by A. J. Baime
* * *
Wherever he looked, Truman faced tough choices.
Should he support the Jews in a quest for a homeland, and please huge numbers of American voters in the process? Or should he side with his own State Department and the oil that was critical to national security?
Should he come out in support of black Americans and the NAACP for civil rights? Or should he side with the Democratic base in the South, led by powerful and popular white congressmen who would oppose any such notions, and without whom the future of the Democratic Party would be imperiled?
Should he support unions and workers in their right to strike and demand rights from big business? Or laws that curb the rights of strikers, in an effort to stabilize the economy during the critical period of reconversion to peacetime?
For American voters, the rising prices of consumer goods was the biggest problem of all, the one they felt with their wallets on a daily basis. Treasury officials, banking officials, the president, and Republican leaders in Congress were at war over the issue of whether to stabilize prices by law. Should the federal government have the power to set the costs of steaks and nylon stockings?
In all of these issues: What was the right thing to do? And what was the politically popular thing to do?
Stuck between opposing forces, Truman saw his presidency weaken. He was ridiculed in cartoons, lambasted in opinion pieces. “It was a cruel time to put inexperience in power,” wrote the columnist Richard Rovere.
Truman alone held the key to the first nuclear arsenal. Never before had an American president controlled such awesome power. And yet, never before had one been so publicly emasculated. Meanwhile, prices of consumer goods continued to soar. The president’s approval rating dropped to 37 percent from 87 percent in just one year, as the 1946 midterm elections approached.
The pressure on the president was becoming nearly unbearable. At one point, Drew Pearson, the nation’s most popular political columnist, criticized Truman’s wife and daughter in a radio broadcast for traveling on a private railcar when soldiers were left off the train because seats were scarce. The accusation was untrue. When Pearson showed up to a White House press conference, Truman angrily confronted him. Secret Service agent Henry Nicholson was standing nearby. He recalled Pearson turning pale as Truman poked a finger into his abdomen.
“God damn you,” Truman said, “you call me what you want—thief, robber—but the next time you tell a falsehood about my wife I will punch you right in the nose, and don’t think I wouldn’t.”
3
“Can He Swing the Job?”
MILLIONS OF AMERICANS WERE STILL baffled as to how Truman had become president in the first place. “Here was a man who came into the White House almost as though he had been picked at random off the street,” recalled White House correspondent Robert Nixon. Truman had no college degree. He had never had the money to own his own home. He had never been the mayor of a city, never served as governor of a state. His presidency was the result of a chain of events so unlikely, only destiny could account for them. He himself would later say that he became the most powerful man in the world “by accident.”
He was born in Lamar, Missouri, on May 8, 1884. His father was a farmer and mule trader; his mother was a crack shot with a rifle and remarkably educated for a farm woman reared in the nineteenth century. The Truman home had no plumbing. By the time Harry was in school, the family had moved to Independence, Missouri, to a home that had electricity, and Harry had two siblings—a brother named John Vivian and a sister named Mary Jane.
As a boy, he found three passions that would guide his personal and political future. The first was Elizabeth “Bess” Wallace. “When I was about six or seven years old,” he would recollect, “my mother took me to Sunday School and I saw there the prettiest sweetheart little girl I’d ever seen . . . She had tanned skin, blond hair, golden as sunshine, and the most beautiful blue eyes.”
For the rest of Truman’s days, Bess would be the focus of his emotional life. It would take years of courting before the object of his devotion would pay any attention to Harry. Her family belonged to Independence’s social elite, while the Trumans were farm people. A family friend would remember Bess’s mother saying, “You don’t want to marry that farm boy, he is not going to make it anywhere.’”
Truman’s second passion was reading. Around the time he first laid eyes on his future bride, he contracted diphtheria. “He ended up being paralyzed for about a year,” recalled Harry’s sister, Mary Jane. “So, that’s when he started reading so much. He couldn’t do anything else and he couldn’t get up without help, and so he’d lie on the floor and put books down on the floor in front of him and read the book that way.” He became obsessed with history and the leaders who had shaped it, from Moses and Hannibal to Ulysses S. Grant and George Washington.
