Bess Truman (31 page)

Robert Hannegan and a group of other party leaders told FDR it had to be another younger man of the center, Harry Truman. Mr. Roosevelt agreed with this analysis and gave Mr. Hannegan a letter stating that he would be happy to run with either Truman or William O. Douglas, the Supreme Court justice. His name was added to avoid the appearance of dictating to the convention, but he had no support whatsoever in the party.

How much Dad knew about this conference, which took place in the White House on July 11, I can’t be sure. He left Kansas City on July 14 and drove to Chicago, arriving there on Saturday, July 15. Almost immediately, he confronted a phalanx of party leaders who informed him that he was FDR’s choice. Bob Hannegan flourished the letter the president had given him.

Still Dad resisted. Jimmy Byrnes, who was as devious as FDR, had called Dad just before he left for Chicago and told him he had the president’s blessing, and asked for Senator Truman’s support. Dad had given it to him without hesitation and now, he insisted, that message superseded Hannegan’s letter.

In his desperation, Dad had summoned two of his closest friends, Tom Evans and Eddie McKim, to come to Chicago to help him fend off the nomination. Tom was the owner of Station KCMO in Kansas City. Eddie, whose name I have mentioned before, was his old army and reserve officer buddy, who had become a prominent insurance executive in Nebraska. Both were baffled by his reluctance to accept the vice presidency. It was to Tom Evans that Dad revealed - or half revealed - his real reason for refusing it. Here is how Tom later recalled their conversation.

“I don’t want to drag a lot of skeletons out of the closet,” Senator Truman said.

“Wait a minute. I didn’t know you had skeletons,” Tom Evans said. “What are they? Maybe I wouldn’t want you to run either.”

“I’ve had the Boss on the payroll in my Senate office and I’m not going to have her name dragged over the front pages of the papers and over the radio.”

“Well Lord,” Tom said. “That isn’t anything terrible. I can think of a dozen senators and fifty congressmen that have their wives on the payroll.”

“Yes, but I don’t want them bringing her name up,” Dad insisted. “I’m just not going through that.”

After repeatedly declaring myself out of the running as a psychologist, I am afraid I am forced to assume the role here. You have just read the words of a man who is yearning to tell his friend the whole truth - but can only tell him part of it. The metaphor Dad used is especially, sadly, revealing. The skeleton he was trying to keep in the closet was not Mother’s name on his Senate payroll. It was David Willock Wallace’s suicide.

Having seen the cruel way the newspapers had exhumed Mr. Roosevelt’s ancestors and used them to try to smear the president, Harry Truman’s fears - which were Bess’ fears - were not completely unreal. But they were somewhat hypothetical. Dad’s anguish revealed Mother’s anguish - her extreme sensitivity about this tragedy, forty-one years later. If her mother had died during these intervening years, Bess might have been less sensitive. She dreaded the impact of the story on Madge Wallace far more than on herself.

Meanwhile, at Dad’s request, Eddie McKim had been touring the state delegations trying to tell them that Senator Truman did not want the nomination. The more Eddie talked to the delegates, the more convinced he became that his old friend’s nomination was not only inevitable, it was necessary.

On Monday, July 17, Eddie, John Snyder, and several other friends tackled Dad in his hotel room. They barraged him with arguments. He was the only man who could prevent the Democratic Party from splitting down the middle. If Byrnes got it, the liberals would take a walk. If Wallace got it, the South would defect en masse. Dad continued to shake his head. “I’m still not going to do it,” he said.

“Senator,” Eddie said, “I think you’re going to do it.”

Dad furiously demanded to know where Eddie got the nerve to say that.

“Because there’s a ninety-year-old mother down in Grandview, Missouri, who would like to see her son President of the United States,” Eddie said.

Dad walked out of the room and did not speak to Eddie for twenty-four hours. With uncanny intuition, Eddie had invoked the name of the one woman who could challenge Harry Truman’s devotion to Bess.

That same day, Mother and I left Denver for Chicago. Mother seemed perfectly calm to me at the time. But my research for this book discovered a sign of her inner agitation. She did not tell her mother where we would be staying in Chicago, and Grandmother, having no other address, wrote to the empty house in Independence for the rest of the week.

We arrived in Chicago on the night of the 18th, and the convention started the next day. Dad continued to resist the nomination for the next two days, but he found no support for his reluctance from anyone. The AFL and railroad labor leaders said they would not consider anyone else. Even Sidney Hillman, the left-leaning CIO leader, told him he was that union’s choice, if Wallace could not be elected.

