Bess Truman (39 page)

Meanwhile, up on Capitol Hill, it was politics of the nastiest kind. Harry Truman took on the whole industrial establishment by demanding another year of price controls to beat back inflation until the servicemen came home, and the economy returned to a peacetime footing. The National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and every other spokesman for business in the country deluged Congress with a demand to “strike the shackles” from the American economy. Congress, caught between a hard rock and campaign donations, waffled, and the Office of Price Administration went down in flames, along with a good chunk of the Truman administration’s credibility. When a president is repudiated by Congress, tie down your hat. Everyone starts running amok.

Meanwhile, on the First Lady’s side of the White House, the job continued to be done with a minimum of enthusiasm. I was now twenty-two - old enough to sense that something was wrong even if I did not know exactly what. We were not the same relaxed family at dinner. For a while I thought it was the upper-class style in which we dined, with a butler and servants hovering around us. They were Mother’s bailiwick. And I noticed something else. She did not seem to be coping, or trying to cope, with our housekeeper, Mrs. Nesbitt, who planned the White House menus, supposedly in consultation with the First Lady.

Early on, I had met one of the Roosevelt sons, and he had asked me: “Has Mrs. Nesbitt begun starving you yet?” I shook my head, and he laughed and said, “Don’t worry, she will.”

Mrs. Nesbitt’s ideas on food reflected Eleanor Roosevelt’s, which can be summed up in one word: awful. I could not understand why Mother did not take charge of the situation. Then, suddenly, I was in charge of the situation. In mid-March, Mother received a frantic phone call from Denver. Fred Wallace had begun to drink in a desperate, self-destructive way. He was hiding bottles all over the house, behind books, in closets. Chris could not deal with him. Grandmother Wallace was frantic.

Although Mother had barely recovered from a bout with the flu, she departed for Denver. A day or two later, Mrs. Nesbitt served brussel sprouts for dinner. Dad pushed them aside, and I informed Mrs. Nesbitt that my father did not like brussel sprouts. The next night, we got them again. Somewhat tensely, I informed Mrs. Nesbitt again that the president did not like that vegetable. The next night, we got them again. I exploded and put through a long-distance telephone call to Denver. “If you don’t come back here and do something about that woman, I’m going to throw a bowl of brussel sprouts in her face!” I raged, displaying a combination Truman-Wallace temper that I scarcely knew I possessed at that point.

“Don’t do anything until I get there,” Mother replied.

I believe that contretemps was a turning point in Mother’s feelings about the White House and the presidency. Out in Denver, she faced the sad fact that Fred Wallace was forty-six years old, no longer her baby brother, but a sick man whom she could not cure. Her real task was back in Washington, where her daughter and her husband needed her.

Bess brought her mother back to the White House and dealt with Mrs. Nesbitt in short order. She vanished from the scene, and on May 2, the rest of the staff learned that our beloved housekeeper was retiring. Her successor was a pleasant woman who quickly grasped the Trumans’ likes and dislikes. Bess seldom had to revise the menus that were submitted for her approval each week.

Before this happy announcement, Mother had done something else that helped her view the White House in a more positive light. She invited her entire Independence bridge club for a four-day weekend. The ten ladies, including her two sisters-in-law and old friends such as Mary Shaw, arrived on April 12. Mother had a schedule lined up for them that would have wilted the iron campaigner, Harry S. Truman himself.

They raced from Congress to the Smithsonian to a luncheon in the State Dining Room to the circus. They had dinner each night at the White House, with Dad presiding, and played bridge aboard the
Williamsburg
as it cruised the Potomac. When the yacht rounded the bend at Mount Vernon, the ship’s bell tolled, and the crew and passengers came to attention as taps were sounded in honor of George Washington.

At the circus occurred the only sour note in the whole weekend - although even Mother laughed about it eventually. A clown figured out that Bess was the First Lady and proceeded to sit in her lap. The look he got froze his funny bone. A Secret Service man went backstage and told the joker not to do that again.

The ladies had a spectacular time, and Bess, watching their wide-eyed enjoyment of it all, began to get a little perspective on the life she was leading. Maybe there was something wonderful as well as something awful about it. She was also discovering that the life of a First Lady was not necessarily all ceremonial chores. She could do a few things in the White House that pleased her first.

