Bess Truman

by Margaret Truman

  We started home to Independence later in the day, stopping in Peoria overnight. Outside, the weather was July in the Midwest at its most broiling; inside the car the atmosphere was close to arctic. Dad tried to be cheerful and philosophical simultaneously. Mother said little. At home, we felt strange entering the old house after it had been closed for the winter. Although May Wallace had opened it up, the rooms still had the dank, musty smell of abandonment, which could not have raised Bess’ spirits.

  Nevertheless, she smiled gamely as her brothers Frank and George and sisters-in-laws Natalie and May Wallace rushed to congratulate Dad, followed closely by his cousins, the Nolands, and other neighbors. The following day, July 24, we had a reception in the front yard. Some 3,000 friends from Independence swarmed onto the grounds and the Trumans had their first experience with marathon handshaking.

  Greeting that many people as a hostess was far different from working a crowd at a political rally. There you have a chance to vary the pace of the handshakes or skip them entirely if your hand starts to ache. About halfway through the procession, Bess had to stop. She was in excruciating pain. She had not yet mastered the quick shake and withdrawal before the mashing can take place.

  For the next few days, we all tried to rest. Dad was staying until August 1 to organize support for Roger Sermon, whose run for the governorship was looking more and more dubious, and Bennett Clark, whose chances of winning renomination to the Senate were growing even dimmer. The vice presidential nominee spent most of his time huddling with politicos in Kansas City. When Mother went out to several luncheons, I retreated to my Uncle Frank Wallace’s house at 601 Van Horn Road, just behind 219 North Delaware Street. Frank’s wife, Natalie, was good company, and I was leery about staying alone in the big house when almost anyone was liable to show up at the door wanting to see the nominee. Aunt Natalie had a piano, and I could practice my scales or otherwise amuse myself on it.

  During one of these retreats, Aunt Natalie and I got talking about the effect that the nomination might have on the family. She feared it would give Fred Wallace dreams of glory. Then she tried to find out how my mother felt about it. When I was not very informative (mainly because I did not know much), Aunt Natalie frowned and said: “I suppose it will all come out now, about the way your grandfather died. The reporters will dig it up. I’m sure it’s going to upset your mother and grandmother terribly.”

  I did not have a clue to what she was talking about. “What do you mean?” I asked. “I thought he died of a heart attack or something like that.”

  Aunt Natalie smiled sardonically. “He shot himself,” she said. “Frank found him.”

  I could not have been more astonished if she had told me that she had seen David Willock Wallace ascend into heaven. I stumbled back to the big house and found Vietta Garr in the kitchen. She had been working for us for decades. I told her the story and asked her if it was true; Vietta nodded. She blamed it on a growth which (she had heard) David Wallace had discovered on the back of his neck. According to that version, he had been afraid of dying of cancer.

  Mother came home, but some shred of my father’s good judgment told me not to say anything to her about Aunt Natalie’s revelation. I waited until Dad arrived later in the evening, and I asked him what he knew about it. I have never seen him so angry and upset. He seized my arm in a grip that he must have learned when he was wrestling calves and hogs around the farmyard. “Don’t you ever mention that to your mother,” he said.

  He rocketed out of the house and down through the backyard to Aunt Natalie’s house. I have no idea what he said to her, but it is not pleasant to think about, even now. I was too shaken to think about it in 1944. Now I can see that Aunt Natalie had been living much too long in what amounted to her mother-in-law’s backyard. She was obviously striking back for twenty-eight oppressive years with Madge Wallace breathing down her neck, sweetly inquiring what she was doing, where she was going every time Natalie left the house. Childless, Natalie had also grown to resent the hours Frank spent with his mother. It was not her sister-in-law Bess that Natalie was out to get with her revelation about David Willock Wallace, it was her mother-in-law. Everybody has a mean streak, I’m afraid, and when circumstances exacerbate it, watch out.

  Harry Truman was one of the few people I have ever met who did not have a mean streak. But he could be tough when he felt it was necessary. That night, I fear Aunt Natalie saw that side of him. She never mentioned David Willock Wallace again to me or, I presume, anyone else.

