Bess Truman (35 page)

Another Roosevelt adviser with whom Dad spent a lot of time was Harry Hopkins. His attitude was a heartening contrast to Jimmy Byrnes'. He and Dad had known each other since the early 1930s. You will recall he was the only member of the Roosevelt administration Dad had met before he became a senator. Hopkins left the Mayo Clinic, where he was being treated for a painful stomach problem that had reduced him to a skeleton, and put his mortally ill body and all the insider’s knowledge in his large and generous mind at the new president’s disposal, without the slightest attempt to upstage him. Perhaps his most valuable contributions were his assessments of Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. He had served as Mr. Roosevelt’s personal envoy to both men and had gotten to know them well.

Toward the end of his first busy week as president, Dad confronted the largest crowd of reporters in White House history, 348, for his first press conference. He impressed everyone with his direct and forthright replies when he thought that questions could be answered without endangering the nation’s security. When he did not think so, he said as much, in his same direct way. It was a startling contrast to Mr. Roosevelt, who was fond of playing hide-and-seek with reporters, tantalizing them with half answers and evasions.

Swiftly, calmly, Dad affirmed his support of black voting rights and fair employment practices, declined to say when he would dispose of the nation’s synthetic rubber factories, and said he expected to confer with the Russian foreign minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, on his way to the upcoming conference in San Francisco to create the United Nations. One reporter asked if Mrs. Truman was going to hold press conferences too. Dad said he did not want to comment on that for the time being. He pointed out that Mrs. Roosevelt was still living in the White House and was planning to have a final press conference soon.

Dad’s smooth reply gave no hint that from his point of view, he was handling an explosive question. In those chauvinistic days, women reporters usually covered the First Lady’s side of the White House. They had a separate organization with which Mrs. Roosevelt had held weekly press conferences. Mother had already received a message from Mrs. Roosevelt suggesting that she continue this custom. It goes without saying that the newspaperwomen were extremely anxious for her to do so.

Mother said no. The squawks from the frustrated reporters were tremendous. But Mother stood her ground. She had no desire to compete in the public mind with Eleanor Roosevelt. This did not mean she had changed her mind about Eleanor Roosevelt. She remained an admirer of her energy and idealism. But Mother felt, quite rightly I think, that admiration did not necessarily require imitation. Bess Wallace Truman was determined to chart her own course as First Lady.

We have seen how traumatic Mother’s memories of newspaper publicity were. They went back to the anguish of her father’s death, the agony of her close friends, the Swopes, during those grisly murder trials. Even more influential was the low opinion of reporters’ tactics and ethics that Mother acquired during Dad’s political struggles in Missouri.

All of these things entered into Mother’s decision. But the bottom line, I think, was a simple fact. Bess Wallace Truman was a different woman from Eleanor Roosevelt. She did not want to be a public personality. She had reasons, strong, even heartbreaking reasons, for wanting to preserve her private self. She also had the courage to insist on it, in the face of violent disapproval.

Mother agonized over the decision. At one point during the first presidential week, in spite of enormous reluctance, she agreed to a press conference. At the last moment, she canceled it and decided to go her own way.

This decision did not mean that Mother put newspapers and reporters out of her mind. On the contrary, she was concentrating in those first days on something she regarded as supremely important for the success of Harry Truman’s presidency - the choice of a good press secretary. She had not forgotten the letter that Mary Paxton Keeley had written to her about the need for one when Dad was vice president. Now it became trebly urgent. The White House correspondents had had a negative reaction to Leonard Reinsch, a radio newsman whom Dad had appointed on a temporary basis.

Bess was particularly upset about this situation because Duke Shoop, the Kansas City
Star
reporter, was running all over Washington telling everyone that he had the appointment as press secretary in the bag. He had also printed a nasty paragraph about Bess in his column: “it’s far too early to say that Mrs. Truman will not enjoy being the first lady of the land, but it’s violating no secret to report that she doesn’t like her new position thus far. President Truman said today [April 13] ‘Bess cried most of the night and it wasn’t for joy, either.’”

