Truman Read online

  It was a famous victory given his starting point, and the buoyancy and determination which were required to pull out of that valley of hopelessness. In that sense it was a foretaste of the qualities he was to show in 1948. But in other respects it was not a foretaste of the Truman presidency. It was fought during two of the most critical months in the history of the Western world. But it was not won because the Democrats of Missouri looked to Truman as a potential world figure who might help steer them through the shoals of international danger. As Hitler swept to victory, as France surrendered, as Britain prepared for invasion, Truman was pre-occupied containing the Pendergast curse and sundering the alliance between Stark and Hannegan.

  Nor was it a ringing endorsement of a senator of six years’ standing against a governor who had neither judgment nor sparkle. Truman had polled little more than 35% of the total vote. It was however a result which gave great pleasure on Capitol Hill. ‘It certainly is gratifying (to put it mildly),’ Truman wrote from Washington on August 9th, ‘when every employee in the building–elevator boys, policemen, waiters, cooks, negro cleanup women, and all—were interested in what would happen to me. Biffle, (Clerk to the Senate) told me last night … that no race in his stay here had created such universal interest in the Senate. He’s having lunch for me today. I guess it will be a dandy. It almost gives me the swell head–but I mustn’t get that disease at this late date.’ The senators themselves were no less enthusiastic. ‘You should have been in the Senate yesterday,’ he wrote the next day, ‘when I slipped in at the back door. Hiram Johnson was making a speech and he had to call for order. Both floor leaders and all the Democrats made a great rush … I thought Wheeler and Jim Byrnes were going to kiss me. Barkley and Pat Harrison were almost as effusive. Schwellenbach, Hatch, Lister Hill, and Tom Stodart, and Harry Swartz almost beat me to death.’

  In the White House there was less enthusiasm but a full recognition of reality. Henceforward Truman was treated as the plenipotentiary of Missouri. Stark wrote to Roosevelt complaining that he had been defeated by a low vote occasioned by the drought. Roosevelt replied with political elegance. ‘Pure Roosevelt’ was how Jonathan Daniels described it:

  ‘Dear Lloyd,

  Your letter enclosing the clipping has been received and I was interested to hear the analysis of the recent Primary fight. I am sure you understand my personal feeling towards you. I can only say that we will all have to get behind the ticket and work for a Democrat victory.

  With all good wishes.

  Your friend,

  Franklin D. Roosevelt.’9

  At the beginning of 1941 Roosevelt proposed giving Stark a Federal appointment on a new Labor Mediation Board. Truman was not pleased, but not anxious to block the move himself. Instead ex-Senator Minton of Indiana wrote on his behalf. Roosevelt promptly desisted. On the other hand Truman himself wrote to Roosevelt in September urging that Milligan, who had had to resign to contend the primary, should be re-instated as District Attorney. He even went so far as to say ‘he has made a good District Attorney’. This however was a matter of politics and not of conviction, as he made clear in two letters to his wife.10 Five years later, as President, he reverted to his earlier position and declined to give him a further term.

  Unlike 1934, the 1940 election proper (as opposed to the primary) was not a walk-over for Truman. He won satisfactorily, but only by about 40,000 votes, which was less than half the majority by which Roosevelt carried Missouri. However, the Democratic candidate for Governor, whose needs had been crucial to the primary outcome in St Louis, lost to a Republican, so that Truman could not be held to have got a notably bad result.

  In the three months between the primary and the general election Truman received one agreeable accolade and suffered one major (and somewhat mysterious) family misfortune. The accolade was his election as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of the Masons of Missouri. He had been an active Mason since his pre-World War I days on the farm at Grandview, and was a natural member of the ‘brotherhood’. But it was an odd time for his installation in the Scottish Rite Temple in St Louis. Most of those involved in inducting him were Republicans, it was in the middle of a fairly vicious campaign, and it marginally helped his re-election.