Coincidentally, Bess’ bridge club weekend was manna to the ever more desperate women reporters. In fact, it was a media coup. “The girls,” as they called themselves, got the kind of press coverage that movie stars and politicians would kill to achieve. They were photographed and interviewed from the moment they stepped off the plane.
Life
magazine did a six-or eight-page spread on them. It was one of the few positive stories the press wrote about the Trumans in 1946, although Bess did not have an iota of politics in mind when she issued the invitation.

As far as the President of the United States could see, everything in the world seemed to be going wrong at once. Half the labor unions in the country were out on strike, and the other half were threatening to join them. The Russians were becoming more and more impossible. Agitators in the armed forces stirred “I wanna go home” riots from Manila to Berlin. Naturally, the press and public were blaming the president for everything. Americans have always expected their presidents to be combination uplifters, hard-boiled politicians, and miracle men.

Although the world was definitely out of joint, something important was happening at the White House that made the mess a lot easier for the president to bear. Around this time, Bess began joining Harry Truman in his upstairs study each night for a long, quiet discussion of the issues, the problems, the personalities with which he was grappling,

Bess had returned to the Truman partnership.

That summer, Bess left me and her mother at 219 North Delaware Street and spent the entire month of July in the White House. To help her tolerate the Washington humidity, Dad had air conditioners installed in her suite. They spent the Fourth of July at Shangri-La, the presidential retreat in Maryland, now called Camp David. She wrote me a cheerful letter, describing “the most peaceful Fourth I have any recollection of.” Dad had gone for a long walk and a swim in the pool, “But [it’s] not for me! I’ve been reading or just sittin’.” During the afternoon, they were going to explore the place in a jeep. “Won’t we be sore tomorrow?”

She teased me about the movies I was missing, especially
Anna and the King of Siam.
But the Marx Brothers’
Casablanca
drew a negative comment. “That will be the night I go to bed early.” Although Bess loved a good laugh, the Marx Brothers never amused her. I think she identified with Margaret Dumont, that dignified matron they were always tormenting.

Bess lured the chief executive home for a brief vacation in August, one that actually achieved some of the quiet that she thought they were still entitled to enjoy, even if they were Mr. and Mrs. President. With all the Wallaces, including Fred and Christine, on hand, we had a lovely family picnic in the backyard, beyond the scrutiny of the public.

On this visit, they also enjoyed a foray into local politicking. Roger Slaughter, a Jackson County congressman, had voted against, and loudly criticized, almost every proposal President Truman had sent to Congress. Dad decided to put this ornery Democrat out of action in the August primary. Bess bet him $10 that he could not do it. That aroused the shrewd Missouri politician still alive inside the President of the United States.

He invited Jim Pendergast, now the leader of the county’s Democrats, to the White House to discuss Mr. Slaughter. How the conversation went can be glimpsed from a paragraph in a letter Dad wrote to Jim before the visit. “If the home county organization slaps the President of the United States in the face by supporting a renegade Congressman, it will not be happy for the President of the United States or for the political organization.”

Mr. Slaughter lost, surprise, surprise. Dad’s first letter to Mother, when he returned to Washington, began: “Where’s my ten dollars? You just can’t believe in your old man’s luck and judgment, can you?” The best part of the whole thing, he added, knowing Bess would love it, “is that Mr. Roberts [managing editor of the Kansas City Star] is very much put out.”

That casual remark reveals another aspect of Bess’ feelings about Harry Truman becoming president. She was not sure he could do the job. That was partly Dad’s fault. He shared so many of his moments of doubt and discouragement with her. This frankness combined with her natural pessimism to produce a lack of confidence. But this feeling too was abating, as the Indianapolis Speedway version of the presidency subsided into the politics that we post-World War II Americans have come to accept as usual.

Bess sent the $10 and not one but two warm letters. The president was ecstatic at this evidence that they were in basic harmony again. He told her the letters had made the day “bright and happy.” Perhaps pushing a little too hard, he continued: “You know that there is no busier person than your old man - but he’s never too busy or too rushed to let his lady love, the only one he ever had, hear from him every day no matter what portends. It hurts just a tiny bit when he finds that trips uptown, time to dress etc. interfere with letters from his lady love.”

Dad thanked her for sending the Wallace family doctor to examine Mamma Truman, who was ninety-three and beginning to fail rapidly. “She is on her way out,” he wrote. “It can’t be helped but I wish it could. She’s a trial to Mary and that can’t be helped either. Wish you could be more patient with both. But I can’t ask too much I guess.”

