Bess Truman (58 page)

Mother and I were good soldiers. We remained dry-eyed during the service in the auditorium. Only when we went into the library courtyard for the burial and Battery D of the 129th Field Artillery, Dad’s old outfit, fired a twenty-one-gun salute with six howitzers did I notice tears glistening in Mother’s eyes.

Those booming guns were reminding Bess of the first time Harry Truman had responded to history’s challenge. She was hearing him tell her, in a moment of presidential anguish: “I wish I never went to war in the first place!” She was remembering other tears, shed in the living room or on the porch of 219 North Delaware in that first wartime summer while a distressed soldier whispered how sorry he was to cause her pain. She was remembering that same soldier, wearing a cocky grin, bounding up the steps of that old house in 1919 to give her an exultant kiss. She was remembering so many things that I could never share in my daughter’s grief.

Finally, the guns stopped firing. The army band stopped playing. The commanding general removed the flag from Dad’s casket and carefully folded it and presented it to Mother. She handed it to me. A soldier stepped forward and laid a blanket of red carnations, Dad’s favorite flower, on the casket. It was Bess Wallace’s last gift to Harry S. Truman.

My first concern, after we had recovered from the early stages of grief, was where Mother should live. I suggested moving to New York, where she could have a small apartment near me and Clifton and enjoy her grandchildren. She vetoed the idea. Now that she was free to go anywhere she chose, she decided to stay at 219 North Delaware Street. The house had become more than a refuge to her now. It was a kind of shrine to her life with Dad and with her mother and brothers. They were all around her there in memory, and she did not want to leave them.

On her desk in her upstairs bedroom, Mother placed that anniversary letter Dad had written her in 1957, summarizing thirty-eight years of their marriage. She often sat down and read it before coming downstairs in the morning. Although she missed him acutely, she reached out to other friends who needed comforting. Chief among these was Mary Paxton Keeley, who had suffered a horrendous blow several months before Dad died. Her only son, Pax, had developed a kidney disorder exactly like the one that had killed his father. He became angry with his mother for never telling him how his father had died. In her eagerness to think of him only as a Paxton, Mary had practically blotted Edmund Keeley out of her memory.

Pax had both kidneys removed and was put on a dialysis machine to await a kidney implant when a donor made one available. Alas, he developed complications and died before they could find one. “My tear glands have dried up,” Mary told Bess. “I could not even cry when Pax died. [She had done so much weeping already.] I wanted to when they blew taps.”

They set each other examples of womanly courage in these lonely years. Mary told Bess she blessed her father “for making me fearless.” In a lively discussion of women’s lib, Mary remembered how all the boys wanted to be firemen when they were growing up. Now women were taking tests to be firemen. One had just flunked because she could not lift a l00-pound bag. Mary thought this sort of feminism was pretty silly and wondered if they would try out for longshoreman next. “I was born liberated,” she wrote.

Mary got ahead of Bess again in the grandchildren sweepstakes by being able to report a great-grandchild, a son by her granddaughter Linda. Describing him at four months, she remarked that it was “the ideal age of man because they don’t even look as though they want to say NO, their favorite word later.” I can see Mother nodding emphatic agreement. What a dim view of males older sisters (Or is it liberated women?) acquire.

I was particularly pleased by a long discussion they had of my biography of Dad. Mary called it a “remarkable achievement.” I realize she is somewhat prejudiced, being my godmother, but she also is a tough critic. She shredded several other books written on the Trumans in her letters to Mother. Mary said she was particularly touched by my tribute to Charlie Ross. By this time, Mary had sent Mother a book of her own autobiographical reminiscences, in which she revealed her broken engagement to Charlie. Mother was fascinated, naturally. “I can’t get over not even suspecting that you and Charlie were engaged,” she wrote. “You had a raft of suitors about that time and I suppose that threw me off.”

Mother enjoyed Mary’s books about the old days in Independence. The two of them chuckled over Frank Wallace’s adventures with his dog U-Know and their quarrels with the Southern family, who complained about the noise the Paxton and Wallace tribes made on summer nights. Bess remembered with delight the way Mary’s father had told off “Sneaky Bill” Southern when he tried to impose a nine o’clock curfew on the neighborhood so he and his wife could get some sleep.

