Kati Marton (17 page)

Bess continued to refuse to acknowledge that she was a public figure. At times her insensitivity to her husband’s position was stunning. She was even willing to embarrass him to make a point. If the country needed reminding that Eleanor Roosevelt was no longer in the White House, they were reminded on October 12, 1945, when Bess was invited to be the guest of honor at a tea given by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Mrs. Roosevelt had resigned from the D.A.R. to protest its discriminatory practices. Now New York congressman Adam Clayton Powell pleaded with Bess to follow her predecessor’s lead. (The D.A.R. had banned Powell’s wife, pianist Hazel Scott, from performing at Constitution Hall because she was black.) But nobody was going to tell Bess whom she could or could not have tea with. Even Bess’s childhood friend Mary Keeley wrote her urging that she cancel the D.A.R. tea; Bess’s answer: “I agree with you that the D.A.R. is dynamite at present but I’m not ‘having any’ just now. But I was plenty burned up with the wire I had from that …. from New York.” Powell quickly dubbed Bess “the Last Lady.”

Bess was unmatched in her lack of interest in being first lady and her minimalist approach to that role. She could not altogether disregard the public role of first lady, but she certainly tried. She even got rid of her Secret Service detail, though she accepted the services of a seventy-five-year-old driver. When one of a score of frustrated reporters assigned to cover the new first lady submitted the question “What will Mrs. Truman wear to the tea for the United Council of Church Women?,” Bess answered, “Tell her it’s none of her damn business.” She gave no direct interviews under any circumstances. “But Mrs. Truman, how are we ever going to get to know you?” a reporter asked her. “You don’t need to know me,” she replied. “I’m only the President’s wife and the mother of his daughter.” She got away with it because the American people agreed
with her. In the late forties, there was no public discussion of “relationships” or self-realization or intimacy or women’s rights. In fact, talking about anything unpleasant or personal was deemed bad manners. The press respected those rules and rarely asked personal questions of the White House’s occupants.

It was more than just midwestern reserve that made Bess hate public life and fear exposure. Bess considered the suicide of her father, David Wallace, who had been depressed over financial losses, in 1903 when she was eighteen to be a dark secret. So deep was the family’s shame that Bess never told her only child, Margaret, about it. Bess was determined that the press would not publish the details of what the family regarded as an embarrassing and painful personal incident while her husband was in high office. The president understood her reticence about publicity and protected her. When an aunt told Margaret how her grandfather had died, “Dad was furious,” Margaret recalled decades later, and he told her, “Don’t you say anything to your mother about it.” Margaret never did, nor did the press mention the suicide in her mother’s lifetime.

Sometimes Harry needed Bess to keep him on an even keel. When the Russian ambassador Nicolai V. Novikov declined an invitation for dinner, the president ordered Secretary of State Dean Acheson to have him thrown out of the country. But on what grounds? asked the stunned Acheson. “He insulted Mrs. Truman by turning down that invitation at the last second,” the president said. “I’m not going to let anyone in the world do that.” Acheson reached for the telephone and asked Bess to reason with the president. She was practiced in this business. “Tell [the president] you can’t do anything until tomorrow, something like that. By that time,” she advised Acheson, “he’ll be ready to laugh about it.” Harry backed off, saying, “When you gang up on me, I know I’m licked. Let’s forget all about it.” Then he reached inside his jacket for the photograph Bess had given him when he left to fight in Europe. “I guess you think I’m an old fool,” Truman growled, “and I probably am. But look at the back.” On the back of the sepia photograph of the blond girl with the penetrating gaze was written, “Dear Harry, May this photograph bring you safely home again from France, Bess.” In an era when men were supposed to be strong and silent, Truman was fearless about letting her—and even those in his inner circle—know he needed her.

Bess did not even try to mask her boredom with the ceremonial aspects of her role. Future New Jersey congresswoman Millicent Fenwick, invited to a reception at Blair House, the official guest house across the street from the White House, recalled a conversation with a fellow guest, an AFL-CIO delegate, who had been to the White House every year for the last twelve. The delegate said that she’d “Never been treated like this,” adding, “I’m never coming back.” The first lady simply ignored her guests, spending the entire time talking to two old friends from Independence.

Once, when Harry found Bess burning some of their letters, he tried to stop her. “Bess, think of history!” She replied tersely, “I am.” She wanted no part of history, so there is only her husband’s correspondence and the memories of their daughter and a few close associates to provide insight into their union. As with every marriage, there are things about the Trumans that are impenetrable, which leave unanswered questions. If they loved each other so, why was Bess always leaving him? And why did she choose her mother over her husband so often during their White House years, spending six weeks at a time in Independence looking after her? (She even brought her to live in the White House with the son-in-law her mother called “Mr. Truman,” when she spoke to him at all.)

Madge Gates Wallace was a woman of overweening self-importance and nothing, not even the presidency, was going to change her view that Harry was not well-bred enough for her daughter. “Mrs. Truman was caught between her mother and her husband,” Scouten remembered. “Mrs. Wallace simply did not acknowledge his presence, barely even talked to him in the White House. But the President was always polite to her. She did not approve of his poker playing or his drinking.”

During the summer of 1945 when Truman was preparing to meet Stalin at Potsdam, he was lonely for his absent wife. He wrote her: “I sit here in this old house and work on foreign affairs, read reports, and … speeches—all the while listening to ghosts walk up and down the hallway …. Write me when you can—I hope every day ….” But she did not write to him every day. And she could bring him down. “Just two months ago today, I was a reasonably happy and contented Vice President,” he wrote on June 12, 1945. “Maybe you can remember that far back too. But things have changed so much it hardly seems
real …. I am blue as indigo about going [to Potsdam]. You didn’t seem at all happy when we talked. I’m sorry if I’ve done something to make you unhappy. All I’ve ever tried to do is make you pleased with me and the world. I’m very much afraid I’ve failed miserably. But there is not much I can do now to remedy the situation ….”

