Bess Truman (27 page)
That meant there was no sleep for Mother or me for the rest of the night. We spent the morning glued to the radio, while Dad’s lead went up and down, sometimes sinking to a nerve-shredding handful of votes. Not until 11:00 a.m. was he declared winner by 7,936 votes.
By that time, he was up, full of glowing, I-told-you-so ebullience. When Dad learned what Mother and I had gone through during the night, he was upset. It troubled him all the way back to Washington, where the Senate was still in session. “I’ll never forget Tuesday night if I live to be a thousand,” he told Bess. “My sweet daughter and my sweetheart were in such misery, it was torture to me.” He found himself wishing “I’d never made the fight.”
Then he reached out to the fighter in Bess, the athlete’s competitive spirit that she never lost. “But it was a good fight.” He listed all the people who had been against him - the newspapers, state and city employees. He told her that Les Biffle, the secretary of the Senate, had said that in all his years in Washington, he had never seen a victory like it. Finally, Dad appealed to what mattered most to Mother, loyalty. “We found out who are our friends and it was worth it for that.”
Then he added a familiar question: “When do you want to come on here?”
Bess decided she had better remain in Missouri, because the Trumans had another election to win in November. It was a good thing she did, because lack of money, a quarrelsome staff, and a formidable Republican opponent soon had everyone anxious. In St. Louis, Dad’s administrative assistant Vic Messall and other Senate staffers got into a brawl with local politicians and called Bess to straighten it out. At another point, Dad had to implore Bess to protect him from Mary Chinn Chiles, head of his woman’s division, who was turning into a female Lloyd Stark in front of his eyes. She was demanding a post on the National Democratic Committee. “Next thing she’ll want to be senator or governor,” the candidate growled. Lloyd Stark did not help matters by sitting out the campaign without a single word or gesture of support.
In Washington, the Senate sat far into the night, quarreling over the military conscription bill, the first ever proposed in peacetime. Prominent Americans such as John L. Lewis, head of the mine workers, and William Green, head of the AFL, denounced it, along with dozens of clergymen, college professors, and isolationist politicians from both houses of Congress. Dad fretted about the Wheeler-Truman Transportation Bill, which was still struggling against the international turmoil. Hitler was bombing London, and FDR was proclaiming the United States the arsenal of democracy. The conscription bill, providing for a one-year draft and requiring all men between twenty-one and thirty-five to register for military service, finally passed. In Missouri, Mary Chinn Chiles was in a sulk. Jim Pendergast, commanding the remnants of the old organization, was in a rage because Dad had decided, in the interest of party unity, to recommend Maurice Milligan for reappointment as federal attorney to serve out his term. He had had to resign to run for the Senate.
“If I can just do something to make the state chairman and McDaniel [Larry McDaniel, the Democratic candidate for governor] angry I’ll be batting 100%,” Dad wrote. Bess, the family baseball fan, knew he meant 1,000 percent. Getting mad himself, Senator Truman made a significant declaration, “I don’t care much of a damn what they do or don’t from here out. I’m going to do as I please and they can like it or not as they choose. I’ve spent my life pleasing people, doing things for ‘em and putting myself in embarrassing positions to save the party and the other fellow. Now I’ve quit. To hell with ‘em all.”
When Bess read this letter in Missouri, she could have had only one comment. “Hurray.” She never had much patience with the egotism and power plays of the politicians who swirled through her life. But she never gave the public a glimpse of this side of her mind. Even more to her credit, she had let Dad deal with them his way.
To make things completely cuckoo, Harriette Shields and her alcoholic husband, Leighton, whom Dad had shipped off to be U.S. attorney in Shanghai, showed up in Independence. Harriette’s health had broken down, either from Shanghai’s climate or from Leighton’s drinking or both. Bess could not resist feeling sorry for them. She sent them on to Washington with her blessing. There, Leighton grandly informed Dad that he wanted an appointment with the president. It is not clear whether he wanted to advise FDR on the situation in the Far East or simply ask him for a transfer. Senator Truman told Leighton that he had trouble getting an appointment for himself.
This episode was not a total loss. It prompted another one of those declarations of independence that Senator Truman began issuing around this time. “I’m not going to see the president any more until February,” he told Bess, “and then he’s going to want to see me. I rather think from here out I’ll make him like it.”
That one definitely got a hurrah from Bess. She never completely forgave FDR for the cynical game he had played with Lloyd Stark in 1939-40. She thought - and I agree with her - that Harry Truman deserved better treatment from the president for the support Dad had given his domestic and international policies.