In the same letter, Mother commented on how stirred she was by a biographical sketch of Mary’s mother, which Mary wrote for the contemporary Mary Paxton study club. “It brought back many things I haven’t thought of for a great many years,” she said, in what I think is a guarded reference to her father.

She may have thought about the painful memories of the past. But she was not prepared to talk about them. Around the time Mother turned ninety, my friend Mary Shaw Branton (“Shawsie”) was working on a history of the Swope murders for a study club to which she belonged. She realized that she had a marvelous living witness to the grisly events in Mother. Shawsie called me and asked if she could interview her. “You better ask her,” I said.

Shawsie arrived at 219 North Delaware Street armed with a tape recorder and a long list of questions. Mother greeted her warmly. She was another of my friends whom she regarded almost as a daughter. Shawsie explained the purpose of her visit. She assured Mother that anything she said would be confidential. She would not be quoted publicly, or even semi-privately within the confines of the study club.

Mother slowly but firmly shook her head. “You might as well put that away,” she said, gesturing to the tape recorder. “I will not say one word to you or anyone else on that subject.”

She served Shawsie tea and chatted for a half hour about her grandchildren, Shawsie’s children, and other homey topics. But the Swopes remained in that world of silence to which Mother consigned the painful part of the past.

She remained acutely sensitive and sympathetic to old friends who were struggling with present problems. She felt bad when she learned that Mary Paxton Keeley had spent Christmas 1973 alone. “It would have been a grim day for me if I had not been able to go to Margaret’s,” she wrote. She told Mary how much she enjoyed her letters and apologized for not answering them one for one. Her arthritis made her writing “practically illegible.”

For Mother and me, the telephone became more important than the mails, for several reasons. One was her deteriorated handwriting, and the other was my bad record as a correspondent. We chatted long distance three or four times a week. She let me worry about her and generally ignored my various pleas. I argued and argued with her to air-condition the house and escape those awful Missouri summers. “Do you know how much that would cost?” she said. I grew almost as blue in the face trying to persuade her to abandon the upstairs bedroom and sleep downstairs in her mother’s old room. After about two years of refusals, she capitulated on that one.

Although her arthritis grew steadily worse, forcing her from a cane to a walker and finally to a wheelchair, Mother did not retreat from life - or from politics. She surprised me completely by getting into the political endorsement game on her own. The 1972 campaign, when the press had trashed the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee, Senator Tom Eagleton of Missouri, because he had had psychiatric treatment for depression, had aroused Mother’s ire. Although she was worried about Dad’s health at that time, she wrote Senator Eagleton a letter expressing her sympathy and continued faith in him as a man and a politician. When the senator came up for reelection in 1974, she let him know through Shawsie Branton that she wanted to help him.

Senator Eagleton called on Mother, and they had a lively conversation about the Democratic Party. She confided to him her low opinion of George McGovern, the Democratic nominee in 1972, because he had allowed left wingers to capture the party. “It’s not the Democratic Party I knew,” she said.

A few months after this visit, Senator Eagleton asked Mother to become honorary chairman of his campaign. After some discussion with me, she agreed. The senator won a satisfying victory.

Two years later, in 1976, Mother tried to do the same thing for Stuart Symington’s son, Jim, when he decided to run for the Senate, after several successful terms as a congressman. He wrote to Mother asking if she would agree to be the honorary chairman of his campaign. Not only did she say yes, she wrote him a letter (unfortunately lost) which dissected the flaws of his prospective opponents in language so vivid he was flabbergasted. Here was one ninety-one-year-old lady who was not out of touch.

The Symington-Truman team would undoubtedly have won that election if the Supreme Court, in one of its more dubious decisions, had not struck down the law limiting campaign donations and expenditures. Running against a tycoon who spent $2.6 million on television ads, Jim got swamped. It was a sad example of new but definitely not better politics pushing out the old style.

Later in 1976, Mother got a win with another endorsement. From her hospital room at Research Medical Center (where she was receiving treatment for her arthritis), she issued a statement backing State Senator Ike Skelton in his race for the Fourth Congressional District seat, which included Jackson County. Through her lawyer, Rufus Burrus, Mother declared that she had known Ike and his mother and father and other members of his family for years and was planning to get an absentee ballot so she could vote for him. In the primary, Mr. Skelton had not run well in Jackson County. With this kind of support from the county’s oldest politico, he won handily.

