Bess Truman (44 page)

Months later, on a voyage to France, Louise Stewart wrote to Bess: “I appreciate with all my heart your many many wonderful kindnesses to me. I guess that it is really what keeps me going most of the time. I keep trying to pick up the pieces of my life but often it seems quite hopeless. But neither you or Bobby expect me to fall down on my face and so I’ll keep trying, but without you I don’t think that I’d make it. . . .”

Shortly after Dad wrote that letter to the Stewarts, Mother and I rushed to Independence. Grandmother Wallace was gravely ill. From the White House, Dad wrote Mother a dramatic letter on the eve of the convention. The situation was one enormous, confusing stew. The southerners and the liberals were at each other’s throats. Everyone in the world was giving the president advice.

He could write that last line to Bess now because he knew that she was on his side, in spite of the pain his confrontations with history had caused her.

Bess and I joined Dad in the White House a few days before the convention began on July 12, 1948. For the first three days, we watched the proceedings on television, an historic first for both the president and the American people. (Dad instantly foresaw what it meant for the president: “No privacy anywhere,” he wrote in his diary.) The convention was not very cheerful viewing. The liberals introduced a civil rights plank that won after a floor fight, and most of the southerners walked out to nominate their own candidate, Governor Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.

I have always liked the reason Mr. Thurmond gave for bolting the Democratic Party in 1948. A reporter pointed out to him that he had not objected when Franklin D. Roosevelt had run on a platform replete with the same promises of justice and equal opportunity for America’s black citizens.

“But Truman really means it,” Thurmond said.

Rumors swirled around various alternate candidates, from Eisenhower to Claude Pepper to Alben Barkley. Dad remained perfectly calm and in close touch with what was really happening. On the evening of July 14, we went up to Philadelphia by train and watched the end of the wrangling in the almost airless Convention Hall. It took most of the night for them to get through nominating Harry Truman for president and Alben Barkley for vice president. Not until 2:00 a.m. did Dad make his acceptance speech to the exhausted delegates.

He gave a speech that shocked those bedraggled Democrats awake, as if they had all been wired to a dynamo - which, metaphorically, they were. “Senator Barkley and I will win this election and make those Republicans like it - don’t you forget that!” he began. “We will do that because they are wrong and we are right.”

He recalled what the Democratic Party had done for the farmer and the workingman in the past sixteen years. It had given them social security, rural electrification, crop price supports, unemployment insurance. If the farmers and labor “don’t do their duty by the Democratic Party they are the most ungrateful people in the world!” He castigated the Eightieth Congress for all the things that had not been done to control inflation, clear slums, fund better schools and social welfare programs. Then he unleashed a lightning bolt.

Pandemonium was the only word to describe the Convention Hall. For two solid minutes, those previously dispirited Democrats stood up on their chairs and roared their enthusiasm for Harry S. Truman. Beside me, Mother was chuckling delightedly. She was one of the few people in Philadelphia who knew all about Turnip Day. A year before, you will recall, Dad had written her a letter on July 26, noting that it was Turnip Day - and Nellie Noland’s birthday.

Mother and I went home to Missouri after the convention to be with Grandmother Wallace, who had had another sinking spell. Mother proceeded to con me into painting the kitchen and pantry. She told me I would enjoy it. She loved to paint and redecorate that old house as much as her mother did. I enjoyed it too for about three days. But with Mother as foreman, it turned into a lifetime job. One coat, two coats, were not enough. I was still painting in mid-August.

Meanwhile, the president was grappling with a major crisis in Europe. After months of threat and bluster, the Russians had clamped a total blockade on Berlin. Dad responded with a massive airlift that kept the city alive without resort to shooting our way through on the ground. The situation remained tense, and the secretary of the army did not help matters by abruptly calling General Lucius Clay, the American commander in Germany, home for consultations. Dad wrote Mother that Clay’s return had stirred up a “terrific how-dy-do for no good reason. Marshall [secretary of state] and I had decided it was not necessary for him to come and so told Forrestal [secretary of defense] - but you know how smart that Defense setup thinks it is.”

Next, Secretary Forrestal intensified the “how-dy-do” by suggesting to the president that he turn over our atomic bomb arsenal to the army to use when they saw fit. “Wouldn’t that be a nice peace gesture?” Dad wryly asked Mother.

He was happy to report that in spite of appearances to the contrary, “it looks like the Russkies are going to come in without a fight.” If this happened and the situation in the Middle East also calmed down. “Things will be in such shape in foreign affairs that we can go to work in earnest on that bunch of ‘Hypercrits’ known as Republicans.

“They sure are in a stew and mad as wet hens. If I can make them madder, maybe they’ll do the job the old gods used to put on the Greeks and Romans.”

Those last two sentences reveal the secret reason for the Turnip Day session, a strategy that Dad had obviously shared with Mother. By this time, she was enjoying the campaign. Deep in her woman’s heart, Mother loved a good fight. She kept this combative side of herself carefully concealed, but it was the secret of her success as a tennis and basketball player in her youth.

Her enthusiasm for the contest with Congress was so strong, she sent Dad a telegram of congratulations (which she persuaded me to sign with her) on the message he sent to the Turnip Day session when they gathered in muggy Washington, D.C., on July 26. I can see now that Bess was doing everything she could to keep her man’s morale high.

Dad responded with a letter to me, which he knew Mother would also see.

On September 11, from the
Williamsburg,
Dad told Mother how the first part of the campaign was shaping up. “Farm speech at Des Moines on Sept. 18, conservation at Denver on the 20th, reclamation at Salt Lake City on the 21st. . . . Then San Francisco, L.A. San Diego, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Ky. West Va and Washington D.C. Seems like a nice little trip - what?”

