Bess Truman

by Margaret Truman

  At this point, she was still much more worried about Vice President-elect Truman. She saw that he would never get any rest in Washington, with everyone from hostess Evalyn Walsh McLean to the Ambassador from Honduras putting him at the top of their guest lists. She decreed that he would have to get out of town, pronto, and he agreed with her. He fled to French Lick, Indiana, for some intensive resting and restorative treatments at the spa there. But he insisted on breaking this badly needed vacation to come to Kansas City to be on hand when his sister Mary received a new title from the Eastern Star. She had made this women’s branch of the Masons her career.

  On Thanksgiving Day, Bess wrote to Dad’s cousin, Ethel Noland, describing in the frankest terms what she thought of all this. “Harry was a wreck after a week here so we simply dumped him on the train for French Lick and he is feeling much better already.” She cautioned Ethel not to tell anyone where Dad was, “unless it is broadcast,” and then issued her opinion of the visit to Kansas City. “He will be in K.C. on the 29th. Some silly Eastern Star performance. He has no business breaking into the treatments he is taking.”

  Bess did not let her absent husband keep her away from that year’s Army-Navy game. We went with Colonel Harry Vaughan and almost froze to death. But Mother loved every minute of it. I vowed that she would not get me to another game without a detailed weather forecast from navy or army intelligence.

  After his visit to Kansas City for Mary Truman’s Eastern Star ceremony, Dad segued south for more rest and relaxation, and we all regrouped in Independence for Christmas. Mother and I spent most of our time in Kansas City frantically shopping for dresses to wear to the inauguration. I only had to buy one or two, but Mother had to acquire a wardrobe to survive the round of parties that were scheduled.

  These started on December 30 with a tremendous bash at Friendship, Evalyn Walsh McLean’s estate. In spite of having denounced her circle as parasites, Dad went and allowed himself to be displayed, because Mother wanted to go. She liked Evalyn’s kooky, unorthodox personality and admired the way she had tried to help Washington’s poor during the Depression, but she had no illusions about her fondness for publicity. “A few headlines and she is on the job,” Bess told her mother.

  A glimpse of the Trumans’ schedule emerges from a letter Dad wrote his mother on January 13. He gave her a list of the receptions, dinners, and meetings he and Mother had to attend between January 18 and the 21. “Some of ‘em are at the same time and blocks apart and I’m supposed to be at all of them,” he wrote. Bess undoubtedly agreed with Dad’s advice to FDR, to use the war as an excuse and abandon the inauguration. “He should have boarded his automobile and driven to the Supreme Court and been sworn in and I should have taken the oath at a regular Senate session,” he wrote.

  Instead, politics as usual had the Trumans swamped with demands for inaugural tickets from half the state of Missouri. Wallace and Truman relatives had priority, of course, but Bess could not hope to board them all in our five-room apartment. We took in Grandmother Wallace, naturally, and stowed a few more with cooperative neighbors, but most of the relatives were parked in hotels. Nevertheless, they all regarded our apartment as their headquarters and showed up expecting coffee and a sandwich at all hours. Between racing home to change for the next party and playing short-order cook, Bess was exhausted by the time January 20 finally arrived.

  It turned out to be another awful day. It is creepy the way bad weather pursued FDR during the last year of his life. This time sleet mixed with rain on a cutting wind. For warmth I had planned to wear a new fur scarf. Mother took my school coat out of the closet. “Put this on,” she said. “And no arguments.” I went into a colossal sulk but Dad backed her up, and off we went to the religious ceremonies at St. John’s Church that began the inauguration.

  President Roosevelt had decided to scale down the festivities out of respect for the men still fighting and dying in the Pacific and in Europe, and to conserve his own strength. Instead of taking the oath on the steps of the Capitol, he began his fourth term on the south portico of the White House.

  Dad was sworn in first, by the departing vice president, Henry Wallace. Then FDR was helped from his wheelchair by his son James, in his marine uniform. Bess studied the president as he stood at the podium and was not reassured by what she saw. There were dark circles of exhaustion under his eyes. His skin had the grayish tinge that many people had already noticed.