Mother enjoyed these forays into politics. She particularly liked her collaboration with Tom Eagleton because her honorary co-chairman was Stan Musial, one of baseball’s all-time greats. When Senator Eagleton visited her on the eve of the campaign, they spent as much time discussing baseball as politics. “She knew every player in the Kansas City Royals starting lineup and had very strong opinions of the plusses and minuses of each one,” the senator told me, bafflement in his voice. He did not realize he was dealing with an ex-third baseman.

Harry Vaughan, who continued to live near Washington, D.C., kept Mother up on the latest doings in that turbulent town. One of his best letters concerned Mr. Nixon’s dilemmas during Watergate.

“My dear Lady,” he began, as usual. “As you may have gathered from the press, Mr. Nixon is a very worried man. He is not sleeping very well.

“One night he had a dream that he was talking to George Washington.

“Nixon: ‘Mr. President, I am in a bit of trouble. What would you advise me to do?’

“Geo: ‘Tell the truth.’

“Nixon: ‘I’m afraid it’s too late for that. I’ll have to think of something else.’

“The next night he had a similar interview with Harry Truman.

“Nixon: ‘Mr. President I’m in a lot of trouble. What should I do?’

“HST: ‘Tell ‘em to go to hell.’

“Nixon: ‘I have tried that but it does no good.’

“The third night he was confronted by Abe Lincoln.

“Nixon: ‘Mr. President, I’m in grave difficulties. What would you advise?’

“Abe: ‘Take a night off and go to the theater.’”

Considering the smears that were flung at Dad’s administration about the “mess in Washington,” it was pretty consoling for Mother to see Richard Nixon, one of the chief accusers, create the biggest presidential mess in history. But her pleasure was sharply tempered by her awareness of the damage that Watergate and a berserk Congress have done to the presidency. Even under Lyndon Johnson’s tenure, Dad often had said to her, “I’m glad I’m not our grandchildren.” She shuddered to think of what he would say about the maze of restrictions and oversight committees with which Congress has virtually crippled the president’s executive powers.

Nevertheless, Mother enjoyed the amazing upsurge of enthusiasm for Dad in the wake of Watergate. She chuckled when she saw Republican Gerald Ford described as Harry Truman’s “No. 1 fan” and was delighted when the Truman Library told her how often they got calls from the Ford White House asking for information on Dad. When President Ford came to Independence to dedicate a statue to Dad in 1976, he and his wife Betty had a pleasant visit with Mother. She liked Betty Ford’s forthright style as First Lady, even though it differed from hers.

As for her own popularity, Mother remained resolutely indifferent. Told that she had been listed in the Gallup Poll among the top twenty most admired women in America, her response was: “I don’t know why.” That brought all possibilities of an interview to a dead stop.

Mother’s opinion of the White House’s tenants did not improve much when we finally elected a Democrat president in 1976. Jimmy Carter was Harry Truman’s opposite in so many ways, it was hard even to think of him in the same political party. Mother was a little hurt (and I, my father’s daughter, steamed) by the way the Carters ignored her except for a few perfunctory birthday messages for their first three and a half years in the White House.

Only when Mr. Carter found himself lagging in the polls as he began his run for re-election against Ronald Reagan did he and his wife suddenly discover Bess Truman and start writing her unctuous letters. For a final touch of pure gall, Mr. Carter decided to kick off his campaign in Independence, in an attempt to identify himself with Harry Truman’s come-from-behind style. He visited Mother, but he did not get anything that remotely suggested an endorsement. All he was able to say when he left the house was “Mrs. Truman asked me to point out that she has a heart full of love for the people of this country.”

Mother demonstrated the sincerity of this statement in her own unique way. She became deeply interested in a proposition that John Snyder, Dad’s secretary of the treasury, brought to Independence in 1978. He and other former members of the administration wanted to create a memorial to Dad. But they knew he disliked having a street or a building named after him. So they came up with the idea of creating a Truman Scholarship Program that would educate young men and women for government service.