Harry Truman (5 page)

Dad never hesitated to kid himself in public. After a whistle-stop speech in California, a lady called up to him, “President Truman, you sound as if you had a cold.”

“That’s because I ride around in the wind with my mouth open,” Dad replied.

In Shelbyville, Kentucky, he had everyone howling as he told the story of how his grandfather, Anderson Shippe Truman, had run off with President Tyler’s descendant. The bride’s mother was so furious, she refused to recognize the marriage. Facetiously Dad added that I had come down to Shelbyville a few years ago, to see if my great-grandparents “were legally married.” I had in fact paid the town a visit, and had been shown the marriage documents, on the way to the Kentucky Derby. The crowd loved it.

What I loved most was when Dad turned his humor on the Republicans. That was his own idea. He saw that Dewey, with his fondness for platitudes that said nothing, was presenting a perfect target. My favorite, I suppose, is the imaginary dialogue between Dewey and the American people that Dad conducted in Pittsburgh. He described Dewey as “some kind of doctor with a magic cure for all the ills of mankind,” and asked his listeners to imagine that “we, the American people” were visiting him for “our usual routine checkup which we got every four years.”

“You been bothered much by issues lately?” asks the doctor.

“Not bothered, exactly,” the patient replied. “Of course, we’ve had a few. We’ve had the issue of high prices, and housing, and education, and social security, and a few others.”

“That’s too bad,” says the doctor. “You shouldn’t have so many issues.”

“Is that right?” replied the patient. “We thought that issues were a sign of political health.”

“Not at all,” says the doctor. “We shouldn’t think about issues. What you need is my brand of soothing syrup - I call it unity.”

Dad twirled an imaginary mustache, and the doctor edged up a little closer and said, “Say, you don’t look so good.”

“Well, that seems strange to me, Doc,” the patient replied. “I never felt stronger, never had more money, and never had a brighter future. What is wrong with me?”

“I never discuss issues with a patient,” the doctor replied, “but what you need is a major operation.”

“Will it be serious, Doc?”

“Not very serious. It will just mean taking out the complete works and putting in a Republican administration.”

In Cleveland, Dad called the public opinion polls “sleeping polls” and said that he was sure the people were not being fooled by them. “They know sleeping polls are bad for the system, they affect the mind. An overdose could be fatal.” Again twirling that imaginary mustache, he said he knew the name of a doctor who was passing them out. It was also fun when he pictured Dewey as an aristocrat having “a high-level tea party with the voters.” But Harry Truman insisted on dragging “that old reprobate, the 80th Congress, out of the back room to disclose him to the guests as the candidate’s nearest and dearest relative.”

My father seemed to gain rather than lose energy as the campaign built. On October 5, he wrote proudly to his sister Mary after returning to the White House from our first swing through the West:

Most of the reporters simply tried to explain away the constantly growing turnouts for a candidate that they in their political wisdom had dismissed before the campaign began. Richard Rovere of
The New Yorker
admitted the crowds were big, but said they were unenthusiastic. He said the people received Dad like “a missionary who has just delivered a mildly encouraging report on the inroads being made on heathenism in northern Rhodesia.” James Reston of
The New York Times
sighed that the President was not conveying “the one thing he wants to convey, a conviction that something really fundamental is at stake in his campaign.”

The reporters may not have noticed the change, but politicians did. They were not as likely to be mesmerized by public opinion polls. One of our more amusing converts was Frank J. Lausche, who was running for governor in Ohio. We were told quite candidly by people close to him that he had bipartisan appeal, and he could see no point in linking his name with a sure loser like Harry S. Truman. Only after considerable verbal arm-twisting did Lausche agree to board the
Ferdinand Magellan
at all. He joined us a few miles outside Dayton, Ohio, but made it clear that he was getting off as soon as we reached that city. Then we hit our first whistle stop of the day. It was only a small city, but 7,000 persons were roaring their approval of Harry Truman there in the middle of the morning. Lausche could not believe his eyes. Then came Dayton. People were practically standing on each other’s shoulders in the station, and they spilled out of it to stop traffic in all directions. “Is this the way all the crowds have been?” Lausche asked cautiously.