  I wish I could tell you that years later I asked Mother if her anxiety about her father’s death was the hidden reason for her opposition to Dad’s nomination. But to the end of her life, I never felt free to violate the absolute prohibition Dad issued on that summer night in 1944. More than once, in these later years, I had hoped Bess would talk to me about her father, but she never did.

  In the course of researching this book, I changed my mind about Mother’s silence on this subject. As I explored Mother’s early life, I realized that she should not be judged by the standards of our talkative times where with the help of legions of psychiatrists we try to ventilate away our woes. Mother was born and grew up in the nineteenth century, and she handled the lifelong burden of David Willock Wallace’s suicide with the psychological strategies of her own time.

  When Theodore Roosevelt’s first wife, Alice Lee, died following childbirth in 1884, he was devastated by the loss. For the rest of his life, he never mentioned her again in his diaries or letters - or even in conversations with his daughter Alice, who bore her mother’s name. This great man and great president, almost the prototype of the courageous American, could only deal with the pain of this loss by putting Alice Lee out of his mind and heart by an act of the will. This tactic may strike us as almost cruel; at the least uncaring. But it worked. Theodore Roosevelt and Bess Wallace Truman survived their grief and lived full, satisfying lives.

  If this resolute silence was necessary to enable a man to survive the loss of a wife in childbirth, hardly an unusual event, think how much more urgent it was for Bess Wallace Truman to consign David Willock Wallace to the silence.

  Early in August 1944, after Grandmother Wallace had absorbed the shock of Dad’s nomination, she wrote Bess a touching, surprisingly perceptive letter. It began on the usual melancholy note. It was a lonely Sunday in Denver; Fred and Christine and the children had all gone to church, and she was sitting on the terrace thinking about us. “I somewhat realize what a task is before you, and Margie, dear,” she wrote, “and I wish in some way I could help.” As always, Grandmother was being oblique. But I think that she was trying to tell Bess in this letter that she wanted her to face the future without worrying about her.

  Bess was determined to minimize the task for the time being. She announced that she and I were going to stay in Independence for the summer. She also made it clear to Dad that she would not campaign with him on a day-to-day schedule. She would make a few appearances at major rallies and nothing else.

  The candidate headed back to Washington, having done everything he could to help Roger Sermon and Bennett Clark in the upcoming primary. From the capital he filled Bess in on conferences with John Snyder and other friends. Already Dad was concerned that FDR was going to ignore him and he would commit political blunders. But John Snyder reminded him that he had plenty of friends inside the administration who would enable him to “get the truth.”

  Dad was disturbed by Mother’s reaction to the nomination. It accentuated his own natural, normal feelings of apprehension about the step he had taken. When he went to the Senate and informed the other members of the Truman Committee that he had decided to resign as chairman, he found himself swept by deep, almost uncontrollable emotions: “Yesterday was a hectic day. The train [from Missouri] was late. Fulton [Hugh Fulton, the Truman Committee counsel] met me at Martinsburg, West Virginia and we talked over every angle of the committee and came to the decision that for the best interests of all concerned I’d bet
ter quit. I had made my mind up on that when the nomination was forced on me. I have never in my life wanted to sit down and really blubber like I did when I told ‘em I was quitting. I didn’t do it - but they did. Connally, Mead, Kilgore, Brewster, Benton, Ferguson were there - so were Fulton, Halley, and one or two others of the staff. . . .”

  Dad was saying farewell to his ten years of senatorial life, and it was as painful for him as it was for Bess.

  A few days later, Dad wrote me a letter in which he tried to cope with that deeper, more hidden worry, David Willock Wallace’s suicide: “This is going to be a tough, dirty campaign and you’ve got to help your dad protect your good mama. Nothing can be said of me that isn’t old and unproven - so this little district attorney [the Republican candidate, Thomas E. Dewey] will try to hit me by being nasty to my family. You must remember that I never wanted or went after the nomination - but now we have it (to save the Democratic Party - so the Southerners and AF of L and RR Labor say) we must win and make ‘em like it. . . . But you must help me keep all the family in line. Most of ‘em on both sides are prima donnas and we must keep our eyes on the ball.”

