Harry Truman (22 page)

Another battle in which my father played a prominent part had to do with the structure of the postwar world. The internationalists in the Senate, of which Dad was emphatically one, wanted President Roosevelt and the Democratic Party to come out strongly for an effective world security organization. The subject was frequently discussed at Truman Committee conclaves. Finally, three members of his committee, Republicans Joseph Ball of Minnesota and Harold Burton of Ohio, and Democrat Carl A. Hatch of New Mexico, joined with Senator Lister Hill of Alabama to introduce Senate Resolution 114, which soon became known as B
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H
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. It called on Congress and the President to begin making concrete plans for postwar international machinery with power adequate to maintain the peace.

The resolution received very little encouragement from the White House. FDR, remembering Wilson’s experience with the League of Nations, was extremely cautious about discussing his postwar plans with Congress. He feared he might antagonize the powerful isolationist sentiment among both Republicans and Southern Democrats. My father was one of the most vigorous backers of B
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. He spent endless hours buttonholing fellow senators, urging them to support it. “The bipartisan character of this proposal is the best thing that has happened in Congress in many years,” he said in a public statement of support.

From March 20, 1943, when the resolution was introduced, until early November, the battle over B
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raged in Congress and the press. Finally, the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Tom Connally of Texas (also on the Truman Committee), introduced a resolution calling for the “establishment and maintenance of international authority with power to prevent aggression and preserve the peace of the world.” The Senate approved it overwhelmingly. My father considered his work on behalf of B
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and its descendant, the Connally Resolution, one of the most important achievements of his senatorial career.

At the time, I knew little of these behind-the-scenes dramas. I had enrolled in George Washington University in 1942 and was struggling to fight my way through horrendous required courses, such as botany, as well as staggering amounts of my major subject, history, which I loved. Dad was delighted when I decided to major in history. But his delight soon turned to chagrin, when he discovered I was as contrary as the rest of the Trumans and was concentrating on English history, not American. However, his spirits rose in 1944, when I took a required course in American history. When we got to the Civil War, he envisioned himself somehow finding time to overwhelm me with his vast and complex knowledge of the various military campaigns. But our teacher was not interested in the military history of the country. He concentrated on social and political history and skipped over the whole military side of the Civil War in about twenty minutes. Dad’s outrage was absolutely spectacular. Mother and I loved it. Battles - who needs them?

With all the pressure he was working under, my father seldom if ever said a cross word to me intentionally. I was still his baby. But the paths of father-daughter relationships don’t always run smoothly, especially when daughter is emerging from her cocoon of shyness and coping with the problems of late adolescence. One night, early in 1944, the Truman Committee gave a dinner for General George C. Marshall, the army’s chief of staff. I was one of the supernumerary guests. I happened to be standing near the door when the General arrived, and Dad introduced me. Then someone called him away, leaving me and the General together. I fell in love instantly with this remarkable man. He asked me what I was studying in college. When I told him it was history, we got into a fascinating discussion. What impressed me - even staggered me - was his eagerness to know
my
opinion of my courses and the teaching techniques I was seeing. He was amazingly interested in education, and he discoursed for some time on his belief that film is one of the best ways to teach history. He urged me to suggest it to my professors.

Finally, after twenty or twenty-five minutes, Dad came over and said, “You can’t monopolize the guest of honor and the General of the Armies, you know.” My mouth fell open. I had forgotten I was talking to General Marshall. He was marvelous at making you forget his importance while simultaneously making you feel that you and what you were saying were important to him.

When I got home that night, I was on Cloud 9. I floated around the apartment, rhapsodizing about the attention General Marshall had paid me. Finally, Dad could stand it no longer. He looked up from a report he was reading and brought me abruptly down to earth. “Why wouldn’t General Marshall sit down and talk with the daughter of the head of the investigating committee of the war effort?” he snapped.

I was shattered. I could have taken this crack from Mother because she is the cynic of the family. Again and again she had pointed out to me I should be suspicious of people who were too nice to me, because Dad was a powerful senator. But somehow, Dad pointing it out made it almost unbearable. Later, he freely admitted he was wrong - he didn’t know General Marshall well at the time.) I retired to my bedroom and cried for an hour. It was a perfect excuse not to study for a chemistry exam the next day, and I came within an eyelash of flunking it. Dad never knew he upset me. But I learned the lesson of his growing importance.

I got another glimpse of this importance - in a somewhat negative way - the day we christened the
Missouri,
in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was my first real visit to New York. John Snyder’s daughter Drucie and another close friend, Jane Lingo, were invited along to be my maids of honor at the ceremony. The night before the launching, we went to see
Oklahoma.
It was my first Broadway show. Drucie, Jane, and I were so excited we stayed up all night, we literally did not go to sleep for one second. By the time we arrived at the Navy Yard, we were glassy eyed. It was a gray January day, typical New York weather. We stood under the bow of the
Missouri,
which was as high as a fifteen-story building, while workmen knocked away the beams that were holding her on the ways. Everything was on a very tight schedule. The speech-making had to be finished just in time to give me a chance to swing my magnum of champagne, and then the last timber would be knocked aside and down the ways she would go.

With no sleep and the excitement of the occasion, I missed what was really going on. The admirals on hand were busy revenging themselves on Dad for previous humiliations. Admirals and generals are a clannish bunch. Embarrass one, and you’ve embarrassed them all tends to be their philosophy. Dad was supposed to give the main speech. One or two admirals were supposed to make brief remarks before him. Instead, they rambled on and on and on. When Dad finally got to the microphone, he had about three minutes to deliver a fifteen-minute speech. I never heard him talk so fast in my life.

