Truman (39 page)

Truman, like Barkley, decided to stand with the President, on the grounds that the size of the Court had been changed before in times past. But he took no part in the debate. He was preoccupied with the railroad investigations, where Wheeler, because of his part in the Court battle, had lost interest and left him most of the work, making Truman vice-chairman of the subcommittee. In June, in the midst of the Court fight, Harry ventured his longest, most daring speech thus far in the Senate, a preliminary report of the railroad investigations. As summer came on, he would have preferred greatly to stay free of the whole Court issue and like so many wished only that it had never happened. He found himself deluged with angry mail. Having announced his position on the bill, he was accused of being a Roosevelt stooge. His headaches returned.

At the White House the President’s advisers were saying that if this fight were won, everything else he wanted would “fall into the basket.”

But all strategies were suddenly shattered on July 14, when Majority Leader Joseph Robinson, who had been carrying the fight for Roosevelt, fell dead in his apartment across from the Capitol, the victim of a heart attack. Only days before Senator Royal Copeland, who was a physician, had slipped into a seat beside Robinson to warn him that he should slow down.

Bess, who was suffering acutely from Washington’s oppressive heat, voiced worries about her own husband’s stamina in a letter to Ethel Noland. “H. is worn out and is not well and will simply have to have a good rest or he will be really ill.”

The fight on the Court was deferred until a new majority leader could be named. In the running were Barkley and the arch-conservative “Pat” Harrison of Mississippi, chairman of the Finance Committee. It was a critical juncture that could determine the future of the New Deal in the Senate, and Roosevelt, determined to see Barkley win, wrote an open “Dear Alben” letter in which he referred to Barkley as the “acting” majority leader. To many in the Senate this seemed arrogant interference with what was solely Senate Business, and so another bitter fight resulted.

From a private poll, Jim Farley calculated that Harrison stood to win by a single vote. Pressure from the White House grew intense—and not especially subtle. Senator William H. Dieterich of Illinois, who had pledged himself to Harrison, received a call from Boss Kelly of Chicago promising Dieterich a say in the appointment of two federal judges, should he vote as Roosevelt wished, which was quite enough to convince Dieterich to switch sides. On July 19, a day before the vote, Harry heard from Tom Pendergast, who had been called by the White House and asked to “tell” Harry Truman how to vote. Only in this instance no offer of patronage was forthcoming.

Harry told T.J. that he had already promised Pat Harrison his support and could not go back on his word. “Jim Aylward phoned me, too,” Harry told William Helm an hour later. “I didn’t mind turning Jim down, not so much, anyhow, but to say No to Tom was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.” According to Harry, this was the one and only time T.J. had ever called him about a vote. Normally, T.J. made his views known by telegram.

But possibly T.J. did not like pressure from the White House any more than Harry, for as Harry also related, Pendergast had said it “didn’t make a helluva lot of difference to him….”

Why Harry had ever lined up with Harrison remains a mystery—he liked Barkley, nor had he any reason to oppose him—unless he saw it as a way to show the President he could not be taken for granted any longer.

He refused to be budged and was so furious with the people at the White House, the President included, that he could hardly contain himself. By going to Pendergast, rather than coming directly to him, they had left little doubt as to what they really thought of him. In their eyes, he was still truly the Senator from Pendergast, It was the worst insult he had suffered since coming to Washington and he decided to let Roosevelt know how he felt. Told that the President was not available, he talked to Steve Early, the press secretary. He was tired of being “pushed around” and treated like an office boy, Truman said. He expected the consideration and courtesy that his office entitled him to.

Senator Barkley, all the while, was under the impression that Harry Truman had given
him
his pledge of support. Barkley would later describe how Harry had come to him saying, “The pressure on me is so great [to vote for Harrison] that I am going to ask you to relieve me of my promise.” It was this foursquare approach of Truman’s that so impressed him, Barkley said. “I always admired him for the courage and character he displayed in coming to me as he did. Too often in politics the stiletto is slipped between your shoulder blades, while its wielder continues to smile sweetly….”