“Yes,” Dad said, “but this is smaller than we had in most states.”

Mr. Lausche swallowed hard. “Well,” he said, “this is the biggest crowd I ever saw in Ohio.” When we pulled out of Dayton on the way to Akron, Lausche was still aboard.

Of all the thousands of people who climbed on and off the campaign train during these hectic weeks, there are two men who stand out in my mind. One was Jake More, who captured the state of Iowa, almost single-handedly. He was not an officeholder. He was, quite simply and in the plainest terms, a Truman believer. My father stirred something deep in him, which convinced him that a victory was possible when everyone else said defeat was a certainty. He appeared with us on the campaign train, and then after we left the state, he never stopped working for the ticket. As a result, Iowa went Democratic for the first time in years.

The other man was Aaron H. Payne, a Chicago lawyer whose clients included Joe Louis. He was the first black man to address a national Republican Lincoln Day dinner (in 1940). He paid his way aboard the train with his own money, and he campaigned for Dad throughout the Midwest in September and October the same way. He told Martin S. Hayden of the Detroit
News:
“Harry S. Truman has done more for my people than Franklin D. Roosevelt ever did.” His goal was to replace every dollar and every vote that the Dixiecrats cost the party with a black dollar and a black vote. Later, we found out that Payne had had tremendous influence in helping us carry four predominantly black wards in Cleveland. Since we won Ohio by a little more than 7,000 votes, it is no exaggeration to say that his influence was crucial.

In Los Angeles, my father decided to deal with the attack from the left. By this time, it was clear that the Progressive party was dominated by hard-core Communists. Wallace did nothing to diminish this impression with his almost unbelievable naïveté. “I would say that the Communists are the closest things to the early Christian martyrs,” he said at one point; at another time, he said that he thought the American Communist party platform for the campaign was at least as good as the Progressive platform.

But instead of lambasting the Progressives as agents of a foreign power, Dad spoke out of his deep respect and affection for the two-party system. In one of his greatest speeches, he urged California’s liberals to return to the Democratic fold. “The simple fact is that the third party cannot achieve peace, because it is powerless. It cannot achieve better conditions at home, because it is powerless. . . . I say to those disturbed liberals who have been sitting uncertainly on the outskirts of the third party: think again, don’t waste your vote.”

My father’s speeches undoubtedly had a great deal to do with bringing the state into the Democratic column, but the immediate reception we received was cool. Jimmy Roosevelt’s negative influence was still strong in the California Democratic Party. Although he had accepted Dad as the Democratic nominee, his enthusiasm was invisible, and the state party reflected this fact. The low point was reached on September 23, when Dad spoke in Gilmore Stadium in Los Angeles. In spite of the fact that Ronald Reagan - considered a rather left-wing Democrat at the time - and other Hollywood notables were on the platform, only about 10,000 people showed up. Thomas E. Dewey had attracted almost twice that number the previous night at the Hollywood Bowl. The problem was lack of advance planning.

Candidates these days send swarms of advance men into every city before they arrive. They are equipped with lavish amounts of money and every known publicity device. In 1948, Oscar Chapman was trying to do it all alone. It was simply too much for one man to handle, especially when he was getting no cooperation from the local Democratic organization. Dad decided to call for reinforcements. In the middle of the night, he ordered Matt Connelly, his appointments secretary and one of the shrewdest politicians aboard the train, to find someone fast. In a few days, we would be in Texas - where the local Democratic organization was even more unsympathetic than they were in California.

An hour later, Don Dawson, a big, handsome ex-army air force officer who had recently joined the White House staff, was jolted out of bed by a phone call from Matt. He was told to get on a plane immediately and head for Texas. It was a very good choice. Don had just the right combination of energy and daring to pull things together down there. As Dad had foreseen, the party regulars were sitting on their hands. But Don quickly put together a team of Truman loyalists, including Sam Rayburn’s brother, the brother of Attorney General Tom Clark, and two old friends of Dad’s, publicist Bill Kittrell and businessman Harry Seay. They began working on each town and city on our schedule. “We knew who the right people were in each community, and we just called them on the telephone and literally told them what to do,” Don said. “We told them when the train would arrive and how to get the people down there.”

