Bess Truman (41 page)

As I began spending more and more time in New York taking voice lessons, Bess complained to the president, especially when he too deserted her in the White House for a brief vacation in Key West. Dad did his best to soothe her, but he did not change his mind. “I am sorry about Margie’s not getting back for any of the W.H. functions,” he wrote. “Looks as if we’ve lost her for good and it’s a wrench - but we’ll have to stand it I guess. Glad the teas turned out to be not so bad as usual.”

When I took an apartment in New York and began my long career as a resident of that city, Dad wrote rather mournfully to his mother and sister about my departure. But he still did not change his mind.

Margaret went to New York yesterday and it leaves a blank place here. But I guess the parting time has to come to everybody and if she wants to be a warbler and has the talent and will to do the hard work necessary to accomplish her purpose, I don’t suppose I should kick.

Most everyone who has heard her sing seems to think she has the voice. All she needs is training and practice.

Gradually, Mother accepted Dad’s point of view. Later in the year, she received a letter from her old friend, Arry Calhoun. She had moved to Vancouver, but distance did not alter Mother’s fondness for her. “I was so delighted to hear from you!” she wrote. She inquired about the weather in the Northwest and expressed a hope that her son, Peter, whom she had adopted after the death of her baby, and her sister, Kathleen, would move out there to join her. “There’s nothing quite like one’s family,” Mother wrote, with an almost audible sigh. “Heavens! How I miss mine!” Then she reported on me. “Marg is busy with her music and so deeply interested in it that
nothing
else matters. I am thankful, tho, that she has an excuse to skip this grind.”

As I began the hard work that every singer confronts to reach and maintain professional quality, I received a letter from Dad that I still treasure.

Early in 1947, I got a tremendous break when the conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Karl Kreuger, invited me to make my debut with his musicians over a nationwide radio hookup. In spite of a sore throat that kept me in bed for the previous four days, I performed well enough to win praise from an encouraging number of critics. Mother telephoned me from the White House and Dad from Key West, where he was taking a brief vacation. Bess was considerably cooler than Dad in her remarks, but she told me that an avalanche of flowers and telegrams were pouring into the White House, and the number of telephone calls had forced them to shut down the switchboard.

I received $1,500 for that performance, and on the second or third day after my return to Washington I asked Mother to go shopping with me. I knew exactly what I wanted to celebrate my success: a lovely mink scarf. The saleslady beamed as I casually told her to charge it to Mrs. Harry S. Truman. “Oh no you don’t,” Mrs. Truman said.

“What?” I said dazedly.

“You bought it, you pay for it. You’re making your own money now.”

She was absolutely right, of course. But she also enjoyed reminding me that if I was going to be a career woman instead of a housewife and mother, I had better learn how to cope with my expensive tastes.

When I began a concert tour in August 1947, Bess added that to her list of responsibilities. In letter after letter, she reminded me of the basic rules she and Dad had laid down. I was to take no freebies from anyone. When I went into the South, she fretted over the possibility that Vietta Garr, who was traveling with me, might be barred from some hotel, and it would get into the newspapers. She consulted with various people and reported that they assured her no hotel in the South would do such a thing, as long as it was clear that Vietta was my maid. I was also regularly sent stamps and told to use them, “if even on postcards.” Other letters ended with “Send that wire!”

To my surprise, along with all these orders Mother mingled some pretty expert press agentry. I launched that first concert tour in Pittsburgh. Mother organized an expedition of prominent friends, including Perle Mesta, to support me. Mother reported that Perle had been “all steamed up” about going to Los Angeles to see me, but she had persuaded her to join the Pittsburgh junket.

After that concert, Mother wrote me a note that I still cherish. “You did a darn good job last night, Margie & I was mighty proud of you. We flew after all & had a perfect trip! (This from me!)”

While trying to run me, Bess was also running the White House. She scrutinized every bill that came into the personal side of the operation and often added them up again to make sure the staff knew their arithmetic. Running the White House is a little like running a hotel, with the added complication of having your own personal expenses tangled up in the business budget. She and Dad went to extreme lengths to make sure that Drew Pearson and his ilk did not find anything to snipe at in this area. They even paid their own dry cleaning bills, although the White House had a resident valet.

I like to joke about Mother’s penchant for penny pinching. But when the Trumans added up income and outgo for the first year in the White House, it became apparent that they needed every cent she could save. They had exactly $4,200 left from the president’s supposedly munificent salary of $50,000 a year.

As we have seen, Bess’ first impulse was to tell the world it was none of its business how she dressed. But she soon had to face the fact that the First Lady’s clothes were under intense scrutiny all the time. She decided to place her couturial confidence in a darkhaired, Greek-born designer named Agasta. I believe Evalyn Walsh McLean steered her in this direction, and it turned out to be good advice. Agasta had taste and tact. She never talked to the press, beyond supplying them with descriptions of new dresses, as Mother introduced them.

