Bess Truman (42 page)

A Russian war, which he saw as a strong possibility, “would cost us $400 billion and untold lives, mostly civilian. So I must do what I can. I shouldn’t write you this stuff but you should know what I’ve been facing.”

What tormented Dad was the attitude of the Republican and southern conservative “squirrelheads” (his term), who were living in 1890. They were more interested in overriding President Truman’s veto of their giveaway tax bill than in the crisis of western civilization.

Not all the Republicans were squirrelheads, of course. The key to reaching the thoughtful moderates was Arthur Vandenberg, the earnest, idealistic senator from Michigan who had become a good friend of Harry Truman during their years together in the Senate. Dad worked tirelessly to convert Senator Vandenberg into an internationalist and succeeded magnificently. Bess played a part in this campaign, too, doing everything in her power to charm the senator’s wife. In late September, Dad wrote to her: “Sen. Vandenberg was highly pleased at the flowers we sent his wife in the Detroit Hospital.”

Not to be discounted in the subtleties of the legislative process is Bess’ influence with other senator’s wives. Early in 1947, she wrote to me: “The Senate women’s luncheon today was something! The nicest one they have ever had, they said.”

The president shared with Bess the climax of his struggle with Congress - the meeting with the Democratic and Republican leaders in the Cabinet Room on September 29. He listed each of them by name, including Vandenberg. The list filled half of one page of the letter. Most of them are forgotten now, but Bess had met all of them and had a good grasp of their personalities. First Robert Lovett, the Undersecretary of State, and then Secretary of State Marshall spoke and answered questions. “After everyone had had his say, I stated the case categorically and told them what we faced and what in my opinion we had to do,” Dad wrote. “There was no objection!”

Bess was pessimistic about her man’s chances, as usual She thought the Republican and southern negativists would override the tax veto and sink the Marshall Plan too. This is an interesting glimpse of how “support” worked in the Truman partnership. It did not mean that Bess was always a cheering section. As Dad wrote in an earlier letter, “I’m happier when I can see you - even when you give me hell.” Basic to the partnership was the principle that Bess would express her own opinions. Even if they disagreed, the important thing was that she was there, caring.

There were ample grounds for pessimism on the eve of the Marshall Plan vote. Bess remembered what had happened when Congress ran amok against President Roosevelt in 1937. “You are right about what I’m facing,” Dad wrote. “But I’ve got to meet it with all I have. It may not be enough but if the Almighty didn’t make my brain container as big as it should be, I’ll have to use what he gave me. Congress will get its share of the responsibility but I can’t and won’t shirk mine.”

As he prepared a radio speech to the nation, Dad filled in Bess on another day in the White House.

Dad’s radio speech rallied popular support for the Marshall Plan. “We’re putting it over,” he wrote exultantly to Mother. He dismissed as minor worries the overriding of his tax veto and political firestorms such as the wrath of the nation’s Catholics, who were mad at him for declaring Tuesday instead of Friday a meatless day to free up food for the starving Europeans. The Catholics did not like getting stuck with two meatless days. It was one of those vote-getting details that slipped by the president and his staff, because they were concentrating on trying to save Western civilization.

Something else was visible in these late 1947 letters to Bess: a growing presidential confidence. Others saw it too. One of the closest and most astute observers was Charlie Ross.

In the summer of 1947, Charlie’s two-year leave from his job at the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
was up. Instead of going back to the paper, he resigned and enlisted for the duration of the Truman tenure. This was doubly remarkable because Charlie was troubled by agonizing bouts of arthritis. Worse, he had already suffered two mild heart attacks from working those eighteen-hour White House days. He concealed these danger signals from Dad and Mother - and perhaps from himself. He was equally debonair about a warning his doctor gave him early in 1948, that he had only four more years to live.

On Christmas Day 1947, Charlie wrote Dad a memorable letter. He said that the past two-and-one-half years had been “the most rewarding years of my life.” He praised the “good team” that Dad had assembled for some of this feeling. “But the greatest inspiration, Mr. President, has been . . . you as President, you as a human being. . . . My admiration for you, and my deep affection, have grown steadily since the day you honored me with your trust.”

I know Dad showed this letter to Mother. It made her doubly proud of having urged Dad to hire Charlie and eternally grateful to Mary Paxton Keeley for cheering her on. As this letter demonstrated, Charlie had become much more than a press secretary. He was a counselor, a friend. Only those who are close to a president understand how much he needs this kind of support.

