Bess Truman (53 page)

Several times Dad became so infuriated, he wrote letters to Mr. Stevenson that would have blown him and the Democratic Party apart if he had mailed them. Here are the explosive opening lines of one he dashed off in early August of 1952.

Dad then recounted the story of Mr. Stevenson’s coyness about the nomination and the way Dad had rescued him from rejection in Chicago. He then described what Mr. Stevenson had done to the Democratic Party thereafter.

On August 16, 1952, Governor Stevenson allowed himself to get mousetrapped by one of the oldest dodges in the newspaper business. The Oregon
Journal
asked him if he could “clean up the mess in Washington.” Mr. Stevenson fell for it, replying solemnly that he had cleaned up a big mess in Illinois and thought he could clean up Washington. At the White House, an exploding president again reached for his pen.

I was not in the White House when these letters were written, but I know Mother - and his own common sense - stopped Dad from mailing them. By and large, Bess believed it was better to suffer fools and foolishness in silence than run the risk of making yourself sound foolish by attacking them.

Mother also regretted the antagonism that developed between Dad and the Republican Party’s candidate, Dwight Eisenhower, during the campaign. Ike’s military skin was thin, and when Dad went after him for duplicity and his nonexistent political experience, the general took it personally. Mother liked Ike and was even fonder of his wife, Mamie, whom she had gotten to know fairly well during the year of the White House Spanish class.

Bess stayed out of the 1952 campaign. Dad went whistle-stopping, with me for family. Mother’s ostensible reason was Grandmother Wallace’s health. After celebrating her ninetieth birthday on August 4, she became feeble and almost completely bedridden. But I think Mother’s withdrawal said something about the campaign, too. She felt Harry Truman had had enough political combat to last two lifetimes. She would have preferred to see him make a dignified withdrawal from the presidency.

Dad was too much a fighter, too much a Democrat to the marrow of his bones, to accept this idea. He was also too deeply involved in the ongoing momentum of the presidency. For instance, he might have turned the campaign around if he had agreed in October to the Communist demand to forcibly repatriate the 132,000 Chinese and Korean prisoners in UN hands. Dad refused. “We will not buy an armistice by turning over human beings to slaughter or slavery,” he said. The Communists replied by launching a series of attacks on the UN Army that inflicted heavy casualties, and cost the Democrats millions of votes.

Dad took the catastrophic Democratic defeat of 1952 personally at first. No one seemed to appreciate the principles for which he had tried to stand. “For seven years the country had faced the Soviet threat - in Iran, in Greece and Turkey, in Berlin, and in Korea and Indochina - and faced it successfully. Yet one demagogic statement made the people forget!” he all but cried out in one of his diary notes. He was referring to Ike’s declaration that he would “go to Korea” and end the war with some unspecified (and, as it turned out, nonexistent) wizardry.

To the crestfallen president, the people seemed to have repudiated the party to which he had given his heartfelt allegiance all his life. Having semi-withdrawn from the battle, Mother was able to take a calmer, longer view. She reminded Dad that the Democratic Party had been trounced in the past. It did not mean the end of the world or the ruin of a president’s reputation. She recalled Woodrow Wilson’s exit from the presidency after World War I, broken in health and spirit. Harry Truman was a long way from either fate.

Gradually - it took about two months - Dad began to see the defeat differently. He realized that the war and the character-assassination tactics of McCarthy and his imitators, whom Ike never repudiated, had stampeded many voters. Even more decisive was the power of Ike’s World War II reputation. Nothing else explained the 6-million-vote Republican majority. “The country from an economic standpoint was never in better condition,” Dad wrote in one of his diary jottings. “There are 63,000,000 employed . . . and only 1.4 million out of work. More farmers own farms . . . than ever before in this or any other country. Wages for all workers are at an all time high. Business profits are at record rates. Yet propaganda, character assassination, and glamour overshadowed these hard facts.”

He was looking history in its ambiguous, treacherous face now. Bess had helped him do that. During these same months, she drew him slowly back into the personal dimension of their lives. She also reached out to him from a need of her own. About three weeks after the election, Grandmother Wallace had a stroke. There was no longer any doubt that she was dying. Mother scarcely left her bedside, except for a cabinet dinner on the night of December 4, at which Adlai Stevenson was the guest of honor. Day by day, Grandmother grew weaker. Then came pneumonia. She slipped into a coma and died quietly at a little past noon on December 5, 1952.

For forty-nine years, Mother had struggled to surround Madge Gates Wallace with a healing love. At times, it had been a burden that would have destroyed a woman who lacked Bess Wallace Truman’s inner strength. Now, at last, she could feel she had triumphed over the blow that fate had struck in 1903. Although Grandmother never had been able to resume a normal life, her daughter’s devotion had enabled her to live with dignity and grace. In spite of her limitations, she remained an essentially loving and lovable woman.

