Bess Truman
Page 41
What to do? There was only one alternative, as Harry Truman saw it. He had to take his case to the people. He decided to do it before the Democratic National Convention, to silence the calamity howlers by showing them there was broad popular support for his record as president. He told Bess that he wanted her and me to come with him on a “nonpartisan” trip across the country to inspect such government properties as the Grand Coulee Dam and to deliver a commencement address at the University of California.
There was not a word of protest from Bess, in spite of the fact that Grandmother Wallace was seriously ill. Her heart was beginning to fail, and that caused severe swelling in her legs, which forced her to stay in bed. In other years, such an illness would have prompted Bess to cancel every social and political obligation in sight. Instead, she took Grandmother home to Independence and persuaded me to join them there. A week later, on June 6, 1948, Mother and I boarded the seventeen-car presidential train in Omaha.
By that time, Dad had made a few stops in Ohio and Indiana, where his remarks about the Eightieth Congress and their betrayal of the farmer and the workingman were not exactly nonpartisan. In Omaha, it was more of the same, and he laid it on with ever more scorching language as we rolled through Wyoming and Idaho and Montana into Washington. There, Dad’s old Senate friend, Governor Mon Wallgren, made a crucial contribution to the Truman campaign style. He began introducing Mother and me at every stop. People seemed to like it, even though we did nothing but smile and wave.
Next, Senator Robert Taft, the dour leader of the Senate Republicans, made another contribution to Trumanology. In a speech in Philadelphia, he accused Harry Truman of “blackguarding Congress at every whistle station in the West.”
J. Howard McGrath, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, promptly telegraphed the mayors of thirty-five cities and towns that we had visited, asking them how they liked being called whistle-stops. Dad, with the same instinct that prompted the Americans of 1776 to make that condescending British tune “Yankee Doodle” into a song of defiance, began talking about his whistle-stop campaign.
In Seattle and Los Angeles, which are somewhat above whistle-stop status, we Truman loyalists got a look at the depth of the president’s support. The sidewalks were jammed with cheering people as we rode through these cities. The Los Angeles crowd was well over a million. Dad gave rousing speeches in both places. That warm-up tour, which many people have forgotten, convinced most of the White House staff that Harry Truman could win in November, no matter what the polls said.
The success of this first campaign trip is reflected in the sunny letter Dad wrote Mother on their twenty-ninth wedding anniversary.
Twenty-nine years! It seems like twenty-nine days.
Detroit, Port Huron, a farm sale, the Blackstone Hotel, a shirt store, County Judge, a defeat, Margie, Automobile Club membership drive, Presiding Judge, Senator, V.P., now!
You still are on the pedestal where I placed you that day in Sunday school in 1890. What an old fool I am.
Touched as she undoubtedly was by this letter, Mother remained a doubter about Dad’s chances for reelection. This opinion did not imply any criticism of his performance as president. It was just her pessimism at work. She kept her opinion to herself and worked her head off to help him win.
The same do or die spirit was not shared by large sections of the Democratic Party. Both parties had chosen Philadelphia for their nominating conventions. The Republicans were meeting first. So dispirited was the Democratic National Committee, they humbly asked the GOP if they would leave up their flags and bunting so the Democrats could save the cost of putting up fresh decorations. Apparently they were hoarding their cash for the 1952 campaign.
The Republicans convened in Philadelphia on June 21, 1948, and they could not have been more arrogant. They nominated Thomas E. Dewey for president and Earl Warren for vice president and talked as if they were already in the White House. Clare Booth Luce said President Truman was “a gone goose,” and threw in a comment on Bess that drove Dad up the wall. She called her an “ersatz First Lady.”
In the White House, we were momentarily distracted from these political slings and arrows by an awful personal tragedy. One of my frequent escorts during the first three White House years had been a tall, handsome ex-naval officer named Bobby Stewart. I was half in love with him, and so was my friend Drucie Snyder, Secretary of the Treasury Snyder’s daughter. Bobby dated her as often as he dated me. We had met Bobby and his parents, Louise and Earl Stewart, through the Snyders.
As brilliant as he was good-looking, Bobby had been raised in Paris and spoke fluent French and a half dozen other languages. His father was an international businessman; his mother was a tiny, red-haired woman from Indiana with a fey sense of humor. Bobby was her only son and the center of her universe. On June 17, Bobby was flying from Denver to New York for Louise’s birthday. The airliner hit a transformer outside the Pittsburgh airport and crashed, killing everyone on board.
Drucie and I were devastated. Mother was almost as upset. To use an old-fashioned phrase, her heart went out to Louise Stewart. With everything Dad had on his mind, she prevailed on him to join us for the funeral ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery. It was one of the hottest days in the history of Washington, D.C. We sat in the little chapel and listened to Louise sob. There was nothing left of Bobby but his arm, which was in a small coffin on the altar.