  In this letter, Dad was strengthening the bond of silence he had forged with me on the night of my encounter with Aunt Natalie. He was also sending Mother a message. He was certain that I would show her the letter or she would ask to read it after I opened it. He was trying to say that he understood her anxiety, and he cared deeply about it.

  From Independence came only silence. On August 10, the senator telephoned Bess, and to his immense relief, he saw that his letter to me had done some good. They had a pleasant chat. “I’m sure glad I called you last night,” he wrote on the following day. “I was so lonesome and feeling sorry for me - which is no good for me or anyone else. But there has been no letter for three whole days.”

  For the rest of the letter, he tried to reassure Bess that things were looking better and better. He had been to the White House and had “a most happy session with Jim Byrnes and afterward with Harry Hopkins.” He also reported - and dismissed - the first attacks on him in the Republican-controlled press. The Chicago Tribune and its “Washington echo sheet,” the Times Herald, had declared that Senator Truman was running against himself because he had criticized the administration fiercely in his committee reports and now had joined it. “They are surely desperate for an issue,” Dad wrote.

  The next day, the senator reported that he was “feeling much better this evening,” thanks to a “nice long letter” from Bess (unfortunately among the lost). A few days later, FDR returned from his Pacific inspection tour and invited his running mate to lunch at the White House. Dad wrote a long letter to Bess about this meeting.

  Wish you’d been here for the White House luncheon today. . . . I went in about five to one and you’d have thought I was the long lost brother or the returned Prodigal, I told him how I appreciated his putting the finger on me for Vice President and we talked about the campaign, reconversion, China, post-war employment. . . .

  Then lunch was announced and we went out into the back yard of the White House under an oak tree planted by old Andy Jackson, and the movie men and then the flashlight boys went to work. He finally got hungry and ran ‘em out. Then his daughter Mrs. Boettiger [Anna Roosevelt], acted as hostess and expressed a lot of regret that you were not there. I told the president that you were in Missouri attending to my business there, and he said that was O.K. He gave me a lot of hooey about what I could do to help the campaign and said he thought I ought to go home for an official notification [of the nomination] and then go to Detroit for a labor speech and make no more engagements until we had another conference. So that’s what I’m going to do. Hope to get things in shape here so I can start home Sunday evening. . . .

  Well this is strung out too much. But the president told me that Mrs. R. was a very timid woman and wouldn’t go to political meetings or make any speeches when he first ran for governor of N.Y. Then he said, “Now she talks all the time.” What am I to think?

  Dad was telling Mother, with that sly final paragraph, that he was hoping she might get over her reluctance to become the First Lady.

  What Dad left out of that letter is almost as significant as what he put into it. He did not say a word to Bess about President Roosevelt’s appalling physical condition. The Pacific inspection trip had exhausted him. His speech was slow and halting, like a phonograph record played at the wrong speed. His hands shook so badly he could not get the cream into his coffee. His skin was ashen, his lips colorless. His mind remained keen, but his body was obviously close to disintegration. He did not even try to pretend that it was a temporary decline. When Dad told him that he was thinking of using an airplane to campaign, Mr. Roosevelt shook his head. “One of us has to stay alive,” he said.

  The campaign picked up steam, and Bess began to participate in it. While I spent a fun-filled week in Columbia, Missouri as the guest of the Pi Beta Phi Chapter at the university, Mother joined Dad for a speech he was making to the American Legion Convention in Chicago. “You should have seen your mother getting off the train in front of about a half dozen photographers,” Dad wrote to me. “She stood up exceptionally well,” They paid a visit to Eugene and Helen Souter, who had been so helpful during the convention. “I’m going to speak at 11 a.m. and your ma and Helen are going to listen - maybe,” Dad wrote. Obviously, Mother had not entirely overcome her reluctance.

  At the end of September, we closed the house in Independence and went back to Washington, taking Grandmother with us. Christine Wallace had all she could do, with her difficult pregnancy, to keep house for her own family. I went back to George Washington University, and Mother stayed out of sight at 4701 Connecticut Avenue.

