Bess Truman (45 page)

We could not get the thing started. The elevator, in keeping with the decrepit condition of the rest of the White House, would only go down if you took the button off, stuck a pencil in the hole and gave it a twist. That night I had to give it about a dozen twists to get it going. If Mother had not been standing beside me, I would have used some very unladylike language. She barely noticed my agitation. Her mind was on the speech that Dad was about to give. By this time, all of her, heart and soul, body and mind, was in the fight.

A few days later, we rumbled out of Washington for the final whistle-stop campaign. The number of people who came down to see us off was not encouraging. As far as Washington, D.C., was concerned, Harry Truman was still a loser. Hadn’t fifty leading journalists predicted in
Newsweek
magazine that he was going to get beaten so badly, the Democratic Party might disappear? Mother glowered at the tiny band of mostly White House staffers who were waving goodbye. It was not a presidential sendoff. “Evalyn Walsh McLean tells me that all everybody talks about is who’s going to be in Dewey’s cabinet,” she said.

Once more the candidate proceeded to wear out everyone but himself and the people who came to hear him. In the Midwest, even in New England - where Harvard sophisticates supposedly scorned Farmer Truman - the crowds kept getting bigger and more enthusiastic. The pollsters and pundits paid no attention to this phenomenon. Their charts and numbers still kept telling them it was a Republican year.

Somewhere in the vicinity of Lima, Ohio, Mother told the candidate that if he called her the Boss once more, she might get off the train. That was her way of killing off the Boss’ boss part of the act. Dad surrendered. By that time, he was getting tired of it too.

On the train, Mother spent most of her time with Dad. She let the staff take care of greeting the numerous politicians who got on and off at various stops as we crossed state lines. She felt it was more important to keep her eye on the president, to make sure he did not go over the edge into total exhaustion. She also functioned as a quiet cheering section and subtle critic, telling him how she thought the latest speech had gone over and suggesting small ways to improve the routine.

Often she played mother to other members of the staff who were working into exhaustion just like the president. As we approached San Francisco, assistant White House counsel George Elsey came into the car with a speech that Dad was supposed to make in about two hours. He had not yet had time to go over it. We were having dinner, and George was very apologetic about interrupting us. But he was also more than a little frantic. “Mr. President, you’ve really got to read this as soon as possible, in case you want any changes . . .,” he began.

“George,” Mother said. “You look frazzled. Have you had any dinner?”

George shook his head.

“Eat this,” Mother said, pushing her dessert, a piece of apple pie, across the table to him.

George ate apple pie for his dinner while Dad read the speech.

One of the nicest developments of the campaign from Mother’s point of view was Mrs. Roosevelt’s emergence as a Truman backer. Although Dad had appointed her to the U.S. delegation to the UN, where she became chairman of the Commission on Human Rights, she had been conspicuously silent throughout the draft-Eisenhower campaign launched by her sons. But when she saw and heard Dad’s fighting campaign, she changed her mind and made a six-minute pro-Truman speech by radio from Paris.

Eleanor Roosevelt also tried to persuade her sons to return to the Democratic Party. However, to her considerable exasperation, they declined. Mother had nothing to do with Mrs. Roosevelt’s change of mind. But she felt her endorsement was an implicit approval of her first ladyship, even though it was so different from Mrs. Roosevelt’s approach to the job.

St. Louis was the climax of our whistle-stop career. Dad let his staff toil over a speech that was, in many respects, a masterpiece. But by this time, he had acquired so much confidence in his ability to speak extemporaneously from a set of notes that he threw it aside and went after the Republicans and their bland candidate the way he once tackled unruly hogs in his mother’s barnyard.

A reporter for
The Washington Post
said that if Harry Truman won by a whisker, he would give the credit to his performance that night in St. Louis.

Our hegira ended at 7:25 p.m., October 31, 1948, when our train clanked into the Missouri Pacific Railroad depot in Independence. “It’s grand to be home,” Dad told the crowd that welcomed us. It was a sentiment that Mother (and I) heartily endorsed. We had traveled 31,700 miles, and the candidate had made 356 speeches to a rough total of 15 million people. At 219 North Delaware Street, Mother did exactly what any woman would do after spending the previous two weeks riding the rails. She made sure she had an appointment at her hairdresser’s the next morning for a wash and set.