Dad sat with Mother as Madge Gates Wallace died. Then he took charge and summoned the White House usher, J. B. West, Mother’s best friend on the staff. He made arrangements for us to take Grandmother Wallace to Independence. The next day, in one of his diary jottings, Dad showed that he had long since forgiven his mother-in-law for her early hostility to his courtship of Bess Wallace.

In accordance with Grandmother’s wishes, her funeral was simple. To avoid the inevitable hordes of curiosity seekers, Mother decided to have the service at 219 North Delaware. Madge Gates Wallace was buried in the Gates family plot - not with her husband, who lay in the Wallace family plot. In death, as in life, the tragedy that ended their marriage and marked their children continued to sunder them.

Mary Paxton Keeley came to the funeral to say farewell to her substitute mother. Not once but three times in the next few months, Bess mentioned in her letters how much this meant to her. “I don’t know when I have been so touched, that you came all the way up from Columbia for Mother’s services,” she wrote in one of her last letters from the White House. “And you know what it would have meant to her.”

Grandmother’s death drew dozens of letters of sympathy from Mother’s Washington and Independence friends. Many of the latter recalled happy times on Delaware Street. For Mother, the death must have accentuated the sense of things coming to a dose. But it also removed a burden that she had borne without complaining to anyone for five decades.

For the first time in her life, Bess was not obligated to live at 219 North Delaware Street. To Dad’s amazement, she proposed that they take an apartment in Washington, D.C., and live there most of the time. I think she may have been motivated in part by her opposition to his idea of returning to Missouri and running for the Senate. She did not want to see him go back into politics under any circumstances. But she was also influenced by her genuine fondness for life in the nation’s capital, where she had acquired so many lively friends.

How serious Mother was about this is visible in a letter she received from Arry Calhoun, telling her how much she enjoyed her farewell visit in the White House. “When you really get settled in your Washington apartment, do let me hear from you and have your address,” Arry wrote. “I do hope you find one you like and a good servant to go with it.”

If the Democrats had won the election, I think Mother might have persuaded Dad to try this idea. But the hostility and downright meanness with which the Republicans greeted Dad’s attempt to make an orderly turnover of the government made him dubious. Already, triumphant right-wing senators and congressmen were talking about hearings that would put half the Truman administration in jail for treason or corruption or both. Harry Truman decided it would be bad for his mental health and his blood pressure to live in a Washington, D.C., run by Republicans. It would be far better for his dignity and his peace of mind if he went home to Independence.

In contrast to the bristling communications between the president and president-elect, Bess invited Mamie Eisenhower for a tour of the White House on December 1. They had a pleasant visit, and Mrs. Eisenhower wrote Mother a note the day after she returned to New York, thanking her for her “graciousness.” She added a sweet comment on Grandmother Wallace. “I know your heart must be heavy with sorrow.”

It was a time of farewells. The newspaperwomen held a luncheon for Mother and demonstrated that they held no grudges for all those “no comments.” On the contrary, her steadfast determination to be herself had obviously won their hearts. At the luncheon, one of the members read a long poem in praise of her - as far as I know the only First Lady so honored. The opening stanzas declared that for them, Bess Truman would always be “far more than a figure in history.”

Apropos of that thoughtfulness, Mother called in Mr. West as we began packing and asked him if I could take the furniture in my White House suite with me if she replaced it. “I don’t see why not,” Mr. West said. He and I and the First Lady drove to a local department store and bought an identical set on the spot. What’s more, Mother paid for it. That impressed me.

Another more serious example of her thoughtfulness is a letter Mother wrote to the head of the Secret Service, praising William Shields, the agent who had had the difficult task of guarding her. “He has been unfailingly efficient and courteous and untiring,” Mother wrote. “No one could have done a better job.” This was true Christian charity, considering how much Mother abhorred the whole idea of anyone watching her.

In these final weeks, Dad had the last laugh on Mother and me about the White House ghosts. We still tended to pooh-pooh the whole idea. No one had knocked on our doors in the middle of the night. I will let Dad’s diary tell the rest of the story.

So we arrived at that farewell day, January 20, 1953. President-elect Eisenhower managed to be unpleasant right up to the last minute, refusing the traditional pre-inaugural lunch at the White House and at first insisting that Dad should pick him up at the Hotel Statler instead of paying the outgoing president the final courtesy of picking him up at the executive mansion. When Ike finally yielded on that point, he proceeded to hit a new low in pettiness by refusing to get out of the car to greet Dad on the White House steps.