On July 21 the Democratic members of the Senate met in the white marble Caucus Room of the Senate Office Building to vote for a majority leader by secret ballot. The winner was Alben Barkley by one vote. (Barkley would later speculate on how he might have felt about Harry Truman had he lost by one vote.) Harry immediately pledged Barkley his support and they were to be friends and allies thereafter.

The steam was gone from the Court bill. On July 22, by a margin of 50 votes, the Senate sent it back to the Judiciary Committee, where it died. The President had suffered his first and worst defeat since taking office, which to Harry’s mind he richly deserved. The whole affair, Harry thought, had been a mistake and very badly managed by Roosevelt.

As time passed, in the comparatively few months of each year when Bess and Margaret were with him in Washington, the Trumans moved from one small, temporary apartment to another—to Sedgwick Gardens on Connecticut Avenue in the spring of 1936, to the Carroll Arms on 1st Street in early 1937, the Warwick Apartments on Idaho Avenue in 1938. In 1939 they were back again at Tilden Gardens, where they began. Margaret, who had grown taller and even more spindly, was attending Gunston Hall, a private school for girls, which was another financial worry for Harry. Independence, however, remained “home” for Margaret, as for Bess, who felt the constant pressure of her mother’s need for her. Madge Wallace, who still believed Bess could have done better in the way of a husband, gave no sign of interest in Harry or his career.

The long separations grew no easier. “I just can’t stand it without you,” he wrote to Bess as the new session got under way in 1937. She was not only Juno, Venus, and Minerva to him, he wrote, but Proserpina, too, and urged her to look that up. Proserpina, as Margaret would remember ever after, was a goddess who spent half of each year in Hades with her husband Pluto, separated from her grieving mother.

His letters dutifully reported his modest social life. He went to the movies, played some penny-ante poker, listened to the symphony or opera on the radio. One weekend he drove to Gettysburg to hike over the battlefield with John Snyder, a St. Louis banker he had gotten to know at summer Army camp over the years. Another day he “played hooky” from the Appropriations Committee and went to the War College to hear Douglas Southall Freeman lecture on Robert E. Lee, which he thought “one of the greatest talks I ever heard.”

His health was uneven and he worried about it perhaps more than necessary. In the wake of the Court-packing fight, he felt so wretched he went to the Army-Navy Hospital at Hot Springs, Arkansas, for a checkup and complete rest. A month or so later, working harder than ever, nerves ragged, he was beset again by savage headaches. “This so-called committee work is nothing but drudgery and publicity,” he wrote, “all so depressing sometimes.” Vic Messall thought possibly he was drinking too much. William Helm wrote later that he had never known anyone who could hold his liquor so well as Senator Truman. On one occasion Helm had seen him take five drinks and show no effect. “Not once did I ever see him under the slightest influence of liquor.”

The records from his stay at the Army-Navy Hospital at Hot Springs say only that he had developed severe headaches and “a sense of continually being tired,” a “general malaise.”

The President and his people continued to exhibit only supreme indifference toward him, which became especially grating whenever the governor of Missouri, Harry’s friend Lloyd C. Stark, came to town. It had been Harry who arranged for Stark to meet Roosevelt for the first time, in October 1936, when Stark was running for governor. By mail and telegram Harry had urged the President to invite Stark and his wife to join him on board his train, as he campaigned across Missouri. “They are charming people,” Harry had assured the President in a telegram from Independence. Now Stark went frequently to the White House and spoke warmly of Roosevelt as “the Chief.” Stark was invited to join poker parties on the President’s yacht on cruises down the Potomac, something Senator Truman could only dream of. Senator Truman often had difficulty getting the President’s secretary even to return his calls.

