Bess Truman (26 page)

Whether she was in Washington or Independence, Bess kept in touch with Senator Truman’s ever more complicated career. When he threw a party in his office as the Senate neared adjournment in the summer of 1939, she provided a ham that “went over big.” More to the point, Dad recited a list of names at the party, a mixture of isolationists and interventionists, liberals, and conservatives, and remarked that from Bess’ reading of the
Congressional Record,
she would no doubt wonder how they ever got along. They all wished him luck in his reelection campaign, which everyone knew already had begun.

Happily, not everything in these years revolved around the dread of defeat in 1940. Bess’ enjoyment of life in Washington, D.C., continued to grow. By 1937, Dad was an established member of the Senate’s hardworking inner circle. He was a close friend of Vice President Garner. His growing prominence made Bess feel more socially secure - as well as more proud of her husband. Invitations to lunches, teas, and dinners multiplied. She even liked the way politics intertwined with these social occasions. For instance, when she told her mother that the Trumans had been invited to tea at Justice Brandeis’ home, she noted the invitation could not have arrived at a better time, with the Pendergast mess in all the papers.

In another letter around this time, she made it clear that she had not lost her feet-on-the-ground Missouri approach to Washington life. She told her mother of going to a “very high-brow dinner” at which a Chinese diplomat made a speech. “It was mostly propaganda,” she remarked. Bess was far more interested in an Indian girl who had practiced law in London for five years and was going back to India “to try to do something for the country. I imagine she’ll do it.” She summed up the rest of the company as “strictly a bunch of brain trusters (minus the Trumans) and a number of top columnists and state department people.”

Bess became active in the Congressional Club, where wives of senators and representatives mingled for lunch and tea. She and Miriam Clark gave a tea for the wives of the Missouri delegation there and invited a national committeewoman to give a talk. Several months later, she told Dad with obvious pride that she had been asked to pour at another tea. She ran a Missouri bridge party for the benefit of the club and raised a whopping $58. (Remember, these were the days of the three-cent stamp.) When the Daughters of the American Revolution came to town for their convention, she gave a successful tea for the Missouri delegates.

For enjoyment, however, nothing quite equaled the June 1939 visit of the King and Queen of England. I was in a near frenzy over it, and Mother was pretty enthralled herself. I had followed with anguish and fascination (I was now fifteen and a complete romantic) the drama of the royal house in recent years, culminating in the abdication of Edward VII to marry American-born Wallis Simpson. I implored Mother for a chance to examine the king and queen close-up to see if I could transfer my allegiance.

We went down to the Capitol the day the royal couple came to Congress. Mother wrote Grandmother Wallace a vivid letter about it. “The whole of the capitol plaza was filled with chairs and it was the hottest place I ever got into. We sat there from 10-11:45 and just broiled, I wouldn’t have stuck it out but Marg had had such a glimpse of them the day before [as they whizzed by in a car]. When they came out they walked the whole length of the plaza thru the middle aisle and we were within fifteen or twenty feet of them so she got a good look. And she still prefers the Duke & Duchess!”

Later, Bess went to a garden party for the royals that “was even nicer than anybody thought it was going to be - and plenty interesting,” she told her mother. “I got myself into the second row when the Queen went thru the garden so got a good look and saw the King from the same vantage point.” She thought the Queen was beautiful but rated the King as only “fairly good looking.” But both passed another, more crucial test. They were “very democratic.”

Bess observed that the king and queen “had made a terrific hit in Washington.” She did not say it, but she was well aware that the visit was more than mere pageantry for the benefit of their American cousins. They had come to try to influence Congress and the American people to join their country’s stiffening stand against Adolf Hitler’s rearmed Germany. Throughout the following summer, Dad played a key role in the struggle to repeal the neutrality laws.

The first round was not encouraging. In midsummer of 1939, Senators Truman, Minton, and Guffey informally polled the Senate on the question for Majority Leader Barkley, and the result was fifty-two against repeal, thirty-three for, and nine doubtful. “You should have seen his [Barkley’s] lip go down,” Dad told Bess.

On August 23, 1939, Adolf Hitler stunned the world - in particular the liberals who persisted in seeing a difference between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia - by signing a nonaggression pact with Josef Stalin. After a decade of spewing hatred at each other, the two gangster states revealed to the world their essential similarity. The agreement was actually an aggression pact against Poland. On September 1, with Stalin’s tacit consent, Hitler invaded that country, and Britain and France were bound by treaty to declare war. It now was the turn of the isolationists in Congress, who had insisted there was no need to do anything about the neutrality legislation because there was no danger of war, to be stunned.