Bess responded to this hint by going to a family party at Vivian Truman’s farm. Dad told her he was “most happy” about the visit. “I have a terrible time with my immediate family about which you, of course, know not a thing. But that visit will help a lot.”

That last sentence stirred Bess’ ire. Was he implying that the Trumans were mad at her because she did not visit them often enough? I suspect that was what Dad meant, but he denied everything. He labored through an explanation of various Truman family feuds and ended by asking Bess not to play newspaper reporter and “begin putting hidden meanings on my remarks.”

Dad’s letters kept Bess in touch with daily doings in the White House, as well as matters of state. He was becoming more and more convinced that the Great White jail was haunted.

By this time, the White House staff had stopped marveling at the down to earth way the Trumans treated them and were just enjoying it. Here, along with a report on a cleanup campaign, is some repartee Dad exchanged with Mayes, a tall, cadaverous White House butler, who, except for his color, had a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln.

Dad was still worried about giving Drew Pearson any ammunition, as this letter makes clear: “I failed to answer your question about your car. It seems to me that if you can get a good price for it you may as well sell it and buy a bond and then when we leave the great white jail a new car can be bought. The new cars won’t have the bugs out of them for two or three years anyway. Be sure though that no regulations or price ceilings are in any way infringed, no matter how good you may think the friendship of the person you sell to may be. The temptation to take a crack at the first family for pay is almost irresistible and so far we’ve escaped any factual misdemeanor and I’d like to finish with that reputation. Save the number. . . .”

Many more of Dad’s letters in the fall of 1946 kept Mother in touch with his ongoing problems with the recalcitrant Congress, Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes, and the man who was becoming the biggest headache of all, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace. Among Mr. Byrnes’ many defects was his tendency to hog the conversation, even when he was talking to the president. “Jim Byrnes came in for one drink,” Dad wrote in December, “and stayed for dinner! You can’t beat that.” The next day Mr. Byrnes brought the Prime Minister of Greece to see the president and met his match: “Saw the Greek prime minister with Byrnes. Almost had to throw him out of the office. Even Byrnes, as great a conversational pig as he is, was out-talked and after a half hour I began ushering him to the door - and he was still going at top speed and finally had to have the door shut in his face.”

Dad’s clash with Henry Wallace was a far more serious matter. The secretary of commerce decided that he was FDR’s heir apparent and began issuing pronouncements on foreign policy, strenuously criticizing the president’s tough attitude toward the Russians. Henry had been making disapproving noises ever since Dad escorted Winston Churchill to Fulton, Missouri, on March 3, 1946, to receive an honorary degree from Westminster College. With President Truman’s obvious endorsement, Churchill told the local audience - and the world - that Russia was ringing down “an iron curtain” across Europe. In Henry Wallace’s confused mind, this made Churchill and Truman warmongers.

Mr. Wallace was launching a tradition that has become a knee-jerk reaction in certain parts of the academic world and in the media. He blamed the United States for our difficulties with the Russians. He saw nothing wrong with letting Moscow do what it pleased in Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. He wanted to reduce our defense spending to the brink of unilateral disarmament. Things came to a boil when Henry gave a speech voicing most of these sentiments to a Soviet-American friendship rally in Madison Square Garden in mid-September. He had brought the speech to the White House and gotten Dad’s approval of a version that criticized both the Russians and the British. He then gave an entirely different version, eliminating almost all criticism of the Soviets. He ended his jeremiad by claiming that Harry Truman agreed with every word he had just said.

When reporters rushed to the White House and asked Dad if this was true, he confirmed it, without realizing the double cross that had been pulled. The result was a major fiasco. Mr. Byrnes, who was talking tough to the Russians in Paris, threatened to resign. Editorial writers heaped abuse on Truman’s two-headed foreign policy. Dad poured out his woe to Bess, who was still in Missouri. He did not receive much comfort from her. “It was nice to talk with you [last night],” he wrote on September 16, “even if you did give me hell for making mistakes.”

The mistake was trusting Henry Wallace. Nevertheless, Dad still struggled to come to an understanding with him.

He was referring in that last sentence to Bess’ scheduled return to the White House. As you can see, their quarrel over the presidency was not completely resolved. But it was out in the open now, and they could face it as partners.

Meanwhile, the Wallace imbroglio continued to boil, with the secretary of commerce revealing the ugly side of his personality, as well as some devious ideas about the presidency that he had acquired from FDR.