The next evening, Bess demonstrated how much she wanted Harry Truman to win this election. She agreed to allow twenty reporters and at least as many technicians to invade 219 North Delaware while Dad made a radio address to the nation from the living room. She even let a photographer take a picture of him, as he again appealed to the American people to take charge of their own government and to ignore what the pollsters and the press were telling them.

The next day, after we all voted at 10:00 a.m., Dad went into his usual Election-Day routine. He calmly announced that he was sure that he was going to win, and if he was wrong, it was too late to worry about it. Whereupon he disappeared. Mother and I were left to cope with the reporters, who grew really frantic that evening when Harry Truman leaped into the lead by a million votes and stayed there, far ahead of Republican Dewey, Progressive Wallace, and the Dixiecrat candidate, Strom Thurmond. By this time, Dad was sound asleep in a hotel in Excelsior Springs, about forty miles from Independence.

In the house, I, the true believer from the start of the campaign, was taking charge of things. I refused to let Mother or Grandmother turn on the radio, where that dedicated Truman hater, H. V. Kaltenborn, kept on saying that Dewey would pull ahead eventually. I spent most of my time on the phone to the Washington headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, where staffers such as Bill Boyle (soon to become chairman) were getting the count direct from precincts and districts in cities and states all over the country. I whooped out the latest good news while my doubting elders sat there, not quite able to believe it.

As the Truman lead became insurmountable, the reporters assaulted the house with a fervor unseen since D-Day. They established a beachhead on the porch, and Mother sent me out to deal with them. After five or ten minutes of sparring - I was getting pretty good at this sort of thing - I finally convinced them that Dad was not in the house.

Mother finally decided to imitate the candidate by going to bed. By this time, it was well past midnight. She was tired, but as she said goodnight, a wicked smile crept across her face. “I wonder if Clare Booth Luce will think I’m real now,” she said.

What memories must have crowded her mind, as she waited for sleep, all the other elections, but, above all, the one in 1940, where Harry Truman’s faith in himself and his destiny had carried him to victory. Tonight was the ultimate justification of that faith. I wonder if Mother grieved, just a little, for the times when her pessimism had made it difficult for her to share that faith. But the emotion was swiftly replaced by the pride, the pleasure, of winning this supreme triumph.

Mother was up early the next morning. She had her usual light breakfast and began examining the house, agreeing with Grandmother that the place needed a good cleaning. Suddenly this housewifely conversation was interrupted by a tremendous racket. Dewey had conceded defeat at 10:14 a.m. A few minutes later, every whistle and car horn in Independence started blowing, and they were soon joined by the air raid sirens. For a moment, Mother thought time had somehow unraveled, that she had gone back forty years, and it was November 11, 1918, Armistice Day. But this time, Harry Truman was not just one of about 2 million victors being saluted. All that noise was for him and no one else.

Fogged out from lack of sleep, I was uptown when the uproar exploded. I wandered into a store and said: “What’s all that noise about?” Fortunately, the storekeeper was an old family friend. After answering my question, he suggested I go home and get some sleep. I should have taken his advice, but I didn’t.

Refreshed from a good night’s sleep, Dad was at the Muehlebach Hotel in Kansas City, where his staff had spent the night. He had been awakened in his Excelsior Springs hideaway at 4 a.m. by his excited Secret Service man, Jim Rowley, who could no longer resist telling him the good news. They turned on the radio and listened to H. V. Kaltenborn still predicting Truman’s defeat, although he was 2 million votes ahead. The two of them laughed uproariously. Dad put on a natty blue suit, had a leisurely breakfast and drove to Kansas City at 6 a.m. He was the freshest man in a room full of glassy-eyed reporters and politicians when Dewey conceded.

Back in Independence, after the whistles and horns stopped blowing, the local politicians realized that they did not have even a shred of a plan to throw a victory party for their native son. They had gone along with the rest of the country’s presumption of a Truman defeat. After some frantic telephone calls to 219 North Delaware Street and the Muehlebach Hotel, they announced that Dad and Mother and I would greet well-wishers that night in the Courthouse Square.

The well-wishers turned out to be a wild-eyed mob of 40,000 from all parts of Jackson County. Men climbed onto the roofs of cars, perched in trees. Parents hoisted children on their shoulders. The streets running into the square were packed solid with cheering Democrats. The local police were swamped. The Secret Service was in a panic. But Dad did not mind the pandemonium in the least. “Protocol goes out the window when I am in Independence,” he said. Then he grew serious. “I thank you very much indeed for this celebration, which is not for me. It is for the whole country. It is for the whole world.”

