Bess Truman (47 page)

After four years of living at a White House pace, that date seemed almost prehistoric. But the statement was true, as far as it went. In 1945, Mother had remarked while talking on the phone to General Harry Vaughan, Dad’s military aide, that neighbors were sending her gifts of food that had overflowed the old icebox. One of the favor seekers was in General Vaughan’s office and overheard the conversation. He offered to get Mother a deep freeze and, for good measure, sent one to each of a half dozen other members of the administration.

Mother sent a thank-you note to the man who shipped the freezer - and thought no more about it until a few weeks later, when the smell of rotting food filled the kitchen. The freezer was a lemon. She had the Secret Service cart it away to the dump and went out and bought her own freezer. Throughout the mudslinging session about these gifts, Mother never said a word to a reporter or anyone else. It was not her style to respond to smears. This whole disgraceful episode, which ended without a single member of the administration even being accused of breaking a law, only confirmed her opinion of the press.

Mother was far more concerned about the terrible beating Dad’s military aide, General Harry Vaughan, took in this affair. She backed Dad’s refusal to accept his resignation, which he offered because he thought he had become a liability to the president. “Harry,” Dad said, “we came in here together and we’re going out of here together. Those so-and-so’s are trying to get me through you.” Mother was fond of Margaret Vaughan, the general’s wife. She also was fond of him.

Mother’s straitlaced public image gave rise to a lot of rumors that she disapproved of General Vaughan and Fred Canfil and other rowdy characters whose company Dad enjoyed in his off-duty hours. Nothing could be further from the truth – as long as they kept their antics out of the newspapers. She recognized that these men gave Dad some badly needed relaxation. I sometimes suspect that she wished her mother had not made her so much a lady that she did not feel free to join them. As I have said earlier, she liked a hearty laugh as much as Harry Truman.

General Vaughan and Mother had some amusing correspondence in which he sensed, I think, this conflict. He addressed her as “My Dear Lady” and wrote in the most elaborate style, as if he were a courtier addressing a queen. He was the only member of the president’s inner circle who had the nerve to tease mother. She let him get away with it because he also told her a lot of funny stories. This was his forte in the Oval Office and more often than not Dad would say: “Tell that one to Bess.”

One of Mother’s favorites concerned a faithful member of the Methodist church who missed three services in a row. The minister called on him to ask why. “Parson,” the man said. “My clothes are so shabby I’m ashamed to go.”

“We’ll take care of that,” the minister said. He collected a complete new outfit for him from charitable parishioners and delivered it forthwith. The next Sunday the old boy still did not show. A little peeved, the minister paid him a visit. He found him sitting on the front porch all dressed up. “What’s the matter, Joe?” he asked. “I expected to see you at the services today.”

“Well I’ll tell you, Parson,” Joe said. “When I got dressed up in these new clothes I looked so prosperous that I went to the Episcopal Church.”

While General Vaughan writhed, and Dad angrily defended him, Mother worked incredibly hard at Blair House, with its triple and quadruple entertaining requirements. A random two-week sample of her schedule in 1949 shows no less than thirteen major engagements, ranging from a Congressional Club breakfast to a musical luncheon given by the Democratic Women’s National Council to a handshaking marathon with a group of Home Demonstration Agents from Vermont. She opened the National Flower Mart on the Pilgrim Steps of Washington Cathedral and received the Society of Sponsors of the U.S. Navy. “So went the busy days,” wrote Edith Helm in her memoir of her White House years, which blissfully ignored the brutal politics that swirled around her polite social world.

Mother did not have that privilege. She had to smile her way through these wearying chores and sit down with the exasperated president in his study that night and discuss what could – and could not - be done.

One topic they discussed surprisingly early in this second term was whether Harry Truman would run for president again. The Republican Eightieth Congress had rammed through the Twenty-second Amendment in 1947, barring a president from serving more than two terms. The wording of the measure exempted the incumbent president from the prohibition, so Dad was eligible to run in 1952.

Mother made it clear that she was opposed to the idea. That led to the problem of finding a successor who would and could carry on the Democratic Party’s policies abroad and at home. This was, in Dad’s mind, an absolutely vital task. Looking over the potential candidates, he did not find many promising names. Some lacked stature, others experience in national and international affairs. Only one man seemed to combine both: Fred Vinson, whom he had first appointed secretary of the treasury, then chief justice. Mr. Vinson had been a popular congressman, a successful executive in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations and a chief justice who was often praised for the smooth operation of the highest court. This experience in the three branches of government made him, in Dad’s opinion, uniquely qualified to be president.

As early as March 1949, on a visit to Key West, Dad wrote to Mother that “the Big Judge,” as he called Mr. Vinson, was coming to see him. “I have to talk to him on some very important things, which affect the future of the nation.” He urged Mother and me to join them. “You’ll have a wonderful weekend and I’ll be able to tell you what I have in mind as a result of my talk with Vinson.”

Mother decided she preferred a weekend with me in Manhattan. So Dad talked with Mr. Vinson without her. The discussion was maddeningly inconclusive. Mr. Vinson was like the girl in the song. He would not say yes, but he would not say no. He was happy on the Supreme Court and obviously reluctant to leave it. But he insisted he was ready to do whatever Harry Truman thought he should do for the good of the country.