That put Mary Paxton Keeley on the warpath. She told Bess she was outraged by the insinuation “that you could not do the job.” Mary reported that she had written to the
Star’s
managing editor, Roy Roberts, and had received an apologetic letter. “I hope I did some good,” Mary wrote. “I notice he [Shoop] has not had a signed column since and I hope he never has.”

Mother urged Dad to give top priority to finding a new press man and recommended as the ideal choice their old Independence classmate, Charlie Ross. President Truman agreed and asked Charlie if he would take the job. After some anguished hesitation - he was giving up a salary of $35,000 a year to take a job that paid $10,000, and he knew the brutally demanding hours he would have to work - Charlie said yes.

Not long after, Bess wrote triumphantly to Mary. “Don’t worry about Duke. He’s made an ass of himself the way he broadcast the fact that he was going to be H’s press Sec’y. Even went down to the press club and spread it there of all places. If there is anybody on earth that H. has absolutely
no
use for it’s D.S.”

Mary replied that she was “very happy about Harry putting Charlie in. Charlie can be a great help to him. He has a splendid background for it and he and Harry talk with the same Missouri accent.”

Other aspects of Bess’ correspondence with Mary during these first White House weeks are extremely interesting. Mary assured Bess that she was confident Harry Truman would do a good job. She said it was a task “more important to us all than any job any man has had.” Then she spoke, as only a friend can speak, to Bess. “Yours is the hardest job I have ever known any woman to undertake but I have never known you to do anything that you did not do well.”

Bess’ reply to those consoling words is the most revealing statement she ever made about Harry Truman becoming president. “I think you have sized up the situation pretty well. We are not any of us happy to be where we are but there’s nothing to be done about it except to do our best - and forget about the sacrifices and many unpleasant things that bob up.”

Regretfully, lovingly, I must disagree with one word in that statement: “we.” In his deepest self, Harry Truman found it impossible to resist the chance, the challenge, to be president, once he realized the door to the White House was open. He did not want to become president at the time and in the manner that he inherited the job. He did not want it because he knew Bess did not want it. But he could not turn his back on this opportunity to confront the history of his time, just as he could not evade World War I or the decision to run for the Senate in 1934, although he knew he was making Bess unhappy both times. His whole life pointed toward these rendezvous with destiny. This was something Mother found hard to accept or understand.

I am not writing as a daughter here. I am using that historian’s tool - which can so easily become a judgmental weapon - hindsight. As a daughter, I know - because I went through the experience as well - that history is not something you think about while you are part of it. All Bess could think of was, the way this decision to become vice president, which we knew meant becoming president, was tearing her life apart. Day and night, her mind was filled with foreboding. Was she going to watch another man whom she loved, another man to whom she had entrusted her happiness, stumble into catastrophic defeat, this time with the whole world watching?

As I have already said - and spelled out the reasons for it - Mother was never an optimist. Now all her pessimism about human nature, about life itself, rushed into her feelings. All her fears about Dad’s health, his tendency to overwork, his (in her opinion) tendency to trust people too much, added to her anxiety.

During these same emotion-filled days, Harry Truman was confronting problems and making decisions that would shape the postwar world. On his first night as president, he decided that the San Francisco conference to create the United Nations must proceed as scheduled, in spite of FDR’s death. He found out from men such as Harry Hopkins and W. Averell Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, that our relationship with Russia had begun to deteriorate months before Franklin Roosevelt’s death, when Stalin started ignoring or distorting the Yalta agreements. From Secretary of War Henry Stimson he learned about the most awesome secret of the war, the project to build an atomic bomb.

Dad selected not only a new press secretary, but a new appointments secretary, a genial, witty former Truman committee staffer named Matthew Connelly. For his military aide, Dad chose his friend, Harry Vaughan, who had become a major general with some help from Harry Truman. He named Fred Vinson, a tall, genial Kentuckian who had succeeded Jimmy Byrnes as head of the Office of War Mobilization, his secretary of the treasury.