  The other event was much odder and wholly disagreeable. The Grandview house and farms had a mortgage of $35,000 upon them. The money had somewhat mysteriously been advanced not by a bank or other financial institution but by the Jackson County School Board. Interest payments had got into arrears. On August 22nd, 16 days after the primary triumph, the County moved in, got a court order for default, sold up the whole property, deprived Truman’s brother of his occupation, and forced his mother (then aged 88) and his sister to move out and set up a new house in the town of Grandview. No sooner had they done this than his mother fell and broke her hip, largely due to the disagreeable unfamiliarity of the new surroundings, so Truman always maintained.

  It is very difficult to understand why Truman could not stop the foreclosure. $35,000 was a substantial amount of money in those days, but it was not vast, even if, which seems an unlikely assumption, he had to raise the whole sum to resist the process. Before the primary, certainly in the slough of despair at the beginning of the campaign, it might have been impossible. But in the flush of victory, particularly in view of his reception in the Senate, it is almost inconceivable that the money or any necessary part of it could not have been raised in Washington or Missouri. John Snyder, for instance, an almost constant companion of Truman’s at this stage, was moving up to be the President of the First National Bank of St Louis.

  Yet Truman took it all curiously casually. Of course he minded greatly about his mother. But Merle Miller recorded him as saying: ‘Had an old squint-eyed guy that was head of the county government, and he thought that would be a good way to help in my defeat, but nearly everybody in Missouri had a mortgage, so it didn’t do me a bit of harm.’11

  To complete the bizarreness of the incident there was the fact that Charles Ross, an old class-mate of Truman’s and a staff writer with the St Louis Post-Dispatch had probably sparked off the whole process by writing an article about the alleged impropriety of the mortgage. It was the sort of behaviour which could easily have led Truman to bear one of his relatively few but unrelenting grudges. On the contrary he made Ross his press secretary when he became President, in which office Ross matched his loyalty with the quality of his service, which was not always so in the Truman entourage, until he died at his desk in December 1950.

  Eventually the Grandview house and two parcels of farm land returned to the ownership of the Trumans in 1946. It was arranged through the intervention and to some extent the generosity of a Kansas City real estate dealer who was an old acquaintance and was happy to have nothing more than a few White House invitations in return. Nevertheless, Truman’s acceptance of the assistance is inconsistent with a view that it was over-scrupulousness about any form of outside help which accounted for his paralysis in 1940. The mystery remains.

  So did Truman’s money troubles as he began his second term. He assuaged them by taking Bess Truman on to his Senate office payroll, at a salary of $4,500 and in the capacity of a mixture of mail sorter and political advisor. Neither much liked the arrangement; at least it was public and unconcealed.

  Truman’s work, during the three and a half years which he served as a second term senator, was almost wholly concentrated upon his chairmanship of the Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program. Mostly it was known as the Truman Committee. In consequence it gave him a national reputation and for the first time made his name known outside Missouri and the Senate. Time magazine put him on its cover in March 1943. About the same time Look conducted a poll of political correspondents which put him among the ten men in Washington most valuable to the war effort; no other member of the Congress was in the list.

  It was loosely estimated that the Committee saved the nation $15 billion. It did so by methods that were non-partisan–all t
he reports were unanimous–and undemagogic because they were designed to achieve results and not to pillory individuals or create sensation. It also steered firmly away from trying to influence strategy or to make or unmake commanders. It investigated contracts and not battles. As a result it was tolerably acceptable to the White House. Roosevelt and those around him would probably have preferred no committee, but if they had to have one the Truman Committee was about the best for which they could have hoped. It operated (and consciously so in Truman’s case) in sharp contrast with the 1860’s Congressional Committee on the Conduct of the War, which tried to sack General McClellan, investigated the alleged anti-Union activities of Mrs Lincoln, and generally infuriated the President. Except on one occasion when Truman put his name to an ill-judged article which he had not properly read and allowed it to appear close to the 1942 mid-term elections ton to Independence were mostly sent from all over the continent to Washington. They were no less constant, no less full, fluent and vivid, not often elegant, but no longer plaintive.