Ten days later, on June 27, 1948, Dad sent the bereaved parents a long letter. “I was very fond of Bobby,” he wrote. “I think he had a great future. It is my hope that you will make Bobby’s spirit realize that future. I believe you can do it.” He suggested that each year they pick out a boy and a girl in Anderson, Indiana, Louise’s hometown, and Columbia, Missouri, Earl Stewart’s hometown, and give them enough money to get them through high school. “In a four year course you would be supporting sixteen young men and young women for a fundamental education - much more important to the young people than college. You would only take those who could not afford the cost of going to high school. . . . You’d make Bobby immortal! You’d have the greatest life interest in the world looking after these young people - and I’m sure God Almighty would be pleased.”
This is from a man who was only ten days away from going to Philadelphia to confront a hostile, divided Democratic Convention. He was struggling to hold the party together, raise money for the campaign, and to keep the Russians out of Berlin. Although Harry Truman wrote this letter, I am absolutely certain that its real author was Bess. Throughout these politically frantic weeks, she sent flowers, wrote letters, and paid visits to Louise Stewart, trying to help her deal with her grief.
Months later, on a voyage to France, Louise Stewart wrote to Bess: “I appreciate with all my heart your many many wonderful kindnesses to me. I guess that it is really what keeps me going most of the time. I keep trying to pick up the pieces of my life but often it seems quite hopeless. But neither you or Bobby expect me to fall down on my face and so I’ll keep trying, but without you I don’t think that I’d make it. . . .”
Shortly after Dad wrote that letter to the Stewarts, Mother and I rushed to Independence. Grandmother Wallace was gravely ill. From the White House, Dad wrote Mother a dramatic letter on the eve of the convention. The situation was one enormous, confusing stew. The southerners and the liberals were at each other’s throats. Everyone in the world was giving the president advice.
I’ve been trying to write you ever since arrival here but just now succeeded in getting it done. I’ve had only one walk, that yesterday morning for twenty minutes and no swim at all.
Went over the platform again at 4:00 p.m., came back to the [White] House at seven, had a big dinner and went to bed at eight-thirty. Never been as tired and groggy in my life. . . .
Yesterday was most hectic. Matt [Connelly] kept running in people to talk to me - people I didn’t want to see. These birds around me have all turned politicians and precinct captains - and they know nothing
about it.
Finished the outline for the platform and sent it to Philly . . . and had Fred Vinson to dinner. He stayed until 11:30 p.m. talking about everything.
I still don’t know what our program is. Biffle [Leslie Biffle, Secretary of the Senate] called and said he had a suite for you and Margie at the Drake. Evidently they expect you to come to the convention Tuesday or Wednesday, I don’t know which. I’m supposed to go there Wednesday or Thursday. Maybe I can tell you what we are supposed to do Sunday on the phone. I don’t know now. It’s worse than Chicago if that’s possible. I wish I’d stayed on the farm and never gone to war in the first place!
He could write that last line to Bess now because he knew that she was on his side, in spite of the pain his confrontations with history had caused her.
Bess and I joined Dad in the White House a few days before the convention began on July 12, 1948. For the first three days, we watched the proceedings on television, an historic first for both the president and the American people. (Dad instantly foresaw what it meant for the president: “No privacy anywhere,” he wrote in his diary.) The convention was not very cheerful viewing. The liberals introduced a civil rights plank that won after a floor fight, and most of the southerners walked out to nominate their own candidate, Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.
I have always liked the reason Mr. Thurmond gave for bolting the Democratic Party in 1948. A reporter pointed out to him that he had not objected when Franklin D. Roosevelt had run on a platform replete with the same promises of justice and equal opportunity for America’s black citizens.
“But Truman really means it,” Thurmond said.
Rumors swirled around various alternate candidates, from Eisenhower to Claude Pepper to Alben Barkley. Dad remained perfectly calm and in close touch with what was really happening. On the evening of July 14, we went up to Philadelphia by train and watched the end of the wrangling in the almost airless Convention Hall. It took most of the night for them to get through nominating Harry Truman for president and Alben Barkley for vice president. Not until 2:00 a.m. did Dad make his acceptance speech to the exhausted delegates.
He gave a speech that shocked those bedraggled Democrats awake, as if they had all been wired to a dynamo - which, metaphorically, they were. “Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make those Republicans like it - don’t you forget that!” he began. “We will do that because they are wrong and we are right.”
He recalled what the Democratic Party had done for the farmer and the workingman in the past sixteen years. It had given them social security, rural electrification, crop price supports, unemployment insurance. If the farmers and labor “don’t do their duty by the Democratic Party they are the most ungrateful people in the world!” He castigated the Eightieth Congress for all the things that had not been done to control inflation, clear slums, fund better schools and social welfare programs. Then he unleashed a lightning bolt.
On July 26, which out in Missouri we call Turnip Day, I am going to call Congress back and ask them to pass laws to halt rising prices, to meet the housing crisis - which they are saying they are for, in their platform.
At the same time I shall ask them to act upon other vitally needed measures. . . .
Now, my friends, if there is any reality behind that Republican platform, we ought to get some action from a short session of the Eightieth Congress. They can do this job in fifteen days, if they want to do it. They will still have time to go out and run for office. . . .