Then came the signal. I gave a mighty bash with my magnum. Nothing happened to the
Missouri.
It seemed to have a mind of its own and was not in the mood for launching. Playfully I put my hand on the bow and gave her a shove. Meanwhile, I was getting a champagne shower. The christening platform was about a third of the way up the fifteen-story-high bow. Normally, once the bottle, which was in a sterling silver jacket, broke, it was hauled to the deck as the ship slid down the ways. The workmen above us were dutifully doing this job - but because the “Mighty Mo” refused to move, the champagne streamed out of the broken bottle right down on me and the commanding admiral. This was an accident - it was not part of the let’s-torment-Truman program, but it did not make Dad any happier. Finally, the “Mo” started to move, and just as it struck the water, the sun came out. It was the only time we saw the sun all day. All the navy men solemnly agreed it was a good omen.

Two years later, when Dad was in the White House, he was still sending off sparks whenever he thought of the treatment he had received from the navy brass that day. On the eve of a trip to Florida he wrote: “The darned navy have tried to give me an impossible schedule. As you know, every Admiral in nine hundred miles will want to be seen with the President. But they are going to be disappointed. I’ll never forget what the same Admirals did to me and my sweet daughter at the launching of the Missouri.”

The same Admirals should read Josh Billings - should have read him before the launching. He said: “Always be nice to your poor relations - they may suddenly become rich someday, and it will be hard to explain.”

At the time, however, his dizzy daughter and her equally dizzy friends restored his good humor with a stunt that is still remembered by old-timers at the Waldorf. We went to dinner in the hotel’s Empire Room and just as crêpes suzette were being served for dessert, all three of us went to sleep, sitting up in our chairs. While waiters got hysterics, Mother politely suggested we ought to go to bed. We nodded, abandoned our crêpes, went upstairs, and collapsed.

This incident may account for a mildly worried tone in the advice Dad gave me on my twentieth birthday:

He wrote this letter from Jacksonville, Florida, where he had gone to make a Jackson Day dinner speech. On this trip he was not impressed either by Florida or by the crowd he drew: “Florida, as represented by Jacksonville, is one heck of a place. The sun was shining brightly when I arrived Sunday, but it turned cold in the night and clouded up, then Monday it got warm and Monday night it stormed and rained and blew a gale, breaking windows and keeping the customers away from my speech. They wouldn’t have come anyway, but they had an excuse. There were about two hundred and they were kind and enthusiastic. The optimistic national committee man and committee woman assured me there’d be two thousand - but zeros are easy to put on in politics.”

More and more Senator Harry S. Truman was becoming a name and a voice people wanted to hear (wind and weather permitting). The work of his committee appealed immensely to Americans everywhere. The idea that my father was “obscure” at this point in his political career is utter nonsense concocted by writers who specialize in overdramatizing politics. When fifty press gallery reporters were asked to list the ten Americans who had contributed the most to the war effort, Dad was the only member of Congress they named. His independence had won him a following, and the Democratic Party simply had to acknowledge this as a fact. He even survived a distinct chill emanating from the White House - a temperature change that withered more than one promising political career during the Roosevelt era.

Part of this chill was caused by Dad’s independence. He persisted in criticizing the manpower policies and many other aspects of the Roosevelt Administration’s conduct of the war. But most of the temperature drop came from a literary double cross. In the fall of 1942
American Magazine
hit the newsstands with an article, “We Can Lose the War in Washington,” a wide-ranging, sensational critique of the whole war effort. The article had my father’s name on it. Less than a week later the Democrats took quite a drubbing in the 1942 elections. It was the first - but, alas, not the last - time Dad took a writer’s word for what was in a document. Harassed and pressured as he was, he fell victim to one of the oldest dodges in the magazine business.

The magazine sent a girl down to Washington with a copy of the final manuscript. She put on a marvelous act in Dad’s office. She told him the presses were ready to roll and begged him to stop everything he was doing and read the article. Then she implied it wasn’t really necessary, because everything that was in it was exactly what Dad had told the writer.

My father had insisted in his original agreement that nothing could be printed unless he initialed each page of the manuscript. Now with the poor girl having fits, Dad’s soft heart melted. “Well,” he said, “you look like an honest girl.” Without reading the manuscript he initialed each page, and she went racing gleefully back to New York. Later that day, he did read the article and his heart almost stopped beating. The piece read as if it had been written by a Roosevelt-hating Republican.

That very night my father sent committee lawyers hustling to New York and they went to court to block the circulation of the issue. But Sumner Blossom, the editor of
American Magazine,
smugly informed the court the issue had already gone to press, and Senator Truman had approved the article. After all, hadn’t he initialed it? Legally Dad had no case, so he could only grind his teeth and accept the responsibility. The article, combined with the Democratic disaster on Election Day, made Dad’s name anathema in the White House for months. Harley Kilgore of West Virginia, one of the stalwarts of the committee, finally explained what had happened to the President, and FDR agreed to forgive and try to forget.

In months to come, my father had more pleasant experiences with other magazines.
Time
put him on its cover on March 8, 1943. The article was inaccurate in many minor ways, and the cover portrait made him look like Rip Van Winkle, but they called him “a billion dollar watchdog” and praised the work of the committee. The
Reader’s Digest
also lavishly praised the committee as “the public’s most accessible court of appeals.” By this time, more and more Democrats realized the style and standards my father set for the Truman Committee had stolen all the thunder from Republican criticisms of the war -criticisms that would have been far more partisan, and aimed more directly at the President.