While this vital groundwork was being laid, Don was confronted with a major decision. Where was the President going to speak in Dallas? The local Texas Democrats thought he should speak right in the railroad station. “They didn’t want to take the chance of going into a big stadium or a ball park,” Don says. “They didn’t think they could produce the crowd.” Don took one look at the station area and decided it was hopeless. Swallowing hard, he informed the local Democrats that the President would speak in the Rebel Stadium. This was a big ball park on the outskirts of the city. Grimly Don and his team tackled the job. “We got loudspeaker trucks at work, and we got the schools to let the pupils out,” he said.

Most important, he called in black leaders and told them that their people would be welcome at the stadium, and there would be no segregation. Don knew Dad would give him complete support on this decision, but it was
very
daring in Texas in 1948.

That is the behind-the-scenes story of how Dad spoke to the first integrated rally in the South. Proudly - and a little ruefully - Don Dawson recalls, “It worked so smoothly that the black newspaper reporters who were on the train didn’t even notice it. We had to go to them later and tell them all about it so that they would print it.” The meeting in Dallas was a tremendous success. Rebel Stadium was packed, and the crowd roared their approval of the tongue-lashing Dad gave the Eightieth Congress.

We followed the same integration policy all the way across Texas. In Waco, there was a tense moment when he shook hands with a black woman, and the crowd booed. But my father refused to back down and boldly told them that black citizens had the same rights as white Americans. “In some towns,” Don Dawson says, “they didn’t even want the black voters to come down to the train. We just told them they were going to come. The President wanted them there.”

In San Antonio, a different kind of confrontation took place. People wanted to know what Dad was going to do about the Russian threat. He proceeded to give them what I consider his greatest foreign policy speech. It was completely off the cuff, completely impromptu, and completely candid. He told them what the Russians had already done - all the agreements they had broken - all the details of their arrogant thrust for world power. Then he told them what he was prepared to do to achieve world peace. Perhaps the most startling part of his plan was to persuade Joseph Stalin to come to the United States. There was much more to this speech - he spoke for almost half an hour - but to my everlasting regret, it has been lost to history. Jack Romagna, the White House shorthand reporter, who was usually on hand to take down all Dad’s off-the-cuff speeches, had not been told to come, and there were no reporters present. Not one word of that speech was preserved.

There were two other high points in our tour of Texas. The first one was a reception arranged for us by Sam Rayburn and his people in Bonham. Governor Beauford Jester, who had not long before accused Dad of stabbing the South in the back, was on hand to take part in the festivities, but it was Sam who ran the show. Dad spoke first at an outdoor meeting, in bitter cold, and then we stood for hours on an indoor receiving line to greet what must have been a majority of the inhabitants of that part of Texas. It was an old-fashioned Southern house, with a central hall that ran from the front door to the back door. The handshakers streamed through the front door and out the rear door. Suddenly Sam exclaimed, “Shut the door, Beauford, they’re comin’ by twice.” But that didn’t discourage anybody. People just kept on streaming out the back door and in the front door again.

On Sunday, September 26, we paid a “nonpolitical” visit to one of Dad’s favorite friends, John Nance Garner, FDR’s first vice president. Throughout the campaign, my father usually refused to make any speeches on Sunday, but there was no harm - and plenty of political value - in paying a visit to “Cactus Jack.” He was adored by the conservative wing of the Democratic Party in Texas. At 5:00 a.m., we were greeted by a high school band, at least 4,000 citizens, and an Angora goat wearing a gold blanket lettered DEWEY’S GOAT. Dad bounced off the train and posed for pictures with the beast, and then jovially declared, “I’m going to clip it and make a rug, then I’m going to let it graze on the White House lawn for the next four years.” He meant it, too, but he found out that one thing our campaign train was not equipped to carry was a goat.