Whatever Bess was engaged in—invariably family or household matters—was as important to her husband as matters of state. One cannot imagine Stalin or Churchill or for that matter FDR writing this letter home from Potsdam: “[Your] letter came last night while I was at Joe’s [Stalin’s] dinner. Was I glad to get it!” he wrote her on July 22, 1945. “I can’t get Chanel N° 5… there is none to be had—not even on the black market. But I managed to get some other kind for six dollars an ounce at the American PX. They said it is equal to N° 5…. I bought you a Belgian lace luncheon set—the prettiest thing you ever saw. I’m not going to tell you what it cost—you’d probably have a receiver appointed for me and officially take over the strong box …. But I seem to have Joe and Winnie [Churchill] talking to themselves and both are being exceedingly careful with me …. The weather is perfect and I feel fine. The boys say there’s never been a conference as well presided over,” he writes with the pride of a son appealing for his mother’s approval.

Because Harry so valued her, Bess was empowered to give him straight-from-the-shoulder advice. Though she burned her letters to her husband, and their real interaction took place behind closed doors, she was not entirely successful in hiding her influence. Philanthropist Mary Lasker, for example, discovered Bess’s quiet role while lobbying the president for an increase in the budget for the National Mental Health Institute. She was getting nowhere until presidential aide Matthew Connelly gave her an essential piece of advice. The only one who can get anything done, if she really wants to, is Mrs. Truman.” Lasker took the case to the first lady, who did indeed take it up with the president. Lasker got $10 million added to the budget for mental health research.

THOUGH BESS HATED LIFE
in the “Great White Jail,” she wanted the voters to return Harry there, for his sake. After two years in the White House, Truman was considered “a gone goose,” in Clare Boothe Luce’s memorable
words. Late one night on the whistle-stop campaign for the 1948 election, Bess approached presidential counselor Clark Clifford. It was obvious to Clifford that she was “a very worried wife.” “I want to talk to you about the President’s chance of winning,” Bess said. “What do you really think?” I just don’t know, Clifford answered. “The party people don’t think he can win.” Well, Bess said,
he
seems to think he can. “She was looking for reassurance,” Clifford recalled. “But, unlike her husband, she did not have the essential optimism which a politician needs to survive.”

If the American people were unaware of the iron bond between Bess and Harry, the White House staff had daily proof. White House maid Lillian Parks recalled the president getting a call in the Oval Office, informing him that Bess felt faint. “He tore out of the White House and ran across Pennsylvania Avenue [to Blair House] with honking cars almost on top of him. How that man ran. The Secret Service were in hot pursuit, but they couldn’t possibly catch him.”

The Trumans’ relationship was based on complete acceptance of each other. They held little back. “It was nice to talk to you last night,” he wrote on September 16, 1946, “even if you did give me hell about making mistakes.” He enjoyed being the “softie” in the couple and letting her play the tough one. “They always kept to those roles,” their daughter recalled. “He never spanked me when I was little. She did. When my allowance was cut from fifty to twenty-five cents because times were hard, he slipped an extra quarter into my palm. As I ran out the door to catch
Maytime
with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, I heard Mother shriek, ‘How’re we ever going to teach that girl the value of money if you do that, Harry.’ They never changed.”

About a year and a half into Harry’s first term, Bess’s resentment at their new life seemed to ebb. Her husband managed to lure her back into the old partnership. From then on, each evening the couple retired behind the closed doors of the upstairs oval study and worked side by side until eleven. Truman claimed to have consulted Bess on every major political decision: “Her judgment was always good. She looks at things objectively, and I can’t always.” Margaret said her mother was a better judge of character than her father and made many personnel suggestions during his administration. She advised that he fire FDR’s former vice
president, Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace. She also suggested that he hire Charlie Ross, their old Independence schoolmate, as press secretary. “The three of us had been in school together,” recalled Ross, then Washington editor of the
St. Louis Post Dispatch.
“Little did I think the girl with the long blonde hair who sat in an up-front desk would one day get me into the White House’s inner sanctum.”

“I know he talked to her about decisions,” Clifford recalled. “The President relied on her antennae for phonies and self-promoters. Truman was proud of the fact that she was a better judge of people than he was. In the middle of a discussion regarding a personnel matter, the President would say, ‘Well, Mrs. T. thinks well of him.’” “In policy matters,” Truman wrote later with characteristic reticence, “I think First Ladies have always had a great deal of influence ….” Bess, he said, was “a full partner in all my transactions—politically and otherwise.”

There was more to the Trumans’ marriage than the bonds of politics or even companionship. J. B. West, the White House chief usher, describes the Trumans’ reunion after a long absence. “After a light dinner in the President’s library,” West recalled, “they sent the maids downstairs. The next morning I was in Mrs. Truman’s study at nine, as usual. She scanned the day’s menu, then, in a rather small, uncomfortable voice she said: ‘Mr. West, we have a little problem.’… She cleared her throat demurely. ‘It’s the President’s bed. Do you think you can get it fixed today?…Two of the slats broke down during the night.’”

“Her wit was dry, laconic, incisive and very funny,” West recalled. “It’s difficult to capture in words because it was so often silent.” Margaret agreed. “I called it her Great Stone Face. She had a wicked wit, sharper than Dad’s, and he loved it.” West called the Trumans the closest family to live in the mansion. He recalled that the Trumans “did everything together—read, listened to the radio, played the piano, and mostly talked to each other.”