Pandemonium was the only word to describe the Convention Hall. For two solid minutes, those previously dispirited Democrats stood up on their chairs and roared their enthusiasm for Harry S. Truman. Beside me, Mother was chuckling delightedly. She was one of the few people in Philadelphia who knew all about Turnip Day. A year before, you will recall, Dad had written her a letter on July 26, noting that it was Turnip Day - and Nellie Noland’s birthday.
Mother and I went home to Missouri after the convention to be with Grandmother Wallace, who had had another sinking spell. Mother proceeded to con me into painting the kitchen and pantry. She told me I would enjoy it. She loved to paint and redecorate that old house as much as her mother did. I enjoyed it too for about three days. But with Mother as foreman, it turned into a lifetime job. One coat, two coats, were not enough. I was still painting in mid-August.
Meanwhile, the president was grappling with a major crisis in Europe. After months of threat and bluster, the Russians had clamped a total blockade on Berlin. Dad responded with a massive airlift that kept the city alive without resort to shooting our way through on the ground. The situation remained tense, and the secretary of the army did not help matters by abruptly calling General Lucius Clay, the American commander in Germany, home for consultations. Dad wrote Mother that Clay’s return had stirred up a “terrific how-dy-do for no good reason. Marshall [secretary of state] and I had decided it was not necessary for him to come and so told Forrestal [secretary of defense] - but you know how smart that Defense setup thinks it is.”
Next, Secretary Forrestal intensified the “how-dy-do” by suggesting to the president that he turn over our atomic bomb arsenal to the army to use when they saw fit. “Wouldn’t that be a nice peace gesture?” Dad wryly asked Mother.
He was happy to report that in spite of appearances to the contrary, “it looks like the Russkies are going to come in without a fight.” If this happened and the situation in the Middle East also calmed down. “Things will be in such shape in foreign affairs that we can go to work in earnest on that bunch of ‘Hypercrits’ known as Republicans.
“They sure are in a stew and mad as wet hens. If I can make them madder, maybe they’ll do the job the old gods used to put on the Greeks and Romans.”
Those last two sentences reveal the secret reason for the Turnip Day session, a strategy that Dad had obviously shared with Mother. By this time, she was enjoying the campaign. Deep in her woman’s heart, Mother loved a good fight. She kept this combative side of herself carefully concealed, but it was the secret of her success as a tennis and basketball player in her youth.
Her enthusiasm for the contest with Congress was so strong, she sent Dad a telegram of congratulations (which she persuaded me to sign with her) on the message he sent to the Turnip Day session when they gathered in muggy Washington, D.C., on July 26. I can see now that Bess was doing everything she could to keep her man’s morale high.
Dad responded with a letter to me, which he knew Mother would also see.
I was highly pleased to get . . . the telegram from you and your mother about the message to Congress.
You seem to have been slaving away at your paint job and your garden. I am hoping to see an excellent result in each instance. . . .
I am somewhat exhausted myself getting ready for this terrible Congress. They are in the most turmoil any Congress I can remember ever has been. Some of them want to quit right away, some of them want to give the Dixiecrats a chance to filibuster and the Majority are very anxious to put the Pres. in the hole if they can manage it.
It will take a few days for the message to sink in completely.
In the meantime I shall take it easy and let ‘em sweat.
On September 11, from the Williamsburg, Dad told Mother how the first part of the campaign was shaping up. “Farm speech at Des Moines on Sept. 18, conservation at Denver on the 20th, reclamation at Salt Lake City on the 21st. . . . Then San Francisco, L.A. San Diego, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Ky. West Va and Washington D.C. Seems like a nice little trip - what?”
Before we launched that expedition, there was a trip to Detroit to speak to an immense Labor Day rally. Mother did not go with us. She went out to Denver to act as honorary godmother at the christening of Fred Wallace’s third child, Charlotte Margaret and special permission from the priest to participate in the ceremony. (Chris Wallace was a Catholic and Freddy had become a convert.) It was one more illustration of her intense involvement in her youngest brother’s life.
That sums up better than several dozen paragraphs from me the pace of the Truman whistle-stop campaign of 1948. Mother joined us in Des Moines, and we rumbled across the American continent with the candidate speaking from 6:00 a.m. in the morning until midnight on some days. The routine at each stop soon became as polished as a vaudeville act. Dad emerged on the observation platform of the last car and got an ovation. The local politicians would greet him, and he would give a brief speech. Then he introduced Mother as “the Boss” and me as “the one who bosses the Boss.”
Sometime during the first week, I noticed that Mother was not exactly enthused by this introduction. I sensed that she did not like the suggestion that she let me push her around, the possible implication that I was a spoiled brat, which reflected on her standing as an American mother. Seeking to head off an explosion, I approached Dad and said, very confidentially: “You know, I don’t think Mother really likes you calling me her boss.”
Dad thought about it for a second, obviously calculating risks and advantages. “It gets a good laugh,” he said.
I remained the Boss’ boss.