used every crooked tactic he knew to win a narrow victory in the August primary, the only election that mattered. It was the beginning of the end of Tom Pendergast’s power. Henceforth, FDR ceased to regard him as the Democratic spokesman for Missouri. Instead, to Dad’s and Bennett Clark’s fury, the president began consulting Governor Stark on federal appointments.

  This only deepened Bess’ dislike of FDR. She did not have Dad’s gift for entertaining two points of view simultaneously. He could approve of FDR’s policies, which he thought were good for the country, and deplore his devious, capricious personality. Bess simply disliked the man for the tricky, inconsistent way he played politics. But she never passed over into that tribe of people who hated the president. That was a phenomenon to which we have been exposed in more recent years. It was just as bad in 1938, when the hatred of FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt peaked.

  For a while, this hatred all but poisoned the air of Washington. Some people said they preferred Stalin to Roosevelt. Others concocted genealogies to prove his name was “Rosenvelt,” and thereby Jewish. A national news service actually circulated a backgrounder that claimed the president had syphilis. They only whispered the other half of the story, that he had caught it from Eleanor. Bess heard (or heard about) Eleanor Roosevelt derided as a Communist, a “Negro lover,” a prostitute. She saw the Roosevelt children assaulted with similar slanders. It did not incline her to view the presidency as a desirable job.

  Back in Missouri that summer, Mother tried to escape the local acrimony by teaching me to play tennis. This proved she could be optimistic about some things or maybe it just confirmed that love is blind. She simply refused to believe that she had a fourteen-year-old daughter who was one of the world’s worst athletes. “I tried to show M. how to serve but it was a washout,” she wrote Dad.

  Mother doggedly insisted I had “the makings of a good player.” She added a wry, middle-aged observation: “I am convinced the courts are about a mile longer than they were when we played.”

  She continued to keep her part-time soldier in touch with politics. Senator Bennett Clark was almost sunk when some enterprising reporter found out he was taxing Democratic jobholders in his St. Louis bailiwick 2.25 percent of their salaries to pay for his reelection campaign. “The receipts had B’s picture on them!” Bess gasped. But Governor Stark, the newspapers’ current white knight, was taxing state employees 5 percent of their pay to elect Judge Douglas, so the story was allowed to fizzle.

  Bess also dealt with the petty annoyances. Emma Griggs appeared on our doorstep with her son John, who was out of a job again. Bess had to listen to their woes. “They’re down on everybody on earth except the Griggses,” she wrote. By the time they left, she was “boiling” and had all she could do to remain a lady.

  She also reported to her husband on the progress of one of President Roosevelt’s less astute political maneuvers. He had written a letter to Senator Alben Barkley in the spring, to help him fen
d off a serious primary challenge from Kentucky’s governor A. B. “Happy” Chandler. In the letter, he told “Dear Alben” that Chandler was “a dangerous person . . . of the Huey Long type, but with less ability.” FDR then persuaded John L. Lewis to put his mine-workers’ muscle and money behind Barkley and looked the other way while WPA administrators turned their employees into Barkley campaign workers. In the summer of 1938, Roosevelt went to Kentucky to speak on Alben’s behalf. The contrast between this solicitude and the president’s apparent indifference to Harry Truman’s political welfare only confirmed Bess’ disillusion with him.

  All this was a prelude to the 1938 midterm elections. Roosevelt supporters went down like tenpins all over the country. The Republicans won a dozen governorships, eighty House seats, and eight Senate seats, without losing a single incumbent. It was easy to see this news was bad for Senator Truman, who was up for reelection in 1940.

  It was now taken for granted that Governor Stark, who could not succeed himself, was going to run against Dad. This worry haunted Bess and Harry throughout 1939. On the one hand, a great deal still depended on the capricious president. Harry Truman was the last man in the world to change his political principles to get elected, and he believed in what Roosevelt was doing. He remained a Roosevelt man. The question was, would Roosevelt remain a Truman man? Governor Stark tirelessly courted the president, flattering and fawning on him the way he had soft-soaped Senator Truman and Tom Pendergast in 1935. They soon were on a “Dear Franklin”-“Dear Lloyd” basis in their letters. Bess and Harry - and almost everyone else in Missouri - soon heard about this development.