  On the pretext that the war demanded most of the president’s attention, FDR did not campaign heavily. But in his few appearances he went out of his way to refute rumors about his failing health. Bess, no better informed on this point than the rest of the country, was impressed by newspaper stories of Roosevelt’s jaunty ride through New York City in a cold autumn rain with the top of his touring car down.

  Meanwhile, Senator Truman toured the country aboard a two-car train. His schedule was brutal; he frequently did not have time to eat his meals. Even his habit of a daily letter to Bess went by the boards. “I suppose you’ll be off me for life,” he wrote from Spokane, Washington, in late October. The following day he was apologizing for failing to telephone from Seattle. “They simply had me so full of appointments. . . . I couldn’t even eat my dinner,” he wrote. “They seem to think I’m cast iron and I am in a campaign, I guess.”

  These letters may have soothed Bess’ feelings of neglect, but they did not contribute to her peace of mind. She began wondering if she and not Eleanor Roosevelt would be a widow before the end of the campaign.

  Both Trumans were grateful for the elimination of another worry. The campaign was not as nasty as Dad feared it would be. In the final days, the Hearst press revived the old canard that Harry Truman had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He refuted it with eyewitness evidence and a demand for even a shred of proof - which was, of course, not forthcoming. Making light of it to Bess, he wrote: “Hugh [Fulton, counsel of the Truman Committee] says we have him [Hearst] for a million dollar libel suit. Be nice to tour South America at his expense, wouldn’t it?”

  At the end of October, we went to New York and joined Dad for a joint speech with Henry Wallace before a huge crowd in Madison Square Garden. Back in Washington, D.C., we boarded the nominee’s special train and headed for Missouri by a route that might best be described as political. We wound through Pennsylvania, with Dad making about ten speeches a day, and then debarked for a spectacular motorcade through Pittsburgh. In Kansas City, we settled into a penthouse suite in the Muehlebach Hotel and regrouped for one more rally and speech in Independence.

  Election night at the Muehlebach lacked the tension of previous Truman contests. Everyone was pretty sure the Democrats were going to win.
Mother announced she was tired and went to bed early. I declined to join her, and she was loath to issue orders to her twenty-year-old daughter in front of so many people. So I stayed up while Dad played the piano and kidded with his fellow politicians. I was too excited to notice at the time the way Mother was boycotting one of the biggest nights in Dad’s life. Her antipathy to a sojourn in the White House obviously remained intense.

  For a while, Dewey startled everyone by running ahead, but his lead began to dwindle rapidly around midnight and by 3:45 a.m. he had conceded. Then the liquor really began to flow, and soon a lot of politicians were gaga. I was shocked. Dad got rid of the boozers and urged me not to say anything about them to Mother. I can see now that he was still worried about her negative feelings and was trying to avoid an argument.

  In spite of his wife’s disapproval, Harry Truman enjoyed himself that night. He was tremendously proud of being the first Missouri politician elected to a national executive office. He also was proud of having made a major contribution to the future of the United States and the world. This was evident in the telegram he sent President Roosevelt:

  I AM VERY HAPPY OVER THE OVERWHELMING ENDORSEMENT WHICH YOU RECEIVED. ISOLATIONISM IS DEAD. HOPE TO SEE YOU SOON.

  For Dad, the euphoria of victory was soon followed by exhaustion. The full impact of his eighteen-hour-day campaign effort hit him. Mother (and I) struggled with an avalanche of congratulatory letters from old friends and acquaintances. After a few days, we all went back to Washington to meet President Roosevelt when he returned from Hyde Park on November 11.

  It was another cold, rainy autumn day, and FDR again decided it was a chance to show there was nothing wrong with his health. He ordered the Secret Service men to take down the top of his Packard. Flanked by Dad and Henry Wallace, he rode up Pennsylvania Avenue while 300,000 soggy citizens cheered. Watching this performance, and fearing the worst about its effect on her exhausted husband, Bess could only conclude that the reports of Mr. Roosevelt’s imminent demise were greatly exaggerated.