While the First Lady was launching a social season that remained unmatched for splendor and dignity (in her memoirs, Edith Helm called it “the most spectacular of my long life”), the Truman presidency was in deep trouble. In the 1946 elections, the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress and declared war on the Democrats. Simultaneously, the Russians, seeing a divided government and a U.S. Army and Navy that had been demobilized into impotence, became more aggressive and arrogant. They backed a guerrilla army in Greece and threatened Turkey. The British, traditional stabilizers of the balance of power in Europe, were bankrupt, and the French and the Italians were not in much better shape. On the other side of the world, the Communists were smashing up Chiang Kai-shek’s corrupt regime in China and threatening the free half of Korea.

When the British abruptly informed the United States that they could no longer support the Greek government in its war with the Communist guerrillas, Dad was faced with the first great foreign policy challenge of his administration. To bolster his political support in this crisis, Dad replaced Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes with General George C. Marshall, the man who as Army chief of staff had been the architect of America’s victory in World War II. This change came as a shock to Mr. Byrnes, who thought he had won a victory when the president fired Henry Wallace.

A doctrinaire conservative like Mr. Byrnes was not the man Dad needed to help him rally the majority of the country to meet the Communist challenge. He wanted a man like General Marshall, who was above politics. Proof of the wisdom of Dad’s choice was the response of the Republican-controlled Senate. They unanimously ratified the general’s appointment the same day it was submitted.

Dad’s admiration of General Marshall was unqualified. The day he came to the White House to accept his new assignment, Dad noted on his desk diary: “The more I see and talk to him, the more certain I am he’s the great one of the age. I am surely lucky to have his friendship and support.”

I am quite certain that Mother was the first person to hear about this decision to give General Marshall the second most important job in the administration. I am equally certain it won her enthusiastic backing. This was a good example of how the Truman partnership worked in the White House. More often than not, in those evening discussions, Mother listened as Dad talked out alternatives. She was particularly good at cautioning him against people like Jimmy Byrnes, who were mainly interested in enlarging their personal reputations at the president’s expense. She was equally good at spotting people whose first loyalty was to the country and the president. For her, as well as Dad, George Marshall was the prototype of this sort of man. Mother was equally fond of his wife, a woman of marvelous charm and grace.

Dad particularly valued Mother’s opinion regarding the political impact of his decisions on the American voter. Most of the time she was a cautionary voice, warning him against impulsive decisions. Only rarely did she suggest a man for a job, or recommend a change in a policy.

If she expressed an opinion with which Dad disagreed, that was the end of it. He had the final say. Dad’s appointments secretary, Matt Connelly, who saw more evidence of Mother’s influence on Dad than anyone else, considered this the most important aspect of the Truman partnership. “She never nagged him,” Matt said. “Once he made a decision, whether or not she agreed with it, she accepted it.”

With General Marshall on his team, Dad tackled the Greek crisis. Working day and night (on the heels of an exhausting effort to prepare a budget and legislative program to submit to the hostile Congress), Harry Truman put together a historic departure in American foreign policy. On March 12
,
Dad went before a joint session of Congress and asked them to approve $400 million in military aid for Greece and Turkey. It was the first time any president had ever proposed such aid when the nation was not at war.

Even more important to the history of our century was Dad’s declaration of support for nations struggling to resist Communist conquest. Without mentioning the Soviet Union by name, he equated it with the totalitarian regimes of Germany and Japan. “I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures,” he said. With those momentous words, the president was declaring to the world - and to Joseph Stalin in particular - that the era of doubletalk was over. Henceforth, the United States regarded Soviet Russia as an enemy of freedom.

The day after Dad delivered that now famous speech, Mother insisted that he take a vacation. He headed for Key West, and his letters from there show how important Mother’s intervention was. “I had no idea I was so tired,” he wrote. “I have been asleep most of the time [since he arrived]. . . . Even drove to the beach instead of walking as I did before.” He added that “Steelman [John Steelman, Assistant to the President] and Clifford [Clark Clifford, White House counsel] were as nearly all in as I was so it is a good arrangement all around.”

Dad wrote me an emotional letter from Key West. It is an interesting comment on his eighteen-month struggle to reach an understanding with Moscow for the sake of world peace.

The submarine base at Key West was becoming a favorite presidential refuge, but Dad had yet to persuade Mother to join him. She saw it as an all-male setup (which it was) and thought Dad would have a better time horsing around with Charlie Ross and Admiral Leahy, playing poker and drinking a little bourbon beyond the range of her critical eye. But he wanted her near him more and more as the presidency gathered momentum, and he went to work in his usual shrewd fashion to tempt her southward. He described a fishing trip that he and Admiral Leahy had taken, praised the sunshine, and assured her that she and her mother would enjoy it.

