Bess Truman

by Margaret Truman

  Bess responded by turning up her worry machine several notches. Her letters were a series of inquiries about her mother’s ankles, Christine’s inflamed arm, Frank’s bad back. This was not entirely new. Thanks to Madge, she had been kept in touch with every cold, sore throat, toothache, and aching back that anyone in the Wallace enclave suffered. Bess tried to manage things from a distance of a thousand miles, warning Chris against taking her son David to school and her mother against cleaning the house until they were well again.

  Back in Washington, just as the Truman Committee began to pick up steam, the senator provided Bess (and me) with a worry that temporarily obliterated the minor ills of Delaware Street. At 4:00 a.m. on April 13, Dad awoke in agony, with excruciating pains shooting through his abdomen and up into his chest. Bess was sure he had fibbed about the army doctors’ examination too, and that he was having a heart attack. A doctor was summoned, and he turned out to be a good diagnostician. He said the fifty-six-year-old senator was probably having a gallbladder attack. It was a common Washington disease, brought on by too many lavish banquets. “The doctor says rich fat food is the principal cause of it,” Bess told Madge.

  The senator rested for a few days and then went over to Walter Reed Army Hospital, where X-rays confirmed the gallstones. The doctors put him on a strict diet, and he went back to work.

  The arsenal of democracy was going full blast all over the country. Other senators were getting reports from their constituents about chicanery here, there, and everywhere, and called on the Truman Committee to investigate them. One of the worst odors was coming from the Aluminum Company of America. When Alcoa’s president tried to defy the Truman Committee, Dad chewed him into little pieces and got headlines all over the country. “We’re getting somewhere,” the senator told Bess.

  Somehow, along with all this politics and social life, Bess managed to keep her seventeen-year-old daughter in focus. We frequently trotted off together to a movie or a concert or opera. Once or twice, she persuaded me to join her for a round of golf. She was not a phenomenon at that sport, having started late, so I could go along as a fellow duffer. Toward the end of the spring, she helped me give a luncheon for about twenty-five friends from Gunston Hall at Pierre’s, an inexpensive downtown restaurant. I never knew, until I read her letter to her mother, where she got the lovely floral centerpiece. She was shocked to discover the local florist was going to charge $12 for it. She went downtown and bought it from a flower cart for $4 and brought it to Pierre’s herself. Mother never lost her ability to pinch a penny.

  She and I also conducted a running battle over the athletic program at Gunston Hall. She insisted I participate. I strenuously maintained it was a waste of time. In one letter, she wearily remarked that for once she had gotten me off to gym without an argument. This imbroglio was temporarily resolved when I discovered fencing, which I liked. But the battle resumed after I graduated from Gunston Hall in 1942 and began at George Washington University, where there was no fencing coach, and some form of athletics was also required. Mother suggested swimming. I said I hated to put my face in the water. She could not understand that, either, and told me to do it or else. “Marg floated the width of the pool with her head under water today, so there’s some hope for her,” she told Dad, making me sound pathetic.

  Having raised four sons into near-adulthood, I can now view these skirmishes as more or less standard maneuvers in the eternal war between parents and children. Mother, having had somewhat quieter but, in some ways, more severe tussles with her mother, did not let these battles disturb her affection for me in the least. But she did not let my resistance change her maternal style, either. In July 1941, I was shipped home to stay with Grandmother while Fred and Christine and their children vacationed in Colorado. Mother’s letters to me are a good summary of that style.

  I was ordered to stay close to home. She never abandoned the fear that someone would try to kidnap me. “Dad told me to tell you not to go anywhere [underlined three times] with Perry. If you can think of an excuse, alright, but if you can’t, just tell him you can’t go.” This reduced me and Perry, my boyfriend of the moment, to sitting on the porch swing eating enormous amounts of candy, which he brought me by the two-pound box. Bess also wanted to know where Grandmother and I were sleeping and was relieved to learn we had both moved upstairs. She wrote that now she would “feel much easier about you.”

