Bess Truman

by Margaret Truman

  The high point of that first post-convention swing was our visit to the home of former Vice President John Nance Garner in the little town of Uvalde, Texas. We arrived at 5:00 a.m. on Sunday, October 26. That did not bother Dad, of course. He thought that was the hour when every right thinking, right living American should get up. The rest of us were practically comatose.

  Fortunately, the citizens of Uvalde kept the same farmers’ hours. Some 4,000 of them whooped and howled into the rising sun at the depot, with the seventy-nine-year-old Mr. Garner leading the cheers. They presented Dad with an angora goat wearing a gold blanket with red lettering which read: “Dewey’s Goat.” Dad loved it. After posing for pictures with the frisky creature, Dad announced: “I’m going to clip it and make a rug. Then I’m going to let it graze on the White House lawn for the next four years.”

  We then sat down to the most awesome breakfast I have ever seen or tried to eat. There was white-wing dove and mourning dove, bacon, ham, fried chicken, scrambled eggs, hot biscuits, Uvalde honey, peach preserves, and gallons of coffee. As we finished this feast, Dad gave Cactus Jack a small black satchel. He said it contained “medicine, only to be used in case of snakebites.” It was the same high quality Kentucky bourbon the vice president used to invite Senator Truman to share when he visited Mr. Garner’s office in his Senate days.

  Outside his house, Mr. Garner described Dad as an “old and very good friend.” Those words guaranteed Harry Truman the votes of the numerous Texas conservatives, who regarded Mr. Garner with almost reverential affection. After all, he had walked out on Franklin D. Roosevelt rather than support him for a third term. Dad responded by calling Cactus Jack “Mr. President.” That was what he used to call him in the Senate. Whereupon Mother astonished everyone by breaking her rule of silence and making her only speech of the campaign. “Good morning,” she said, “and thank you for this wonderful greeting.”

  We got back to Washington from that first trip with (according to Dad’s count) 140 stops and 147 speeches behind us. Edith Helm, the White House social secretary, informed Mrs. Truman that the capital’s hostesses and diplomats and social climbers were in a dither because she had not yet announced a schedule of formal dinners and receptions. Mother let them dither. She issued a statement that the president was too busy campaigning to discuss the subject with him.

  There was another reason for this delay, which Mother wisely declined to mention. The White House was in danger of collapsing. She and Dad had been worried about it for more than a year. Their alarm began when Dad noticed how the floor in his upstairs oval office shook when the color guard stamped across it to bring the colors downstairs to begin an official reception. He ordered an inspection that reported various ceilings, including the one in the State Dining Room, were staying up only from force of habit. Nothing but a few rusty nails were supporting them.

  For most of 1948, we lived with a forest of steel pipes in our bedrooms and sitting rooms. They were supposed to hold up the ceilings, but they could do nothing about the rot that was destroying the old timber. In the summer of 1948, one leg of my piano broke through the floor. The engineers next reported that Dad’s bathroom was in danger of falling into the Red Room, and they were worried about the stability of his bedroom, too. They moved him into Lincoln’s bedroom.

  Can you imagine what the press would have done with this story during the 1948 campaign? The whole mess would have been blamed on Harry Truman. The White House would have become a metaphor for his collapsing administration. Mother’s decision to say nothing about it and take the heat for the lack of a formal social season was one of her major, hitherto unknown contributions to Dad’s fight to become president in his own right.

  This did not mean the First Lady was escaping her handshaking chores. We were barely off the train on October 16 when Mother gave a tea for 150 members of the Democratic National Committee. I particularly remember the night Dad gave a radio speech denouncing the Eightieth Congress’ anti-labor bill, the Taft-Hartley Act, which they had passed over his veto. Mother had been standing up all afternoon, shaking hands with hundreds of members of the Colonial Dames of America. As we started downstairs to watch him speak, I thought she looked terribly tired and suggested we use the elevator.

