Bess Truman (49 page)

On November 1, 1950, I was in Portland, Maine, preparing for a concert that night. Dad spent an unnerving morning in the executive wing of the White House (that part of the mansion was still functioning) getting ominous reports of a Chinese Communist presence in North Korea. He returned to Blair House for lunch with Mother and Grandmother Wallace, then took a nap – a custom he had adopted to help him handle the sixteen-hour presidential day. Mother chatted with Grandmother Wallace in her bedroom, which she seldom left. She was eighty-eight and growing feebler.

At 2:50 p.m., Mother and Dad were scheduled to go to Arlington National Cemetery to dedicate a statue to Field Marshall Sir John Dill, a British member of the Combined Chiefs of Staff during World War II. It was a gesture aimed at underscoring our solidarity with allies who had contributed soldiers to the United Nations Army in Korea.

It was a warm day, and most of the windows and the front door of Blair House were open. Only a lightly latched screen door stood between intruders and the interior of the building. Of course, the idea of intruders never entered anyone’s head. Pedestrians were allowed to stroll along the sidewalk only a few feet from the door. There were guards on duty in sentry boxes on the east and west ends of the yellow brick and stucco building. But no one, including the president and First Lady, had the slightest sense of danger from this proximity to the public.

At a few minutes after 2:00 p.m., Mother left Grandmother Wallace and entered her second-floor bedroom to begin dressing for the trip to Arlington. An incredible series of blasts suddenly erupted from the street below her windows. In two minutes, there were no less than twenty-seven staccato explosions. Mother rushed to the window and looked down on a shocking sight.

One of the guards, Leslie Coffelt, was writhing on the ground in a death agony. Another guard was lying in the gutter clutching a shattered leg. Two other men in shabby civilian clothes were lying on the sidewalk, bleeding profusely. There was blood everywhere.

Mother fled into Dad’s bedroom crying: “Harry, someone’s shooting our policemen!”

Dad dashed to the window and stuck out his head to get a good look at the carnage. “Get back, get back,” the surviving guards and Secret Service men on the street implored him. They did not know what was going to happen next. Dad retreated to the door of his room and peered out. A husky Secret Service man was crouched at the head of the stairs with a submachine gun pointing at the front door.

Dad did not mention that to Mother. He calmed her down and told her to go back and finish dressing. He would find out what had happened and tell her on the way to Arlington. He soon learned that he and Mother had come alarmingly close to being killed. Two Puerto Rican nationalist fanatics, Oscar Collazo and Victor Torresola, had noticed Blair House’s easy access from the street and tried to shoot their way into the building. They failed largely because Collazo’s gun had jammed when he pulled the trigger, giving the guard he was trying to murder time to draw his own gun and return his fire.

Torresola had gunned down guards Coffelt and Joseph E. Downs in the west booth. But the mortally wounded Coffelt put a bullet through Torresola’s brain as he raced toward the door. Collazo was stopped on the steps by a hail of bullets from other policemen and Secret Service agents and toppled to the sidewalk with three bullets in him; none were fatal wounds.

Mother was shaken by this senseless act of violence. It seemed to confirm all the intimations of disaster she had sensed when Dad became president. She was particularly anxious to make sure her mother did not hear about it. She issued orders to Vietta Garr, who was still with us as Grandmother’s companion, to say nothing to her and passed similar commands to the Blair House staff. With her iron self-control, Mother was able to join Dad and drive to the ceremony in Arlington as if nothing had happened. There, as Dad airily dismissed their brush with death with the comment, “Presidents have to expect such things,” Mother thought of me in Portland. She rushed back to Blair House and telephoned me at my hotel. She knew I had spent the afternoon in seclusion as most singers do before a concert. Thereafter, however, Mother’s usually strong sense of reality deserted her.

“I just want you to know everyone’s all right,” she said.

“Why shouldn’t everyone be all right?” I asked. “Is there anything wrong with Dad?”

“He’s fine. He’s perfectly fine,” Mother said. “I’ll talk to you later tonight, after your performance.”