Unfortunately, Charlie Ross’ view of Harry Truman was not shared by a great many people, as 1948 dawned. Almost everyone assumed that Dad would not run for reelection. Seldom has a president sunk so low in the opinion polls. According to their statistics, only 36 percent of the population approved of the way Harry Truman was doing his job.

As late as September 24, 1947, Dad himself seemed to share this low opinion. On that day, he wrote to Bess: “I’d be much better off if I were out or licked and I suspect you and Margie would be much more pleased.” But the support Bess gave him throughout the struggle for the Marshall Plan - and winning that fight - changed his attitude dramatically.

I suspect that Dad also may have been thinking about one of the last conversations he had had with Mamma Truman, a month or two before she died. She asked him if Senator Robert Taft was going to be nominated for president by the Republicans in 1948. “He might be,” Dad said.

He knew that among all the Republicans she disliked (and she definitely disliked all of them), Senator Taft was the most detested. “Harry, are you going to run?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Mamma,” Dad replied.

“Don’t you think it’s about time you made up your mind?” she asked.

Bess demonstrated what she was thinking by deciding to invite the Wallace family to join us for Christmas in the White House, instead of going home. She thought it might be the next to last Christmas of the Truman presidency, and she wanted her family to enjoy the White House without a smog of defeat dampening everyone’s spirits. Fred and Chris and their two children, Uncle George and Aunt May, and Uncle Frank and Aunt Natalie joined us for a pleasant holiday.

Early in 1948, Bess wrote to Nellie Noland, Ethel’s sister, that “it just didn’t seem right, not to go home for the holidays, but after all the family arrived it didn’t seem to make any difference.” It was another glimpse of the intensity of her feelings for the Wallace family. No matter where they were geographically, when they were together, Mother felt at home.

It was partly to make Mother feel more at home in the White House that Dad got involved in a pitched battle with Congress and the press in these first months of 1948. One of the chief pleasures of 219 North Delaware Street were its porches, particularly the back porches, where the family whiled away more than one summer afternoon or evening, secure from prying eyes. With the Truman partnership running smoothly again, Dad hoped Mother would spend more of her summers in Washington. He decided the White House ought to have a back porch and soon found the perfect place for it - on the second floor, behind the six columns of the south portico.

You would have thought he had just announced he was going to replace the White House with a lean-to or a split-level bungalow, to hear the howls from Congress and the press. Representative Frederick A. Muhlenberg, a Pennsylvania Republican who claimed he was the only architect in Congress, declared the porch was “illegal” as well as aesthetically wrong.
The Washington Post
accused Dad of “meddling” with a building that did not belong to him. The Fine Arts Commission, composed exclusively of what Dad called “high-hats,” intoned that the porch would “permanently change the appearance of the south facade.”

Dad ignored them and hired William Adams Delano, a former chairman of the Fine Arts Commission, to design the porch. Mr. Delano approved the idea heartily, which silenced the Fine Arts Commission. He agreed with Dad’s contention that the porch was a major improvement that was needed to complete the White House’s design, as well as to give the presidential family a place to relax outdoors in warm weather without 20,000 people staring at them. As Dad explained it, the porch “broke the skinny perpendicular lines” of those portico columns. It also eliminated the need for seven ugly awnings that jutted between the columns during the summer to keep the sun out of the Blue Room on the first floor.

All these arguments made good sense, and every presidential family since the Truman days has used - and praised - the porch. But no one, as far as I know, has connected its creation to 219 North Delaware Street.

Meanwhile, serious politics and incessant first ladying remained the order of the day. The major battle on the presidential front was persuading the Republican Congress to vote for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. By this time, the cold war had begun in earnest. Russia, as Dad wrote in a letter to Bess, “has at last shown her hand, and it contains the cards [Secretary of State] Marshall and I thought it would.” Few sensible Americans could think otherwise, after the Communist coup that seized Czechoslovakia at the end of February 1948.

This turning point in Soviet-American relations put President Truman under terrific strain. Bess again became alarmed at his exhaustion and insisted on another vacation at Key West. He went down there at the end of February 1948. The international situation did not improve, and he began to think we might be at war with Russia in thirty days. He told me this in a long, hair-raising letter on March 3. Whenever war threatened, Dad thought of its impact on my generation of Americans, who would have to fight it. He felt a need to explain to me how hard he had tried to avoid it.

In this letter, he went all the way back to his Senate career and his achievements there, which led to the vice-presidential nomination. Then he turned to the years of his presidency.