As the year 1949 ended, the sunny political skies began to darken in ways far more serious than the attempt to smear General Vaughan. In September, U.S. intelligence discovered that Soviet Russia had exploded an atomic bomb, breaking America’s nuclear monopoly. Next came the dismaying news that much of the breakthrough had been achieved by stealing atomic secrets with the help of various espionage rings in Great Britain and the United States. The media already had echoed with allegations about Communist influences in the government, thanks to a much-publicized confrontation between a former State Department official, Alger Hiss, and a former Communist, Whittaker Chambers, before a hearing of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. When Mr. Hiss denied knowing Mr. Chambers and insisted he had never given him secret State Department documents, he was indicted for perjury.

In China, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime collapsed under a final Communist onslaught, and he fled to Taiwan with the remnants of his army and government. This too produced fodder for the anti-Communist witch-hunters, who tried to pin the “loss of China” on the Truman administration. Dad responded to all these challenges. After weeks of thought and analysis, he released the news of the Russian bomb in a way that minimized a panicky response. After more study of intelligence reports and the best scientific advice, he decided that the Russians were capable of building a hydrogen bomb and ordered the United States to begin construction of that terrifying weapon. Dean Acheson released a white paper that made it clear Chiang Kai-shek, not the United States, had lost China.

But politicians - and reporters - are not satisfied by a calm statement of the facts once they sense the possibility of creating a sensation. Early in February 1950, the greatest sensation monger of the era, Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, stepped onstage with a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, accusing Dean Acheson of harboring 205 Communists in the State Department. Dad contemptuously dismissed the telegram the senator sent to him demanding action.

But McCarthy soon was joined by a host of unsavory allies, such as Senator Kenneth Wherry of Nebraska. They concentrated most of their venom on Dean Acheson for losing China and declaring that he would still consider Alger Hiss a friend, even after he had been convicted of lying under oath about being a Communist. But they also flung accusations at John Snyder, who had succeeded Fred Vinson as Secretary of the Treasury, and at any other department where dissatisfied bureaucrats or out-and-out nuts told them that Communists were employed.

Although Dad did not give the public a hint that he took the witch-hunters seriously, their assaults and the enormous responsibility involved in the decisions on atomic weapons took a toll on his nerves and energy. McCarthy and his allies were undermining the keystone of his presidency, a bipartisan foreign policy. In a letter to his cousin, Ralph Truman, Dad wrote that he was in the midst of “the most terrible struggle any president ever had.” In mid-March 1950, headaches began to torment him for the first time in years.

Alarmed, Mother urged a retreat to Key West to regain his strength and equilibrium. As usual on such matters, he took her advice. But the worries did not go away in the Florida sunshine. From there he wrote her one of the most anguished letters of his presidency.

After reporting the good news that his head had stopped hurting, he turned to the political situation. “You see everybody shoots at me, if not directly, then at some of the staff closest to me. I’d much rather they’d pound me directly. The general trend of the pieces is that I’m a very small man in a very large place and when some one I trust joins the critical side - well it hurts. I’m much older and very tired and I need support as no man ever did.”

Earlier in the letter, he mentioned that Chief Justice Fred Vinson had paid him another visit. “The Chief Justice is one man in high place who still believes in me, trusts me and supports me. . . . What has made me so jittery - they started on Snyder and have almost broken him, then Vaughan, whose mental condition is very bad. Now they are after the top brain man in the Cabinet [Dean Acheson]. The whole foreign policy is at stake just as we are on the road to a possible solution. . . . I’m telling you so you may understand how badly I need
your
help and support now.”

On this visit, Dad again discussed with Chief justice Vinson whether he would become his successor. He wanted to begin laying the groundwork for making him a viable candidate. He reminded Mother of Mr. Vinson’s loyalty during the ‘48 campaign, when he asked him to go to Moscow to see if he could make a breakthrough for peace with Stalin. “He didn’t want to go,” Dad recalled, in this letter. “But he said, ‘I’m your man to do what you want me to do for the welfare of the country.’ How many Congressmen, Senators, even Cabinet Officers would have said that?”

The linkage in this hitherto unpublished letter between a conference with Mr. Vinson and the hint in the opening lines that Mother had joined “the critical side” convinces me that they were still debating the question of Dad running in 1952. With Mr. Vinson still on the fence, Mother was urging Dad to find another candidate. He was still hoping the chief justice would make up his mind.

A few days later, the Key West sunshine had restored Dad’s optimism and energy. He wrote Mother another letter, noting that Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, a hitherto respectable Republican conservative, had joined the McCarthyite red-baiters. He had decided to answer these demagogues with another whistle-stop tour that would tell people the truth. “We’ll take them to town as we did before,” he promised her.

Back in Washington, President Truman apparently settled the question of running again and ended the tension it was causing between him and his wife. A month before he launched his counteroffensive against McCarthy, he sat down at his desk and wrote one of those memorandums to himself that are the closest he came to keeping a diary. It is not only a significant document in the history of the Truman marriage and their political partnership. It contains some of Dad’s most profound thoughts on the presidency.

I am sure Dad showed this magnificent statement to Mother, and I am equally sure that she glowed as she read it. That settles it, she thought. She could look forward to the next two years in the White House with something close to tranquility. She could anticipate a future in which she and her husband would finally have some time together to enjoy themselves as private citizens.