  We could not get the thing started. The elevator, in keeping with the decrepit condition of the rest of the White House, would only go down if you took the button off, stuck a pencil in the hole and gave it a twist. That night I had to give it about a dozen twists to get it going. If Mother had not been standing beside me, I would have used some very unladylike language. She barely noticed my agitation. Her mind was on the speech that Dad was about to give. By this time, all of her, heart and soul, body and mind, was in the fight.

  A few days later, we rumbled out of Washington for the final whistle-stop campaign. The number of people who came down to see us off was not encouraging. As far as Washington, D.C., was concerned, Harry Truman was still a loser. Hadn’t fifty leading journalists predicted in Newsweek magazine that he was going to get beaten so badly, the Democratic Party might disappear? Mother glowered at the tiny band of mostly White House staffers who were waving goodbye. It was not a presidential sendoff. “Evalyn Walsh McLean tells me that all everybody talks about is who’s going to be in Dewey’s cabinet,” she said.

  Once more the candidate proceeded to wear out everyone but himself and the people who came to hear him. In the Midwest, even in New England - where Harvard sophisticates supposedly scorned Farmer Truman - the crowds kept getting bigger and more enthusiastic. The pollsters and pundits paid no attention to this phenomenon. Their charts and numbers still kept telling them it was a Republican year.

  Somewhere in the vicinity of Lima, Ohio, Mother told the candidate that if he called her the Boss once more, she might get off the train. That was her way of killing off the Boss’ boss part of the act. Dad surrendered. By that time, he was getting tired of it too.

  On the train, Mother spent most of her time with Dad. She let the staff take care of greeting the numerous politicians who got on and off at various stops as we crossed state lines. She felt it was more important to keep her eye on the president, to make sure he did not go over the edge into total exhaustion. She also functioned as a quiet cheering section and subtle critic, telling him how she thought the latest speech had gone over and suggesting small ways to improve the routine.

  Often she played mother to other members of the staff who were working into exhaustion just like the president. As we approached San Francisco, assistant White House counsel George Elsey came into the car with a speech that Dad was supposed to make in about two hours. He had not yet had time to go over it. We were having dinner, and George was very apologetic about interrupting us. But he was also more than a little frantic. “Mr. President, you’ve really got to read this as soon as possible, in case you want any changes . . .,” he began.

  “George,” Mother said. “You look frazzled. Have you had any dinner?”

  George shook his head.

  “Eat this,” Mother said, pushing her dessert, a piece of apple pie, across the table to him.

  George ate apple pie for his dinner while Dad read the speech.

  One of the nicest developments of the campaign from Mother’s point of view was Mrs. Roosevelt’s emergence as a Truman backer. Although Dad had appointed her to the U.S. delegation to the UN, where she became chairman of the Commission on Human Rights, she had been conspicuously silent throughout the draft-Eisenhower campaign launched by her sons. But when she saw and heard Dad’s fighting campaign, she changed her mind and made a six-minute pro-Truman speech by radio from Paris.

  Eleanor Roosevelt also tried to persuade her sons to return to the Democratic Party. However, to her considerable exasperation, they declined. Mother had nothing to do with Mrs. Roosevelt’s change of mind. But she felt her endorsement was an implicit approval of her first ladyship, even though it was so different from Mrs. Roosevelt’s approach to the job.

  St.
Louis was the climax of our whistle-stop career. Dad let his staff toil over a speech that was, in many respects, a masterpiece. But by this time, he had acquired so much confidence in his ability to speak extemporaneously from a set of notes that he threw it aside and went after the Republicans and their bland candidate the way he once tackled unruly hogs in his mother’s barnyard.

  Of all the fake campaigns, this one is the tops so far as the Republican candidate for President is concerned. He has been following me up and down this country making speeches about home, mother, unity and efficiency. . . . He won’t talk about the issues, but he did let his foot slip when he endorsed the Eightieth Congress.

  I have been all over these United States from one end to another, and when I started out the song was - well, you can’t win, the Democrats can’t win. Ninety percent of the press is against us, but that didn’t discourage me one little bit. You know, I had four campaigns here in the great state of Missouri, and I never had a metropolitan paper for me the whole time. And I licked them every time!