  She sent me separate amounts of money to pay for my music lessons and for my allowance. With the latter came a warning that I had to “make it go a long way.” We had a good laugh over one of these letters, which she inadvertently signed “Bess.” I liked it and threatened to call her that from now on - but of course I did not have the nerve. It was just habit, she explained.

  A crisis was triggered when I received an invitation to a church picnic in Excelsior Springs, about forty miles from Independence. I wanted to go. Mother decided I could if I followed her instructions. I was to take Route 10, but I was told to drive slowly because it was “very twisty and narrow.” I was also to avoid getting sunburned, and I had to take a reliable girlfriend with me. But Mother could not figure out how I could get home if the picnic lasted until after dark. Night driving was absolutely banned. She summed up this tangle of instructions and prohibitions by telling me to “call me collect after you get back and if you don’t go call me in the morning” (so she could turn off her worry machine). I was so exasperated I abandoned the idea.

  In another letter in this 1941 series, Mother wrote with genuine enthusiasm that it was “swell about your voice improving.” When she returned to Independence in mid-August, at least half her letters to Dad were written while sitting behind the wheel of her car, waiting for me to finish a singing lesson with Mrs. Strickler. This was the summer in which I began to think I might really want to be a singer. I worked extremely hard at it, day after day (unlike my piano playing, which I had pursued mainly to please Dad, and which usually involved more arguments with Mother than practicing). At the end of the summer, Mother wrote Dad that “M. [Margaret] Strickler says Marg is making remarkable progress and she wants her to sing for that tall hat teacher of hers in N.Y. around Easter, when she will be there!”

  By this time, Congress had voted to stay in session until the national emergency ended. Since that might last a decade, Mother and Dad decided we had better become full-time residents of Washington, D.C. Instead of doing my usual split-year schedule at two schools, Bess enrolled me at Gunston Hall and headed for Washington in mid-September. Her mother was predictably disconsolate, but Bess did not let Madge’s sighs change her mind. There was another reason for this decision. In July, the senator had put Bess on his office payroll at a salary of $2,400 a year.

  For all practical purposes, Bess had been working as a member of the staff since 1934. She visited the office regularly and signed letters for him and read and handled routine correspondence. More than a few other senators and congressmen had relatives on the payroll to make ends meet. It was risky because a snide opponent or newspaper critic could make it seem corrupt, although it was perfectly legal and even necessary for men who had to live on their inadequate salaries. The Trumans had not felt secure enough to chance it until Dad’s reelection.

  The war news continued to be awful, from America’s point of view. In the spring of 1941, Germany had overrun Greece and Yugoslavia and then launched a massive assault on Russia, adding another customer to the arsenal of democracy. This meant more work for Senator Truman - and it soon became apparent that all of it could not be done in Washington. He was from the Show-Me state, after all, and had a long established habit of seeing things for himself close up.

  The senator spent most of August and September 1941 rampaging up and down the West Coast, forcing defense plant managers from San Diego to Spokane to tell him the truth about their labor troubles and production bottlenecks: “Looked over the new marine base camp and then got another walk around a plane plant, the Consolidated [in San Diego] - said to be the
biggest of ‘em all. The managers are all such liars you can’t tell anything about the facts. Each one says he’s having no trouble and everything is rosy but that the other fellow is in one awful fix. By questioning five or six of them separately I’ve got an inkling of the picture, and it is rather discouraging in some particulars but good in others. We are turning out a very large number of planes and could turn out more if the navy and army boys could make up their minds just what they want. Labor is a problem. The same brand of racketeer is getting his hand in as he did in the camp construction program. Some of ‘em should be in jail. . . .”

  To save time, he flew everywhere, and Bess did a lot of worrying about his flight schedule. As we rode toward Independence on the B.&O. in mid-August, Bess kept watching the thick clouds to the south and southwest. She knew Dad was in a plane heading for Dallas. “It was a tremendous relief to get your phone call last night,” she wrote the next day. Those clouds “didn’t look so cheerful.”

