Bess Truman (38 page)

During these months, Bess was short-tempered with Dad, sometimes in front of me and even in front of White House staffers. One day, George Elsey, a naval aide, soon to become assistant to White House counsel Clark Clifford, was riding in the limousine with Mother and Dad on the way back from a reception at the Congressional Club. The president began complaining about Congress’ refusal to let him expand the executive wing to add more offices. There was a fence blocking the path of this expansion and Dad said: “If they don’t give me permission in a few days, I’m going to get a bulldozer in here and knock that damn fence down and go ahead without their permission.”

“Harry,” Bess said, waving her fingers under his nose, “you will do no such thing!”

Bess had scarcely gotten rid of Commodore Vardaman when she found herself embroiled in one of the nastiest political crossfires of the Truman presidency. It started with her acceptance of an invitation from the Daughters of the American Revolution to a tea in her honor at Constitution Hall on October 12. The announcement of this forthcoming event raised the hackles of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell of New York, a thoroughly unpleasant demagogue on race and anything else that could get him a little publicity. Powell announced that his wife, pianist Hazel Scott, had been refused permission to perform in Constitution Hall because of her color.

This stirred memories of an ugly incident in 1939, when the singer Marian Anderson had been barred from Constitution Hall by the DAR because of her race. Mrs. Roosevelt had resigned in protest from the DAR, which stubbornly refused to change its biased policy regarding the use of the hall.

Congressman Powell sent a telegram to Bess the day before the tea, urging her not to attend. He went out of his way to compare what she was doing with Eleanor Roosevelt’s protest. “I can assure you,” he wrote, “that no good will be accomplished by attending and much harm will be done. If you believe in 100 percent Americanism, you will publicly denounce the DAR’s action.”

Bess stood her ground. She was not a segregationist, but she was also not a crusader. She wired back that “the invitation . . . was extended prior to the unfortunate controversy which has arisen. . . . In my opinion the acceptance of the hospitality is not related to the merits of the issue. . . . I deplore any action which denies artistic talent an opportunity to express itself because of prejudice against race origin.”

President Truman backed up Bess with a telegram of his own, which reminded Mr. Powell that we had just won a war against totalitarian countries that made racial discrimination their state policy. He said that he despised such a philosophy, but in a free society neither he nor Mrs. Truman had the power to force a private organization to change its policy.

In his heart, Dad knew this telegram was a mistake. He was far more inclined to condemn the DAR. He already was formulating plans for one of the great breakthroughs against discrimination, the integration of the armed forces. But Bess had decided she was not going to let a congressman tell her where she could have a cup of tea. She still was not quite able to accept the idea that she too was a public figure as much as the president.

Bess went to the tea. Adam Clayton Powell retaliated by calling her “the last lady.” Dad was furious and forthwith banned the Congressman from the White House. Mr. Powell was right about one thing. Much damage was done, not to race relations but to the Truman partnership. There could not have been a worse beginning to her first ladyship, as far as Bess was concerned. She had been maneuvered into a comparison with Eleanor Roosevelt and had come out a dismal second on the public opinion charts.

In the midst of this brawl, Bess received a letter from Mary Paxton Keeley, urging her to jettison the DAR. Bess’ answer revealed her stubbornness - and her wrath. “I agree with you that the DAR is dynamite at present but I’m not ‘having any’ just now. But I was plenty burned up with the wire I had from that - in NY.”

Mother left that word blank, not I. Even when she was steaming, she remained a lady.

On another matter during this first fall in the White House, Bess demonstrated her normally sound political instincts. The American economy was having a difficult time readjusting to peace. There were shortages of everything from steak to coffee, and prices were rising at an alarming rate. Americans had saved something close to $134 billion during the war and were itching to spend it. A New York
Daily News
headline read: PRICES SOAR, BUYERS SORE, STEERS JUMP OVER THE MOON. Bess decided it would be a grave political mistake to launch a formal social session at the White House, with elaborate dinners and receptions. Instead, she announced that she would hold a series of teas and ladies luncheons, beginning on December 1.

Official Washington grumbled. Nothing is more desired by the ambassadors and bureaucrats and congressmen than an invitation to a White House formal dinner. But the decision was warmly approved by the rest of the country.

As she approached this truncated social season, Bess wrote another letter to Ethel Noland that again revealed her unhappiness. “I meant to answer your note at once,” she wrote. “But I seem to get very little done that I
want
to do. . . . I get so homesick some days. Think about you all often.”

This acute homesickness makes no sense for a woman who had spent most of the previous eleven years in Washington. Bess was suffering from the White House blues, a disease whose symptoms are the opposite of Potomac fever.

All these negative feelings came to a boil at the end of December 1945 when we went home for Christmas. Mother and I and Grandmother Wallace departed on December 18. Dad stayed in Washington waiting to hear from Secretary of State Byrnes, who was involved in heavy negotiations with the Russians in Moscow. He also decided, he told his mother, that he wanted to let the family have at least part of their holiday without a presidential invasion. So he waited until Christmas Day to fly home. The weather was awful; every commercial plane in the nation was grounded. After waiting four hours, Dad ordered the
Sacred Cow
aloft. It was one of the wildest flights of his life.

The New York Times, The Washington Post,
and other guardians of the republic castigated the president for “taking chances with his personal safety.” Bess’ comments when he got to 219 North Delaware Street were not much more cordial. In the privacy of their bedroom, the conversation went something like this.

