Bess Truman (51 page)

Dad assumed the uncharacteristic role of family worrier after talking to her on the telephone one night early in June. “Your voice sounded as if you were very tired last night,” he wrote. “Please get some rest. That’s what you are home for. . . . Please take care of yourself I don’t think you fully understand that I can face the world and all its troubles if you and Margie are all right. I don’t think I can do it if you are not.”

Meanwhile, General MacArthur as a boiling political issue was slowly evaporating. A special Senate committee headed by Richard Russell of Georgia launched a careful investigation of his dismissal. One after another, the top military men in the nation, from General Marshall and General Bradley to General Hoyt Vandenberg, the chief of the Air Force, supported the president’s decision and confirmed that General MacArthur had been insubordinate. They also took some rather large pieces out of the general’s military reputation. General Lawton Collins said that MacArthur had violated almost every basic rule of military strategy in his “home by Christmas” drive to the Yalu River in November 1950.

When General MacArthur testified before the committee, it soon became clear that he was unable to prove his claim that he had a policy, and President Truman had no policy. He admitted that the United States would be insane to invade Manchuria and begin a war with China’s 400 million people. The senators - and the American public - gradually realized that MacArthur’s cry, “There is no substitute for victory,” was a hollow slogan.

On June 25, 1951, a year to the day after the Korean War began, Dad wrote Mother an anniversary letter that reflected this major change in public opinion.

As you might gather from that last line, at this point I was adding to the Trumans’ worries. I was whirling around Europe in a six-week tour with my friend Annette Davis Wright and my secretary (and friend) Reathel Odum. It had started off as a vacation, with me proudly announcing I could and would pay my own and Reathel’s way. But I had forgotten that my name was Margaret Truman.

The president and First Lady explained to me that politicians on both sides of the iron curtain would be asking their advisers and intelligence people what the visit meant. There was also the problem of security. Only two Secret Service men could be spared to go with me. That was not enough to protect us if we stayed in hotels and guest houses. By the time all the details were worked out, we were booked into nothing but embassies and legations.

I still managed to have a wonderful time, dining with such lofty figures as Winston Churchill and the King and Queen of England, spending twenty minutes in a private audience with Pope Pius XII, and doing my best in many interviews to play goodwill ambassador in England, France, Holland, Luxembourg, and Italy.

What was the First Lady of the United States doing while her daughter was making like a princess on parade? A letter that caught up to me in London brought me down to earth. The First Lady was painting the back stairway and steps at 219 North Delaware Street. “There’ll probably be some of it [painting] left for you to do in July!” she warned me. “Mr. Gregg [the carpenter] is making a cabinet for the pantry & that will require
several
coats.”

She filled me in on other details of life in the Gates-Wallace manse. “Grandmother is taking all of us to the Plantation [a local restaurant] tomorrow to dinner. She surely has come to life since she has been home - but [she is] back at her old tricks. Waked me up twice before 7:30 this morning wanting me to call to make the reservations. [She] thought it was already Sunday. You can easily imagine how
happy
I was!

“May [Wallace] is having the [Bridge] Club Tuesday and I guess that will start the parties. All this is pretty humdrum compared to the glamorous things you will be doing.”

Next came the inevitable reminder to write. She wanted to hear all about whom we had met, what we had seen at each stop. She particularly hoped that Reathel, who had worked so hard for me and her, would “enjoy every minute” of the trip. Then a final “Mother” touch. “Don’t forget flowers to the Queen . . . along with a note.”

I can see now that painting the old house was exactly the sort of relaxation Mother needed after the harrowing six months she had just spent in Washington. I also was stirred to see how much sheer pleasure she took in thinking about me having a good time. I guess you have to become a parent yourself before you can understand how love makes this phenomenon possible.

Bess spent the summer of 1951 in Independence fretting over her mother. She urged Mary Paxton Keeley to pay a visit. “Mother would love to see you if you get there on a good day. Today is a bad one - doesn’t remember one thing for five minutes even. Told Vietta I haven’t been in to see her today and I have been in there not less than ten times.”