Truman’s third passion was politics. As his daughter, Margaret, would later write, “You have to understand how profoundly the Trumans identify with the word Democrat.”
The Truman family considered themselves “Rebel Democrats,” tracing their political identities back to the Civil War. Both of Harry’s parents came from slave-owning families who sided with the South. Truman’s mother often told the story of how, when she was a child, Union loyalists known as Jayhawkers had raided her family’s farm, killing the farm animals and burning the family home to the ground. For many families like the Trumans, in places like Missouri and to the south, the Union army and President Abraham Lincoln became inextricably linked to the Republican Party. The Trumans saw their party affiliation as an obsession born of a lost war. Their devotion to the Democratic Party was unquestioned, like the color of their skin.
“Democrats were not made by campaign promises and rational debate, in Independence,” Margaret Truman later wrote. “They were born.”
Were it not for a world war, Truman would probably never have left the farm, nor gotten married. Here is where destiny intervened for the first time in his life. In April 1917, when the United States entered World War I, he was thirty-three years old. On March 30, 1918, he sailed for France, a lieutenant in the US Army’s 129th Field Artillery Regiment, Thirty-Fifth Division. By the time his group, Battery D (194 men), made it to the front lines, Truman had been elevated to captain, due largely to his age. It was his first shot at leadership.
Truman led his soldiers on horseback into the Argonne Forest for the largest American military operation in history up to that time—the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Over twenty-six thousand American troops were killed. When the Axis powers surrendered and Truman’s Battery D had fired the last shots on November 11, 1918, he took enormous pride in the fact that his unit had not lost a single man. Before Truman left Europe, he received a letter from Bess Wallace back in Missouri. “You may invite the entire 35th Division to your wedding if you want to,” she wrote. “I guess it’s going to be yours as well as mine.”
Truman returned to Independence, married Bess, and moved into the Wallace house at 219 North Delaware Street, which would be his home for the rest of his life, outside of his years in the White House. In 1920 he opened a business with a wartime buddy, “my Jewish friend” Eddie Jacobson, on Twelfth Street in nearby Kansas City. Truman & Jacobson was a haberdashery with twenty feet of storefront, big glass windows, and a sign at the top: SHIRTS, COLLARS, HOSIERY, GLOVES, BELTS, HATS. After just two years, the recession of 1921–22 put Truman & Jacobson out of business, and left Harry in dire financial straits. “I am still paying on those debts,” he would write in a diary, twelve years later.
At thirty-eight, he was lost and broke, living in his wife’s family home, where his in-laws looked down their noses at him. Once again, destiny intervened.
During one of his last days at Truman & Jacobson, Harry was in the store behind the counter when a local political figure named Mike Pendergast stepped in off the street. Truman had served in the army with Pendergast’s son Jim, and Mike had gotten to know Truman.
“How’d yo
u like to be a county judge?” Mike Pendergast asked.
“I don’t know,” Truman said.
“If you would like, you can have it.”
Truman needed a job. In Jackson County, judges were county commissioners—elected officials rather than arbiters of jurisprudence. Truman had no political experience, but he did have the one thing he needed to win an election: the backing of the Pendergast family, most importantly Tom Pendergast (Mike’s brother), who controlled the Kansas City Democratic machine. Weighing over 250 pounds, Tom Pendergast was a legend in Missouri. He was a kingmaker—so powerful that he could pick candidates for political office and all but guarantee their victory. It was also well-known that, in Jackson County, Pendergast had his fingers in the rackets—gambling, liquor.
