Bess Truman (37 page)

This letter describes the opening of the conference.

I’ve only had one letter from you since I left home (on July 6]. I look carefully through every [diplomatic] pouch that comes - but so far not much luck. . . .

The first session was yesterday in one of the Kaiser’s palaces. I have a private suite in it that is really palatial. The conference room is about forty by sixty and we sit at a large round table - fifteen of us. I have four and they each have four [seats], then behind me are seven or eight more helpers. Stalin moved to make me the presiding officer as soon as we sat down and Churchill agreed.

It makes presiding over the Senate seem tame. The boys say I gave them an earful. I hope so. Admiral Leahy said he’d never seen an abler job and Byrnes and my fellows seemed to be walking on air. I was so scared I didn’t know whether things were going according to Hoyle or not. Anyway a start has been made and I’ve gotten what I came for - Stalin goes to war August 15 with no strings on it. . . . I’ll say that we’ll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won’t be killed. That is the important thing. . . .

Wish you and Margie were here. But it is a forlorn place and would only make you sad.

Dad also reached out across 6,000 miles to talk to Mother in Independence by a special telephone hookup. The phone had a “scrambler” device which prevented anyone from eavesdropping on the conversation. This next letter was written after one of these calls. Potsdam, for those who, like me, never did well in geography, was a suburb of Berlin, and Dad’s comments reflect a recent tour of the shattered Nazi capital.

When Dad got a letter from Mother, his day was made, even in Potsdam.

Three days later, they were still at it.

In a final letter, Dad summed up what he and Stalin had failed to agree on.

There was one subject that Harry Truman did not mention in these letters from Potsdam. Throughout the last weeks of July, he got a stream of reports from the test of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. In the opening paragraphs of his letter summing up the conference, he made an oblique reference to it. He remarked that he had “an ace in the hole” if Stalin refused to reach an agreement. Obviously, Bess knew about the existence of the bomb. But it is also clear that Dad did not discuss with her the decision to drop it.

This omission does not imply a guilty conscience on his part. On the contrary, it underscores the virtually unanimous conviction among America’s leaders that there was no alternative to dropping it. In the preceding weeks, Harry Truman had studied reports from committees of scientists and military men, all of whom voted by large majorities to use the weapon. The idea circulated by some of Dad’s third-rate biographers that he spent hours reading and rereading the “To be or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet, agonizing over the decision, is utterly absurd. To put it in the negative, no American president, including Franklin D. Roosevelt, could have refused to use this weapon. He could never have defended a decision to go ahead with an invasion of Japan that would have cost American lives, whether the final casualty figure was 10,000 or 1 million.

After a final conference with his advisers and with Winston Churchill, Dad authorized the Army Air Force to drop the bomb to end the war swiftly. The “Little Boy,” the code name for the first bomb, was dropped on August 6, 1945, while Dad was on his way home from Potsdam. Bess was on a train to Washington, D.C., at the time. She was alone (except for her Secret Service detail), having left me in Independence with Grandmother Wallace. Three days later, John Snyder escorted her from the White House to meet the USS
Augusta
at Norfolk, when it arrived on August 9. That same day, according to the plan recommended by Dad’s military advisers, a second bomb smashed Nagasaki. Major General Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project that created the bomb, had predicted (with amazing accuracy, as events proved) that a second bomb would be necessary to convince the Japanese that the first one was not a fluke.

John Snyder recalls that Bess was deeply disturbed by this new weapon. “What do you think of it?” she asked him. “Should we have dropped it?”

John told her it was necessary to end the war and save American - and Japanese - lives. Bess accepted the explanation without comment. But she found herself wishing that Harry Truman had consulted her on this momentous decision. I am not suggesting she would have changed his mind. However, she did not like the way the news had taken her by surprise. It underscored what she felt as she read Dad’s letters from Potsdam, describing decisions on issues that he had never so much as mentioned to her before. She was forced to face an unpleasant fact. She had become a spectator rather than a partner in Harry Truman’s presidency.

That made her angry.

What had happened? Depending on your point of view, you can blame it on history, on Bess, or on Harry Truman. I am inclined to blame history, that maddening, mysterious tangle of people and events which Abraham Lincoln reminded Americans that they could not escape.

History had been accelerating at such a tremendous rate of speed since April 12 that Harry Truman had had no time to discuss with Bess dozens of major and minor decisions. There was no
Congressional Record
to read and reflect on, none of the leisurely give and take of the Senate, where a wife could analyze issues and personalities and make shrewd observations, helpful suggestions.

Instead, Bess felt like she was suddenly watching the man she loved driving a supercharged car at suicidal speed around the Indianapolis raceway for eighteen hours a day. Occasionally, he glanced her way, and she was able to shout a suggestion, such as “HIRE CHARLIE ROSS.” But most of the time he was too busy trying to keep the car on the track. She felt more and more superfluous. This feeling combined with her original opposition to Harry Truman becoming president to build a smoldering anger that was tantamount to an emotional separation.