  In Washington he was mostly engaged in hearings and the preparation and presentation of reports. He was throughout both firm and thorough. He had sub-committees under other senators, but he never allowed their reports to go out without having himself been carefully through them. He almost invariably presided over the hearings of the full Committee, and insisted that they be conducted in a calm, quasi-judicial atmosphere, although that was hardly his natural style. ‘And another thing I’m proud of,’ he told Merle Miller, ‘we didn’t give a hoot in hell about publicity.’12 They were not, of course, subject to the temptations of television cameras, but his claim was true so far as the raw material of the proceedings, as opposed to the finished product of the reports, was concerned. As a result there were no confrontations for the sake of headlines. But there were notable jousts with Jesse Jones, Secretary of Commerce and head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, as well as with two labour leaders: John L. Lewis, who although rough in controversy was relatively safe to take on because he was maverick and unpopular; and Sidney Hillman, who was much more redoubtable, because he was highly responsible and central to the administration’s relations with organized labour.

  Only in rare cases did the committee seek retribution. Its aims were essentially that lessons should be learned for the future and that economy and honesty should be encouraged by the fear of exposure. No more than three or four people went to gaol as a result of its activities. But neither this continence nor the eschewal of deliberate publicity-seeking prevented the Committee, and particularly Truman himself, from gaining speedily in both the awareness and the esteem of the public.

  As the 1944 election began to loom so thoughts turned to the composition of the Democratic ticket. The prospect of a fourth term for Roosevelt was much more easily accepted than had been the idea of a third term. The country was at war, as opposed to being buffeted by a European conflict, and once the 150-year-old convention of a maximum of eight years had been breached there was no great excitement in favour of erecting a new limit. Truman did not repeat his reluctance of 1939/40. At a 1944 Jackson Day (February 17th) dinner in Florida he came out firmly and early in favour of electing F.D.R. to see the war through.

  There was much more doubt as to whether Henry Wallace should be asked to do it with him. And some of those who doubted began to think of Truman as a possible substitute. The first reference to the matter in his letters to his wife came as early as July 12th, 1943:

  ‘The Senator from Pennsylvania [Guffey] took me out into his beautiful back yard [garden in the capital] and very confidentially wanted to know what I thought of Henry Wallace. I told him that Henry is the best Secretary of Agriculture we ever did have. He laughed and said that is what he thinks. Then he wanted to know if I would help out the ticket of it became necessary by accepting the nomination for Vice-President. I told him in words of one syllable that I would not—that I had only recently become a Senator and that I wanted to work at it for about ten years.’13

  There is no reason to doubt the genuineness of Truman’s reluctance at this stage. In fact it persisted and strengthened over the ensuing year. But this was the oddest possible way of putting it. At the time he had been a senator for eight and a half years, and on the day he was sworn in as vice-president he had been one for exactly ten years and seventeen days.

  4

  HEIR TO A DYING PRESIDENT

  ‘The truth is that … the last year and a half of the President’s life was a time when his superb machine … was slowly but inexorably running down, because of the long and taxing use that he had made of it.’1 So in 1981 wrote Joseph Alsop in his penetrating and succinct centenary evocation of Franklin Roosevelt. Eighteen months back from April 12th, 1945 takes us to October 12th, 1943, a few weeks after the second Quebec meeting between Churchill and the President, a few weeks before the Teheran Conference, the first meeting of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill.

  If, as I believe it to be, Alsop’s judgment is true, it means that during the whole period when Roosevelt was contemplating a fourth term, deciding upon it, influencing the choice of a vice-presidential running-mate, campaigning for re-election, winning, being re-inaugurated, seeing, if he happened to look that way, his third vice-president in operation, he had no surplus energy and probably knew, if he cared to contemplate it, which he mostly did not, that he had not long to live.