I spent most of these two days touring Chicago’s department stores with Marion Montague, a school friend from Washington whom I had invited to join me. Mother remained in our hotel, the Morison, and discussed the situation with Dad when he returned from the Stevens Hotel, where Robert Hannegan and the other heavy politicos were staying. She had invited an old Independence friend, Helen Bryant Souter, who lived in Evanston, to join her. Helen fended off numerous reporters who wanted to talk to Mother as it became more and more evident that Dad was the probable vice presidential nominee.

In Denver, Grandmother Wallace and Freddy and Chris listened to the radio and read the newspapers with growing puzzlement. On the 20th, Grandmother wrote a letter telling Mother that she missed her and was fighting off a “homesick spell,” She added that “F and I listened to several talks over the radio last night. They don’t seem to think Harry is not a candidate.”

The climax to the struggle was a telephone call Bob Hannegan put through to FDR, who was in San Diego, about to depart on a Pacific inspection tour. Hannegan held out the phone so Dad could hear the president declare that Truman was his choice. “Why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place?” Dad snapped, furious at Roosevelt’s deviousness, which had already given him so many headaches and, in 1940, near heartbreaks.

At this point, Bess still could have forced Harry Truman to issue an absolute, unshakable no, a refusal on the order of General Sherman’s historic turndown of the presidential nomination in 1884. She could have told him that the whole idea of him becoming president and her becoming First Lady was intolerable to her. He would have said no, even if he really believed that his refusal might, in FDR’s words, “break up the Democratic Party in the middle of a war.”

But there was an invisible line in their partnership that Bess never crossed - a line that divided a wife’s power over her husband between influence and control. Bess never hesitated to try to influence Harry Truman’s decisions. But she never attempted to control him - especially in those lonely moments when he confronted his deepest instincts that drove him to risk the pain and sacrifice of meeting history head on. This was the most awesome of those moments. Bess allowed him to accept its inevitability, even though she dreaded the pain it might cause her.

For the next few days, the nomination did not look inevitable. The Wallace backers in the party were numerous and vocal, and they put up a vigorous fight for their candidate. They packed the galleries and staged ear-splitting demonstrations in the sweltering convention hall. On July 20, they came within a whisker of stampeding the convention into renominating Wallace by acclamation. After a night of furious politicking, the Truman forces met the wild-eyed Wallace devotees in a tremendous brawl the next day.

Mother and I were in a box looking down on the floor, where the state delegations sat like regiments waiting to be hurled into battle. Helen Souter was with us, still doing her best to keep reporters at bay. Several thought she was Mrs. Truman and tried to interview her. Dad remained on the convention floor with the Missouri delegation, of which he was the chairman. Ignoring his pleas, they already had voted unanimously to make him their candidate.

Henry Wallace led on the first ballot, mostly because favorite sons controlled a dozen delegations and were hoping for a deadlock that might have made one of them a compromise candidate. In the second ballot, Dad edged ahead. Suddenly delegation after delegation switched to him, and the final result was a landslide 1,031 to 105. Pandemonium exploded as exultant Truman supporters cavorted in the aisles.

Take a look at the picture in the middle of the book showing Mother and me as the final count was announced. I am cheering my head off. Mother was barely able to muster a smile. At twenty, of course, I reveled in the pandemonium and was relatively unbothered by the suffocating heat. I also had been having a good time in Chicago while Mother suffered through anguished days and sleepless nights.

I can sympathize with her now. I can see what she saw, what she felt. It was not only the fear of her father’s suicide returning to haunt her and her mother. She was losing the serene, comfortable life of a senator’s wife, which she had worked so hard to master. She was fifty-nine years old, and all her life she had been making sacrifices for people, putting herself and her concerns second to her mother’s peace of mind, her brothers’ welfare, her daughter’s health, her husband’s career. She had a right to eight or ten years of serenity and fulfillment - and she had to sit there and watch that wish annihilated by these whooping, howling maniacs who were determined to put her husband in the White House.

Her personal fears and desires were only part of Bess’ opposition to the nomination. She knew Harry Truman’s tendency to overwork. If he pushed himself to the brink of breakdown as a senator, what would he do as a president? Everyone was talking about the toll the presidency had taken on FDR. She envisioned an equally deadly impact on Harry Truman, who had recently celebrated his sixtieth birthday.