It was an indication of how shaken Mother was that she did not seem to realize that people read newspapers and listened to the radio in Portland, and it was virtually impossible for me to get from the hotel to the concert hall without someone telling me what had happened. Reathel Odum, Mother’s ex-secretary, who was traveling with me, conferred with my manager, and they jointly decided to tell me what had happened. They did not want a local reporter to undo me with a question seconds before I went on stage. Once I was reassured that Dad was all right, I relaxed and sang without the slightest nervousness.

For Mother, the assassination attempt cast a shadow of anxiety over the remaining months of Dad’s presidency. No longer could she justify her occasional defiance of the Secret Service, lest Dad be encouraged to do the same thing. Having survived about 50,000 high explosive shells in World War I, he was totally fatalistic about the danger. He discussed this attitude and other aspects of the assassination attempt in a letter to his cousin, Ethel Noland: “I’m really a prisoner now. I’m like the “600” and the cannon, only mine are guards and they are trying to keep me out of the “mouth of hell.” Everybody is much more worried and jittery than I am. I’ve always thought that if I could get my hands on a would-be assassin he’d never try it again. But I guess that’s impossible. The grand guards who were hurt in the attempt on me didn’t have a fair chance. The one who was killed was just cold bloodedly murdered before he could do anything. But his assassin did not live but a couple of minutes - one of the S.S. men put a bullet in one ear and it came out the other. . . . I was the only calm one in the house. You see I’ve been shot at by experts and unless your name’s on the bullet you needn’t be afraid - and that of course you can’t find out, so why worry.”

For a professional worrier like Mother, this was no reassurance. She dismissed Dad’s complaints when the Secret Service decreed a temporary ban on his morning walks and insisted on taking him from Blair House to the White House in a heavily guarded car, which picked him up in the back alley. She had to depart and return in the same furtive fashion, which she disliked as much as he did.

The assassination attempt may have had something to do with her decision not to go home with him on November 5 for a two-and-a-half-day visit to dedicate a Liberty Bell replica, given to Independence by the people of Annecy-le-Vieux, France. A small army of Secret Service men and Kansas City police followed Dad everywhere, even when he had dinner with Frank and Natalie Wallace. Mother decided in advance that she could not stand it and stayed in Washington.

There, Blair House became a mansion under siege. After November 1, 1950, pedestrians were no longer permitted to walk past it. The number of guards was increased. Even the streetcar platform was removed from the avenue in front of the house to make sure that a would-be assassin could not mingle with a crowd of people waiting there. All these precautions only reminded Mother of that day of carnage and terror.

There were numerous other threats on Dad’s life, which he did not mention to Mother or me. Early in 1951, he explained to his cousin, Ralph Truman, why he could not attend the reunion of the Thirty-fifth Division. Stressing that it was “completely confidential,” Dad wrote: “The Secret Service have received more than the usual number of threats to rub me out at the reunion. You know I never worry about those things. . . . But some good fellow who has three or four kids may be killed - to keep me from that fate.”

Almost all these threats were stirred by the hate-filled diatribes of Joe McCarthy and his Republican friends. The mentally unbalanced found it a perfect focus for their paranoia to believe that the president and his secretary of state were Communist agents.

Unfortunately, a dismaying number of voters were influenced by McCarthy’s linkage of Communist aggression in Korea with his baseless charges of subversion at home. General MacArthur did not help matters when, on the eve of the elections, he demanded permission to bomb the bridges over the Yalu River to stop the Communist Chinese from crossing them. The general once more did not seem to be able to grasp that this would give them the pretext to intervene in massive force. By maneuvering the president into issuing a refusal, the general made Harry Truman look weak and indecisive and convinced most of Dad’s staff that MacArthur was working with the Republicans.

The November elections were an unnerving blow to Dad’s hope of leaving behind him in 1952 a bipartisan foreign policy that would guarantee a peaceful world. Although the Democrats did not lose control of Congress, the top leadership in the House and Senate was defeated. Scott Lucas, the Senate Majority Leader, lost in Illinois; Francis M. Myers, the Democratic whip, lost in Pennsylvania. That enabled the Republicans to crow that the voters had repudiated not just these men, but the president.