  People are waking up to the fact that this is their government and that they can control their government if they get out and vote on election day. That is all they need to do. . . . People are waking up, that the tide is beginning to roll, and I am here to tell you that if you do your duty as citizens of the greatest Republic the sun has ever shone on, we will have a government that will be for your interests, that will be for peace in the world, and for the welfare of all the people, and not just a few.

  A reporter for The Washington Post said that if Harry Truman won by a whisker, he would give the credit to his performance that night in St. Louis.

  Our hegira ended at 7:25 p.m., October 31, 1948, when our train clanked into the Missouri Pacific Railroad depot in Independence. “It’s grand to be home,” Dad told the crowd that welcomed us. It was a sentiment that Mother (and I) heartily endorsed. We had traveled 31,700 miles, and the candidate had made 356 speeches to a rough total of 15 million people. At 219 North Delaware Street, Mother did exactly what any woman would do after spending the previous two weeks riding the rails. She made sure she had an appointment at her hairdresser’s the next morning for a wash and set.

  The next evening, Bess demonstrated how much she wanted Harry Truman to win this election. She agreed to allow twenty reporters and at least as many technicians to invade 219 North Delaware while Dad made a radio address to the nation from the living room. She even let a photographer take a picture of him, as he again appealed to the American people to take charge of their own government and to ignore what the pollsters and the press were telling them.

  The next day, after we all voted at 10:00 a.m., Dad went into his usual Election-Day routine. He calmly announced that he was sure that he was going to win, and if he was wrong, it was too late to worry about it. Whereupon he disappeared. Mother and I were left to cope with the reporters, who grew really frantic that evening when Harry Truman leaped into the lead by a million votes and stayed there, far ahead of Republican Dewey, Progressive Wallace, and the Dixiecrat candidate, Strom Thurmond. By this time, Dad was sound asleep in a hotel in Excelsior Springs, about forty miles from Independence.

  In the house, I, the true believer from the start of the campaign, was taking charge of things. I refused to let Mother or Grandmother turn on the radio, where that dedicated Truman hater, H. V. Kaltenborn, kept on saying that Dewey would pull ahead eventually. I spent most of my time on the phone to the Washington headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, where staffers such as Bill Boyle (soon to become chairman) were getting the count direct from precincts and districts in cities and states all over the country. I whooped out the latest good news while my doubting elders sat there, not quite able to believe it.

  As the Truman lead became insurmountable, the reporters assaulted the house with a fervor unseen since D-Day. They established a beachhead on the porch, and Mother sent me out to deal with them. After five or ten minutes of sparring - I was getting pretty good at this sort of thing - I finally convinced them that Dad was not in the house.

  Mother finally decided to imitate the candidate by going to bed. By this time, it was well past midnight. She was tired, but as she said goodnight, a wicked smile crept across her face. “I wonder if Clare Booth Luce will think I’m real now,” she said.

  What memories must have crowded her mind, as she waited for sleep, all the other elections, but, above all, the one in 1940, where Harry Truman’s faith in himself and his destiny had carried him to victory. Tonight was the ultimate justification of that faith. I wonder if Mother grieved, just a little, for the times when her pessimism had made it difficult for her to share that faith. But the emotion was swiftly replaced by the pride, the pleasure, of winning this supreme triumph.

  Mother was up early the next morning. She had her usual light breakfast and began examining the house, agreeing with Grandmother that the place needed a good cleaning. Suddenly this housewifely conversation was interrupted by a tremendous racket. Dewey had conceded defeat at 10:14 a.m. A few minutes later, every whistle and car horn in Independence started blowing, and they were soon joined by the air raid sirens. For a moment, Mother thought time had somehow unraveled, that she had gone back forty years, and it was November 11, 1918, Armistice Day. But this time, Harry Truman was not just one of about 2 million victors being saluted. All that noise was for him and no one else.