Dad was gloomy over the odds England and France faced. He discussed the situation with General Robert M. Danford, under whom he had served in France, and they were both “mighty blue,” he told Bess. “Neither of us think that England and France can lick the Germans and Russians. They were beaten in the last war when we got in. If Germany can organize Russia and they make England give up her fleet, look out - we’ll have a Nazi, or nasty, world.”

FDR had reconvened Congress for another special session after little more than a month’s recess, and the battle over neutrality resumed. “We are in the midst of a terrific struggle and I hope we answer it for the country’s welfare,” Dad wrote to Bess. I doubt if there was a woman in the country, including Eleanor Roosevelt, who was more intimately involved with this crisis. In letter after letter, Dad gave her the insider’s view of the brawl. He told her that FDR had made his “best speech” to the joint house on September 21, urging them to repeal the neutrality laws. But Senators Nye and Walsh [leaders of the isolationist bloc] and Bennett Clark “looked down their noses all the time he was speaking and never applauded once.”

Back in Independence, Bess kept the senator in touch with his ongoing struggle for political survival. She sent him clippings of
Examiner
stories and editorials that showed their hometown paper was leaning toward Stark. The more she thought of anti-Roosevelt types like Colonel Southern, the less she liked them. She told Harry she had become an FDR supporter again. “I am most happy you are . . . back in line,” he wrote. “You should not have gotten out seriously. My patronage troubles were the result of the rotten situation in Kansas City and also the jealous disposition of my colleague [Bennett Clark]. While the president is unreliable, the things he’s stood for are, in my opinion, best for the country.”

I found myself envying Mother as I read Dad’s letters over the next month. To be in on such an enormous drama, with the fate of the world at stake. I never had a clue to what was going on. I remained immersed in my fifteen-year-old world, which was exciting from my point of view. I was acting in Shakespeare at Gunston Hall and singing over the radio with other congressional children in a broadcast that some enterprising media men had set up. Mother kept the home folks in closer touch with my doings than she did with Dad’s. Everyone at 219 North Delaware Street was glued to the radio when I performed, and they all predictably declared me the best.

The neutrality fight raged on. The isolationists, with a liberal sprinkling of German-American Bund types from St. Louis, deluged Dad with letters. He ignored them and flew to Caruthersville in the heart of rural Missouri to make an anti-neutrality speech to the most conservative voters in the state. Talk about profiles in courage. He was buoyed to discover that there were four political factions in that part of the state, and they all hated Lloyd Stark.

Dad topped this one by giving a speech sponsored by Moral Rearmament (MRA) calling on Americans to resist the amoral dictatorships of the left and right. The MRA people told him they were going to distribute 3 million printed copies of the address.

On November 4, the neutrality struggle came to a climax in Congress. By hefty majorities, the lawmakers repealed the embargo and authorized the president to sell arms and munitions to the belligerents on a cash-and-carry basis. This vote left Senator Truman and his wife free to concentrate on his struggle for reelection.

There were other matters that flew back and forth between them. Oscar Wells, Mother’s cousin, finally drank himself out of his job - and almost off the planet, wrecking his car as well as his career and ending up in jail. Harry told Bess that his government employers “just could, and would, not take him back again. . . . It’s a mess but I don’t see any way to help him.” He was relieved to discover that Bess was inclined to let Oscar solve his own problems. She was realistic enough to see that the Truman reelection was the only problem they should take seriously.

Not even my Uncle Fred, who was out of a job again, claimed much of Mother’s attention. She reported it to Dad, along with an unfortunate accident in which Fred injured his eye, but there was little he could do for Fred in late 1939. He could not even protect his own brother, Vivian, and friends for whom he had gotten jobs in the Federal Housing Authority. They were all getting fired in an anti-Pendergast purge that White House subordinates were pursuing, presumably with (or simply presuming on) FDR’s approval. Even more humiliating, politically, was Dad’s attempt to get his most loyal supporter, Fred Canfil, named a federal marshal in Kansas City. This was an appointment that traditionally belonged to a senator. The White House ignored Senator Truman.

