Bess Truman (21 page)

Earlier in the summer, discussing their finances, Harry had told Bess that he hoped to build a reputation as a senator that would “make the money successes look like cheese.” But he warned her that she would have to put up with a lot “because I won’t sell influence and I’m perfectly willing to be cussed if I’m right.” In spite of their differences in the ragged summer of 1935, on this crucial point Bess Wallace Truman was in complete agreement with the junior senator from Missouri. There was not a word of reproach for his defiance of the big boss and the newspapers. When he finally got home, I am quite certain that there were words of praise.

I suspect, however, those words came somewhat later. The first thing on both their minds was some time together, away from everyone. In a matter of days, they were in the car heading for Colorado, accompanied only by their eleven-year-old daughter, who still was unaware of the drama that was swirling around her.

When Senator Truman returned to Washington early in December of 1935, Bess and daughter remained in Independence. Bess refused to consider the possibility of celebrating Christmas any place but at 219 North Delaware Street. For the senator, this was not good politics. Every time he came home from Washington, he got his picture in the paper and was deluged with pleas for jobs and favors. The Depression still was rampant, in spite of all the things President Roosevelt was doing to fight it. “I dread the trip home,” he wrote to Bess, “because I know what they’ll do to me.”

In fact, the fifty-one-year-old senator had found the three months he spent in Missouri almost as exhausting as the previous year in Washington, D.C. “You’ve no idea how tired I was,” he wrote in another letter. “I’m not starting home until Dec. 21st if that suits you. It’ll take me until then to rest up.”

Meanwhile, the same lament that had dominated his letters in the summer began to reappear: “If you and Margey had just come on [to Washington] with me everything would be perfect.” There was an unintended dividend from his loneliness. He spent his evenings reading the interstate-commerce law and all the relevant court decisions and became an expert on the transportation business, which in those days mostly meant the railroads.

During the day, the senator spent a lot of his time looking for an apartment. He found one for $130 a month and was so elated he could not sleep. There was no lease, but they could have it until June. Alas, Bess did not go back to Washington with him after Christmas. I had a cold, and she, fearing the worst as usual, decreed I was too ill to travel.

This left the senator adrift in the heavy seas of the Washington social season. His tension headaches returned, and he went to a fancy party at Senator Guffey’s house and discovered almost everyone in white tie and tails. He and Sherman Minton of Indiana, who was also out of uniform, commiserated on their wifeless state. “He said never, never would he come to town again without Mrs. Minton,” Harry wrote.

My cold refused to go away, and Bess refused to budge until I was in perfect health. One day I had a fever, the next day I didn’t. On January 14, I had recovered, and Bess began packing. But on the fifteenth, the chilblain palace on Delaware Street struck again, and I had another cold. The expedition was canceled. The senator said he had not been so disappointed since he lost the 1924 election for eastern judge of Jackson County. “I honestly believe that house is infected with cold germs or something,” he wrote, obliquely putting his finger on the real problem. “If you ever arrive, I’ll never let you out of my reach again.”

When we finally got there the following week, there were more problems. Nettie, the maid and sometime cook who had been a big help the previous year, was getting married, and this made her unreliable. She began disappearing for several days at a time. From Independence came advice that ignored the Trumans’ tight budget. “Let the house go and take your dinners out,” Madge Wallace told Bess.

I rediscovered my old friends at Gunston Hall and met a few new ones, so Bess was soon able to assure her mother that I was perfectly content - news that Madge seemed reluctant to believe. Along with the usual Washington whirl of parties and receptions, Bess undertook to shepherd two younger relatives, Elsie and Oscar Wells, who were living in Washington. He drank too much, and Bess tried, pretty much in vain, I think, to comfort her.

Even more time-consuming were another couple, Harriette and Leighton Shields, who were about the same age as Harry and Bess. She was the daughter of a St. Louis businessman who had been a Truman supporter - one of the few in that city. But it was sentiment and not politics that attracted Bess to Harriette and Leighton. This was another marriage mangled by alcohol. Harriette was sweet and pretty; Leighton was a lawyer who had drunk his way out of a promising legal career in St. Louis and had a minor job, probably arranged by his father-in-law, with the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

The two decided that jointly they could convert the Trumans into a meal ticket. Bess felt so sorry for Harriette she could not resist urging her husband to do something for Leighton. While Bess could be hard on those who needed no help, sympathy overwhelmed her judgment when she saw a woman afflicted with a drinking husband.