  Fogged out from lack of sleep, I was uptown when the uproar exploded. I wandered into a store and said: “What’s all that noise about?” Fortunately, the storekeeper was an old family friend. After answering my question, he suggested I go home and get some sleep. I should have taken his advice, but I didn’t.

  Refreshed from a good night’s sleep, Dad was at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City, where his staff had spent the night. He had been awakened in his Excelsior Springs hideaway at 4 a.m. by his excited Secret Service man, Jim Rowley, who could no longer resist telling him the good news. They turned on the radio and listened to H. V. Kaltenborn still predicting Truman’s defeat, although he was 2 million votes ahead. The two of them laughed uproariously. Dad put on a natty blue suit, had a leisurely breakfast and drove to Kansas City at 6 a.m. He was the freshest man in a room full of glassy-eyed reporters and politicians when Dewey conceded.

  Back in Independence, after the whistles and horns stopped blowing, the local politicians realized that they did not have even a shred of a plan to throw a victory party for their native son. They had gone along with the rest of the country’s presumption of a Truman defeat. After some frantic telephone calls to 219 North Delaware Street and the Muehlebach Hotel, they announced that Dad and Mother and I would greet well-wishers that night in the Courthouse Square.

  The well-wishers turned out to be a wild-eyed mob of 40,000 from all parts of Jackson County. Men climbed onto the roofs of cars, perched in trees. Parents hoisted children on their shoulders. The streets running into the square were packed solid with cheering Democrats. The local police were swamped. The Secret Service was in a panic. But Dad did not mind the pandemonium in the least. “Protocol goes out the window when I am in Independence,” he said. Then he grew serious. “I thank you very much indeed for this celebration, which is not for me. It is for the whole country. It is for the whole world.”

  Mother and I stood beside him, smiling. For her, this explosion of admiration and affection from her friends and neighbors was tremendously satisfying.

  The next morning, we headed back to Washington on our campaign train. I crawled into a berth and got the first real sleep I had encountered in forty-eight hours. So I have to rely on other eyewitnesses for what happened en route. Dad meant what he had told the celebrators in Independence. But humility did not preclude a little private crowing, especially over the red-faced pollsters and journalists. Mother was ahead of him in this department. She chortled when she heard that Drew Pearson had filed a column for the day after the election, analyzing “the closely knit group around Tom Dewey who will take over
the White House eighty-six days from now.” At St. Louis, someone brought onto the train a copy of the Chicago Tribune, with the headline, DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. Bess thrust it into Harry Truman’s hands, and he held it up for a famous picture.

  In Washington, D.C., a stupendous crowd met the train at Union Station. It is surprising that some people were not crushed to death. Mother looked out the window at the wildly smiling faces and frantically waving hands and turned to me. “Remember how many came down to see us off last month?” she said.

  Victory was not going to make an optimist of her.

  But she enjoyed every minute of that celebration in her adopted hometown. The Washington, D.C., police band played ruffles and flourishes and “Hail to the Chief,” the presidential song, as we were escorted through the crowd to a seven-passenger open touring car. We rode through the streets with Dad and Vice President Barkley sitting on top of the back seat. Over 800,000 cheering people jammed the sidewalks while bands, official and impromptu, seemed to be playing “I’m Just Wild About Harry” on every corner.

  I suddenly remembered something my tennis-champion mother had said when Dad was nominated for vice president in Chicago. “It’s nice to win,” I yelled, above the din.

  “You bet it is,” Bess Wallace Truman said.

  Mother was still enjoying the victory the next morning, when Mr. West, the assistant usher with whom she worked on the menus for official dinners, came into her office and congratulated her. She picked up a copy of a recent issue of Time with Dewey on the cover. “It looks like you’re going to have to put up with us for another four years,” she said.

  But most of those four years, it soon became apparent, would not be spent at the White House. The engineers and architects who had been inspecting the mansion told Dad that the building was literally in danger of falling down on top of us. There was only one solution - we would have to move to Blair House, and the White House would have to be completely renovated.