“So you’ve finally arrived,” Bess said. “I guess you couldn’t think of any more reasons to stay away. As far as I’m concerned, you might as well have stayed in Washington.”

To ruin his Christmas completely, on December 27, Dad received an urgent call from Charlie Ross, informing him that Secretary of State Byrnes wanted to deliver a “fireside chat” to the nation on the Moscow conference before he said a word about it to President Truman. It was not the first time, but it was close to the last time that Mr. Byrnes revealed his inclination to treat Harry Truman like a puppet.

Dad rushed back to Washington to deal with this crisis. But he was so furious with his wife, he could not think about anything else until he wrote her a letter, telling her exactly what he thought of her rotten temper and insulting words. He mailed it special delivery that night.

The next day, I received a telephone call in Independence. “Margie,” Dad said, “I want you to do something very important for me. Go over to the post office and ask to see Edgar Hinde [the postmaster]. Tell him to give you a special delivery letter that I mailed to your mother, yesterday. It’s a very angry letter and I’ve decided I don’t want her to see it. Burn it.”

I did as I was told. Postmaster Hinde naturally made no objection. He handed me the letter, which had just arrived. I took it home and burned it in the backyard incinerator. I felt terribly guilty. I had made such a fuss as a teenager about Mother’s tendency to read my mail. If Mother had ever looked out the window and asked me what I was doing, I would have had hysterics.

That day, December 28, 1945, a calmer Harry Truman sat down at his desk in the Oval Office and wrote Bess one of his most important letters.

With those latter words, Harry Truman was telling Bess that he had known since the day he became president eight months ago that this explosion was coming. Now at least her anger was out in the open, and they could begin to deal with it - and the presidency.

Twenty-seven years later, when Harry Truman died, this letter was found in his desk at the Truman Library. It is the only one of the 1,600 surviving letters that he wrote to Bess that he kept there.

After Christmas, Madge Wallace departed for Denver with her son Fred and his wife Christine. Mother and I and Vietta Garr returned to Washington on New Year’s Day. We had a private Pullman compartment, which Drew Pearson expanded into a private car. This viper in a reporter’s disguise (he made Duke Shoop look like St. Francis of Assisi) wrung his hands at the thought of “the Truman women” traveling like Vanderbilts while “GI’s had to travel in day coaches.” At his next press conference, Dad pulled Pearson aside as he was leaving and threatened to punch him in the nose if he wrote anything like that again.

Next came an incident that takes on new depth and significance when told in the context of the troubled Truman partnership. Although Bess had canceled the formal White House occasions, Dad decided that it would be a good idea to have a diplomatic dinner. Americans would not object to seeing foreigners eating heartily at the White House, and the bonus in improved relations with the home countries might make it worth the time and trouble.

At the last moment, the Russian ambassador, Nicolai V. Novikov, had someone call and say he was ill. An investigation revealed he was healthy and happy in New York. The cause of his illness, it soon became apparent, was his proximity at the White House table to the envoys of Estonia and Latvia, two countries that the Soviet Union had swallowed at the end of the war, although their governments in exile were still recognized by the United States.

The dinner went off smoothly enough, but the next day Dad stormed into his oval office breathing fire. He summoned Dean Acheson, the undersecretary of state who was running the State Department while Jimmy Byrnes was in Moscow, and informed him that he wanted Novikov declared persona non grata and thrown out of the country.

“Why?” asked the aghast Acheson, who could see the headlines blossoming, the army and navy going to full alert.

“He insulted Mrs. Truman by turning down that invitation at the last second.” Dad stormed. “I’m not going to let anyone in the world do that.”

Outside the Oval Office, Matt Connelly put through a hurried phone call to Bess and told her what was about to happen. Was she as angry as the president? he asked. Matt, a shrewd Irishman, was pretty sure she was not.

“Let me talk to him,” Bess said.

Matt connected the call to Dad’s telephone, and Mother told him to calm down. She urged him to discuss the matter with Dean Acheson, whom she had already met and liked.

“I’m talking with him now. He agrees with you,” the president said.

He handed the telephone to Mr. Acheson, and Bess expressed her abhorrence of the move. “His critics will have a field day,” she said. “We’ve already given them too much ammunition.”

“What do you - er - suggest,” Mr. Acheson said. He was only a foot or so from the steaming president.

“Tell him you can’t do anything for twenty-four hours, something like that,” she said. “By that time he’ll be ready to laugh about it.”

At this point, Mr. Acheson did something clever. He put words in Bess’ mouth. He repeated aloud things she was not saying. “Above himself - yes. Too big for his britches - I agree with you. Delusions of grandeur.”

Dad snatched the phone away from him. “All right, all right,” he said to Bess. “When you gang up on me I know I’m licked. Let’s forget all about it.”

He hung up and reached for the photograph Bess had given him when he left for France. He kept it on his desk in a gold filigree frame. “I guess you think I’m an old fool,” he said, “and I probably am. But look on the back.”

The acting secretary of state read the inscription Bess had written there so many years ago. “Dear Harry, May this photograph bring you safely home again from France - Bess.” He understood a little of what Dad was feeling.

But Dean Acheson could not know the deeper levels of emotion that were swirling around the photograph during those early months of 1946. In my biography of my father, I have written whole chapters of solid evidence that Harry Truman was not, normally, a hotheaded, hair-trigger man. On the contrary, he rarely lost his temper and preferred to give his decisions long, cool, analytical thought before making them. His behavior in the Novikov incident only revealed how profoundly his quarrel with Bess was disturbing him.