Bess Truman (46 page)

This was an opinion that Bess Wallace Truman shared. It had a personal dimension for her, because in 1947, the Waggoner-Gates Mill, a small corporation by the standards of American big business, had ceased producing Queen of the Pantry Flour, after sixty-four years. The Waggoners, who were majority stockholders, had decided to sell the business, because it was no longer profitable. Frank Wallace, who had devoted twenty years of his life to trying to keep it afloat, was “sick about it,” Grandmother Wallace told her daughter. After much wrangling with the Waggoners, the company staggered on as a local mill, producing flour for bakeries and restaurants and other large buyers. It finally shut down for good in 1953.

In his 1948 victory, Dad had carried Democratic majorities into both houses of Congress. But he soon discovered that this did not mean smooth sailing for his legislative program. Southerners, after treacherously deserting the party in the election, were eager to call themselves Democrats and use their seniority to grab key committee chairmanships. They promptly went into business as obstructionists and political saboteurs in alliance with Truman-hating Republicans such as Robert Taft.

Nevertheless, 1949 was the happiest, most peaceful year of the Truman presidency. The 48 victory gave Mother and Dad a feeling that they could finally catch their breaths and take the time to enjoy themselves a little. For Mother, this took the form of inviting more personal friends to Blair House for lunch or dinner, or if they were from out of town, for a weekend visit. I may be flattering myself, but I think she was lonely without me.

One day Mother sat down with Edith Helm and announced in a solemn voice that she wanted to arrange a luncheon in honor of a member of the White House staff. Under no circumstances was any mention of it to be made to the press. Mrs. Helm dutifully got out her appointment book and asked who the guest of honor was going to be. She presumed it was Charlie Ross or someone of his lofty rank in the circle around the president.

Mother’s eyes twinkled. “You.”

After thirty years of sending out invitations for other people, Mrs. Helm was thrilled by this idea. She and Mother worked out the guest list together, inviting mutual friends such as Perle Mesta; Mrs. James Thomson; the daughter of Missouri’s 1912 presidential candidate, Speaker of the House Champ Clark; and Mrs. D. Buchanan Merryman, aunt of the Duchess of Windsor. Mother discovered from a conference with the Blair House housekeeper that Mrs. Helm particularly liked an exquisite set of blue-and-gold Lowestoft china, and this was used for the table. The White House florist made a lovely blue-and-gold centerpiece to match the china.

The luncheon was a triumph of hospitality - and privacy. The reporters never heard a word about it. That was the best part of it, as far as Mother was concerned.

Another of 1949’s highlights, for Mother, was a visit by Winston Churchill and his wife. Mother gave an official dinner for them in the dining room of Lee House. I did not have to be lured to Washington for this fete. I came like a speeding bullet. It was a cheerful evening. The great Englishman showered compliments on President Truman for the Marshall Plan and the NATO alliance. Mother glowed. Although she was chary of her praise, she loved to hear other people say nice things about Dad. It was especially nice to hear them from a man of Winston Churchill’s stature.

At that dinner, Mother tried to add a touch of 219 North Delaware by directing the housekeeper to serve one of Vietta Garr’s best dishes, stuffed cucumbers, with the fish course. The cook apparently decided he did not have to consult with Vietta on the recipe, and the result was an inedible disaster. I will never forget the expression on Mother’s face when she tried to cut one of those things. They were still raw. That cook was soon on his way to some greasy spoon, where he belonged.

No one said a word about this culinary misfortune, of course, and afterward, Mr. Churchill gave Mother a beautifully bound copy of his little book on painting. She asked him to inscribe it. He sat there for about fifteen minutes, brooding over that task, and finally just wrote: “For Mrs. Harry S. Truman from Winston S. Churchill.” I remember being disappointed when I nosily peered over Mother’s shoulder and read this inscription. I had been expecting him to come up with some brilliant bit of Churchillian rhetoric. He may have pondered such an alternative and decided this simple statement was a better match to Mother’s personality. I now think he was right.

While I was struggling to find my way in show business, the First Lady gave her blessing to a pioneering theatrical experiment - shipping an American production of Shakespeare abroad for the entertainment of supposedly snobbish Europeans. The man who managed this feat with a lot of support and encouragement from Mother was a former Independence English teacher, Blevins Davis, who had gone to New York in the 1930s and became a successful Broadway producer.

In 1946, Blevins married the widow of railroad baron James Norman Hill. When she died in 1948, he inherited $9 million. In 1949, Denmark invited the United States to send a company to perform
Hamlet
in Elsinore Castle, where the story began, and Blevins put his money and theatrical experience at the disposal of the United States. Mother smoothed his path to State Department approval and the production, starring Clarence Derwent, Walter Abel, and an unknown actor named Ernest Borgnine, was a tremendous hit.

This was the beginning of a whole series of theatrical companies that Blevins took abroad in the next few years. The climax of these artistic expeditions was his production of
Porgy and Bess,
which toured Europe from London to Moscow to almost continuous applause. Blevins’ pioneering, which put a severe dent in his fortune, eventually led to the creation in the mid-fifties of a State Department division that routinely sends artistic companies abroad. Few people know that Bess Wallace Truman was the godmother of this good idea.

Another of Mother’s invisible contributions to the country was less spectacular but far more important. When Harry Truman became president, the budget for the National Institutes of Health was about $2 million. This was hardly surprising. The days of all-out war on cancer and other killer diseases were still in the distant future. Most of America’s money was being invested in the shooting war to defend the country and the world against the fascist threat.

