Bess Truman (33 page)

After endless hours of conferring with key senators, Dad worked out a compromise. The RFC would be severed from the Commerce Department, and the job would be given to someone more acceptable to conservatives and moderates. Mr. Wallace would then be approved for the now toothless commerce appointment. Wallace angrily insisted he wanted both jobs, until Dad bluntly informed him that he had better settle for half a loaf or get nothing. Even with this compromise, Dad had to use all his skills at parliamentary maneuver to push the deal through the Senate without letting FDR’s original two-job appointment come to a vote that would have humiliated the president. The Senate’s opinion of Mr. Wallace was all too visible in the vote to take the RFC away from him: It was seventy-two to twelve.

Bess did not pay much attention to this internal Democratic squabble. She was far more worried about the way the press continued to belittle Harry Truman. During the campaign, they had constructed a straw man, a gray little mediocrity that FDR had tolerated on the ticket to keep the party bosses happy. Henry Wallace’s frustrated supporters in the Democratic Party were helping to perpetuate this myth.

One of the leading protagonists of this make-Harry-Truman-look-dumb school was Duke Shoop, the Kansas City Star’s Washington reporter. He wrote a snide, sneering story about Bess and the vice president attending that party at Evalyn Walsh McLean’s, emphasizing the gorgeous furniture, the expensive silver and gold plate, and describing Mother and Dad awed by it all, as if they were a couple of bumpkins.

Even supposed friends, carried away by the discovery that they now knew someone authentically famous, got into the act. Henry Bundschu, their Independence neighbor, wrote a reminiscence of Harry Truman in which he compared him to Calvin Coolidge. Henry was a Republican, which excuses him slightly, but with that kind of friend around, Harry Truman did not need enemies.

Bess was appalled. So was her old friend, Mary Paxton Keeley, watching this media auto-da-fe from her post as a journalism professor at Christian College in Columbia, Missouri. She wrote Bess a shrewd letter in mid-February 1945, urging her to tell the vice president to hire an expert to handle his publicity. “I wrote to Henry Bundschu giving him the devil for comparing Harry with Calvin Coolidge,” Mary added. But she thought Shoop’s story on the McLean dinner was a more serious matter. “I know it is all right to go to that dame’s dinner,” she wrote. “But it shouldn’t get in the paper as if Harry was a wide eyed country boy who had left the plow handles to eat off the gold plate.”

With a nice compliment to her old friend, Mary got to the main point of her letter. “I know you are not impressed by anyone in Washington any more than Harry is, but these fool stories can give the wrong impression of Harry.” The vice president needed a good press secretary to “put out stuff to overbalance this social poison.”

Bess’ answer showed how concerned she was.

Not long after this exchange, Vice President Truman got the worst piece of publicity yet. He went to a party at the National Press Club at which someone suggested he play the piano. He sat down to do no more than riffle the keys when - presto - the actress Lauren Bacall was sitting on top of the piano, with her gorgeous gams on full display. The picture made several hundred magazines and newspapers, and Bess was furious. It was exactly the kind of publicity she had been warning against since Harry Truman arrived in the Senate.

Bess would have been even more upset about this publicity if she had thought Vice President Truman might soon become President Truman. She continued to doubt an early entrance into the White House. Late in March, she received a letter from Ethel Noland informing her that the editor of the Boston
Globe
had sent a reporter to Independence for background on Harry Truman, because he was convinced that FDR was going to die soon. Bess replied that she hoped “the Boston
Globe
man is a mighty bad prognosticator.” She then offered proof that he was, in her opinion. “F.D. looks fine to me. I sat by him at a W.H. dinner last week & had a good chance for close observation. He’s a little deaf - but that’s not going to wreck him. So am I!”

Bess had encountered FDR on one of his good days. We know, now, that he even baffled his doctors by seeming to be on the brink of dissolution one day and the next day be brimming with vitality and good cheer. The letter also suggests that Dad continued to avoid discussing Mr. Roosevelt’s health with Bess.

Ten years later, in his memoirs, Dad told of going to see the president a week after he returned from Yalta: “I . . . was shocked by his appearance. His eyes were sunken. His magnificent smile was missing from his careworn face. He seemed a spent man. I had a hollow feeling within me for I saw that the journey to Yalta must have been a terrible ordeal.”

Dad tried to think how he could help the president conserve his strength.

This arrangement did not produce the hoped-for effect. Even though FDR was freed of the burden of his braces, his speech was lifeless and rambling. He infuriated the Senate by telling them no more about Yalta than they had read in the newspapers. A few weeks later, Dad was even more shocked by the president’s dazed, vacant manner at the annual dinner of the White House Press Association. But he did not say a word about these impressions to Bess.

One worry he did share with her was the president’s disinclination to bring him into the inner circle of the administration. He saw FDR in private only twice after he returned from Yalta. They discussed domestic political problems, none particularly important. Mr. Roosevelt invited Dad to sit in on the few cabinet meetings he called during this period. But he soon learned that nothing important was discussed there. FDR preferred to hold detailed discussions with individual members before and after the meetings.

