Bess Truman (36 page)

No one wanted a swift, bloodless end to the war with Japan more than Harry Truman. He had the grim statistics of recent battles on his desk. It had cost 25,489 marines, a third of the landing force, to capture eight square miles of volcanic rock known as Iwo Jima. On Okinawa, a larger island south of Japan, the toll had been 49,151 Americans. Kamikazes - suicide planes - had sunk 34 U.S. ships and damaged another 368. His military experts were telling him it would cost a minimum of 1.25 million American casualties, and God knows how many ships to invade and subdue the main Japanese islands.

For Bess, the German surrender had a strong personal meaning. Unlike many of his ancestors, Mary Paxton Keeley’s son had survived the war. “I thought about you mighty early on VE day,” she wrote to Mary a few days later. “It must be almost beyond belief to you that Pax isn’t, now, constantly in danger.” Pax had already selected a wife, a young woman Mary described as “better than I could have picked if he had asked me to find a girl for him - which he did not ask me to do. She is tall and blonde like Margaret.” Mary hoped Bess could come to the wedding. Bess said she would love to come, if she was in Missouri when it took place.

To keep the women reporters from exploding in frustration, Mrs. Helm suggested that Bess invite them to tea in the upstairs rooms, so they could at least give their readers a few details about how the Trumans were living. Bess agreed but requested Mrs. Helm to make it clear that she was not going to answer questions. Everything that was said had to be off the record. The women eagerly accepted this arrangement, and I was drafted to help the conversation flow smoothly. But Mother found it hard to relax. She disliked being required to invite these inquisitive people into her private life.

Two days later, on May 28, the Trumans gave a formal reception at the White House for the Prince Regent of Iraq. It was Bess’ first encounter with the incredible minutiae involved in these official visits. She and the president received a six-page memorandum detailing every step of the affair, from the moment the prince regent’s three cars came through the White House gate until he departed.

Here is a sample of these marching orders. “After a suitable interval, the president will take the Regent into the White House and present him to Mrs. Truman. The acting secretary of state will introduce Nuri Pasha [former prime minister and political boss of Iraq] to Mrs. Truman. She will then be escorted by a White House aide to the Red Room. The president, with the Regent on his right, will proceed to the Blue Room.” The next paragraph went into equally intense detail about who would not be introduced to whom until they got to the Red Room, where Bess was to serve the Regent a cup of tea.

This was pretty trying stuff to people used to the informal hospitality of Missouri.

Missouri was where Bess decided to go, not long after this reception. She had a good excuse: 219 North Delaware Street was being painted, renovated, and overhauled on its way to becoming “the Summer White House.” For a while the newspapers had called it The Hyde Park of the West and other silly names, such as The Gates Victorian Mansion. Bess maintained she would be there to supervise the work. I suppose there was some truth to that, but the job was being done by a good Independence contractor, and the U.S. government, which was paying the bills, would have been happy to send a team of army engineers to supervise things, if she had requested it.

My point is, Harry Truman needed her a lot more in the real White House. But Bess was reverting to those early Senate years when she yielded to the impulse to retreat to 219 North Delaware Street, that original refuge from life’s harsh blows. I am sure that she also told herself that I would be better off out of the glare of the White House’s publicity for a few months. Her mother had even more to do with this decision. Grandmother Wallace was not happy in the White House, and a summer in her own house would, Bess hoped, cheer her up. But these reasons were essentially rationalizations for Bess’ retreat from the White House, the presidency, the role of First Lady.

Without Bess and his daughter, Harry Truman found the White House a “lonesome place.” At night, he sat up reading cables and memos and reports until he was too tired to focus his eyes. He fretted over the Roosevelt loyalists still in various government posts. He called them “the palace guard.” He tried to assure Bess that he was mastering the job. Early in June, he told her he was getting a grip on the various government departments. “There’ll be no more to this job than there was to running Jackson County,” he wrote.

But when he cited the “big headaches” - foreign relations, national finances, postwar military policy, reconverting the wartime economy - he obviously was asking for support. “Things get tougher and tougher,” he wrote a few weeks later after a meeting with General Eisenhower and other military advisers. The soldiers told him, as they had told FDR, that they needed the cooperation of the Russians in the final assault on Japan. A Russian attack would tie down millions of Japanese soldiers in Manchuria. Without it, the Americans would have to fight the entire 5-million-man Japanese Army on its home islands. That meant the United States had to keep trying to deal with Joseph Stalin, who was becoming more and more brazen in his determination to impose communism on everyone within range of a Russian gun.

There were times when the president sounded more than a little discouraged. In this letter, he sees himself competing for a place in history with previous White House winners and losers.

In Independence, Bess soon discovered that she could not escape the public. A crowd of 200 people greeted us at the depot. A traffic jam soon developed on Delaware Street, and the Independence police department had to put a man on duty full time to deal with the hundreds of cars that drove slowly by the house. More hundreds of well-wishers and curious trooped past on foot, making the Secret Service jittery.

Bess’ reaction to this public scrutiny was demonstrated on June 5, when moving vans took away the furniture Fred and Christine Wallace had left in the house and a team of workmen delivered the furniture she had shipped from Washington, D.C. Mother ordered the blinds pulled and the lights turned on in the middle of the day, so the gawkers on the street saw nothing.