  Then the political walls tumbled down in Kansas City. The FBI, the IRS, and a swarm of other government investigators tracked down the bribe the insurance companies had paid to Tom Pendergast. Worse, they discovered that Boss Tom had been cooking the books of eight companies that he owned, to avoid paying $1 million in income tax. Only then did the Trumans and most other people learn that he was a compulsive gambler who bet as much as $100,000 a day on horse races around the nation. The bribes and the unpaid taxes supported this habit.

  Boss Tom was indicted on April 7 and pleaded guilty on May 22, 1939. He stood before the judge, a humbled hulk of his former self, and was sentenced to fifteen months in the penitentiary. This was enough all by itself to give the Trumans political nightmares, But investigators soon revealed that Henry F. McElroy, the city manager of Kansas City, had his own unique brand of bookkeeping, which concealed a $20 million deficit. McElroy died before they could put him in jail, but other Pendergast loyalists, such as the former state insurance commissioner, Emmett J. O’Malley, and Matt Murray, who had succeeded Dad as reemployment director and went on to head the state WPA, joined Boss Tom in prison. Reading about these disasters from distant Washington, Bess remarked to her mother, “the whole town seems to have gone haywire.”

  The Trumans had no illusions about what this meant. “The terrible things done by the high-ups in K.C. will be a lead weight to me from now on,” Dad told Bess, a few months after the collapse. Having the Kansas City Star and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch against him did not help matters. The Star referred to him as “the last survivor of the once dominant Pendergast organization to hold high office.” The Post-Dispatch published an editorial that declared that Harry Truman was “automatically disqualified” from serving another term because he was a Pendergast man.

  In late September, Bess reported from Independence that the Star was accusing Dad of holding up the appointment of two deputies to Federal Attorney Maurice Milligan. The story implied that he was seeking petty revenge against the man who had put Tom Pendergast in jail. Dad had told Duke Shoop, the Star’s capital reporter, the White House would not consult him about the deputies and if they did, “they wouldn’t mean it.” Shoop - or the rewrite men in Kansas City - twisted this statement into the story they printed. Mournfully, Dad concluded: “It doesn’t make much difference what you say and you can rest assured that from now on they’ll willfully misconstrue everything I do.”

  The situation made Roosevelt’s opinion of Lloyd Stark all the more important. Bess’ heart leaped when Dad reported that FDR had told Senator Clyde L. Herring of Iowa that Stark was “an egotistical fool,” and he wanted to see Senator Truman reelected. She asked if she was free to repeat that to everyone she knew in Missouri. Dad’s reply suggests that he had acquired some of her dislike of FDR: “Go ahead and say what the president told [Herring] about Stark. It won’t hurt anything. They are about alike.”

  A few weeks later, Dad saw FDR, and the president insisted on talking Missouri politics with him. “I do not think your governor is a real liberal,” he said. “He has no sense of humor. He has a large ego.” The president said he was planning a swing around the country and urged Dad to get on his train when it entered Missouri. “You can rest assured your governor will without any invitation.” From there, Dad went to see Bennett Clark, who was “cockeyed [drunk] but very affectionate.” Bess had recently sent Dad a clipping from a St. Louis paper in which Clark had predicted Senator Truman would not run for reelection. Now Clark said he was going to announce he was supporting Senator Truman as soon as he got back to Missouri. Of course, he did no such thing.

  Adding further strain was the worsening situation around the world. Dad threw himself into the president’s struggle to get the neutrality laws changed so that the United States could deal with Germany and Japan. As the laws then stood, the president was forbidden to sell arms or munitions to either side in a war. It made the United States a spectator in world affairs and gave the dictators the illusion that they could get away with anything.