The topper in this endless series of headaches was the Truman farm. A vindictive county court judge, elected on an anti-Pendergast “reform” ticket, foreclosed the mortgage of $35,000 Mamma Truman had borrowed from the county school fund, and after eighty years of struggle and heartbreak, the land was lost. The only motive was an attempt to embarrass Dad. In hard times, such mortgages were routinely extended and the unpaid interest added to the principal. Dad and Vivian had to move Mamma Truman to a small house in Grandview. Bess did her best to help with the transition, for which Dad was grateful. “I’m glad you went to see Mamma,” he wrote. “No matter how much front she puts on, she hates to leave the farm.”
By the end of September, the combination of campaigning and getting bills through the Senate had the candidate frazzled. “I was never so tired in my life,” he wrote to Bess. “My desk looks like a cyclone had piled up all the unanswered letters in the world. The Senate will not adjourn.” He found himself wishing he had just bundled her up and taken her back to Washington with him. “I need somebody I can tell my troubles to most awful bad - and it looks like you are it.”
In spite of these fits of gloom, the senator was soon home in Missouri, and if he stopped long enough to tell his troubles to Bess, no one except her noticed it. Once more, there was a whirlwind campaign, but this time, election night was a celebration instead of a sob session. Dad coasted to a relatively easy victory over his Republican opponent, winning by more than 40,000 votes. It was a campaign that attracted national attention. Harry Truman won without the support of a single major newspaper or political organization. He had proved he was a political power in his own right.
For Bess, this was a source of pride in itself. But from her woman’s point of view, this 1940 victory also meant something equally important. After almost twenty years of political and economic peril (one writer described Dad as a man who had been doing a high-wire act without a net), the Trumans had achieved safety, permanence, security, and - not unimportant to Mother - just the right amount of prestige. She liked being the wife of the senator from Missouri. She looked forward to playing that pleasant role for the rest of her life.
Our Christmas on North Delaware Street in 1940 was one of the happiest of many happy holidays in that stately old house. We had the usual huge tree, and no one felt any need to scrimp on the presents. Little more than a week later, on January 3, 1941, Mother and I were back in Washington to see Dad sworn in for his second term while the entire U.S. Senate rose to give him a standing ovation.
In our five-room apartment at 4701 Connecticut Avenue, Bess tackled redecorating with the air of a woman who was thinking of the place as home. I remember one exhausting day when we moved every piece of furniture in the house from one side of the room to the other for about five hours before she decided things looked right. No. 4701 was a pleasant place to live. We had a second-floor apartment with French doors that opened onto a small porch. Writing to her mother, who did not want to hear anything nice about Washington, Bess described the porch as “2X4.” It was a little bigger than that. In the spring, irises and azaleas bloomed on the lawn around us. It was hardly the equal of 219 North Delaware Street, but it was several dozen degrees nicer than your ordinary city apartment.
Another nice thing about 4701 was a nearby restaurant to which the Trumans could take guests. Although Bess did our everyday cooking, she had neither the inclination nor the talent for major efforts in the kitchen. In this respect, she remained her mother’s daughter. One day, in the fall of 1941, someone sent us a couple of ducks. “I guess I’ll have to experiment on them tomorrow,” she told her mother. “It sure will be an experiment.”
It sure was. The result probably accounts for my lifelong hatred of duck. I was seventeen years old at this point and rapidly acquiring my own opinions about everything from entrees to escorts. I had a lively circle of friends at Gunston Hall. We tooled around town on our own, going to the movies or visiting back and forth. For me, Washington had become a second home, too.
With less need to worry about entertaining me, Bess plunged into the capital’s senatorial social life. In mid-January, she gave her mother a rundown of her schedule. It included three teas and a supper on Sunday, a luncheon, a tea, and a dinner at the Mayflower on Monday. It made me tired just reading it.
In February, she went to a formal dinner at the White House. As the third-ranking woman present, she sat next to young Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg. He and his parents had been invited to Washington to demonstrate American disapproval of the Nazi seizure of their small country. “He is just twenty one and is as nice and attractive and democratic as any young American,” Bess told her mother. On her left sat Senator Maloney of Connecticut. “He’s lots of fun so I really enjoyed it,” she wrote.
A few days later, she took Ernestine Gentry, a youngish sister-in-law of her friend Mary Shaw, to a Congressional Club tea for Mrs. Roosevelt. Ernestine, who could be rather uppity to people Bess’ age, was properly thrilled. Although by this time Eleanor Roosevelt had come under fierce attack for her support of people and causes that conservatives considered left wing, I never heard Mother say a word of criticism against her. She particularly admired the way she tried to give women a stronger voice in American politics.