Even more painful was the success of the professional red-baiters. Richard Nixon won a Senate seat in California by claiming that his opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, was “pink right down to her underwear.” Everett Dirksen defeated Scott Lucas by talking about “young men coming back in wooden boxes,” killed by Communists. Senator Millard Tydings was crushed in Maryland by a barrage of innuendos and outright lies, such as a faked picture of him with Communist leader Earl Browder. Joe McCarthy had vowed to get Tydings and Lucas, and his success was certain to intimidate Democrats in both houses and encourage Republicans to imitate the “unmitigated liar,” as Dad called him.

Seldom in their thirty-one years of marriage had Bess seen Harry Truman so downhearted. He blamed himself for not keeping the pressure on McCarthy. As usual, he had put the national interest, coping with the Korean War, ahead of politics. Now that conflict was spiraling out of control, after seeming to be on the brink of victory only a few weeks earlier. More and more reports of Red Chinese intervention flowed into the Pentagon and over to the White House. Then the reports suddenly ceased. The Chinese disappeared.

In Korea, General MacArthur decided the Chinese were bluffing. He ordered a “final offensive,” which would bring the soldiers “home by Christmas.” Ignoring cautionary warnings from the joint Chiefs of Staff, he sent his soldiers north to the Yalu River border between North Korea and Red China. On November 28, 300,000 Chinese troops struck the United Nations Army with overwhelming force and sent it reeling into chaotic retreat. Suddenly, Dad was faced with the possibility of a military and political catastrophe of terrifying proportions.

On top of this nightmare came a terrible media snafu. At a press conference on November 30, instead of concentrating on Harry Truman’s historic declaration that the United States would
not
abandon Korea in the face of this Chinese sneak attack, the reporters seized on his answer to a question about the possible use of the atom bomb and distorted it into a frenzy of headlines that Dad was about to use nuclear weapons to end the war.

As always, when the press twisted Dad’s words and intentions, Mother was upset. Another person close to the president was even more upset: Charlie Ross. As press secretary, he felt responsible for avoiding such upheavals. Usually, Charlie sensed trouble from the way reporters were pushing a line of questioning and asked the president to restate and clarify his replies at the end of a press conference. This story got away from Charlie for a good reason. He and everyone else on the White House staff were operating in a daze of exhaustion. Ever since the Chinese attack, the lights in the west wing never went out, and sleep was snatched on couches and jammed-together chairs.

I was far away from this turmoil, purple pinning it from concert hall to concert hall on a tour that had begun on October 1, when the news from Korea had been sensationally good. The tour was scheduled to end with a concert in Constitution Hall on December 5, 1950. Dad spent most of the day conferring with British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, who had rushed to Washington for a conference when he read the misleading headlines about the atomic bomb. Dad was in the process of turning this impolitic visit into a useful discussion of how to deal with the Chinese in Korea.

At the end of the afternoon, Dad gave Charlie Ross a summary of his talk with Mr. Attlee for release to the press. Charlie planned to brief the reporters, have dinner, and join Dad and Mother at Constitution Hall for my concert. Dad left for Blair House, and Charlie handled the briefing in his usual smooth style. The TV reporters asked him if he would repeat himself for their cameras, and he wearily agreed. As they set up their equipment on his desk, Charlie joked with his secretary about his TV style. Suddenly he slumped in his chair. Dr. Graham, the White House doctor, was frantically summoned, but by the time he got there, Charlie was dead. His tired, damaged heart had failed.

Dr. Graham called Dad. He walked into Mother’s bedroom with tears streaming down his face and said: “Charlie Ross just dropped dead at his desk.” Mother wept as well. She was not a crying type ordinarily, but there were so many memories storming through her mind and heart. She remembered that blithe and brilliant editor of
The Gleam,
in 1901. She saw him strolling down Delaware Street, holding Mary Paxton’s hand. She did not know, then, the unique pain the news would stir in Mary’s heart. (That night, Mary later told her, she awoke hearing Charlie calling her name.) Mother also thought of the pain it would cause Charlie’s wife, Florence, and his two sons.

The Trumans’ tears were brief. Sheer necessity required self-control. Mother raised the most urgent question. Should they tell me? She decided on the same approach she had taken to the attempted assassination. She persuaded Dad that it would be better to wait until after the concert.