“Poppa Vin,” as Mother and I soon called Fred Vinson, had been in Washington since 1924, when he was elected to Congress. He later became a federal judge, a position he held until President Roosevelt drafted him to serve as a key White House war administrator. Few people could match his insider’s knowledge of national politics.

For another politically sensitive post, secretary of agriculture, Dad chose Senator Clinton P. Anderson of New Mexico, a friend from the Senate years. He saw that it was absolutely necessary to surround himself with his own team, loyal to him, not Franklin Roosevelt.

On April 18, the thirteenth and last truck loaded with the Roosevelts’ personal possessions rolled away from the White House. Mrs. Roosevelt stopped at Blair House to say goodbye to the Trumans. She was somewhat apologetic about the condition of the White House. The war and her heavy travel schedule had never given her time to do much decorating or housekeeping. She also warned us that the place was infested with rats. A big rat had run along the porch railing when she was lunching with three friends on the south portico a few months earlier.

On April 19, the seventh day of the Truman presidency, Mother and I went over to inspect our new quarters. The expression on Mother’s face when she saw the dingy, worn furniture and the shabby white walls, unpainted in twelve years, was more expressive than a paragraph of exclamation points. I am referring to the private rooms, upstairs, where first families spend most of their time. The splendid first-floor rooms, which every visitor to Washington lines up to see, were polished and glowing as always. But the private quarters were far below the level of the furnished apartments Bess had lived in during her first years in Washington, before we settled into 4701 Connecticut Avenue. In my diary, I wrote: “The White House upstairs is a mess. . . . I was so depressed when I saw it.” If that was the way a casual twenty-one-year-old felt, you can imagine Mother’s feelings.

We fled back to Blair House’s elegance, and Mother ordered a major redecoration before we moved in. To allow me some privacy and a place to entertain friends, she gave me a suite that included a sitting room, bedroom, and bath. She let me pick out my own color scheme - Wedgwood blue for the walls, flowery chintz curtains, rust-red sofas. For her suite, she chose lavender in the bedroom and gray in the sitting room.

Meanwhile, she was grappling with her own staff problems. She persuaded Reathel Odum, a petite, attractive young woman who had worked in the Truman Senate office since 1936, to become her personal secretary. Reathel was bright and willing, but she did not know any more about the way First Ladies operated in the White House than Mother. Yet it did not seem a good idea to retain anyone from Mrs. Roosevelt’s staff. Like Dad, Mother felt she needed her own team. Discussing this with me in Blair House, Mother decided to bend this principle somewhat. “I’m going to ask Mrs. Helm to stay on. I think I can work with her,” she said.

Edith Helm was the White House social secretary. The widow of an admiral, she was a dignified, charming woman who could hold her own with any of the so-called best people of Washington, because she was one of them. She knew everything about everything when it came to protocol, the press, the pressures on a First Lady. Moreover, she had perspective. She had begun working in the White House during Woodrow Wilson’s administration, so her memory went back to those distant days when the First Lady was not named Eleanor Roosevelt and did not give press conferences. I was there when Mother asked Mrs. Helm to stay on the job. She was delighted by the offer, and Mother was delighted with her prompt acceptance. With her on the team, Mother’s worries about diplomatic or political gaffes subsided.

We moved into the White House on May 7 so that Dad could celebrate his birthday there the following day. Instead, we found ourselves celebrating the surrender of Germany, along with the rest of the country. Dad wrote his mother and sister a lively letter describing the big event.

It was a wild day, in Washington and in the country at large. Mobs of people poured into the streets to cheer and yell and kiss. At the end of his brief talk, Dad reminded everyone that “our victory is only half over.” We had another war to win with Japan, an empire bigger and far more fanatic than Nazi Germany. He added a plea to Japan’s leaders to lay down their weapons and tried to soften the terms of unconditional surrender that Mr. Roosevelt had decreed. “Unconditional surrender does not mean the extermination or enslavement of the Japanese people.”