Truman won his first election in 1922 to become a Jackson County judge. From there, the “Big Boss” Tom Pendergast controlled his political career. As Truman’s war buddy Harry Vaughan later put it, “Old Tom Pendergast wanted to have some window dressing. And Truman was really window dressing for him because he could say, ‘Well, there’s my boy Truman. Nobody can ever say anything about Truman. Everybody thinks he’s okay.’”
In 1934 Pendergast was desperate for a Missouri candidate who could represent his political machine in the US Senate. When one of his underlings mentioned Truman’s name, Pendergast shrugged. “Nobody knows him,” he said. “He’s an ordinary county judge and not known outside Jackson County.” Then: “Do you mean seriously to tell me that you actually believe that Truman can be nominated and elected to the United States Senate?”
Having run out of potential candidates, Pendergast flexed his muscle and won fifty-year-old Harry Truman a job in Washington. The Missouri press was outraged. Truman was “Boss Pendergast’s Errand Boy,” “the Senator from Pendergast.” Before leaving for Washington with his wife and daughter, Truman stopped in to see the Boss. Pendergast told him, “Work hard, keep your mouth shut, and answer your mail.”
* * *
“If you had seen Harry Truman . . . in the freshman row in the Senate, you would hardly have picked him as a future leader,” remembered the Washington Post’s Marquis Childs. “He seemed to be one of those inconspicuous political accidents—a nice fellow cast up by the workings of machine politics.” According to one Post story on freshman senators, Truman was “not considered brilliant, either as an orator or as a scholar.”
Truman stayed under the radar, voting consistently along party lines, supporting Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal. Nearing the end of his first term, he came into work one morning in 1939 to learn that Tom Pendergast had been indicted on tax-evasion charges. On May 29 of that year Boss Pendergast landed at Leavenworth. The news was an extreme blow to Truman’s already shaky reputation. “The terrible things done by the high ups in K.C. will be a lead weight to me from now on,” he wrote his wife.
By the time Truman gathered his friends to discuss his reelection plans in 1940, the Nazis had invaded Poland and World War II had begun in Europe. The Missouri senator’s career was over, Truman’s friends agreed. The popular Democratic governor Lloyd Stark was running for Truman’s Senate seat. “We didn’t give him a chance,” recalled Truman’s friend A. J. Granoff, a Kansas City lawyer. “We expected him to be beaten badly.”
Truman dug in and ran one of the most storied campaigns in Missouri history. Along the way, the family finances grew so dire that a bank foreclosed on the home his mother and sister were living in, in Grandview. But once again, Truman’s life took an inexplicable turn. Against all odds, he defeated Governor Stark to win the Democratic primary in the closest election the state had seen in almost two decades, then went on to win in November.
No one could point a finger at Boss Pendergast. Harry had done it on his own.
As Truman began his second Senate term, news of Nazi triumphs shocked the world. Early in 1941 President Roosevelt received $10.5 billion in appropriations for emergency defense purposes. Truman took a road trip in his Dodge on his own dime to inspect the army construction sites that were consuming much of that money. What he saw concerned him, and on February 10, 1941, he made a speech on the Senate floor.
“I am introducing a Resolution,” Truman said to his fellow senators, “asking for an investigation of the National Defense Program.” Truman’s idea was to set up a Senate committee to police government military spending. Soon he was traveling the nation with a team of senators—five Democrats, two Republicans—uncovering inefficiencies and raw-material bottlenecks. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States entered the war, Truman found himself in an extraordinary position. The so-called Truman Committee was poised to become vital to the war effort. When the committee released its first report in 1942, on cost overruns at military construction sites, the Washington Post commented: “To thousands, the first question after the shock of the Truman report must have been: Who in the world is Truman?”
Two years later, as an ailing FDR prepared for his fourth election campaign, his advisers convinced him to drop his vice president, Henry Wallace, from the 1944 ticket. Wallace had a following, but he had failed to ingratiate himself with many in Roosevelt’s inner circle, and aides feared his far-left-leaning views and personal idiosyncrasies would be a liability in the campaign. FDR needed someone new. “Truman just dropped into the slot,” recalled Ed Flynn, a powerful Bronx political leader who was in the White House with FDR on July 11, the night the decision was made.