  On the other hand, Bess had seen Harry Truman in more than a few exhausted states, and he had recovered his vitality after a decent rest. She was more impressed by the way the president insisted on defying the weather again, to demonstrate his good health. He stood coatless and hatless in the freezing wind to take the oath and give a brief speech.

  Bess did not have much time to fear the worst, anyway. After the ceremony, FDR retreated to his bedroom. Bess had to join Eleanor Roosevelt in trying to cope with 1,805 damp, frozen VIP’s who had stood in the slush on the White House lawn for the ceremony. All those hands had to be shaken before everyone lined up for a buffet lunch. This first horde had scarcely departed when a second wave of 678 appeared for a tea. Dad left Mother and Mrs. Roosevelt to deal with these minor-league VIP’s. All in all, it was an exhausting day for a woman only a month away from her sixtieth birthday.

  Two days after the inauguration, FDR sailed off to Yalta to confer with Stalin and Churchill. The war was going well. In Europe, the western Allies had beaten back Hitler’s last desperate gamble in the Battle of the Bulge and were now across the Rhine and smashing their way into the heart of Germany. The Russians were pounding into the collapsing Reich from the east. In the Pacific, the Philippines were close to liberation, and B-29’s were battering Japan from newly captured bases in the Mariana Islands.

  For Bess, the possibility of an early victory had a personal dimension. She presumed it would take much of the crushing weight of responsibility from President Roosevelt’s shoulders, which meant that there was a good chance that he would live considerably longer than the pessimists were predicting.

  While the president dickered with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta, the vice president was not exactly idle. Before FDR left, he handed Dad one of the messiest jobs ever. He had fired Jesse Jones, his secretary of commerce and the darling of the Senate’s conservatives, and appointed Henry Wallace in his place. It was up to Dad to get the Senate’s consent to this highly political move. What made it truly explosive was the secretary of commerce’s control of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which loaned billions of dollars each year to large and small businesses to fuel the war effort. That made the secretary of commerce one of the most powerful men in the U.S. government.

  After endless hours of conferring with key senators, Dad worked out a compromise. The RFC would be severed from the Commerce Department, and the job would be given to someone more acceptable to conservatives and moderates. Mr. Wallace would then be approved for the now toothless commerce appointment. Wallace angrily insisted he wanted both jobs, until Dad bluntly informed him that he had better settle for half a loaf or get nothing. Even with this compromise, Dad had to use all his skills at parliamentary maneuver to push the deal through the Senate without letting FDR’s original two-job appointment come to a vote that would have humiliated the president. The Senate’s opinion of Mr. Wallace was all too visible in the vote to take the RFC away from him: It was seventy-two to twelve.

  Bess did not pay much attention to this internal Democratic squabble. She was far more worried about the way the press continued to belittle Harry Truman. During the campaign, they had constructed a straw man, a gray little mediocrity that FDR had tolerated on the ticket to keep the party bosses happy. Henry Wallace’s frustrated supporters in the Democratic Party were helping to perpetuate this myth.

  One of the leading protagonists of this make-Harry-Truman-look-dumb school was Duke Shoop, the Kansas City Star’s Washington reporter. He wrote a snide, sneering story about Bess and the vice president attendi
ng that party at Evalyn Walsh McLean’s, emphasizing the gorgeous furniture, the expensive silver and gold plate, and describing Mother and Dad awed by it all, as if they were a couple of bumpkins.

  Even supposed friends, carried away by the discovery that they now knew someone authentically famous, got into the act. Henry Bundschu, their Independence neighbor, wrote a reminiscence of Harry Truman in which he compared him to Calvin Coolidge. Henry was a Republican, which excuses him slightly, but with that kind of friend around, Harry Truman did not need enemies.