Before we launched that expedition, there was a trip to Detroit to speak to an immense Labor Day rally. Mother did not go with us. She went out to Denver to act as honorary godmother at the christening of Fred Wallace’s third child, Charlotte Margaret and special permission from the priest to participate in the ceremony. (Chris Wallace was a Catholic and Freddy had become a convert.) It was one more illustration of her intense involvement in her youngest brother’s life.

I acted as hostess on the train to Detroit and got a preview of what the “nice little trip” was going to be like. We were up at 6:15 a.m., and Dad made six speeches, including the major address to 200,000 roaring workers in Detroit. He joked with Mother about it in a letter a few days later, admitting that “six speeches on Monday was rather strenuous.” He added that he had told the reporters that this was “only a sample of what they’d get on the western trip.”

That sums up better than several dozen paragraphs from me the pace of the Truman whistle-stop campaign of 1948. Mother joined us in Des Moines, and we rumbled across the American continent with the candidate speaking from 6:00 a.m. in the morning until midnight on some days. The routine at each stop soon became as polished as a vaudeville act. Dad emerged on the observation platform of the last car and got an ovation. The local politicians would greet him, and he would give a brief speech. Then he introduced Mother as “the Boss” and me as “the one who bosses the Boss.”

Sometime during the first week, I noticed that Mother was not exactly enthused by this introduction. I sensed that she did not like the suggestion that she let me push her around, the possible implication that I was a spoiled brat, which reflected on her standing as an American mother. Seeking to head off an explosion, I approached Dad and said, very confidentially: “You know, I don’t think Mother really likes you calling me her boss.”

Dad thought about it for a second, obviously calculating risks and advantages. “It gets a good laugh,” he said.

I remained the Boss’ boss.

The high point of that first post-convention swing was our visit to the home of former Vice President John Nance Garner in the little town of Uvalde, Texas. We arrived at 5:00 a.m. on Sunday, October
26
.
That did not bother Dad, of course. He thought that was the hour when every right thinking, right living American should get up. The rest of us were practically comatose.

Fortunately, the citizens of Uvalde kept the same farmers’ hours. Some 4,000 of them whooped and howled into the rising sun at the depot, with the seventy-nine-year-old Mr. Garner leading the cheers. They presented Dad with an angora goat wearing a gold blanket with red lettering which read: “Dewey’s Goat.” Dad loved it. After posing for pictures with the frisky creature, Dad announced: “I’m going to clip it and make a rug. Then I’m going to let it graze on the White House lawn for the next four years.”

We then sat down to the most awesome breakfast I have ever seen or tried to eat. There was white-wing dove and mourning dove, bacon, ham, fried chicken, scrambled eggs, hot biscuits, Uvalde honey, peach preserves, and gallons of coffee. As we finished this feast, Dad gave Cactus Jack a small black satchel. He said it contained “medicine, only to be used in case of snakebites.” It was the same high quality Kentucky bourbon the vice president used to invite Senator Truman to share when he visited Mr. Garner’s office in his Senate days.

Outside his house, Mr. Garner described Dad as an “old and very good friend.” Those words guaranteed Harry Truman the votes of the numerous Texas conservatives, who regarded Mr. Garner with almost reverential affection. After all, he had walked out on Franklin D. Roosevelt rather than support him for a third term. Dad responded by calling Cactus Jack “Mr. President.” That was what he used to call him in the Senate. Whereupon Mother astonished everyone by breaking her rule of silence and making her only speech of the campaign. “Good morning,” she said, “and thank you for this wonderful greeting.”

We got back to Washington from that first trip with (according to Dad’s count) 140 stops and 147 speeches behind us. Edith Helm, the White House social secretary, informed Mrs. Truman that the capital’s hostesses and diplomats and social climbers were in a dither because she had not yet announced a schedule of formal dinners and receptions. Mother let them dither. She issued a statement that the president was too busy campaigning to discuss the subject with him.

There was another reason for this delay, which Mother wisely declined to mention. The White House was in danger of collapsing. She and Dad had been worried about it for more than a year. Their alarm began when Dad noticed how the floor in his upstairs oval office shook when the color guard stamped across it to bring the colors downstairs to begin an official reception. He ordered an inspection that reported various ceilings, including the one in the State Dining Room, were staying up only from force of habit. Nothing but a few rusty nails were supporting them.

For most of 1948, we lived with a forest of steel pipes in our bedrooms and sitting rooms. They were supposed to hold up the ceilings, but they could do nothing about the rot that was destroying the old timber. In the summer of 1948, one leg of my piano broke through the floor. The engineers next reported that Dad’s bathroom was in danger of falling into the Red Room, and they were worried about the stability of his bedroom, too. They moved him into Lincoln’s bedroom.

Can you imagine what the press would have done with this story during the 1948 campaign? The whole mess would have been blamed on Harry Truman. The White House would have become a metaphor for his collapsing administration. Mother’s decision to say nothing about it and take the heat for the lack of a formal social season was one of her major, hitherto unknown contributions to Dad’s fight to become president in his own right.

This did not mean the First Lady was escaping her handshaking chores. We were barely off the train on October 16 when Mother gave a tea for 150 members of the Democratic National Committee. I particularly remember the night Dad gave a radio speech denouncing the Eightieth Congress’ anti-labor bill, the Taft-Hartley Act, which they had passed over his veto. Mother had been standing up all afternoon, shaking hands with hundreds of members of the Colonial Dames of America. As we started downstairs to watch him speak, I thought she looked terribly tired and suggested we use the elevator.