Although she stayed behind the scenes, Bess’ interest in politics remained intense. Congress was still divided between isolationists and interventionists, but both sides agreed that the United States needed a strong national defense. They voted stupendous sums to build a two-ocean navy, to expand steel, aluminum, and other defense-related industries, and to build training camps for the men being drafted into the army. The total appropriation came to something like $25 billion, and no one seemed to know or care how it was being spent.
Across Dad’s desk in those first weeks of 1941 came a lot of letters from Missourians telling him of the shocking waste and corruption visible even to a casual observer in the construction of Fort Leonard Wood, in Pulaski County. What made him even angrier was the discovery that 90 percent of the defense dollars were going to giant corporations, most of them in the Northeast. One night, he sat down and discussed the situation with Bess. He did not want to embarrass the president at this crucial period, when the isolationists were looking for ammunition to smear him, but he was convinced that the corruption and misdirection of the defense program could wind up wrecking the Democratic Party. Bess reminded him that Harry Truman had quite a reputation as an investigator of large, complex businesses, and he had promised her - and himself - that after his reelection he was not going to worry about what FDR thought.
On February 10, 1941, Dad made a fateful speech in the Senate proposing the creation of a committee to investigate these enormous defense expenditures. That was the moment when history, that faceless, unpredictable force that kept butting into Bess’ life, began making mincemeat of her hopes for a serene existence as a senator’s wife.
The game began with some typical Roosevelt maneuvers. The president told the press he warmly welcomed Senator Truman’s idea and simultaneously had his man on the Senate Audit and Control Committee bottle it up. But FDR was finally forced to swallow the proposal in order to head off a dedicated Roosevelt hater, Georgia Congressman E. Eugene Cox, who was putting together a similar committee in the House. The president next tried to cripple the investigation before it started by having the Audit and Control boys vote the Truman Committee a munificent $15,000 - to investigate $25 billion.
This time, FDR was dealing with an old pro who had vowed to do things his way and make the president like it. Dad promptly hired a staff and arranged to pay them by stashing them on the payrolls of various government agencies, an easy thing to do if you have senatorial clout. Dad made sure he had that vital ingredient by refusing to let Majority Leader Alben Barkley and Vice President Henry Wallace shove a lot of Roosevelt yes-men onto his committee. Instead, he chose Carl Hatch of New Mexico and Mon Wallgren of Washington, who shared Harry Truman’s fondness for hard work and his dislike of grandstanding. He also chose Tom Connally of Texas and James Mead of New York, two veteran senators with tremendous influence in the government. They were Roosevelt supporters, but not yes-men.
For his first target, Dad went after the new army camps. The dirt he turned up stunned Washington and the country. The government was letting architects and contractors earn as much as 1,669 percent above their average annual profits. Time-and-a-half and double-time wages at Fort Meade in Maryland cost $1,803,280. Dad soon had documented $100 million worth of waste in the $1 billion camp-building program.
When Mother and I went home to Independence for a visit during my spring break from Gunston Hall, Dad wrote Bess that a procession of Roosevelt appointees had “come down to tell me how to run my committee.” He ignored them and went back to the Senate to ask for more money to continue his investigations. This time he got $85,000.
At home, Bess found herself coping with several crises. Mamma Truman had fallen in her unfamiliar new house and broken her hip, inspiring Dad to wrathful commentary on the local politicians who had forced her to sell the farm. Christine Wallace was also ill, and we had to pitch in with the care and feeding of her two children. Dad had gotten Fred Wallace a job at the Federal Housing Authority, but he still preferred to live at home with his mother, to his wife Chris’ considerable distress.
The spring visit had become a necessity to calm and console Madge Wallace. She was now in her eightieth year and was becoming childishly dependent on Bess. Once, in January 1941, Bess telephoned when Madge was lying down. Later in the day, Bess telephoned again, and Madge told her she was “about to have a good cry” because she did not get a chance to talk to her. Swelling in her ankles forced her to stay in bed, and she “lay there all day thinking of you and Margaret.” Even phone calls did not help much. In May, she told Bess that one had made her “homesick.”
Bess responded by turning up her worry machine several notches. Her letters were a series of inquiries about her mother’s ankles, Christine’s inflamed arm, Frank’s bad back. This was not entirely new. Thanks to Madge, she had been kept in touch with every cold, sore throat, toothache, and aching back that anyone in the Wallace enclave suffered. Bess tried to manage things from a distance of a thousand miles, warning Chris against taking her son David to school and her mother against cleaning the house until they were well again.