During the 48 campaign, Mother had met and liked Florence Mahoney, a lively woman who was married to a relative of James A. Cox. He was the newspaper publisher whom Dad had met in Florida in 1947 and persuaded to back his policies. Mrs. Mahoney had become interested in the politics of the nation’s health through her friendship with Mary Lasker, the philanthropist widow of a public relations executive who had contributed millions to medical research. Mrs. Mahoney suggested to Mother that the National Institutes of Health could become the center of a massive effort to conquer major diseases such as cancer. Mother found this a fascinating idea and went to work on making it a reality.

For the next four years at budget time, Mother urged Dad to increase the NIH funding. The result of her quiet advocacy is visible in the dollars and cents record. By the time Harry Truman left the presidency in 1952, the NIH was getting $46 million from the federal government, a twenty-fold increase. It obviously helps to have the First Lady for a lobbyist.

Florence Mahoney told me that for three decades she had yearned to tell this story, but she abided by Mother’s unwavering refusal to give her permission. With a shrewdness that goes back to her first interview after Dad was nominated for vice president, Mother never wanted anyone but Dad to get credit for the achievements of his administration. She never forgot the way the newspapers had tried to make Harry Truman look like a Pendergast yes-man, then a cheap imitation of Franklin Roosevelt. She never wanted anyone to be able to say that Harry Truman got his ideas from his wife.

During these first happy months of the second term, I spent most of my time in New York, practicing hard. I was getting pretty independent, and Mother acknowledged this in small ways. When my friend Jane Watson, daughter of IBM’s president, became engaged to Jack Irwin and asked me to be a bridesmaid, Mother agreed to give a small dinner and dancing party at Blair House for them in May. She sent me the menu she had worked out and asked for my approval. This almost convinced me, at the age of twenty-four, that I was an adult at last.

Mother came up to New York for the wedding, which was at Brick Presbyterian Church. Lawrence Tibbett, the Metropolitan Opera’s first American-born star, who sang at the ceremony, greeted her in the vestibule. “I just saw Margaret. She’s in the wings,” he said.

Mother was somewhat startled by this casual transformation of a church into a theater. “If I told that to your Grandmother,” she said, as we discussed the wedding the next morning, “she’d go into shock.” Mother’s eyes twinkled. I realized that she thought it was funny.

That year, Harry Truman wrote Bess another memorable anniversary letter. She had gone home to Independence early in June to supervise the continuing repairs on the house.

Dad was really ebullient that year. He even had the nerve to revive a custom he had dropped somewhere around 1913, calling Mother “Miss Lizzie,” when he wanted to make her mad. The man just liked to live dangerously. That June, when Mother went home, he wrote to Ethel Noland: “Hope you’ve seen Miss Lizzie by this time.” He speculated about what would have happened to him if “Miss Lizzie” had “gone off” with one of her early beaus. “Harry . . . probably would have been either a prominent farmer in Jackson County or a Major General in the regular army and not have been half so much trouble and worry to his ‘sisters and his cousins and his aunts.’”

During these first sunny months of the new term, Bess was also cheered by her mother’s surprising return to good health. After seeming to be in an inexorable decline, Grandmother Wallace’s Christmas rally continued, and by the time she went back to Independence in June, Dr. Wallace Graham, the White House physician, told Dad she was in better health than at any time in the previous two years.

Among the presidential political family, however, a tragic situation developed with Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. He was the last holdover from FDR’s cabinet, but he had given unstinting loyalty to Harry Truman. He had been savagely battered in two big political brawls, the unification of the armed services into the Department of Defense and the recognition of Israel. He had backed the president in the teeth of the quarreling generals and admirals in the first one but had made no secret of his disagreement with Dad’s decision to recognize Israel. It was an honest difference of opinion, but Drew Pearson and his ilk declined to admit such a possibility. They smeared Mr. Forrestal at every opportunity.

A sensitive, emotional man, he simply broke down under the beating. He became more and more mentally disturbed, and Dad finally had to ask him to resign. He entered Bethesda Naval Hospital for treatment for severe depression. Bess was deeply affected by this political agony - it stirred her deepest sympathies. On Easter Saturday, she sent Mr. Forrestal a bouquet of roses. He wrote her a touching reply.

“My dear Mrs. Truman: The flowers you sent are beautiful and have helped brighten a bleak day. I am moved that you should trouble to send me a token but it’s typical of your thoughtfulness. A Happy Easter to you and the President and Miss Truman. You all deserve it.”

He signed it: “Faithfully.” A few days later, his faith, whether in himself or his country, ran out. He leaped to his death from his hospital room.

Mother was terribly shaken. Dad was enraged. He considered Drew Pearson the murderer of James Forrestal and said so. Some people thought this was an extreme statement. Perhaps it was, in a literal sense of the word. But in the emotional context of his marriage, as I have explained it in this book, it is easy to see why Dad’s anger was intensified by his knowledge of the impact of Mr. Forrestal’s suicide on Mother.

That summer in Independence, Mother went on a diet to reduce her weight as well as to control her blood pressure. Serious dieting while on Washington’s merry-go-round of official lunches and dinners was difficult. She cut down drastically on her calories and rigorously banned all salt and salted meats from her menus. The result was impressive. Her blood pressure came down, and she lost twenty pounds. Later in the year, she sat for one of her best photographs, in the living room of 219 North Delaware. Here was proof positive of her change of heart about being First Lady – she let a photographer inside her sanctuary, not to win an election, but just to take her picture.

Back in Washington at the end of the summer, Bess found herself and our house in the political headlines. A favorite congressional tactic when a president is riding high is an investigation that smears innuendos all over his administration. A classic of this brand of capital throat-cutting was launched in August, when Senator Clyde R. Hoey of North Carolina began an investigation of so-called five-percenters in the Truman White House. It would be a waste of time even to try to summarize this tangle of allegation and rumor about favors done and presents given in return for them. But Mother was amazed to discover that she had been one of the recipients of a deep freeze, given by one of the favor seekers back in 1945.