The president’s confidence in Bess’ support continued to grow, even though, according to the pollsters, his popularity with the voters was sinking so fast it would take one of the submarines from Key West to locate it. At the end of June in 1947, when Bess took her mother home to 219 North Delaware, he wrote her a teasing letter that recalled all the shows they had seen together, in particular,
The Girl from Utah
, with its hit song, “They’ll Never Believe Me.” “You’d just said you’d take a chance on me,” he wrote. “Wasn’t it a terrible chance? Never did I think I’d get you into all the trouble you’re in now. Well you didn’t have to take the chance, did you?”

Less than two months after he wrote that letter to Bess, Harry Truman’s mother died at the age of ninety-four. He had been prepared for it ever since another fall had left Mamma Truman bedridden. In the spring of 1947, while he was pushing the Greek-Turkish aid bill through Congress, she had come so close to death, Dad flew to Missouri to be at her side. He signed the historic aid bill in his Muehlebach Hotel office on May 22.

Two days later, Mamma Truman amazed the doctors by awakening and demanding a slice of watermelon. For the next two months, she seemed to be recovering. Dad went back to work in the Great White Jail, as he called the White House. He wrote Mother a wry account of a typical day in the summer of 1947.

On July 26, he was in a Missouri-ish mood.

Dad barely finished that letter when he got a phone call from his sister Mary. Mamma Truman had contracted pneumonia and wasn’t expected to live. Dad rushed to his plane. About an hour after they took off, he was dozing in his cabin when his mother’s face suddenly appeared before him with amazing clarity. A few minutes later, Dr. Wallace Graham, the White House physician, told Dad they had just received word that Mamma Truman was dead. “I knew she was gone when I saw her in that dream,” Dad said. “She was saying goodbye to me.”

Two days after her funeral, Dad was back in the White House, still grief-stricken. He wrote me the following letter.

Mamma Truman’s death removed from Dad’s life the other woman to whom he had turned again and again for the emotional support he needed to maintain his balance in the presidency.

If anything confirms the truth of my analysis of Harry Truman’s motives in 1944, when Eddie McKim brought Mamma Truman into Dad’s presidential thoughts, it is the incredible number of letters he began writing to his mother from the moment he entered the White House. As a senator, he had written to her no more often than a dutiful, busy son might be expected to correspond. In the White House, his letters multiplied incredibly; often he wrote every day - with the same candor and wealth of detail he put into his letters to Bess.

Now Martha Ellen Truman was gone, and that meant Harry Truman’s need for Bess’ support intensified. I am referring here to emotional support, not to any advice he might get from her on the blizzard of problems he faced. His daughter, yours truly the biographer, was out of the picture, crisscrossing the continent on concert tours. I am not sure if Bess was aware of this deepened need. She was not given to analyzing anyone, including herself, psychologically. But I think she sensed it on an intuitive level.

The best piece of evidence was her willingness to join him and me on a diplomatic mission to Brazil in September 1947. Persuading Mother was a feat in itself, because the trip involved flying across thousands of miles of sea and jungle. Even a flight to Missouri was torture to her. Dad made the decision almost on the spur of the moment, another obstacle. Mother usually did not like to be taken by surprise.

Twenty nations had been meeting in Rio de Janeiro to discuss inter-American security. They startled everyone, including themselves, by coming up with a treaty that banned aggression in the Western Hemisphere. Brazil was also celebrating the 125th anniversary of its independence. President Truman decided to go down there, sign the treaty personally, and help the Brazilians celebrate. Bess succumbed, I think, for a special reason.

The trip was a sentimental journey for Mr. and Mrs. Truman. A number of times in his early letters, Dad had mentioned his desire to take Mother - or send her - on a tour of South America. Every woman has, I think, a romantic place she has longed to visit. For Mother, it was the Latin half of the New World. Harry Truman knew this, and I think it played no small part in his decision to go to Brazil.

It also made good political sense, I should add. It was part of a program Dad had launched earlier in the year to build solidarity between the United States and the countries of our hemisphere. Already he had visited Mexico and Canada with tremendous success.

In a long letter to her mother from Rio de Janeiro, Bess made no attempt to conceal her nervousness about flying. “The heavy clouds & fog lifted from the city just before we came in yesterday. . . . When we circled the bay (it’s perfectly enormous) we were flying with one wing down towards the water & it looked as if we were going right into it, which I didn’t enjoy.”