The renovation of 219 North Delaware did not go smoothly. The plumbers’ slow pace particularly irked Bess. She complained to the president, who wrote to her in mid-June that “the plumber troubles make me tired also - but we are up against it and will have to put up with it. Hope you can get caught up on it in a reasonable time.”

Somewhat naively, Mother asked Dad what he thought of a proposition that floated in from Fred Wallace in Denver. A well-to-do friend in that city had offered Fred a house, free of charge, which the president would use as a summer White House when he and Mother came to visit Fred and Christine.

“I don’t believe it would be good policy to let Fred take that house in Denver,” Dad wrote. “We should only have the one in Independence on the basis I outlined to you.” (The basis was the government’s willingness to pay for the improvements.) Dad was worried about giving columnist Drew Pearson, whom he particularly detested, material for a scandal. “If we should go to Colorado we should stay at a hotel and
pay
for it,” he wrote.

Bess was disappointed by this decision, although she found it difficult to argue against it. Fred had recently quit his government job and gone into the real estate business. He was not making much money. But that did not justify the risk he was asking Dad to take.

Some badly needed comic relief was provided by Vietta Garr, our long-running cook and maid, who had left the Wallace-Truman payroll to manage a luncheonette. Bess had asked her sister-in-law May Wallace to persuade Vietta to return. Somehow reporters got wind of this negotiation and asked Vietta if she had made up her mind yet. “I don’t know,” Vietta said. “They’re a nice family to work for but I’m sort of on the outs with the cooking right now.” She gave the newsmen a rundown of the Delaware Street kitchen, speaking with special fondness of the outsized old-fashioned icebox. “I don’t think they will ever have an electric icebox in the house,” she declared. “Mr. Frank owns some stock in the Independence Ice Company.”

Along with some other pertinent comments, a letter to Reathel Odum provides the denouement of Vietta’s performance. “This house is bedlam and I wish I had never come home,” Mother wrote. “There is someone working in almost every room in the house and a horde of them on the outside. I don’t see any end to it. . . . Vietta came today so that will help. At least I don’t have to cook.”

In another letter to Reathel during these same weeks, Mother summed her policy in regard to reporters, who were pestering Reathel and Mrs. Helm for stories. “Just keep on smiling and tell ‘them’ nothing.”

Gawking curiosity seekers, slothful plumbers, hammering carpenters, were not the only upsets Bess encountered in Independence that summer. When she went to the first meeting of her bridge club, the members all stood up as she walked into the room. It was a half humorous, half serious gesture. They were trying to tell her how proud they were that she had become First Lady. They were also expressing some of the awe Americans feel for the presidency.

Dad had had a similar experience with Eddie McKim. When he came to the Oval Office the day after Dad took over, Eddie started calling him “Mr. President” and could not bring himself to sit down in his presence.

Mother dealt with the bridge club in her own direct way. “Now stop it, stop it this instant,” she said. “Sit down, every darn one of you.”

Late in June 1945, the president flew to San Francisco to address the closing session of the UN conference. On the way back, he stopped in Independence. He had promised Bess that he would “do as I’m told” while he was there. She hoped that these words meant she would enjoy his company for a few quiet days. But he brought the presidency with him, and instead of a peaceful interlude, the visit was four days of continuous uproar. As Mother put it in a letter to Reathel Odum, “The place has been running over with all sorts of people.” Both Trumans were learning that a president could not go anywhere without an army of reporters and aides and Secret Service men in his wake.

In this case, Dad should have realized that the first visit of Missouri’s first president would inevitably be a circus. The biggest crowd in the history of Jackson County roared a welcome at the airport. Dad loved every minute of it, especially the part where he issued a proclamation declaring Kansas City part of “Greater Independence.” On his last day, Dad tried to arrange twenty-four hours at home without intrusions. But he yielded to reporters’ pleas and granted a picture session on the front porch at 3:00 p.m. He had no trouble persuading me to join him, but after a few minutes of click-click they naturally asked for Bess. Dad went into the house to get her. A few minutes later he came out looking unhappy. “Take a few more of us, why don’t you, boys,” he said. Mother had flatly refused to join us.

After Dad returned to Washington, Mother declared her independence from the Secret Service on her home turf. She called in our resident agents and informed them that under no circumstances was she going to tolerate anyone trailing her when she went shopping or visiting friends. She would put up with surveillance in Washington, D.C., where she could see it was necessary. But not here. Thereafter, when she went anywhere, I or one of my aunts was her only escort.

Bess’ dark mood may have been worsened by bad news from Denver. Fred Wallace was starting to drink again. But Harry Truman felt, accurately, I fear, that he was the chief cause of her woe. On July 5, on the eve of leaving for a summit conference with Churchill and Stalin in Potsdam, Germany, he telephoned her from the White House. The conversation was so unpleasant, he was still upset about it the next day, when he wrote her this farewell letter.

As president, Dad was deeply concerned about the potential impact of this venture in diplomacy on his standing with the American voters. He remembered that Woodrow Wilson had ruined his popularity at home by letting European statesmen out-negotiate him at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. Dad was skeptical of what could be gained from any agreement with Stalin, who already had proved himself to be a double-dealer. But he was at least as worried about Bess’ reaction to the presidency. He tried to remedy the situation by writing the frankest imaginable letters to her from Potsdam, in the hope that she would feel a part of this history-in-the-making, even though she was 6,000 miles away.