  When the senator added to his investigatory trips a political swing through Missouri that occupied the better part of two weeks in the fall, things grew a little tense. The familiar situation was ironically reversed. Now Bess was in Washington, D.C., complaining about how much time the senator was spending in Missouri. Bess was never shy about letting him know when she was displeased. A telephone call made it clear, as Dad wrote the next day, that she was “not in the happiest frame of mind.” He admitted he had been away a long time but vowed “I haven’t wasted one minute.”

  In spite of her wifely complaints, the politician in Bess enjoyed the letters Dad wrote her from Missouri that fall. He reveled in the contrast between the treatment he was getting and what they had gone through in 1940. The St. Louis Star-Times and Globe Democrat both ran stories about the Truman Committee on their front pages “exactly as I said it,” he wrote. “Last year that would have been impossible.” In Kansas City, he saw over 1,000 people in two days at the Muehlebach Hotel, members of every faction and age group, all seeking favors and asking his advice as the ruler of the party in Missouri. “What a difference from last year this time and what a kick there is in it,” he chuckled.

  Around this time, Dad started writing letters to me. He decided I was too old - I was seventeen and a half - to be satisfied with a “kiss Margie for me” at the end of his letters to Mother. I was amused to note on the first one that he had not abandoned the argument he had had with Bess Wallace Truman about my name. (You will recall it took them four years to agree on it.) The letter - and all subsequent ones - was addressed to “Miss Mary Margaret Truman.”

  Some of Dad’s early letters were lectures on the history of ancient Greece or the Civil War, subjects I was studying in school. But some of them were intensely personal. This one, written in early October 1941, is one of my favorites.

  Dear Margie,

  I have a hotel radio in my room. The co-ed singing program is now on, and the charming young lady who is the “Charming Co-ed” hasn’t half the voice of my baby.

  You mustn’t get agitated when your old dad calls you his baby, because he always will think of you as just that - no matter how old or how big you may get. When you’d cry at night with that awful pain, he’d walk you and wish he could have it for you. When that little pump of yours insisted on going 120 a minute when 70 would have been enough, he got a lot of grey hairs. And now - what a daughter he has! It is worth twice all the trouble and ten times the grey hairs.

  Went to the Baptist Church in Caruthersville this morning and the good old Democratic preacher spread himself He preached to me and at me. . . . Last week I had dinner in Trenton and the Chinese Consul General was on the program with me and he made a corking speech to the United States senator present and not to the audience at all. It’s awful what it means to some people to meet a senator. You’d think I was Cicero or Cato. I’m not. Just a country jake who works at the job.

  Less than a month after he returned from Missouri, Dad was off again, prowling through defense plants and watching army maneuvers in Tennessee. Everyone thought we were close to war with Germany. President Roosevelt had U.S. destroyers escorting British merchant ships as far as Iceland, and on October 16 the USS Kearny took a torpedo that killed eleven men. Two weeks later, the USS Reuben James was sunk, and 100 sailors died. The isolationists were unimpressed. When the president tried to get some changes in the neutrality laws that would permit American merchant ships to be equipped with cannons, the brawl was stupendous, and the measure passed both houses by narrow margins.

  Unquestionably, FDR was trying to provoke a war with Germany, something that would get a president impeached these days. But Hitler declined to accept the challenge. The president was being equally hostile to Japan, slapping an embargo on oil shipments and scrap metal after they seized French Indochina earlier in the year. Everyone knew that the Japanese could not survive more than a year without American oil. They were consuming their reserves at the rate of 28,000 tons a day. But the Japanese too seemed disinclined to give the president the incident he needed to break the power of the isolationists in Congress and among the American people. Instead, a team of bowing, smiling diplomats arrived in Washington to negotiate a compromise settlement.