Mother and I stood beside him, smiling. For her, this explosion of admiration and affection from her friends and neighbors was tremendously satisfying.

The next morning, we headed back to Washington on our campaign train. I crawled into a berth and got the first real sleep I had encountered in forty-eight hours. So I have to rely on other eyewitnesses for what happened en route. Dad meant what he had told the celebrators in Independence. But humility did not preclude a little private crowing, especially over the red-faced pollsters and journalists. Mother was ahead of him in this department. She chortled when she heard that Drew Pearson had filed a column for the day after the election, analyzing “the closely knit group around Tom Dewey who will take over the White House eighty-six days from now.” At St. Louis, someone brought onto the train a copy of the Chicago
Tribune,
with the headline, DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. Bess thrust it into Harry Truman’s hands, and he held it up for a famous picture.

In Washington, D.C., a stupendous crowd met the train at Union Station. It is surprising that some people were not crushed to death. Mother looked out the window at the wildly smiling faces and frantically waving hands and turned to me. “Remember how many came down to see us off last month?” she said.

Victory was not going to make an optimist of her.

But she enjoyed every minute of that celebration in her adopted hometown. The Washington, D.C., police band played ruffles and flourishes and “Hail to the Chief,” the presidential song, as we were escorted through the crowd to a seven-passenger open touring car. We rode through the streets with Dad and Vice President Barkley sitting on top of the back seat. Over 800,000 cheering people jammed the sidewalks while bands, official and impromptu, seemed to be playing “I’m Just Wild About Harry” on every corner.

I suddenly remembered something my tennis-champion mother had said when Dad was nominated for vice president in Chicago. “It’s nice to win,” I yelled, above the din.

“You bet it is,” Bess Wallace Truman said.

Mother was still enjoying the victory the next morning, when Mr. West, the assistant usher with whom she worked on the menus for official dinners, came into her office and congratulated her. She picked up a copy of a recent issue of
Time
with Dewey on the cover. “It looks like you’re going to have to put up with us for another four years,” she said.

But most of those four years, it soon became apparent, would not be spent at the White House. The engineers and architects who had been inspecting the mansion told Dad that the building was literally in danger of falling down on top of us. There was only one solution - we would have to move to Blair House, and the White House would have to be completely renovated.

Fortunately, we did not have to flee across the street like refugees. The victorious president had inveigled Mother and me into joining him and his crew at Key West for a well-earned vacation. We would move out of the Great White Jail when we returned.

That Key West vacation was not only well-earned, it was badly needed. Bess was as exhausted as Dad and came down with an alarming cold and sore throat that all but prostrated her during our last two days in the White House. Dad was so upset, he could not sleep and kept appearing at her door at 3:00 and 4:00 a.m. to make sure she took her medicine.

A combination of sunshine and elation soon had the Trumans restored to what Dad liked to call “fighting trim.” We had a good time at Key West on that first visit. Everybody was in a mood to clown, do impromptu jigs, and laugh their heads off at almost anything. There is a wonderful picture of Mother in near convulsions over a wacky pre-inaugural costume parade staged by the White House staffers and correspondents.

That gives me a chance to say something about Mother’s laugh. It was a unique sound, which spilled out of the center of her body. Hearty would be an old-fashioned way of describing it. In this book, I have inevitably spent a lot of time describing the serious side of Mother’s life. But I want to go on record here about how much she loved a joke and how often she laughed at the pomposity and pretentiousness and downright silliness that afflicts the human race.

Mother and I slept on the presidential yacht,
Williamsburg,
at Key West. We let the men inhabit the modest quarters ashore and play poker and practical jokes on each other and drink whiskey to their wicked (as they liked to imagine themselves) hearts’ content. As a dividend to this first visit for the two of us, Mother and I took a cruise to Cuba aboard the
Williamsburg.
Mother particularly enjoyed this look at another part of South America. We saw the Morro Castle, shopped on the Prado, and had champagne with Senora Prio, Cuba’s First Lady, at the Presidential Palace. At no time during the visit did Mother use the Spanish she had studied during the first years at the White House. Fearing that a mistake would get into the newspapers, she made no attempt to let the Cubans know she had a good grasp of their language.