Perhaps the most interesting development as 1939 drew to a close occurred on a Sunday afternoon Dad spent at Charlie Ross’ house. Charlie had returned to Washington earlier in the year to resume his job as the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch’s
chief capital reporter. During the visit, Charlie got out a copy of their 1901 graduation ceremony program and passed it around to several other
Post-Dispatch
staffers. Then, with considerable emotion, he told Dad that he had not written the vicious editorial against him in 1934. But he had had to publish it or get fired. Dad told Bess about this confession in an ebullient letter, which included some warm remarks in his favor from other
Post-Dispatchers.
The man who covered foreign affairs, no doubt reflecting his knowledge of Senator Truman’s fight for the repeal of the neutrality laws, told him he was one of the few men in the Senate who was “honest of purpose.” All the newsmen said they disliked Stark and Milligan.

That letter made Bess’ heart soar. Charlie Ross’ Independence roots guaranteed him a special place in her affection. But a few days later, she received a letter that sent her emotions plunging in the other direction. Not even Harry Truman’s optimism could withstand the rotten things that were being said about him in the newspapers in Missouri, especially in the Kansas City
Star.
The drama of the neutrality crisis was over, and his loneliness (Bess and I had been in Missouri since August) reasserted itself. “I’m so homesick I’m about to blow up and have been for two months,” he wrote on December 15, 1939. “It’s a miserable state of affairs when a man dreads showing up in his home town because all his friends are either in jail or about to go there.”

Bess knew 1940 was going to be a long year.

I wish I could tell you that Bess wrote Harry Truman a marvelous letter in response to that outburst of gloom, telling him that she believed in him if no one else did. But at this point, she probably was more discouraged about his chances than he was. She was in Missouri, reading the slams and smears and digs in the newspapers every day. But that strong will, which kept her turbulent Wallace emotions under control, stood her in good stead during these trying days.

It was a moment in Harry Truman’s career when a panicky wife could have wrecked him. Not long after he wrote that downcast letter, FDR sent him a message, telling him that he did not think he could win renomination next year and offering him a job on the Interstate Commerce Commission.

The most interesting aspect of this offer seems to me is its absence from his letters to Bess. Would a man who was in the habit of telling his wife everything (except news that would upset her, such as a diagnosis of heart trouble) omit such an offer? It was honorable retirement, a safe haven that paid far more than a senator’s job. There are only two explanations: (1) Senator Truman did not trust FDR to keep his word; (2) this was another of those lonely moments when Harry Truman confronted his rendezvous with history. I think both explanations are right.

Senator Truman sent a message back to the White House. He was going to run for a second term as senator from Missouri, if the only vote he got was his own. It is a fascinating political moment: Two totally different men confronted one another. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the supreme manipulator, the man whose word was not his bond, who slivered and sliced the truth until it looked like macramé; Harry Truman, who believed a political promise was a binding contract and preferred to tell the truth, bluntly, totally, whenever possible.

Back in Missouri, there was no doubt about which man Bess Truman preferred. She accepted her husband’s decision and put her shrewd political brain to work on the campaign. Dad was inclined to apologize to Charlie Ross for all the rotten thoughts he had had about him since that 1934 editorial. Bess advised him to wait until the campaign was over. She saw that it would do the Trumans no harm to let Charlie feel like the guilty party for the next nine months. Dad reluctantly agreed. “I guess maybe it would be well to wait until after the campaign to apologize,” he wrote. “Newspapermen have to act as if they have no heart and no friends.”

For the next six months, Bess and Harry and their sixteen-year-old daughter went back and forth to Washington, D.C., so often, those bankrupt railroads Dad had been investigating should have been able to declare a dividend. Bess decided to try the trip by bus when she and I were traveling alone. It was a disaster. We were a couple of dishrags when we reeled into the terminal in Kansas City. No human being should be required to spend two days on a bus. Even two hours is too much in my opinion.

It was confusing. More often than not, Bess was in Washington while the senator was whirling around Missouri, trying to rally his discouraged friends. In mid-March, we went home for a visit that combined Easter and politicking. Bess and I returned to Washington without Dad. “I wired Mother this morning as soon as we got here,” Bess wrote. (The wire to Madge was written into the budget of every trip.) “But I didn’t know where to wire you.” She added that it was going to be “right lonely for the next ten days,” but she hoped “things were working out in St. Louis.”