The couple had her feeling sorry for them in the spring of 1935. That summer, they had showered the bachelor senator with dinner invitations, and he reluctantly accepted one of them, after which he wryly reported to Bess that Leighton was sober for once. In December, he remarked that Leighton was coming into the office to see him. “I fear he is going to become a nuisance,” he warned. But he continued to put up with them because he sensed that Bess’ deepest feelings were involved.

Leighton Shields wanted the senator to make him an assistant U.S. attorney. Instead, with a shrewdness that he always concealed beneath his plain farmer manner, Harry Truman found him a job that got Leighton and Harriette far away from Bess. He persuaded the Roosevelt administration to appoint Leighton the district attorney in Shanghai, China. There was a United States court there that handled cases involving U.S. residents of several Chinese ports at which Americans had treaty rights.

Politics were relatively tranquil in the early months of 1936, in Congress, at least. Most of the action was in the U.S. Supreme Court, which began declaring unconstitutional much of the New Deal legislation that Senator Truman and his confreres had sweated over in the preceding summer. The outrage within the Roosevelt administration was immense. But most of the politicians’ thinking was focused on the presidential election that was coming in the fall. Roosevelt, wary about offending the party’s conservatives and stunned by the court decisions, did not try to pass much innovative legislation.

Once more, with hindsight to bolster us, we find it hard to believe that the Democrats were worried about the 1936 election. But most of the nation’s newspapers had swung sharply against Roosevelt, and the business community also had lost faith in his social engineering, which had failed to end the Depression. Father Coughlin had declared himself an all-out foe of the New Deal and launched a third-party movement with a galaxy of assorted extremists in his retinue. Huey Long had been killed by an assassin’s bullet in the lobby of the Louisiana State House in the fall of 1935, but no one knew where or how his discontented followers would vote.

Harry Truman continued to work for a unified Democratic Party in Missouri, pushing the election of Lloyd Stark as governor as the best guarantee of this goal. Early in May, he dashed back to the state Democratic convention in Joplin, Missouri, where he continued to line up backers for Stark’s candidacy. He told Bess all about it in a letter crowded with names of forgotten politicians. He stopped in Independence to see Mrs. Wallace, and she told Bess what a pleasant surprise that was. Madge was beginning to look with a little more favor on her son-in-law.

But Madge still was unreconciled to separation from Bess. On April 16, when Bess had been in Washington less than three months, her mother began asking her when she was coming home. This became a regular feature of succeeding letters that spring. Bess tried to defend herself by sending Madge a rundown of her schedule. “What a world of things you have to do this week!” Madge exclaimed. “How do you keep it up? I imagine you will enjoy the quiet and rest when you come home.” Underlining each word, she added: “How much longer will it be before you are here? We are growing very impatient.”

By June 15, Bess again was back in Independence, and Senator Truman was wandering around their empty apartment, telling her how lonesome he was. He returned to the subject of buying a house. Their big fear was the possibility that they would not be able to sell it if he lost his bid for reelection four years hence. “I’m sick of this two-time move every year,” he wrote. “It costs more than we get for the stay in Washington no matter what we do, and that rent if we were smart enough, could be an investment.”

His main political concern was the way the Roosevelt administration was ignoring him on patronage and giving Bennett Clark all the plums. This was standard Roosevelt tactics, to woo opponents with favors and presume that loyal supporters would stay loyal no matter what was done to them. What made this policy especially irritating in Clark’s case was his spoiled-boy approach to his job. Because his father, Champ Clark, had once been the most powerful Democrat in the country and almost became president in 1912, Clark seemed to think he could get away with anything. He drank too much, constantly broke appointments, and still wanted everyone in Washington to acknowledge his importance as Champ Clark’s son.

Nevertheless, Clark was important in Missouri, and Harry Truman urged Bess to remember this in one of the few rebukes he ever gave her. When Myra Colgan, a Truman cousin who was working in Washington, asked Harry if Bennett was the only heavy drinker in his family, he blamed Bess. “Apparently there must have been cause for the question,” he wrote. “Now that’s nothing but plain gossip, and I’m not in the habit of telling it to you or anyone else.”

While I had twelve-year-old fun in Independence and Bess played bridge and cleaned house, Senator Truman went to the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. From there, he wrote letters full of wry politics and laments about how much he missed her.

The next day, he still was thinking about Bess and regarding the convention with an even more disenchanted eye.

The next day, June 26, his thoughts were almost exclusively about Bess.

Senator Truman stayed at the convention until President Roosevelt and Vice President John Nance Garner were renominated and then drove back to Washington, where he listened to FDR’s acceptance speech on the radio and wrote another letter to Bess on their seventeenth wedding anniversary.