Mother’s political instincts were even more opposed to the nomination. She foresaw that anyone who succeeded FDR, especially through “the back door,” as Dad put it, was going to have a terrible time becoming president in his own right.

All in all, hindsight tempts me not only to sympathize with Mother, but to say she was right. On a rational, reasonable estimate of the situation, Dad should have said no.

But Mother was confronting - she and Dad were both confronting - something deeper, stronger than reason, logic, or common sense.

A phalanx of policemen helped Dad fight his way to the platform. An exultant Bob Hannegan held up his arm, as if he were a prizefighter who had just won a knockout victory. The delegates continued to go berserk in the aisles. Dad finally seized the chairman’s gavel and banged for order. The celebrators sat down and listened to one of the shortest acceptance speeches in the windy history of political conventions:

You don’t know how very much I appreciate the very great honor which has come to the state of Missouri. It is also a great responsibility which I am perfectly willing to assume.

Nine years and five months ago I came to the Senate. I expect to continue the efforts I have made there to help shorten the war and to win the peace under the great leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

I don’t know what else I can say except that I accept this great honor with all humility.

I thank you.

As he left the platform, Dad commandeered another cordon of police and fought his way through the frenzied crowd to our box. There we were blinded by the flashbulbs of a hundred photographers. Men pounded and pawed us, screaming congratulations. Women wept and flung their arms around us, all but fracturing our spines. Dad told the police to get us out of there as fast as possible. Clinging to each other like shipwreck victims on a raft in the middle of a hurricane, we let Chicago’s finest batter their way through the mob to a waiting limousine.

As we got into the car, Bess glared at the nominee. “Are we going to have to go through this for the rest of our lives?” she asked.

It was not a good beginning.

The next morning, the reporters were after us like a brigade of hunters gunning for quail - or sitting ducks. Bess had a press conference in which she did not try hard to disguise her lack of enthusiasm for her husband’s nomination. She frankly admitted she had been opposed to it but now said she was “almost reconciled.” When asked why she had felt that way, she replied that her reasons were “perhaps selfish.” She liked the calm of a senator’s life and disliked the “pressures” she foresaw in the vice presidency.

In her oblique way, Mother gave the reporters a glimpse of how her political partnership with Harry Truman operated, although no one paid much attention to it at the time. She said that she “understood the issues” but had no intention or desire to comment on them. That was “the Senator’s job.” With shrewd political instinct she omitted the source of her understanding: her intense scrutiny of the newspapers, her daily reading of the
Congressional Record,
her discussions with her husband. She sensed that if she sounded too knowledgeable, the hostiles among the reporters would instantly churn out stories portraying Harry Truman as his wife’s yes-man.

Asked if she had any relatives who had been in politics, Bess said that her grandfather, Benjamin Wallace, had been one of the first mayors of Independence. She coolly short-circuited further questions about her family by saying that “as far as she knew” she was not related to Henry Wallace, but she considered him “a very fine man.” Then she summed up the Truman-Wallace contest with a remark that gave the reporters another insight into Bess Wallace Truman. “It’s nice to win,” she said.

Bess patiently answered a lot of nonsensical questions about Dad’s favorite foods (beefsteak and fried potatoes) and what she did with her spare time. I put in a plug for her fried chicken and her chocolate pie, two of her best dishes, and had to answer a lot of even sillier questions about my spare time. I had just finished my freshman year at George Washington University, majoring in history. Studying is not a momentous activity, nor is going to the movies and concerts and taking voice lessons. I spent most of my time doing these things, and I found it hard to understand why the reporters were interested. One of them, Margaret Alexander of the Kansas City Star, began following me around. That I distinctly disliked.

We started home to Independence later in the day, stopping in Peoria overnight. Outside, the weather was July in the Midwest at its most broiling; inside the car the atmosphere was close to arctic. Dad tried to be cheerful and philosophical simultaneously. Mother said little. At home, we felt strange entering the old house after it had been closed for the winter. Although May Wallace had opened it up, the rooms still had the dank, musty smell of abandonment, which could not have raised Bess’ spirits.

Nevertheless, she smiled gamely as her brothers Frank and George and sisters-in-laws Natalie and May Wallace rushed to congratulate Dad, followed closely by his cousins, the Nolands, and other neighbors. The following day, July 24, we had a reception in the front yard. Some 3,000 friends from Independence swarmed onto the grounds and the Trumans had their first experience with marathon handshaking.