  When Japan attacked China in 1937, for instance, the president could do nothing but make disapproving noises. When FDR asked Hitler for assurances that he would not attack the weaker nations of the world, the Führer replied that he would be glad to promise not to invade the United States. Roosevelt haters in the Senate and elsewhere chortled almost as much as the Nazi deputies in the Reichstag.

  Dad got into this neutrality fight even though it endangered the Wheeler-Truman Transportation Bill on which he and Senator Wheeler had worked four years. The bill incorporated reforms of the abuses Senator Truman had found in the finances of the railroad industry, after his months of hearings, as well as other reforms needed to restore vitality to the nation’s transportation system. Pushing this bill through the Senate and House was a frustrating, exhausting business. It also was important to his survival as a senator. To have one’s name on a piece of major legislation was the best proof that Harry Truman had been a productive, hardworking lawmaker.

  Whether she was in Washington or Independence, Bess kept in touch with Senator Truman’s ever more complicated career. When he threw a party in his office as the Senate neared adjournment in the summer of 1939, she provided a ham that “went over big.” More to the point, Dad recited a list of names at the party, a mixture of isolationists and interventionists, liberals, and conservatives, and remarked that from Bess’ reading of the Congressional Record, she would no doubt wonder how they ever got along. They all wished him luck in his reelection campaign, which everyone knew already had begun.

  Happily, not everything in these years revolved around the dread of defeat in 1940. Bess’ enjoyment of life in Washington, D.C., continued to grow. By 1937, Dad was an established member of the Senate’s hardworking inner circle. He was a close friend of Vice President Garner. His growing prominence made Bess feel more socially secure - as well as more proud of her husband. Invitations to lunches, teas, and dinners multiplied. She even liked the way politics intertwined with these social occasions. For instance, when she told her mother that the Trumans had been invited to tea at Justice Brandeis’ home, she noted the invitation could not have arrived at a better time, with the Pendergast mess in all the papers.

  In another letter around this time, she made it clear that she had not lost her feet-on-the-ground Missouri approach to Washington life. She told her mothe
r of going to a “very high-brow dinner” at which a Chinese diplomat made a speech. “It was mostly propaganda,” she remarked. Bess was far more interested in an Indian girl who had practiced law in London for five years and was going back to India “to try to do something for the country. I imagine she’ll do it.” She summed up the rest of the company as “strictly a bunch of brain trusters (minus the Trumans) and a number of top columnists and state department people.”

  Bess became active in the Congressional Club, where wives of senators and representatives mingled for lunch and tea. She and Miriam Clark gave a tea for the wives of the Missouri delegation there and invited a national committeewoman to give a talk. Several months later, she told Dad with obvious pride that she had been asked to pour at another tea. She ran a Missouri bridge party for the benefit of the club and raised a whopping $58. (Remember, these were the days of the three-cent stamp.) When the Daughters of the American Revolution came to town for their convention, she gave a successful tea for the Missouri delegates.

  For enjoyment, however, nothing quite equaled the June 1939 visit of the King and Queen of England. I was in a near frenzy over it, and Mother was pretty enthralled herself. I had followed with anguish and fascination (I was now fifteen and a complete romantic) the drama of the royal house in recent years, culminating in the abdication of Edward VII to marry American-born Wallis Simpson. I implored Mother for a chance to examine the king and queen close-up to see if I could transfer my allegiance.

  We went down to the Capitol the day the royal couple came to Congress. Mother wrote Grandmother Wallace a vivid letter about it. “The whole of the capitol plaza was filled with chairs and it was the hottest place I ever got into. We sat there from 10-11:45 and just broiled, I wouldn’t have stuck it out but Marg had had such a glimpse of them the day before [as they whizzed by in a car]. When they came out they walked the whole length of the plaza thru the middle aisle and we were within fifteen or twenty feet of them so she got a good look. And she still prefers the Duke & Duchess!”