I stayed in Independence during these tumultuous final days of World War II. Bess wrote me a number of letters, which are a study of her attempt to ignore the kettledrums of history. On August 10, the day after the second atomic bomb exploded and the Japanese tottered, her entire letter dealt with paying a new maid, Leola, $5 each Wednesday without fail and using the balance of the check she enclosed to pay for my music lessons. Her only comment on Washington, D.C., was: “It’s plenty sticky here today and looks like rain.”

The return address on the envelope was also a comment in itself. She wrote: “1600 Penn. Ave, Wash. D.C.” She still could not bring herself to write that fateful phrase, “The White House.”

On August 14, Bess shared in the general exultation over the Japanese surrender. She joined President Truman on the north portico to wave to the huge crowd in Lafayette Square. That same day she wrote a letter to Mary Paxton Keeley. Her only acknowledgment of history being made was a parenthesis under the word “Tuesday” in the upper right-hand corner, “(I hope V-J Day)”. The letter began with a lament that “the weeks at home went so horribly fast.” Then Bess turned to Mary’s son, Pax. “I hope Pax is back in this country and is on the verge of a wedding.” She asked Mary for news of a play she had written about Lincoln; it was being considered by a New York producer. (Alas, it did not make it to Broadway.)

“I left Mother and Marg at home,” Bess serenely continued, while Washington, D.C., and the rest of the country celebrated. “Marg [is] working hard at her voice lessons & has really made some progress this summer. . . . If you get up to Indep. be sure to go see the family. [I] am still planning to read the Sandburg Lincoln as you suggested. Will probably have plenty of time this month. Not much doing except callers. Please let me know about Pax. I think of him so often.”

Mother’s subsequent letters to me were mostly chitchat about my friends inquiring for me, the activities of an ex-beau. In this same period, Dad was giving his mother and sister a different version of what was happening: “I have been trying to write you every day for three or four days but things have been in such a dizzy whirl here I couldn’t do anything but get in the center and try to stop it. Japan finally quit and then I had to issue orders so fast that several mistakes were made and then other orders had to be issued. Everybody has been going at a terrific gait but I believe we are up with the parade now.”

Not until August 18 did Bess tell me what was going on - and that was after the excitement was over.

“Everything has quieted down around the White House,” Bess wrote. “Dad had the Chiefs of Staff of Allies to dinner last night. Just twenty eight altogether. The table was lovely, with small white dahlias and deep rose and violet asters - four large bowls of them & tall candlelabs between them. The Marine Band played all evening and [we] enjoyed it in the upper hall.”

The sum total of my reaction to this letter in 1945 was: I wish I were there. Now I see it as a summation, an image of the distance between Bess and the presidency. Harry Truman was downstairs giving elegant stag dinners, and she was watching and listening in the upper hall.

But Bess was still a woman who cared deeply about people she knew and liked. On August 31, she joined twenty other “Wed. USO workers” who journeyed fifty miles to Winchester, Virginia to offer their sympathy to a fellow USO’er whose son had been killed on VJ day on Mindanao. On a happier note, she was enormously pleased that her cousin Maud Louise’s husband, General Charles Drake, had been rescued, alive and relatively well, from a prison camp in China. She sent me a news clipping about it in one of her letters and commented on how happy she was.

There is a glimpse of her feelings in another letter, written on board the presidential yacht,
Potomac,
during a Sunday outing on the river of the same name. Bess told me that the navy was going to turn over to us a bigger, more seaworthy ship, the
Williamsburg.
“Captain Kuver [the commander of the
Potomac
] says we can go round the world in it! Shall we?”

She was still yearning to escape the task that was facing her, somehow.

A letter to Ethel Noland displayed similar sentiments, focusing on 219 North Delaware Street this time. On September 4, after she had been in Washington less than a month, Bess wrote: “I’ve been wondering how all of you are. . . . I am getting anxious to go home again. I was sick to miss seeing Chris and Marian [who visited Grandmother and me in Independence] but there was nothing I could do about it.” She ended this letter with a glimpse of her view of the White House. “The Ambassador of Guatemala and his gal are calling this afternoon so I must get on down there. It’s always something!”

Meanwhile, President Truman was grappling with the problems of postwar America. As he remarked to his mother in one of the many letters he wrote to her at this time, it was the “political maneuvers” that he had to start thinking about now. On September 6, he made a bold move to assume the presidency in his own right. He sent a twenty-one-point program to the members of Congress, calling on them to join him in a series of programs that would make sure the United States did not collapse into another depression. He called for a massive housing program, an unemployment compensation program, and generous aid to small business. The Republican-southern Democrat coalition in Congress screamed as if he had asked them to surrender their wallets. It was the beginning of a three-year brawl.

On September 14, Dad and Mother flew to Independence to bring me back to Washington for my final year at George Washington University. By this time, Bess had made it extremely clear to the president that she did not want a repetition of his first visit. This one was supposed to be quiet and private. The local folk were asked in advance to cool it on fanfare and celebrations. But Americans have never been inclined to obey such edicts. A crowd of 200 swarmed around 219 North Delaware Street as the presidential car arrived.