  Bess was appalled. So was her old friend, Mary Paxton Keeley, watching this media auto-da-fe from her post as a journalism professor at Christian College in Columbia, Missouri. She wrote Bess a shrewd letter in mid-February 1945, urging her to tell the vice president to hire an expert to handle his publicity. “I wrote to Henry Bundschu giving him the devil for comparing Harry with Calvin Coolidge,” Mary added. But she thought Shoop’s story on the McLean dinner was a more serious matter. “I know it is all right to go to that dame’s dinner,” she wrote. “But it shouldn’t get in the paper as if Harry was a wide eyed country boy who had left the plow handles to eat off the gold plate.”

  With a nice compliment to her old friend, Mary got to the main point of her letter. “I know you are not impressed by anyone in Washington any more than Harry is, but these fool stories can give the wrong impression of Harry.” The vice president needed a good press secretary to “put out stuff to overbalance this social poison.”

  Bess’ answer showed how concerned she was.

  I . . . quite agree with you that Harry has had some pretty bad press notices lately. If we had to run for the Senate in ‘46 they’d be terrible. They mostly stem from that skunk of a Duke Shoop. “Snoopy” Shoop, they call him back here. He isn’t allowed to blast him politically now so he does the next best he can. Like Pegler [Westbrook Pegler, the Hearst columnist] he can’t possibly write anything kind about anybody.

  We have eaten off the “gold plate” once or twice a month (or have been asked to - we don’t always go - ) for the last four or five years, but D.S. is never there so he wouldn’t know.” She added that she “sure would like to have heard Henry B. [Bundschu] stuttering over your letter!

  Not long after this exchange, Vice President Truman got the worst piece of publicity yet. He went to a party at the National Press Club at which someone suggested he play the piano. He sat down to do no more than riffle the keys when - presto - the actress Lauren Bacall was sitting on top of the piano, with her gorgeous gams on full display. The picture made several hundred magazines and newspapers, and Bess was furious. It was exactly the kind of publicity she had been warning against since Harry Truman arrived in the Senate.

  Bess would have been even more upset about this publicity if she had thought Vice President Truman might soon become President Truman. She continued to doubt an early entrance into the White House. Late in March, she received a letter from Ethel Noland informing her that the editor of the Boston Globe had sent a reporter to Independence for background on Harry Truman, because he was convinced that FDR was going to die soon. Bess replied that she hoped “the Boston Globe man is a mighty bad prognosticator.” She then offered proof that he was, in her opinion. “F.D. looks fine to me. I sat by him at a W.H. dinner last week & had a good chance for close observation. He’s a little deaf - but that’s not going to wreck him. So am I!”

  Bess had encountered FDR on one of his good days. We know, now, that he even baffled his doctors by seeming to be on the brink of dissolution one day and the next day be brimming with vitality and good cheer. The letter also suggests that Dad continued to avoid discussing Mr. Roosevelt’s health with Bess.

  Ten years later, in his memoirs, Dad told of going to see the president a week after he returned from Yalta: “I . . . was shocked by his appearance. His eyes were sunken. His magnificent smile was missing from his careworn face. He seemed a spent man. I had a hollow feeling within me for I saw that the journey to Yalta must have been a terrible ordeal.”

  Dad tried to think how he could help the president conserve his strength.

  I recalled the expressions of pain I had seen on the president’s face as he delivered his inauguration speech on January 20 on the south portico of the White House. Apparently he could no longer endure with his usual fortitude the physical pain of the heavy [leg] braces pressing against him.

  I urged that he address Congress [on the results of the Yalta Conference] seated in the well of the House, and J explained that I had already cleared this unusual arrangement with the congressional leaders. He had asked for no such consideration, but he appeared relieved and pleased to be accorded this courtesy.

  This arrangement did not produce the hoped-for effect. Even though FDR was freed of the burden of his braces, his speech was lifeless and rambling. He infuriated the Senate by telling them no more about Yalta than they had read in the newspapers. A few weeks later, Dad was even more shocked by the president’s dazed, vacant manner at the annual dinner of the White House Press Association. But he did not say a word about these impressions to Bess.