On the way home from Havana, we ran into the tail end of a hurricane, which made for a rough voyage. I am immune to seasickness and so was Mother. I guess I inherited it from her. Dad, on the other hand, was never happy at sea, although he did, by sheer willpower, master airsickness. A few days later, Mother had the president out on the still choppy ocean, on the stern of a fishing boat. She tartly reminded Dad that he had extravagantly praised the fishing at Key West and had yet to take her out for a troll. She took fiendish pleasure in inflicting this on him. She knew Harry Truman hated to fish. But on this and all subsequent visits to Key West, a fishing expedition became a fixture of the vacation.

We did not realize just how important this vacation was to Mother’s health until we got back to Washington. Early in December, we journeyed to Norfolk, Virginia, to present a massive silver service to the battleship
Missouri
on behalf of our native state, which had paid for it. In the midst of the ceremony, which included a twenty-one-gun salute fired practically into our eardrums, Mother developed a severe nosebleed. Doctor Graham took her behind the scenes and tried to stop it by applying pressure, but that did not work. He finally had to cauterize the veins in her nose. Back in Washington, he immediately took Mother’s blood pressure and discovered it was 190 - alarmingly high. It was grim evidence of the strain she had been under during the campaign - and the previous three and a half years in the White House. Dr. Graham put her on medication and banned salt from her diet. Meanwhile, we moved out of the White House into Blair House and took over its next-door twin, Lee House, in the bargain. Mother announced that the formal social season was canceled, and the secret of the collapsing White House was finally released to the press.

Now the big question was what to do about the tottering mansion. Should it be ripped down to the foundations and replaced by an entirely new building? Dad consulted Mother on this decision and found she emphatically agreed with his instinct that no matter how thoroughly the old building might have to be gutted, some of it should be preserved. Mother felt that there should be continuity as well as change in this symbol of the presidency. She pushed hard to keep at least the outer walls. The engineers scraped off the white plaster and found sturdy brick underneath it. They decided the walls could be saved.

It took several months to reach this decision. During the last month of 1948 and the first weeks of 1949, Bess was far more preoccupied with two other problems. Her mother again became seriously ill early in December. Grandmother was eighty-six at this point, and Mother was so alarmed, she summoned Fred Wallace from Denver. His presence seemed to inspire Madge Gates Wallace to rally, and by the time we went home to Independence for Christmas, she was almost well again.

A few weeks later, Bess wrote to Mary Paxton Keeley, who was so fond of Grandmother: “We were afraid for a day or two [Mother] was not going to make it. But we got her back here [to Washington] by air and she seemed no worse for the trip. And she can have every attention here and be under my eye too. She has to be coerced into doing a lot of things.”

The inauguration was not so easily solved. Mother had to buy an entire wardrobe for the various functions, and so did I. As usual, she insisted a Wallace family Christmas had first priority and did not get down to the business of choosing some of her dresses until we went back to Washington. To complicate matters, Agasta, her Washington couturier, seldom made evening dresses, so Mother chose Madame Pola of New York to create two of these. That required dashes to Gotham for fittings. Between these expeditions and moving into Blair House, Agasta grew somewhat frantic. On January 12, 1949, with the inauguration only eight days away, she was still shopping for the right material.

That day, Agasta found a “lovely piece of raw silk” (she wrote) “that is very new.” She was right about the silk. It was a fascinating mixture of iridescent black and gray. From it, she made the two-piece gray-and-black outfit Mother wore to the inauguration ceremony. It had a straight skirt and a peplum jacket with which Mother wore a hat of moonstone straw cloth, trimmed with a single mauve-pink rose embedded in black tulle.

Agasta also created a short, blue, moiré faille dinner dress, with the fullness gathered into folds at the side of the skirt and held with an enormous navy blue rose. Mother wore this dress to the dinner for Dad and Vice President Barkley. For her inaugural reception - with the White House closed, the reception was held at the National Gallery of Art - Madame Pola created a gown of pearl gray satin with silver lamé and a silver thread design in the shape of a feather. It was cut on princess lines, floor length, with a little train. The deep V-neck was outlined with cutouts of the feather motif. It has often been displayed at the Smithsonian.