Greeting that many people as a hostess was far different from working a crowd at a political rally. There you have a chance to vary the pace of the handshakes or skip them entirely if your hand starts to ache. About halfway through the procession, Bess had to stop. She was in excruciating pain. She had not yet mastered the quick shake and withdrawal before the mashing can take place.

For the next few days, we all tried to rest. Dad was staying until August 1 to organize support for Roger Sermon, whose run for the governorship was looking more and more dubious, and Bennett Clark, whose chances of winning renomination to the Senate were growing even dimmer. The vice presidential nominee spent most of his time huddling with politicos in Kansas City. When Mother went out to several luncheons, I retreated to my Uncle Frank Wallace’s house at 601 Van Horn Road, just behind 219 North Delaware Street. Frank’s wife, Natalie, was good company, and I was leery about staying alone in the big house when almost anyone was liable to show up at the door wanting to see the nominee. Aunt Natalie had a piano, and I could practice my scales or otherwise amuse myself on it.

During one of these retreats, Aunt Natalie and I got talking about the effect that the nomination might have on the family. She feared it would give Fred Wallace dreams of glory. Then she tried to find out how my mother felt about it. When I was not very informative (mainly because I did not know much), Aunt Natalie frowned and said: “I suppose it will all come out now, about the way your grandfather died. The reporters will dig it up. I’m sure it’s going to upset your mother and grandmother terribly.”

I did not have a clue to what she was talking about. “What do you mean?” I asked. “I thought he died of a heart attack or something like that.”

Aunt Natalie smiled sardonically. “He shot himself,” she said. “Frank found him.”

I could not have been more astonished if she had told me that she had seen David Willock Wallace ascend into heaven. I stumbled back to the big house and found Vietta Garr in the kitchen. She had been working for us for decades. I told her the story and asked her if it was true; Vietta nodded. She blamed it on a growth which (she had heard) David Wallace had discovered on the back of his neck. According to that version, he had been afraid of dying of cancer.

Mother came home, but some shred of my father’s good judgment told me not to say anything to her about Aunt Natalie’s revelation. I waited until Dad arrived later in the evening, and I asked him what he knew about it. I have never seen him so angry and upset. He seized my arm in a grip that he must have learned when he was wrestling calves and hogs around the farmyard. “Don’t you ever mention that to your mother,” he said.

He rocketed out of the house and down through the backyard to Aunt Natalie’s house. I have no idea what he said to her, but it is not pleasant to think about, even now. I was too shaken to think about it in 1944. Now I can see that Aunt Natalie had been living much too long in what amounted to her mother-in-law’s backyard. She was obviously striking back for twenty-eight oppressive years with Madge Wallace breathing down her neck, sweetly inquiring what she was doing, where she was going every time Natalie left the house. Childless, Natalie had also grown to resent the hours Frank spent with his mother. It was not her sister-in-law Bess that Natalie was out to get with her revelation about David Willock Wallace, it was her mother-in-law. Everybody has a mean streak, I’m afraid, and when circumstances exacerbate it, watch out.

Harry Truman was one of the few people I have ever met who did not have a mean streak. But he could be tough when he felt it was necessary. That night, I fear Aunt Natalie saw that side of him. She never mentioned David Willock Wallace again to me or, I presume, anyone else.

I wish I could tell you that years later I asked Mother if her anxiety about her father’s death was the hidden reason for her opposition to Dad’s nomination. But to the end of her life, I never felt free to violate the absolute prohibition Dad issued on that summer night in 1944. More than once, in these later years, I had hoped Bess would talk to me about her father, but she never did.

In the course of researching this book, I changed my mind about Mother’s silence on this subject. As I explored Mother’s early life, I realized that she should not be judged by the standards of our talkative times where with the help of legions of psychiatrists we try to ventilate away our woes. Mother was born and grew up in the nineteenth century, and she handled the lifelong burden of David Willock Wallace’s suicide with the psychological strategies of her own time.

When Theodore Roosevelt’s first wife, Alice Lee, died following childbirth in 1884, he was devastated by the loss. For the rest of his life, he never mentioned her again in his diaries or letters - or even in conversations with his daughter Alice, who bore her mother’s name. This great man and great president, almost the prototype of the courageous American, could only deal with the pain of this loss by putting Alice Lee out of his mind and heart by an act of the will. This tactic may strike us as almost cruel; at the least uncaring. But it worked. Theodore Roosevelt and Bess Wallace Truman survived their grief and lived full, satisfying lives.