  On his November trip to Tennessee, Dad was already getting worried about his growing fatigue. He was on the Appropriations Committee, the Military Affairs Committee, and several other major committees in Congress, besides running the Truman Committee. He confessed, some eighteen months after the fact, that he had had a scary episode at the 1940 convention. He almost had passed out during the vice presidential nomination fight. “I had to hang on a railing for fifteen minutes until somebody got me a cup of water,” he wrote. That was enough to set Bess’ worry machine going full blast. She began urging him to take a rest.

  He did not get a chance to pay much attention to her for the next few weeks. A tremendous battle erupted in Congress over a bill to prohibit strikes in defense plants. Early in December, fate intervened. Senator Alva Blanchard Adams of Colorado died, and a large contingent of lawmakers felt obligated to go to his funeral. As the senator from a nearby state, Dad went along. It was a pleasant two-day trip. During this expedition, the House of Representatives passed the antistrike labor bill, and Dad wryly noted to Bess that many of the Congressmen were congratulating themselves for being away with a good excuse. No Democrat wanted to support the bill since it was violently opposed by organized labor. But privately, a majority favored the idea.

  Obeying orders from the White House, the Senate announced it would hold hearings on the House bill. Everyone knew this was part of a plan to emasculate it, a decision that was bound to deepen the split between Democratic liberals and conservatives. Nothing else of any importance was on the congressional agenda for the rest of the year, and most of the lawmakers on the funeral train headed for their native states instead of returning to Washington. Senator Truman did pretty much the same thing. He stopped off in Missouri to do a little politicking prior to attending a state-wide, Democratic “harmony” dinner in Jefferson City, scheduled for December 9.

  On Sunday, December 7, 1941, the senator called Bess from the Pennant Hotel in Columbia, where he had decided to hole up for the day reading the papers and getting some extra sleep. Bess heartily approved of that idea. They chatted about the pleasant visit he had just had with the Wallaces and the Trumans in Independence. Later in the day he wrote her a letter, noting with amusement that he was on the front page of four major Missouri papers, including the Kansas City Star.

  In Washington, D.C., it was a gloomy, chilly day, and I had a cold. As usual, Mother insisted I stay indoors. I groused, also as usual, but obeyed. I fiddled with my homework for a while, and then turned on the New York Philharmonic. Mother did some light cleaning and then wrote some letters. With most members of Congress going home imminently, the Washington social season was pretty much over, and she had nothing on her schedule.

  An excited voice interrupted the orchestra to report that Japanese
planes were attacking Pearl Harbor. I never was good at geography, and I thought that was some port in China. When Mother looked in to see how I was breathing, I complained about the way the music was being ruined by bulletins about a Japanese air raid that could just as easily have waited for the six o’clock news.

  Mother, in closer touch with the international situation, asked me what the Japanese were bombing. When I said Pearl Harbor, she did a vanishing act. I sat there blinking while she raced to the telephone and frantically demanded a long-distance operator. She awoke Dad from his snooze in the Pennant Hotel and told him what was happening. He dashed across the road and found a small plane whose pilot volunteered to fly him to St. Louis. There, he wangled a night flight to Washington, which soon turned into one of his more harrowing journeys.

  The weather was atrocious. Every landing was a breath-stopping descent through a soup of fog and rain. In Pittsburgh, they sat on the ground for three hours while the pilots and the control tower debated whether they should take off. Bess shared almost every minute of this awful trip, because she spent the night calling the airline to keep track of the plane. Finally, she drove out to National Airport at dawn and waited in a continuing murky drizzle for Dad to land. The plane circled overhead for a half hour before the pilots came in on a radio beam, unable to see anything.

  Dad was so tired he all but fell into the car. Mother drove a lot faster than usual to our apartment, where the senator shaved, bathed, and put on fresh clothes. Dad and I then raced to the Capitol for the joint session of Congress. He barely made it to the floor in time to vote for a declaration of war on Japan.