I sat in the press gallery for this historic moment, having talked my distracted mother into giving me her ticket to the joint session and tricking her into thinking I had no temperature by playing games with the thermometer. I feel a little guilty, now, thinking of the way I got to relish this momentous scene, while Mother, who had done so much to get Dad there on time, sat home. But she may have been grateful for a chance to be alone and get a grip on her nerves. Dad’s horrendous plane trip had been pure anguish for her.
There was nothing special about the waves of applause that greeted the president as he slowly made his way to the rostrum of the House of Representatives’ chamber. That was the standard tribute Congress always paid the Chief Executive. But I will never forget the hush as he seized the lectern and prepared to speak. The silence was full of tension, foreboding; it was almost funereal. Mr. Roosevelt already had met with the congressional leaders and told them about the damage the Japanese had inflicted on our fleet and air force at Pearl Harbor. The news had spread through the rest of Congress. They sat there, fearing the worst.
Then the president’s voice rang out. “Yesterday, December 7, 1941 - a date which will live in infamy - the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”
I felt those words go through Congress, through me and everyone in the galleries, like a jolt of electricity. This speech was not going to be a report of a terrible defeat. It was going to be a summons to battle - angry, proud battle. But the silence persisted. Congress was still waiting for the bad news. The president continued, speaking so slowly each word might have been transcribed by hand.
“It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time the Japanese Government has deliberately sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.”
He told us that the navy and the army air force had suffered “severe damage” at Pearl Harbor. He reported that the Japanese had also launched attacks against Malaya, Hong Kong, Guam, the Philippines. As commander in chief of the Army and Navy, he had directed that “all measures be taken for our defense.”
But the silence persisted. The president’s voice rose, regaining the anger of his opening words: “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.”
That did it. Congress exploded into cheers and applause. I could see Dad clapping with the rest of them, even though he knew through his chairmanship of the Truman Committee how unprepared we were to meet this crisis.
A hush descended again - no longer funereal but full of pent-up fury - as we listened to the president’s final, fateful words. “I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan on Sunday, December 7, 1941, a state of war has existed between the United States and the Japanese Empire.”
On December 18, my mother and I went home for a different Christmas from the one we had expected. Every day the government seemed to proclaim a shortage of something crucial, such as rubber or sugar. The Japanese seemed to be winning everywhere. Dad stayed in Washington to defend the Truman Committee against an all-out assault from the White House and the armed forces. Secretary of War Robert Patterson had announced on December 13 that the committee ought to go out of business because it would “impair” the war effort to give the members information.
On December 21, the senator wrote to Bess that he was waiting for a call from the president about the committee, but he did not expect it to come through, and he would probably have to rush back to Washington to see him right after Christmas. “He’s so damn afraid that he won’t have all the power and glory that he won’t let his friends help as it should be done,” he wrote. If Roosevelt refused to see him and persisted in trying to destroy the committee, Senator Truman was prepared to tell him “to go to hell.”
In Independence, Bess spent a lot of her time visiting the dentist and the doctor. She doubted if she would be returning home for a long time. In a week, we were on our way back to Washington. Bess apologized to Ethel Noland for failing to get “even another glimpse of all of you but Heavens - how fast the week went. It seems to me I saw more of Dr. Hull [the dentist] and Dr. Andrews than I did of anyone else.”
From Washington, Bess apologized to her mother for the brevity of our stay. Speaking for herself and her daughter, she wrote; “We both hated to leave home, we had such a nice visit. But I imagine we are all going to have to do a lot of things we hate doing in the next few years.”
She had no idea how prophetic those words would soon become.
As 1942 began, Washington, D.C., became the headquarters of a global war. The city started losing the polite, easy-going atmosphere Bess had known and liked. Thousands of people arrived to staff the government agencies organizing American industry for the mightiest production effort in history. The District, as the locals called it, was on its way to becoming the rude, crowded metropolis of today. There was one striking difference. With the government rationing rubber and gas, the traffic, already light, became almost nonexistent. All three Trumans took buses to work and school, leaving on separate schedules. Grandmother Wallace became alarmed when she heard about this. Although I was about to celebrate my eighteenth birthday, she thought I was incapable of crossing Connecticut Avenue alone without getting squashed by a wayward army truck. Bess had to reassure her that the traffic was so light; there was nothing to worry about.
The year began with a visit that gave Bess great pleasure and hope. Fred Wallace wrote to tell her that he was coming to Washington to talk to some of his government superiors about his future. Bess promptly urged him to bring Christine with him and orchestrated the entire operation by mail. She persuaded Vietta Garr, the part-time cook and maid, to move into 219 North Delaware Street to help Grandmother Wallace with “the imps,” as Mother fondly called David and Marian Wallace. She told her mother to “let Vietta take the brunt” and not overdo on the child-care business. Fred and Christine arrived in Washington, and Bess took an entire week out of her busy schedule to show them the sights. I also was pressed into service as a guide and hostess. We had a lovely time, and Fred and Chris seemed to enjoy themselves every minute.