Dad paid her a brief visit in July and spent the rest of the time worrying about the war in Korea, which dragged on although the Communists had implicitly admitted they could not win by agreeing to begin peace negotiations late in June. He could not ask Mother to leave Grandmother Wallace, but he could not resist going back to his old tactic of letting her know what she was missing.

Early in September, he sent her a marvelously detailed report of a baseball game he attended to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the American League. Chief Justice Vinson was along and “knew all the old players and all the new ones.” The owner of the Washington Senators, Clark Griffith, sat next to Dad and told him “what the various players on the Washington team should have done and didn’t do.” Dad had absolutely no interest in baseball, but he knew that Mother was going crazy, reading this. She would have loved every minute of it. Dad ended the torture by remarking: “Old Clark said Washington lost because you were not present, I agreed with him.”

A few days later, Mother persuaded Dad to take a five-day vacation in Independence on his way back from San Francisco, where he opened a conference that led to the signing of a treaty of peace with Japan. It was the best rest he got all year. Most of the time he just lazed around the house and backyard or strolled over to chat with the Nolands and other neighbors.

When Bess returned to Washington with her mother later in the month, she immediately reopened the question of Chief Justice Vinson and his candidacy. The longer it slid along, the more she feared that Dad might be persuaded by the party politicians or his staff to run for another term. This time Dad really pressed the chief justice. After another three months of hemming and hawing, he said no. He did not think he could handle the strain of four years in the White House. He also feared he would embroil the Supreme Court in politics if he became a candidate.

Mother was even more disappointed than Dad, if that was possible. The Big Judge’s refusal threw everything back to June 25, 1950. Harry Truman was not the sort of man to walk out on his deep sense of responsibility for achieving a peaceful world. How much ground she had for worry is visible in a letter Dad wrote to Dwight Eisenhower in the middle of December 1951.

Ike replied in a handwritten note on January 1, 1952, disclaiming any political ambitions. “The possibility that I will ever be drawn into political activities is so remote as to be negligible,” he wrote. Unfortunately, this only increased the possibility of Dad running for another term. At this point, he and everyone else presumed that Ike was a Democrat and the Republican candidate would be Robert Taft. The thought of him in the White House was behind that sentence in the letter to Ike about keeping the isolationists out. Memories of Mamma Truman’s detestation of this sour-faced Republican added fuel to Dad’s determination.

Back in the White House after a Christmas visit home, Dad’s diary jottings and letters reveal his divided state of mind - of which Bess was all too aware. “What a New Year’s Day!” he wrote on January 1. “1952 is here and so am I - gloomy as can be. But we must look to the program of world peace, and keep on looking. . . . I wish I was seventeen instead of sixty-seven.”

On January 3, with that amazing ability to look objectively at himself, he wrote an essay on his health and strict diet, which he disliked. It began with a fatherly, if highly opinionated, comment on my appearance, as he assessed it over the Christmas holidays.

This meditation suggests a president who was in fighting trim. But Mother knew better. She saw the slow erosion of Dad’s vitality as he began his eighth year in the White House. It took him longer to recover from his bouts of exhaustion. As he approached his sixty-eighth birthday, he found it harder and harder to keep working a sixteen-hour day.

With all these worries on their minds, Dad and Mother still found time to remember ordinary people who had crossed their paths and came to them now in need of help. Here is Dad’s reaction to a problem Mother brought to his attention. The memorandum was addressed to White House aide Don Dawson, a savvy lawyer who usually dealt with much weightier problems.

Meanwhile, the question of running again in 1952 was still rumbling around Dad’s mind. It crept into a letter he wrote and decided not to send to
The New Yorker
magazine.

Dad wrote that last sentence the day after General Eisenhower announced that he might be responsive to a draft for the presidency - less than a week after writing the letter I have just quoted, denying all political ambitions. At the same time, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge revealed that the general was a Republican who had voted for Dewey in 1948. The Eisenhower for President organization promptly opened offices in half the states in the country. If Ike did not know this campaign was about to begin, he had to be the most naive man alive. If he knew it, his letter to Dad comes awfully close to a lie.