She also disliked the ride from our embassy to the site of the conference, the Hotel Quitandinha in the resort city of Petropolis, in the mountains about thirty-eight miles north of Rio. The only approach to the site was up a steep, curving two-lane road, with a sheer drop of 1,500 feet only inches from our tires and not a guardrail in sight. In spite of a heavy rain, Bess told her mother that we “went at a
very lively gait and took the hairpin turns at a terrible speed.” I don’t remember being that scared, but it was not the most enjoyable car ride I have had.

Bess also found fault with her daughter’s antics in Rio. One night, I went partying with several members of the staff. No one, including me, seems to have remembered to tell the president and First Lady where we were going. When we got back at 2:00 a.m., they were both pacing the floor. Mother gave me hell right on the spot, and Dad gave the staff more of the same the next morning.

What Bess loved most about Rio were the gardens. “The flowers and shrubs are out of this world,” she told her mother, from whom she had inherited her love of growing things. “The gardens in front of the embassy are gorgeous. The hibiscus are all double & a brilliant red. There are a lot of other flowers and flowering shrubs that are like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

The Brazilians could not have been more hospitable and enthusiastic. But for the Trumans, the high point of the trip was our voyage back aboard the USS
Missouri.
For twelve days, we were more or less insulated from nasty columnists, international crises, and critical congressmen. Best of all, we had to shed all pretensions to being VIP’s when the ship crossed the equator. That was when King Neptune came aboard to initiate all pollywogs [first-time crossers] into his domain.

The more ridiculous the costume in which a pollywog greets the king, the better. The goal is to amuse him and make the initiation less rigorous. Mother donned a sport shirt and a baker’s hat. It is a sight I will never forget. I did not look much better in a raincoat, boots, and sou’wester hat, all three sizes too big for me.

After greeting his majesty (actually a chief petty officer wearing dungarees and a cockeyed cardboard crown), we retired for the night to await our punishment. The next morning the “No. 1 pollywog,” the President of the United States, was the first to approach Davy’s throne and beg for mercy. He got off by promising to sign autographs for Davy and his pirate escorts and to supply them with Corona cigars for the rest of the voyage.

Mother seemed to be in trouble for a while. Davy accused her of sowing “typical feminine disregard of our royal whim” by having “so cozened and comforted our No. 1 pollywog and otherwise made home so delightful for him that you have delayed for many years this long-sought audience with Harry S. Truman.” However, the No. 1 shellback aboard, Admiral Leahy (he had crossed the equator aboard the battleship
Oregon
in 1898), interceded for her, and Davy decided to grant his first amnesty in several centuries.

The rest of us were not so lucky. I had to bow down six times before his majesty and lead six ensigns in singing “Anchors Aweigh.” Charlie Ross and the other members of the presidential party took even worse punishment. They got clamped to an operating table and had some royal medicine - a mixture of alum, mustard, quinine, and epsom salts - poured down their throats. Then they got ducked in the royal tank and ran a gauntlet of electrically charged pitchforks. I began to dislike the rough stuff but Mother, having dealt with an unruly mob of Delaware Street males, loved every minute of it. She laughed hardest when the reporters got the business.

There was a new sense of solidarity - and not a trace of self-pity - in Dad’s letters to Mother that fall. She returned to Missouri for a few weeks to close the house for the winter and bring her mother to Washington. During this period, Harry Truman pushed through the Republican Congress one of the great foreign policy initiatives of our time, the Marshall Plan.

Earlier in 1947, the president had responded with both his heart and his head to the description Undersecretary of State Will Clayton had brought back from a tour of Europe. The center of Western civilization was close to collapse, harried by food shortages, industrial stagnation, and Communist threats from without and within its national borders. The $12 billion Harry Truman eventually persuaded Congress to appropriate transformed Western Europeans from a people without hope to a strong, prosperous community again.

Bess played a part in this struggle, which was fought both in the press and among the public as well as in Congress. Rather than present the spectacle of VIP’s feasting while Europe was starving, she canceled all the state dinners for the 1947 social season. To prove she was not shirking her job, however, she continued the receptions, which involved the really herculean handshaking. The receptions did not require any serious outlay of food - and incidentally, no liquor was served at them. This was not Bess’ idea. It was a White House tradition.

Hindsight makes it sound easy, but the letters President Truman and Bess exchanged reveal how tough it was to get the Marshall Plan through Congress. He rehearsed with Bess many of the arguments he used to rally support for the program. “To feed France and Italy this year [1948] will cost 580 million, the Marshall Plan 16.5 billion. But you know in October and November 1945 I cancelled 63 billion in appropriations - 55 billion at one crack. Our war cost that year was set at 105 billion. The 16.5 billion is for a five year period and is for
peace
.
”