Once, on a quick visit to Capitol Hill, Stark poked his head in at Harry’s office door to say that some of the folks in Missouri were trying to get him to run for the Senate when Harry came up for reelection, but that Harry need not worry. When Stark had gone, Harry told Vic Messall, “That son-of-a-bitch is fixing to run against me.”

Alone one night in October listening to the radio, he began to weep. “A couple of kids were singing ‘They’ll Never Believe Me’ from the
Girl from Utah
,” he wrote to Bess, “and I sat here and thought of another couple of kids listening to Julia Sanderson and Donald Brian singing that beautiful melody and lovely sentiment, and I wished so badly for the other kid that I had to write her to sort of dry my eyes.”

No one ever seemed to understand how sentimental he was, below the surface. He was lonely, homesick, feeling unappreciated, feeling sorry for himself, thinking often of times gone by. “Today is my father’s birthday,” he wrote on December 5. “He’d be eighty-six, if he’d lived. I always wished he’d lived to see me elected to this place. There’d have been no holding him.”

The brighter side was an unlikely new friendship. A staff member of the railroad subcommittee, Max Lowenthal, had invited him to meet Justice Louis D. Brandeis, at one of the winter teas that Brandeis and his wife gave Sunday afternoons in an old-fashioned apartment on California Street. These Brandeis teas, as Marquis Childs would write, had become a “slightly awesome institution” in the capital, with Mrs. Brandeis presiding as umpire over a kind of musical chairs game designed to give the justice ten or fifteen minutes of individual conversation with as many guests as possible within an hour and a half. Truman was not accustomed to meeting such people, he had told Lowenthal candidly when the invitation was first issued. But to his surprise, Brandeis had spent more time with him than any of the other guests, wanting to hear about Harry’s railway investigations and appearing extremely pleased to learn that Harry had read some of his books.

They sat in stiff, uncomfortable chairs in a large living room where little had changed since the time of Woodrow Wilson, the walls decorated with photographs of classical ruins. Brandeis, the first Jew to serve on the Supreme Court and the country’s most distinguished Jeffersonian liberal, was by then in his eighties and to Harry, “a great old man.” The day was cold, with snow forecast, but Harry felt warmed by the whole experience, a little out of place, yet more welcome than he had ever expected. “It was a rather exclusive and brainy party. I didn’t exactly belong but they made me think I did.”

He went several times again, and as he later wrote, he found that he and Brandeis were “certainly in agreement on the dangers of bigness.” The influence of Brandeis was apparent soon enough.

On Monday, December 20, 1937, Senator Truman delivered the second of his assaults on corporate greed and corruption. In the earlier speech in June he had recalled how Jesse James, in order to rob the Rock Island Railroad, had had to get up early in the morning and risk his life to make off with $3,000. Yet, by means of holding companies, modern-day financiers had stolen $70 million from the same railroad. “Senators can see,” he said then, “what ‘pikers’ Mr. James and his crowd were alongside of some real artists.” Now, in a prepared address written and rewritten several times with the help of Max Lowenthal, he attacked the power of Wall Street and the larger evil of money worship, sounding at times not unlike his boyhood hero, William Jennings Bryan. He had announced the speech in advance, so as to be heard by something more than an empty chamber. “It probably will catalogue me as a radical,” he warned Bess, “but it will be what I think.”

His lifelong hatred of high hats and privilege, all the traditional Missouri suspicion of concentrated power and of the East, came spouting forth with a degree of feeling his fellow senators had not seen or heard until now. He attacked the “court and lawyer situation” in the gigantic receiverships and reorganizations that destroyed railroads, and named the powerful law firms involved—Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine & Wood of New York; Davis, Polk, Wardwell, Gardner & Reed, also of New York; Winston, Strawn & Shaw of Chicago. He cited the immense fees taken by the attorneys for the receivers, told how some attorneys took their families on free vacations to California in the private cars of a bankrupt line, how a receivership judge on the federal bench had a private car on the bankrupt Milwaukee & St. Paul at his beck and call.

“Do you see how it pays to know all about these things from the inside?” he asked.