The visit was important to Mother because when she was home in Independence for the Christmas holidays her mother told her that Fred seemed to have licked his drinking problem. Bess reported the good news to Dad, who replied: “I hope you’re right about Fred but I doubt it.” This only redoubled Mother’s wish to do everything in her power to make Fred happy - and, presumably, sober. She loved this big, ingratiating youngest brother for his own and for her mother’s sake.
Although the war was absorbing most people’s time and attention, social Washington continued to operate, thanks to a few resident millionaires. Bess told her mother about a spectacular dinner she attended at Friendship, the mansion of Evalyn Walsh McLean. A year younger than Bess, Mrs. McLean was the daughter of a Colorado mining tycoon. In 1902, she had married the son of the owner of The Washington Post, and their combined wealth reportedly topped $200 million.
“She has the most tremendous place,” Mother wrote. “We went through three rooms before we even got to the dining room and the drawing room still had some bare spots with over a hundred people in it. We were seated at tables of ten. I sat between the Australian minister (Casey) and J. Edgar Hoover.” Also at the table was Mrs. McLean, who examined Mrs. Truman through huge horn-rimmed spectacles that gave her, someone once said, an expression that was half astonished, half inquisitive. Her presence was proof of Senator Truman’s growing importance.
A few days later, Bess told her mother about attending a luncheon at which Mrs. Maxim Litvinov, wife of the Russian ambassador, spoke. Like her husband, Bess was unimpressed by the love affair between Russia and the United States
that some people were trying to promote on the strength of the alliance against Hitler. In a recent letter, Senator Truman had told Bess he considered the Communists “as untrustworthy as Hitler and A1 Capone.” Several months later, Bess remarked to her mother that they were attending a reception at the Soviet Embassy to celebrate their “October Revolution - whatever that was.” They had skipped it the previous year, and she was inclined to do it again, but Senator Truman decided they had better go.
Like several million other American housewives, Mother began fretting about shortages of such staples as potatoes and coffee. At one point, she reported to Dad that there was not an Irish potato in any store in town. She told her mother about seeing frantic housewives grabbing bananas out of a bin as if they were in a bargain store. More ominous sounding, at first, was her letter telling her mother she was having blackout curtains made. “We are to have a ten hour blackout beginning at 8 o’clock Tuesday night,” she wrote. “It’s for checking up purposes and will probably be as much of a fizzle as all the rest of the OCD orders have been.”
Bess had it in for the Office of Civilian Defense because they had banned awnings on all Washington apartments and houses. They feared an incendiary bomb attack. Mother thought this was silly (which it was). She was no doubt among several thousand influential housewives who got the OCD to abandon this prohibition before the hot summer weather began.
Other aspects of Washington and the world brought the war home to Mother this year. She became deeply involved in the anguish of her cousin, Maud Gates, who was married to a brigadier general, Charles Drake. He had the misfortune to be stationed in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded. Cousin Maud begged Mother for some inside information on what was happening to him, but all Senator Truman could get was a mishmash of rumors. Charlie was on Cebu one day and Corregidor and Mindanao another. In fact, he was trapped on Bataan with other regulars and Filipino troops. Bess reported to her mother on her growing concern for Cousin Maud. She neither ate nor slept and began to look as if she might break down. But like other army wives, she somehow managed to stay strong. Other friends and relatives went into the army and moved toward the battlefronts. From Mary Paxton Keeley came a letter telling Bess that her only son, Pax, true to the Paxton family tradition, had enlisted in the infantry. A Paxton had fought in every war since 1776, often getting killed in the process. Harry Vaughan, Dad’s 1940 campaign treasurer who had become one of his key Senate aides, was an Army Colonel in Australia, which the Japanese seemed intent on invading. An Independence friend, Julia Rice Latimer, had a son who had lost a leg at Pearl Harbor and was in a California hospital. Mother asked Dad to inquire for him when an investigation took him to the West Coast.
The fifty-eight-year-old senator and his committee zoomed around the country, making headline after headline. Bess stayed in Washington, D C., running the office, signing letters, dealing with jobseekers, and visiting Missourians. She found it hard to resist old friends who came to town expecting her to play tourist guide. When Ketura Harvey, sister of her former boyfriend, Julian Harvey, arrived, Bess groaned to her mother that she would have to use some of her precious gas to take her to Arlington, or “I’ll never hear the end of it.”
Every Wednesday, without fail, Bess spent five or six hours at the Washington, D.C., USO, handing out doughnuts and coffee and chatting with the lonely soldiers and sailors who were working in the capital. Her own experience in World War I made her tremendously sympathetic to servicemen separated from their homes and families. She may also have remembered the vivid reports Mary Paxton Keeley sent her from France about her canteen work over there in 1918.
The war continued to go badly for our side. Although we had won a crucial (and lucky) victory at Midway in the struggle with Japan, elsewhere around the world the Allies were fighting desperately on the defensive, and frequently losing. Hitler continued to chew up the Russians and simultaneously rampaged across the North African desert toward Cairo. Rumors that the British might make a deal with Hitler to save their empire upset many people in Washington. Harry Truman was one of them. Here he reports his thoughts to Bess on April 30, 1942, after a bad night’s sleep in Durham, North Carolina.