I was fond of that dress, but I adored Mother’s ball gown. It was made of black panne velvet cut on slender lines, the skirt draped to one side. It had a deep circular collar heavily encrusted with hand-drawn white Alençon lace. The collar fell gracefully over her shoulders, forming a lovely oval neckline. I have already used the word regal to describe Mother when she wore an evening dress. In that gown, the word had to be spelled with a capital “R.”

The inauguration was a continuation of the victory celebration, as far as Mother was concerned. For the entire week, she did not give me a single order or cautionary warning, even though I practically ignored sleeping and eating. She bubbled with good humor and, as tireless as Dad, played hostess to droves of Wallace and Truman relatives and every real and imaginary VIP in Missouri. One thing that she particularly enjoyed was the tons of money the inaugural committee had to spend on the parade, the ball, the whole works. The Republican Congress, certain that Dewey was going to be elected, had voted $80,000 to guarantee a real bash. For a penny pincher like Mother, this was ecstasy indeed.

Another thing that pleased Mother was Dad’s decision to make it the first integrated inauguration in our nation’s history. Hotels and restaurants were informed that if they attempted to bar anyone because of the color of his skin they would find themselves in court about ten seconds later. It was the perfect answer to the insults Congressman Adam Clayton Powell had flung at Bess in 1945.

At the same time, Mother’s realism did not permit her to ignore the serious side of the inaugural. As Dad raised his hand to take that solemn oath on the steps of the Capitol, I glanced at Mother and saw tears on her face. They were a mixture of joy and sadness. She still rejoiced in Dad’s victory, but she knew that the next four years were not going to be easy.

As we settled into life at Blair-Lee House, Mother made the pleasant discovery that in the Turnip Day special session, Congress, again presuming the next president would be Republican, had voted to raise his salary from $50,000 to $100,000, and given him a $50,000 expense account. This eased some of the pressure on the Truman budget. No longer did Mother have to worry about that thin $4,200 margin of error before the precipice of debt.

At the end of January, I went off to New York to resume my singing career. Grandmother Wallace, who thought I had fallen out of love with this idea, was upset. She wept and said all sorts of awful things about her granddaughter appearing on the stage. Mother did not say a word against my decision, and behind the scenes she did her best to calm her mother. In fact, as a show of support, Mother parted with Reathel Odum, who by this time had become an invaluable First Lady’s aide. Reathel came to New York with me as a companion - not a chaperone. I made it clear that I had had enough minding to last me a lifetime. In New York, I began studying under a new voice coach.

In Washington, Bess tackled the formidable problems of being First Lady in Blair-Lee House. She decided to move some of the choicer pieces of furniture from the executive mansion to give the new quarters a White House flavor. She also had several doors cut between the two buildings, which converted them into one house, more or less.

The real problem was entertaining the Washington social horde, which grew more numerous with every passing day. The maximum number Blair House could handle for dinner was 18, for teas, 250. This meant diplomatic dinners and receptions and all the other functions had to be done three and four times, instead of just twice. When a foreign premier or president or king visited, Bess decided they would give a state dinner at the nearby Carlton Hotel, using the White House staff and White House traditions of table decorations, and, of course, diplomatic protocol.

On the presidential side of things, in his inaugural address Dad had startled the world with his announcement of his Point Four program to share our scientific knowledge with underdeveloped countries. To sustain this outreach and continue his policy of peace through strength among the free nations, he chose a new secretary of state, Dean Acheson. (Secretary Marshall had announced his intention to retire before the election.) Mother was delighted with this choice, and I am sure that her advice played a part in it. She felt this suave, intellectual New Englander understood Harry Truman, and she admired his grasp of foreign affairs. She also liked his charming, vivacious wife, Alice.

Secretary Acheson performed magnificently in his first major assignment, the creation of the NATO alliance, in spite of the fulminations of Senator Taft and other isolationist Republicans. On the domestic front, Dad launched his Fair Deal program aimed at giving all the citizens of the republic, small businessmen and farmers, blacks as well as whites, a just share of our postwar prosperity.

I won’t go so far as to say that Mother coined the term “Fair Deal,” but it was an idea she emphatically approved. No one was more anxious than she to see Harry Truman emerge from FDR’s shadow. She bristled at the idea that the Truman administration was a continuation of the New Deal.

Dad summed up the Fair Deal’s philosophy in a letter to a prominent businessman early in 1949. “I think small business, the small farmer, the small corporation are the backbone of any free society and when there are too many people on relief and too few people at the top who control the wealth of the country then we must look out.”