The cabinet meetings did give Dad a chance to see the games FDR liked to play with his followers. “He took a great deal of pleasure in getting one member of the cabinet to argue against another and in then hearing what they had to say,” Dad later recalled. “He would beam when Ickes jumped on Hopkins or Hopkins on Ickes. He sometimes seemed amused when [Secretary of the Treasury] Morgenthau raised mischief with the Secretary of State on how he was handling things.”

At neither the cabinet meetings nor their two private sessions did the president say a word to Dad about foreign policy, which was absorbing 90 percent of Mr. Roosevelt’s exhausted mind. The Yalta agreements were collapsing in front of his eyes, as Stalin ruthlessly imposed a Communist regime on Poland.

FDR was getting telegrams from Winston Churchill asking bluntly: “Poland has lost her frontier. Is she now to lose her freedom? I do not wish to reveal a divergence between the British and the United States Government, but it would certainly be necessary for me to make it clear that we are in the presence of a great failure and an utter breakdown of what we settled at Yalta.”

For all Vice President Truman knew about this momentous development, it might have been taking place on another planet.

As far as Bess could see, except for those spasms of bad publicity, things were going well. She told Mary Paxton Keeley that even her mother seemed “contented” about living in Washington. “It becomes harder and harder for her to get around so it’s a good thing for her to be here on one floor - and with plenty of heat.” To Ethel Noland, she wrote: “Harry looks better than he has for ages - is really putting on a little weight.” Her only worry was Chris and Fred Wallace, who were struggling to recover from the loss of the twins to which she had given birth in November. The babies had only lived a day.

The Trumans even began planning a summer vacation, something they had never been able to do while he was running the Truman Committee. One of Dad’s closest Senate friends, Mon Wallgren, had become governor of Washington. Dad and Mother accepted an invitation to join Mon and his wife for a July cruise up the Pacific Coast to Alaska.

In another letter to Ethel Noland, Bess conveyed a charming picture of domestic contentment. “Marg. has gone to a picture show and Harry to a poker party. Mother is practically asleep in her chair - so it’s very peaceful.”

The day after Bess wrote that letter, FDR went to Warm Springs, Georgia, for a badly needed rest. She knew nothing about the way the crowd at the Warm Springs station had gasped when they saw the president’s condition, how he had sagged in his wheelchair, his head bobbing out of control. For Bess, it was another piece of encouraging news, like the headlines reporting Allied armies gaining as much as fifty miles a day inside the crumbling Third Reich. She hoped - and believed - that two or three weeks in Warm Springs and a daily diet of good news from the battlefronts would restore Mr. Roosevelt.

After church on Easter Sunday, April 8, Mother and Dad took special delight in ignoring critics such as Duke Shoop and going to a luncheon at Evalyn Walsh McLean’s home. It was one of the pleasures of being a new vice president, with no worries about an imminent reelection campaign. They went to many other parties in the same carefree spirit during these first months of 1945. I remember being stirred by how happy and handsome they looked as they left our apartment in formal clothes. Bess’ blue eyes sparkled. She looked regal. The Vice president cut quite a figure too in white tie and tails.

I particularly remember how spiffy they appeared on the way to a party given in their honor by Perle Mesta. An heiress to two fortunes, one from her father, the other from her husband, she had been a Republican most of her life. She switched her allegiance in 1941 and moved to Washington, D.C., where she became not only a social lioness but a major contributor to the Democratic Party. She was a shrewder, more aggressive woman than Evalyn Walsh McLean. Mrs. Mesta relished power as much as the limelight. Dad - and a lot of other Democratic politicians - admired her far more for her ability to raise money than for her glittering parties. Mother enjoyed her effervescent personality. Perle was exactly like the woman in the musical Irving Berlin wrote about her,
Call Me Madam.

There still was plenty of politics for Bess to discuss with the vice president. The Senate was in a swivet over FDR’s failure to tell them anything about the agreements he had made at Yalta, and Dad had a daily struggle to prevent the southern Democrats from joining the Republicans in humiliating the president. They balked at almost everything the administration submitted to them, even a treaty with Mexico on water rights along the Rio Grande.

In a letter to his mother and sister, Dad described a typical vice presidential day. He got to the office about 8:30 a.m. and with the help of Reathel Odum, one of his Senate staffers who had followed him to this new job, he waded through a foot high stack of mail.

Bess spent the first week of April working with the VP on a Jefferson Day speech he was giving over network radio on April 13. By this time, Dad had gotten in the habit of having Mother read all his speeches in advance. This one was important, because the president was also scheduled to speak from Warm Springs. Dad was going to introduce him.

April 12 was another rainy day. Dad was flying to Providence the following morning to give his speech to the Rhode Island Democrats, and Bess eyed the lowering clouds, worried as always whenever her husband took to the air. I was getting ready to go to a birthday party for my friend and next-door-neighbor, Annette Davis. A nice young man was escorting me and I was feeling ebullient.

About six o’clock, the telephone rang and I answered it. In an odd, tight voice, Dad asked to speak to Mother. When I tried to kid with him in our usual style, he cut me off and ordered me to put Mother on the line. I obeyed and went back to putting on my makeup, wondering if I had done something to offend the vice president.

“Bess,” Harry Truman said. “I’m at the White House. President Roosevelt died about two hours ago in Warm Springs. I’m sending a car for you and Margaret. I want you here when I’m sworn in.”

Bess’ old antagonist, history, was in command of her life now.