  One worry he did share with her was the president’s disinclination to bring him into the inner circle of the administration. He saw FDR in private only twice after he returned from Yalta. They discussed domestic political problems, none particularly important. Mr. Roosevelt invited Dad to sit in on the few cabinet meetings he called during this period. But he soon learned that nothing important was discussed there. FDR preferred to hold detailed discussions with individual members before and after the meetings.

  The cabinet meetings did give Dad a chance to see the games FDR liked to play with his followers. “He took a great deal of pleasure in getting one member of the cabinet to argue against another and in then hearing what they had to say,” Dad later recalled. “He would beam when Ickes jumped on Hopkins or Hopkins on Ickes. He sometimes seemed amused when [Secretary of the Treasury] Morgenthau raised mischief with the Secretary of State on how he was handling things.”

  At neither the cabinet meetings nor their two private sessions did the president say a word to Dad about foreign policy, which was absorbing 90 percent of Mr. Roosevelt’s exhausted mind. The Yalta agreements were collapsing in front of his eyes, as Stalin ruthlessly imposed a Communist regime on Poland.

  FDR was getting telegrams from Winston Churchill asking bluntly: “Poland has lost her frontier. Is she now to lose her freedom? I do not wish to reveal a divergence between the British and the United States Government, but it would certainly be necessary for me to make it clear that we are in the presence of a great failure and an utter breakdown of what we settled at Yalta.”

  For all Vice President Truman knew about this momentous development, it might have been taking place on another planet.

  As far as Bess could see, except for those spasms of bad publicity, things were going well. She told Mary Paxton Keeley that even her mother seemed “contented” about living in Washington. “It becomes harder and harder for her to get around so it’s a good thing for her to be here on one floor - and with plenty of heat.” To Ethel Noland, she wrote: “Harry looks better than he has for ages - is really putting on a little weight.” Her only worry was Chris and Fred Wallace, who were struggling to recover from the loss of the twins to which she had given birth in November. The babies had only lived a day.

  The Trumans even began planning a summer vacation, something they had never been able to do while he was running the Truman Committee. One of Dad’s closest Senate friends, Mon Wallgren, had become governor of Washington. Dad and Mother accepted an invitation to join Mon and his wife for a July cruise up the Pacific Coast to Alaska.

  In another letter to Ethel Noland, Bess conveyed a charming picture of domestic contentment. “Marg. has gone to a picture show and Harry to a poker party. Mother is practically asleep in her chair - so it’s very peaceful.”

  The day after Bess wrote that letter, FDR went to Warm Springs, Georgia, for a badly needed rest.
She knew nothing about the way the crowd at the Warm Springs station had gasped when they saw the president’s condition, how he had sagged in his wheelchair, his head bobbing out of control. For Bess, it was another piece of encouraging news, like the headlines reporting Allied armies gaining as much as fifty miles a day inside the crumbling Third Reich. She hoped - and believed - that two or three weeks in Warm Springs and a daily diet of good news from the battlefronts would restore Mr. Roosevelt.

  After church on Easter Sunday, April 8, Mother and Dad took special delight in ignoring critics such as Duke Shoop and going to a luncheon at Evalyn Walsh McLean’s home. It was one of the pleasures of being a new vice president, with no worries about an imminent reelection campaign. They went to many other parties in the same carefree spirit during these first months of 1945. I remember being stirred by how happy and handsome they looked as they left our apartment in formal clothes. Bess’ blue eyes sparkled. She looked regal. The Vice president cut quite a figure too in white tie and tails.

  I particularly remember how spiffy they appeared on the way to a party given in their honor by Perle Mesta. An heiress to two fortunes, one from her father, the other from her husband, she had been a Republican most of her life. She switched her allegiance in 1941 and moved to Washington, D.C., where she became not only a social lioness but a major contributor to the Democratic Party. She was a shrewder, more aggressive woman than Evalyn Walsh McLean. Mrs. Mesta relished power as much as the limelight. Dad - and a lot of other Democratic politicians - admired her far more for her ability to raise money than for her glittering parties. Mother enjoyed her effervescent personality. Perle was exactly like the woman in the musical Irving Berlin wrote about her, Call Me Madam.