If this resolute silence was necessary to enable a man to survive the loss of a wife in childbirth, hardly an unusual event, think how much more urgent it was for Bess Wallace Truman to consign David Willock Wallace to the silence.

Early in August 1944, after Grandmother Wallace had absorbed the shock of Dad’s nomination, she wrote Bess a touching, surprisingly perceptive letter. It began on the usual melancholy note. It was a lonely Sunday in Denver; Fred and Christine and the children had all gone to church, and she was sitting on the terrace thinking about us. “I somewhat realize what a task is before you, and Margie, dear,” she wrote, “and I wish in some way I could help.” As always, Grandmother was being oblique. But I think that she was trying to tell Bess in this letter that she wanted her to face the future without worrying about her.

Bess was determined to minimize the task for the time being. She announced that she and I were going to stay in Independence for the summer. She also made it clear to Dad that she would not campaign with him on a day-to-day schedule. She would make a few appearances at major rallies and nothing else.

The candidate headed back to Washington, having done everything he could to help Roger Sermon and Bennett Clark in the upcoming primary. From the capital he filled Bess in on conferences with John Snyder and other friends. Already Dad was concerned that FDR was going to ignore him and he would commit political blunders. But John Snyder reminded him that he had plenty of friends inside the administration who would enable him to “get the truth.”

Dad was disturbed by Mother’s reaction to the nomination. It accentuated his own natural, normal feelings of apprehension about the step he had taken. When he went to the Senate and informed the other members of the Truman Committee that he had decided to resign as chairman, he found himself swept by deep, almost uncontrollable emotions: “Yesterday was a hectic day. The train [from Missouri] was late. Fulton [Hugh Fulton, the Truman Committee counsel] met me at Martinsburg, West Virginia and we talked over every angle of the committee and came to the decision that for the best interests of all concerned I’d better quit. I had made my mind up on that when the nomination was forced on me. I have never in my life wanted to sit down and really blubber like I did when I told ‘em I was quitting. I didn’t do it - but they did. Connally, Mead, Kilgore, Brewster, Benton, Ferguson were there - so were Fulton, Halley, and one or two others of the staff. . . .”

Dad was saying farewell to his ten years of senatorial life, and it was as painful for him as it was for Bess.

A few days later, Dad wrote me a letter in which he tried to cope with that deeper, more hidden worry, David Willock Wallace’s suicide: “This is going to be a tough, dirty campaign and you’ve got to help your dad protect your good mama. Nothing can be said of me that isn’t old and unproven - so this little district attorney [the Republican candidate, Thomas E. Dewey] will try to hit me by being nasty to my family. You must remember that I never wanted or went after the nomination - but now we have it (to save the Democratic Party - so the Southerners and AF of L and RR Labor say) we must win and make ‘em like it. . . . But you must help me keep all the family in line. Most of ‘em on both sides are prima donnas and we must keep our eyes on the ball.”

In this letter, Dad was strengthening the bond of silence he had forged with me on the night of my encounter with Aunt Natalie. He was also sending Mother a message. He was certain that I would show her the letter or she would ask to read it after I opened it. He was trying to say that he understood her anxiety, and he cared deeply about it.

From Independence came only silence. On August 10, the senator telephoned Bess, and to his immense relief, he saw that his letter to me had done some good. They had a pleasant chat. “I’m sure glad I called you last night,” he wrote on the following day. “I was so lonesome and feeling sorry for me - which is no good for me or anyone else. But there has been no letter for three whole days.”

For the rest of the letter, he tried to reassure Bess that things were looking better and better. He had been to the White House and had “a most happy session with Jim Byrnes and afterward with Harry Hopkins.” He also reported - and dismissed - the first attacks on him in the Republican-controlled press. The Chicago
Tribune
and its “Washington echo sheet,” the
Times Herald
, had declared that Senator Truman was running against himself because he had criticized the administration fiercely in his committee reports and now had joined it. “They are surely desperate for an issue,” Dad wrote.

The next day, the senator reported that he was “feeling much better this evening,” thanks to a “nice long letter” from Bess (unfortunately among the lost). A few days later, FDR returned from his Pacific inspection tour and invited his running mate to lunch at the White House. Dad wrote a long letter to Bess about this meeting.