Building some kind of a base of support in St. Louis was crucial to Dad’s strategy, now that he could not rely on a massive vote from Kansas City. He involved his fellow reserve officer, banker John Snyder, in his political fate by persuading him to come to Washington as head of the Defense Plants Corporation. In Washington, Bess assured him that she would do her best to make Mrs. Snyder, who was not thrilled to leave St. Louis, feel at home.

In another letter, Bess told her traveling man that she did not mind in the least when he called her at 2:00 a.m. to tell her things were starting to look brighter. She also reported that Senator Tom Stewart of Tennessee “thinks he can get things fixed up so he can go tonight [he was coming to Missouri to speak for Dad].” She was “anxious to know about the St. Joe [St. Joseph’s] meeting.” This was another step in the campaign’s strategy, building strong “outstate” support in cities and towns beyond the influence of Kansas City and St. Louis. With a sigh, Bess added that “it sure was lonesome last night.”

With no money to pay for a Missouri campaign staff, Dad drew on his Senate office staff for help. In April, he traveled with his administrative assistant, Vic Messall, Vic’s wife Irene, and his secretary Millie Dryden. Bess worried about this arrangement. By now, the newspapers had more than demonstrated their readiness to spread any smear about Senator Truman they could find. She sent Dad a letter while he was en route to another meeting in St. Louis advising him not to bring the women to any of the conferences he was having with the city’s politicians. “Don’t give any of that St. L. outfit a chance to talk about you and Vic being with the girls down there,” she wrote. “No one is going to miss seeing Mildred!”

Bess wanted the inside story on everything that was happening in Missouri. Her letters sometimes read like a list of questions. Did Maurice Milligan (who was thinking of joining the senatorial race) get the reception the
Star
said he got at the Young Democrats meeting? Was Dad pleased that Senator Stewart was going to speak in Kirksville? She commiserated with him about more and more bad news from Kansas City. On April 2, in the city elections, the Pendergast organization got trounced, carrying only five of the city’s sixteen wards. “It was rotten luck about the KC election,” she wrote.

For a little while, Bess got deep into the tangled web of the insurance company bribe that had put Tom Pendergast in jail. She reported to Dad that a man who worked for one of the companies thought he had information that Senator Truman might find useful. He was prepared to go to Missouri and speak to him. Dad decided that the less said about that matter, the better, and Bess so informed the informer.

Bess also reported on the political climate at the White House. She noted with glee that Lloyd Stark, in town to solicit FDR’s support, got exactly ten minutes with the president, while Senator Truman had recently spent two hours in the Oval Office discussing legislation and other matters. On the eve of the Missouri State Democratic Convention, she all but whooped at the news that the gathering was in the hands of Harry Truman’s friends. They were going to pick delegates for the National Democratic Convention, and she wondered if they would go so far as to keep Governor Stark off the slate.

Dad decided this would be unwise. It might enable Stark to portray himself as a martyr, persecuted by vengeful Pendergastites. The governor was voted a place on the delegation, but he was the only Stark man in sight. Dad got the Missouri seat on the resolutions committee, one of the most important jobs at the national convention. The word went out that Stark had behaved horribly at the state convention, and he proceeded to confirm this report by his conduct at the national convention.

Already running for the Senate, the governor announced he also was a candidate for the vice presidency. He handed out Stark Delicious apples to people and organized a Stark for vice president parade. Bess laughed when Dad told her how Mary Chinn Chiles, six feet tall, invaded the procession with a big sign that read TRUMAN FOR SENATOR. Mary was the chairman of the Truman campaign’s woman’s division.

Stark’s actions drew Senator Bennett Clark into the race on Harry Truman’s side. Bennett remarked that the governor seemed to be running for everything in sight and wondered if this included the archbishopric of Canterbury and the emirate of Afghanistan. Bennett and Dad teamed up to make sure Stark did not even get the votes of the Missouri delegation when the convention chose Henry Wallace as vice president at FDR’s request.

It took Bennett a while to break his silence and deliver on his promise to back Dad. By the time he spoke, the Truman campaign was well launched, with a big rally on June 15 in Sedalia, shrewdly chosen because it is almost equidistant between St. Louis and Kansas City. Mother and I were on the platform, and Mamma Truman sat in the front row of the audience. The crowd was big and enthusiastic, and I pounded my hands black and blue while Democrats from all parts of the state said nice things about Harry S. Truman. Before and after the rally, I watched Mother and Dad “work the crowd,” shaking hands with at least half the 4,000 people that were on hand. I pitched in wherever I thought someone wanted to shake hands with a sixteen-year-old.