Back in Washington, just as the Truman Committee began to pick up steam, the senator provided Bess (and me) with a worry that temporarily obliterated the minor ills of Delaware Street. At 4:00 a.m. on April 13, Dad awoke in agony, with excruciating pains shooting through his abdomen and up into his chest. Bess was sure he had fibbed about the army doctors’ examination too, and that he was having a heart attack. A doctor was summoned, and he turned out to be a good diagnostician. He said the fifty-six-year-old senator was probably having a gallbladder attack. It was a common Washington disease, brought on by too many lavish banquets. “The doctor says rich fat food is the principal cause of it,” Bess told Madge.
The senator rested for a few days and then went over to Walter Reed Army Hospital, where X-rays confirmed the gallstones. The doctors put him on a strict diet, and he went back to work.
The arsenal of democracy was going full blast all over the country. Other senators were getting reports from their constituents about chicanery here, there, and everywhere, and called on the Truman Committee to investigate them. One of the worst odors was coming from the Aluminum Company of America. When Alcoa’s president tried to defy the Truman Committee, Dad chewed him into little pieces and got headlines all over the country. “We’re getting somewhere,” the senator told Bess.
Somehow, along with all this politics and social life, Bess managed to keep her seventeen-year-old daughter in focus. We frequently trotted off together to a movie or a concert or opera. Once or twice, she persuaded me to join her for a round of golf. She was not a phenomenon at that sport, having started late, so I could go along as a fellow duffer. Toward the end of the spring, she helped me give a luncheon for about twenty-five friends from Gunston Hall at Pierre’s, an inexpensive downtown restaurant. I never knew, until I read her letter to her mother, where she got the lovely floral centerpiece. She was shocked to discover the local florist was going to charge $12 for it. She went downtown and bought it from a flower cart for $4 and brought it to Pierre’s herself. Mother never lost her ability to pinch a penny.
She and I also conducted a running battle over the athletic program at Gunston Hall. She insisted I participate. I strenuously maintained it was a waste of time. In one letter, she wearily remarked that for once she had gotten me off to gym without an argument. This imbroglio was temporarily resolved when I discovered fencing, which I liked. But the battle resumed after I graduated from Gunston Hall in 1942 and began at George Washington University, where there was no fencing coach, and some form of athletics was also required. Mother suggested swimming. I said I hated to put my face in the water. She could not understand that, either, and told me to do it or else. “Marg floated the width of the pool with her head under water today, so there’s some hope for her,” she told Dad, making me sound pathetic.
Having raised four sons into near-adulthood, I can now view these skirmishes as more or less standard maneuvers in the eternal war between parents and children. Mother, having had somewhat quieter but, in some ways, more severe tussles with her mother, did not let these battles disturb her affection for me in the least. But she did not let my resistance change her maternal style, either. In July 1941, I was shipped home to stay with Grandmother while Fred and Christine and their children vacationed in Colorado. Mother’s letters to me are a good summary of that style.
I was ordered to stay close to home. She never abandoned the fear that someone would try to kidnap me. “Dad told me to tell you not to go anywhere [underlined three times] with Perry. If you can think of an excuse, alright, but if you can’t, just tell him you can’t go.” This reduced me and Perry, my boyfriend of the moment, to sitting on the porch swing eating enormous amounts of candy, which he brought me by the two-pound box. Bess also wanted to know where Grandmother and I were sleeping and was relieved to learn we had both moved upstairs. She wrote that now she would “feel much easier about you.”
She sent me separate amounts of money to pay for my music lessons and for my allowance. With the latter came a warning that I had to “make it go a long way.” We had a good laugh over one of these letters, which she inadvertently signed “Bess.” I liked it and threatened to call her that from now on - but of course I did not have the nerve. It was just habit, she explained.
A crisis was triggered when I received an invitation to a church picnic in Excelsior Springs, about forty miles from Independence. I wanted to go. Mother decided I could if I followed her instructions. I was to take Route 10, but I was told to drive slowly because it was “very twisty and narrow.” I was also to avoid getting sunburned, and I had to take a reliable girlfriend with me. But Mother could not figure out how I could get home if the picnic lasted until after dark. Night driving was absolutely banned. She summed up this tangle of instructions and prohibitions by telling me to “call me collect after you get back and if you don’t go call me in the morning” (so she could turn off her worry machine). I was so exasperated I abandoned the idea.