Got awake and began fighting the war, and running the [Truman] committee, and finally got started on a mystery story by Mary Roberts Rinehart, and then fought the war some more and by that time most of the night was gone. But I feel all right now. That German peace offensive worries me. If Britain were to run out on us, or if China should suddenly collapse, we’d have all that old isolation fever again and another war in twenty years. We must take this one to its conclusion and dictate peace terms from Berlin and Tokyo. Then we’ll have the Russians and China to settle afterwards.
Bess responded with similar worries about the British. “Looks as if we had better send some smart American over there to run the war for them. Not that we have done too well ourselves.” In July 1942, she commented: “I can’t see any hope but a second front. The psychological effect would be great, even if they could not wade all the way to Berlin in 15 or 20 minutes.”
The urgency of the job confronting the Truman Committee soon had its chairman working himself to the brink of exhaustion. Dad had to cope with bruised egos on his own committee and jealous senators on other committees who wanted to win a few investigatory headlines of their own. He took on Donald Nelson, head of the War Production Board (WPB), with a critical blast that shredded the WPB performance. Nelson had been given sweeping executive powers by the president, but he failed to exercise them to coordinate the war effort.
Nelson was furious, but his wrath was mild compared to the choler of the mossbacks at the Navy Bureau of Ships, who refused to give a contract to a genius named Andrew Jackson Higgins for a landing craft that the army and the marines desperately needed. By the time Dad was through with the spluttering admirals, Higgins had his contract. (And by the time we invaded North Africa in November 1942, the army had the boats, which inspired a telegram from General Eisenhower thanking the builder.) Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, the Republican in FDR’s war cabinet, was so mad he tried to foment a Senate investigation of Truman. “That ought to be good,” the senator wrote Bess.
To muster public support, Senator Truman began speaking regularly over the radio about his committee’s work. Bess’ comment on a speech he made in June of 1942 is an interesting glimpse of their partnership at this time. “Your speech last night was really ‘some-thin’,” she wrote. “I think it was the best radio speech I have heard you make. Ethel [Noland] said your consonants were all pronounced just as her speech teacher taught her. In your ‘spare time’ [she put it in quotes by way of wryly noting it did not exist] it really would be a good idea to take a few speech lessons if you are going to be on the radio from now on. But if you keep on doing as well as you did last night you won’t need any.”
Bess enjoyed the excitement Senator Truman was causing. She even enjoyed his clashes in the Senate with jealous colleagues. When she was in Independence she continued to receive and read the Congressional Record, and she loved the way Dad “made a monkey” out of Senator Tom Connally of Texas when he made a sarcastic, ill-informed speech about the way the Truman Committee’s reports had become the final word on everything in the war effort. Connally was on the committee, but he seldom came to hearings. “I read the record of the 18th [of June] yesterday and enjoyed it hugely,” she wrote. “It’s somebody else getting the headlines that’s bothering Tom C.”
For their twenty-third wedding anniversary, Dad sent Mother twenty-three roses and one of his most heartfelt letters. “Twenty three years have been extremely short and for me altogether most happy ones. Thanks to the right kind of a life partner for me we’ve come out reasonably well. A failure as a farmer, a miner, an oil promoter and a merchant but finally hit the groove as a public servant - and that due mostly to you and lady luck. The lady’s best roll of the dice was June 28, 1919.” She was still his sweetheart, “as good looking and loveable as when she
was sixteen.”
Bess replied that “it always amazes me that you can write a so called love letter when you have had so little practice.” She told him she was particularly pleased to get roses on her twenty-third wedding anniversary. “It doesn’t seem at all possible it has been that long but I’m pretty sure it has.”
Mother telephoned Dad on their anniversary eve, and the next day he apologized for his sluggish conversation. “I was so tired I could hardly sit up.” That started the Wallace worry machine churning. She suggested he invite his Man Friday, Fred Canfil (who had become a committee investigator), to live with him until Congress adjourned, knowing that when Fred was around Dad was more likely to play poker than work. Failing that, she implored him to let Fred do all the driving on the trip to Independence, and make sure the driving was slow. This was a plea she never tired of making, but this time she had a good argument for it. “You’ll get a sort of rest by taking the time on the road,” she pointed out.
On the eve of his return home, Mother urged Dad to take a month-long summer vacation. She found a quote in, of all places, the Kansas City Star, recommending it. But he did not feel he could let the committee run without his supervision. After little more than two weeks in Independence, he was back in Washington again, doing battle with the admirals, Donald Nelson, and assorted other characters, including the leaders of the steel industry.
Bess continued to enjoy the headlines he was making. In mid-August, she wrote that he had been mentioned on the radio again yesterday. “Don’t you ever skip a day?” she asked teasingly. She sent him an editorial from the Kansas City Times, praising his investigation of the Higgins contract mess, and remarked that she “had to read it twice to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.” Two years earlier, the Times did not have a single kind word to say for Senator Truman.
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