A few days later, the senator wrote an emotional letter from Washington, telling Bess he had been “reaching for you all night long.” He apologized for not letting her “and Miss Margie” know how much he appreciated our help in Sedalia: “Both of you did untold and yeoman service, and the more I think of that day’s work, the more pleased I am.”

In another letter, he had a private laugh with Bess over the latest development in the race. Maurice Milligan, Tom Pendergast’s prosecutor, had decided to run. He did not know it, but Dad’s friends had taunted him into it by inflaming his jealousy of Lloyd Stark. The object was to split the anti-Pendergast vote between them. Dad and Bess enjoyed the confusion this produced in the Kansas City
Star’s
editorial writers. “That awful paper had an editorial on Stark and Milligan in which you could see much anguish,” Dad wrote.

All this Missouri turmoil took place in the shadow of dreadful news from Europe. Hitler’s legions had launched their blitzkrieg against the French and English, and by the time Dad spoke in Sedalia, the storm troopers were goose-stepping through Paris. The threat of war had a lot to do with FDR winning his nomination for a third term in July. Even with this in his favor, he had to throw himself into the arms of Boss Frank Hague of New Jersey and Boss Ed Kelly of Chicago to carry his divided party. For the Trumans, the ironies of that political move almost were too heavy to think about.

Dad’s letters to Mother during July and the first week in August read like local train schedules: “On Thursday, I’ll be in Keytesville at 2, Brunswick at 4 and Carrollton at 8.” At times, both sets of nerves got a little frayed. Bess lost her temper over the way Dad was barking orders and Dad apologized for offending her. “Guess I’m getting cranky,” he wrote.

Dad zoomed back to Washington and reported every senator and office boy seemed to be rooting for him. He organized a few verbal uppercuts to Governor Stark’s jaw from his fellow solons. Senator Gillette, in charge of investigating campaigns, issued a blast accusing the governor of repeating his dirty trick of forcing state employees to contribute 5 percent of their salaries to his campaign. A half dozen other senators, including Majority Leader Barkley, came to Missouri and endorsed Senator Truman.

Finally, with Mother and I feeling numb and Dad exhausted, we got to August 5, primary day. That night, we crowded around the radio in the living room at 219 North Delaware Street and listened to the returns. It was one of the worst nights of Bess’ life. The early returns gave Stark a 10,000-vote lead, which he held for several hours. Dad astonished her (and me) by announcing that he was sure he was going to win, and in the meantime, would get some badly needed sleep. He went to bed, leaving us and Grandmother Wallace and Fred and Christine up to our chins in gloom.

I can still see the tears streaming down Bess’ face as we went to bed. A lot of salt water was running down my cheeks, too. But I realize now my disappointment did not come close to the anguish Mother was feeling. She had tried so hard to help Dad. She wanted him to win with a fierceness, an intensity that transcended anything else she had ever desired. She had come to love her life in Washington, D.C. She had become a success in her own right as a senator’s wife. To have it all demolished by the collapse of Tom Pendergast and the blindness, the simple-mindedness of a few newspapers.

Bess went to bed, but I am sure there was no sleep for her. She lay in the darkness listening to Harry Truman’s steady breathing next to her. She wanted him to hold her, she wanted to hold him, but she knew how much he needed the sleep he was getting. She lay there, weeping.

About 3:30 a.m., the silence in the old house was shattered by the clang of the telephone. Bess groped for the black noisemaker in the dark bedroom. “This is Dave Berenstein in St. Louis,” said a cheerful voice. “I’d like to congratulate the wife of the senator from Missouri.”

“I don’t think that’s funny!” Bess snapped and slammed down the phone.

Only as she sank back on her pillow did Bess remember that Berenstein was the Truman campaign manager in St. Louis. She charged into my room and shook me awake. “Marg,” she gasped. “I hope I’m not dreaming. I’ve just heard the most incredible news. Do you think it could be true?”

I was too sleepy to make much sense out of Berenstein’s call. But that eager gentleman was soon back on the line, asking why Mrs. Truman had all but punctured his eardrum with that slam of the receiver. He had presumed that everyone would still be awake, rejoicing over the good news. Dad had carried St. Louis by 8,000 votes and was now ahead of Governor Stark.