The next day, when Dad dropped into his old Kansas City barbershop for a haircut, the crowd blocked traffic and almost broke the windows trying to get a look at him. Swarms of drivers and a small army of walkers streamed past the house, making it difficult for any of us to sit on the porches or enjoy the grounds in our usual way without giving the Secret Service men heart attacks.

Dad flew back to the White House after two days, leaving Mother considerably less than happy with his “quiet” visit. She stayed in Independence for another two weeks, ostensibly to help me shop for a fall wardrobe. From Washington came letters from a troubled president.

Two days later, he reported that he had replaced Frances Perkins as secretary of labor. She had told Dad soon after he became president that she wanted to leave the job, which she had held since 1933. He took the opportunity to get rid of some troublesome Roosevelt loyalists in the Labor Department.

Three days later, on September 22, he told her about an acrimonious cabinet meeting: “We . . . had a stormy Cabinet meeting discussing the atomic bomb. Lasted two hours and every phase of national and international politics was discussed. It was very helpful. I must send a message down [to Congress] on it soon.”

The funny part of the meeting was that those on the right of me were “Left” and the others on the left were “Right.” Stimson, Acheson, Interior (Fortas for Ickes) Schwellenbach, Wallace, Hannegan, McNutt were arguing for free interchange of scientific knowledge, while Vinson, Clark, Forrestal, Anderson, Crowley were for secrecy. Anyway I’ll have to make a decision and the “Ayes” will have it even if I’m the only Aye. It is probably the most momentous I’ll make.

The message - the plea - in these letters was unmistakable. He was trying to get Bess back into the partnership. But she could not manage it. Her anger continued to smolder.

Meanwhile, Bess was the First Lady, whether she liked it or not. When she and I returned to Washington at the end of September, she tackled the job with dogged resignation. The ladies of the press still were clamoring for more information. Bess decided that Reathel Odum and Mrs. Helm would hold a press conference for her. They gamely obeyed, and met the assembled women reporters looking, Mrs. Helm later wrote, “like condemned criminals.” One of the reporters wrote that “their attitude toward this part of their duties clearly was that there must be an easier way to make a living.”

Basically, all Miss Odum and Mrs. Helm did was distribute copies of the First Lady’s schedule for the coming week. The still-dissatisfied reporters, nothing if not ingenious, used these schedules to ferret out more information.

Reathel Odum remembers taking calls in Bess’ second-floor office while the First Lady sat a few feet away, scribbling memos on letters to be answered. “What will Mrs. Truman wear to the tea for the United Council of Church Women today?” the reporter would ask.

Reathel would pass the question to the First Lady, who replied: “Tell her it’s none of her damn business.”

Reathel would pick herself up off the floor and say: “Mrs. Truman hasn’t quite made up her mind.”

Anyone who was too pushy ran straight into Bess’ hard side. One day Mrs. Merriweather Post, who showed up at the White House without an appointment and demanded to see the new First Lady. Bess sent Reathel Odum out to talk to her in the lobby. Mrs. Post did not even get invited to sit down.

Another woman pestered Bess with letters and phone calls to get her husband appointed a federal judge. Bess told Reathel Odum what she thought of her. “If she thinks I can get a federal judgeship for her fat Overton she is completely out of her mind. It’s very embarrassing to be put on the spot like that. I’m sending [you] her most recent ‘spasms’ . . . keep them for Mr. T’s private file.”

Bess’ determination to avoid publicity extended to her staff. One of the more ingenious women reporters announced she would like to do a profile of Reathel. After all, she had had an interesting Washington career. She had followed Harry Truman from the Senate to the vice presidency to the White House. Reathel was, understandably, thrilled when the reporter called to tell her that a leading magazine had accepted the idea. Reathel went to Bess and asked for her approval. “Absolutely not,” she said, and that was the end of it.

Bess was not going to let anyone around her contract Potomac fever, a Truman term for those who get carried away by the Washington limelight. President Truman was encountering some serious cases of it on his side of the White House. First Eddie McKim, whom he had hoped to make his chief of staff, came down with it and had to be sent back to Nebraska. Dad managed this task without losing Eddie’s friendship.

Commodore Jake Vardaman was a more difficult case. Dad was fond of Mr. Vardaman, who had been a big help in the 1940 senate campaign. He made him his naval aide, a job with more honor than responsibility. (Mr. V. had gone into the navy during the war and risen to the rank of captain.) Not having much to do, the commodore decided that the First Lady needed help. He proceeded to try to “organize” Bess’ correspondence and to tell Mrs. Helm and Reathel Odum that they were doing all sorts of things wrong. Bess had a rather warm conversation with the president about Mr. Vardaman. He was instantly recalled to the executive side of the White House and eventually kicked upstairs to the Federal Reserve Board.