  There were a substantial number of other people who knew this too, including the possible vice-presidential nominees and the would-be king makers in the Democratic Party organization. Apart from favourite sons, of whom there were many, there were at least eight, who, with varying degrees of seriousness were at one time or another discussed as possible vice-presidents by Roosevelt himself. There was obviously Wallace, the incumbent. There was Byrnes, ex-senator from South Carolina, then (very briefly) associate justice of the Supreme Court before becoming Director of the Office of War Mobilisation and, as some dubbed him, not to his displeasure, ‘assistant President’ and future Secretary of State under Truman. There was Barkley, majority leader in the Senate; and there was Rayburn, Speaker of the House. There were Winant, ambassador to London and ex-Governor (Republican) of New Hampshire, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and Henry Kaiser, the man who, it was currently thought, could build anything from ships to motor cars to aircraft, quick, plentiful and cheap. And there was Truman.

  Winant, Douglas and Kaiser in vice-presidential terms, were little more than figments over whom Roosevelt allowed his imagination to flicker. Whether or not any of them wanted the job is therefore not known; they may not even have posed the question to themselves. All the others except for Truman did, stimulated or at least undisturbed by the prospect of the succession and therefore by the unusually ambiguous nature of the nomination they were seeking.1 Truman, by no means wholly out of modesty, was unattracted either way. So far as the vice-presidency per se was concerned he stressed the obscurity in which nearly every vice-president in the history of the Republic had lived and died. He liked asking those who pressed him if they could remember who was vice-president to Fillmore or Polk or some other nineteenth-century president who had survived his term, and even on one occasion over-reached himself by asking it in relation to McKinley and still getting a negative response.

  Additionally, however, he fully apprehended the probability of Roosevelt dying without four years, and liked that prospect no more. ‘1600 Pennsylvania is a nice address,’ he wrote to his daughter twelve days before he was nominated, ‘but I’d rather not move in through the back door—or any other door at sixty.’2 He also answered a St Louis Post-Dispatch reporter: ‘Do you remember your American history well enough to recall what happened to most vice-presidents who succeeded to the presidency? Usually they were ridiculed in office, had their hearts broken, lost any vestige of respect they had had before. I don’t want that to happen to me.’3

  The hand that Roosevelt played in the approach to the choice was enigmatic at the time, remains puzz
ling, and now seems unlikely ever to become clear. The earlier statements about his health should not be taken as meaning that a persistent pall of indifference had settled over him. He was convinced that it was his duty to run, and that being so, he was determined to win. This was not something which could be taken for granted. Dewey, Governor of New York and the youngest presidential candidate of this century (a year younger than John F. Kennedy) had been smoothly nominated on the first ballot at the Republican Convention in mid-June. In retrospect the ‘little man on the wedding cake’ looks an easy candidate to beat. But this was not obvious at the time. Indeed Dewey’s reputation as a loser only came four years later with his amazing defeat by Truman. In early July 1944 the main poll showed Roosevelt leading him by a margin of only 51 to 49. And the actual outcome in November was not very different. Roosevelt secured a strong electoral college result—432 to 99—but this was due to the luck of all the big states except Ohio just slipping his way. His lead in votes cast was only 531/2% to 461/2%, the narrowest popular majority since Wilson’s second election in 1916.

  It was not magnificent for the leader of the free world against a man who two years before had been only a District Attorney, although a very successful one. What is significant however is that Roosevelt could not afford to think that he could stroll to victory. Nor did he attempt to do so. He made very few speeches—in effect only five—and for the rest of the time sheltered behind an Olympian commander-in-chief role. But this was probably sound tactics as well as a necessary conservation of energy. Of these five speeches at least three showed most of his old campaigning verve. His ‘my little dog Fala’ speech in Washington in September contained some of the most daring and brilliant political raillery in which he had ever indulged, and the orations at Soldiers’ Field, Chicago (before 100,000) and in the Boston Bowl were both memorable. In New York he subjected himself to the ordeal of a 50-mile 4-hour waving drive in pouring rain and an open motorcar, and did a near repeat in Philadelphia. He was of course battling against the rumours of his ill-health as much or more than against Dewey, but the fact that he felt he had to fight so hard against either meant that he could not be indifferent to the identity of his running-mate. Nor was he beyond making shrewd political judgments about this identity.