Truman himself had no idea of the machinations that would land him on the 1944 ticket—not yet. As the party delegates readied to nominate a VP candidate at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago Stadium, Truman agreed to take a phone call from Roosevelt, who was in Washington. The Missourian ended up in a crowded suite at the Blackstone Hotel on July 22. The phone rang. A party official named Bob Hannegan picked up, and Roosevelt’s voice came through so loud, others in the hotel suite could hear.
“Bob,” FDR said, “have you got that fellow lined up yet?”
“No,” said Hannegan, with Truman standing next to him. “He is the contrariest goddamn mule from Missouri I ever dealt with.”
“Well, you tell that senator that if he wants to break up the Democratic party in the middle of a war, that’s his responsibility.”
Truman agreed to follow Roosevelt’s lead, and was nominated by the party at a frenzied convention meeting that night. On election night—November 7, 1944—FDR won a fourth term, and Harry Truman became America’s vice president.
* * *
Eighty-two days after the beginning of his fourth term, FDR was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage, and the first thing that could be heard out of the mouths of many when they learned the news was: “Good God! Truman will be President!” Truman was a few weeks shy of his sixty-first birthday. He took the oath of office on April 12, 1945, with Bess and his only child, Margaret, standing beside him. “The gravest question mark in every American heart is about Truman,” Michigan senator Arthur Vandenberg wrote in his diary the night Truman was sworn in. “Can he swing the job?”
Patriotism and victory were on Truman’s side. Democrats and Republicans rallied behind the new president. The Allies won the war, and revealed the war’s greatest secret—the atomic bomb. Truman’s approval rating hit 87 percent after the Japanese surrender, higher than Roosevelt’s had ever been. But in the weeks following, that number began to sink slowly and steadily, and with it, the hopes of the entire Democratic Party.
4
“I Was Amazed at How Calm He Seemed in the Face of Political Disaster”
ON JULY 9, 1946, ROUGHLY eleven months after Truman announced the surrender of Japan, he held a lunch at the White House unlike any that had ever occurred in the executive mansion. Administration officials gathered around a projection machine, and fresh footage of the latest atomic bomb test rolled. The test shot had gone off eight days earlier, on July 1, at a site in the Pacific. Film cameras captured the fury: A sudden white light blinded the camera lens m
omentarily, giving way to a ballooning fireball that resembled a new sun being born.
The president watched silently as the footage showed the shot from different camera angles. No one in the room felt the impact more than Truman. The death toll in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was so vast, the actual numbers would never be known, and Truman was haunted by the decision he had made to use the bomb. It was the most controversial decision any president had ever made, and Truman feared having to make it again.
Sitting near the president, Henry Wallace—now the secretary of commerce—said the explosion looked like a tremendous “blooming chrysanthemum.” Wallace leaned over to Dean Acheson, an official from the State Department, and said that in fifteen or twenty years, “You will look toward Washington and see these beautiful chrysanthemums arising one after another.”
The latest bomb test was the culmination of a series of events over the past five months that made everyone watching the footage feel as if World War III was in the making. On February 9, 1946, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin made a rare appearance on a speaker’s platform, at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. An avoidance of future war “was impossible under the present capitalistic development of world economy,” Stalin said in his speech. He announced a Five-Year Plan of preparation “to guarantee our country against any eventuality.” His Five-Year Plan sounded suspiciously like the Four-Year Plan Adolf Hitler had announced in 1936, which in retrospect was an economic and industrial campaign to prepare for war. Clearly alluding to the atomic bomb, Stalin added a promise that Soviet scientists would “not only catch up with but also surpass those abroad.”
Less than a month later, on a stage at Westminster College in Truman’s home state of Missouri, former British prime minister Winston Churchill delivered his chilling “Iron Curtain” speech.