Truman Read online

  There is a widespread view that he was persuaded by the spring that Wallace, with whom he would have been personally happy to continue and who was strongly backed by many Democratic enthusiasts, including Eleanor Roosevelt, would not do, both because Wallace would alienate votes across the nation and because he would be ineffective in the new term at delivering two-thirds of the Senate for the peace treaties and American adherence to the United Nations, and that of the other possibilities the President wanted Truman for the converse of these two reasons. If Roosevelt was as clear as this his convolutions ran great risks of frustrating his purposes.

  It is understandable that he did not wish to impose a candidate on the Convention. He was vulnerable to the charge of being monarchical. And he had to give the assembled delegates something to do. He was not going to attend himself, even though he passed through Chicago while they were assembling. All he gave them by way of an acceptance speech was a somewhat flat radio link-up from San Diego before he embarked on a Pacific bases trip. If he was going to show them any respect it had to be over the vice-presidential choice.

  There was also his endemic dislike of telling people to their faces that they were not his choice. This was fortified by a more rational political desire not to make unnecessary enemies, and embellished by a slightly sadistic enjoyment of a teasing, ambivalent approach to appointments. In mid-May he sent Wallace off on a seven-week trip to China, from where he re-emerged only on July 9th. That cut him off from canvassing his support and did him no good for publicity as the journey had to be secret. When he returned he was told by intermediaries that he was to be dropped. He insisted on seeing Roosevelt and stressed his strength in the polls and with delegates. Roosevelt, we are told, appeared ‘surprised and impressed’. He concluded the interview by saying: ‘I hope it’s the same team again, Henry.’4 This is necessarily hearsay. What is documented is the letter of exquisitely qualified endorsement which he wrote for Wallace. It was addressed to the probable Permanent Chairman of the Convention and signed at Hyde Park on Friday, July 14th:

  ‘… because I know that many rumours accompany annual [sic] conventions, I am wholly willing to give you my own personal thought in regard to the selection of a candidate for Vice-President … The easiest way of putting it is this: I have been associated with Henry Wallace during his past four years as Vice-President, for eight years earlier while he was Secretary of Agriculture, and well before that. I like him and I respect him, and he is my personal friend. For these reasons, I personally would vote for his renomination if I was a delegate to the Convention.

  At the same time I do not wish to appear in any way as dictating to the Convention. Obviously the Convention must do the deciding. And it should—and I am sure it will—give great consideration of the pros and cons of its choice.

  Very sincerely yours,

  Franklin D. Roosevelt.’5

  Three days earlier, in the White House, Roosevelt had caused Ed Flynn, the boss of the Bronx and his closest persistent friend and ally amongst the ‘pros’ to summon the core of the Democratic Party organization to dinner. The main participants, apart from Flynn, were Hannegan, the National Chairman and Truman’s St Louis ally of 1940, who had taken on this post when Truman himself refused it at the end of 1943, Edwin Pauley, a Los Angeles oil man who was National Treasurer and powerful at this stage, Frank Walker, the Postmaster-General, Ed Kelly, Mayor of Chicago, and George Allen, the Secretary of the Democratic National Committee.

  They were all against Wallace, not only as a vote loser (although Flynn had previously reported to Roosevelt, surely with a touch of hyperbole, that his presence on the ticket would cost the party New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New Jersey and California) but also because they were terrified of the prospect of having him as President of the United States. Roosevelt was well informed of their opposition beforehand. If he had really wanted Wallace, he would have asked a different group to dinner. Wallace’s name was hardly seriously discussed.

  Others were fairly quickly discarded: Rayburn with regret because he could not carry the Texas delegation, and Barkley nominally on grounds of age (which did not prevent his being elected four years later) but perhaps more because he and Roosevelt had fallen out over the President’s veto of a tax bill. Winant and Kaiser did not get off the ground. Nor did Douglas, except that Roosevelt chose to keep him in play. That left Byrnes and Truman. The President had undoubtedly been recently and actively encouraging Byrnes, while there is no evidence that he had made any sort of direct approach to Truman. Nonetheless he easily accepted the ditching of Byrnes, on the grounds that he was too Southern and that being a renegade Catholic gave him the worst of two religious constituencies.2

  That left Truman. Hannegan and Pauley were determinedly for him. The others with the possible exception of Kelly of Chicago, who wanted to keep Senator Lucas of Illinois in with a chance, were somewhere between content and enthusiastic. Truman just dropped into the slot,’ Flynn wrote. Roosevelt spoke appreciatively of him on a number of grounds, said that he did not know him very well (which was indeed the truth), in particular did not know his age (just 60), but allowed those present who must have known it perfectly well to remain silent while not causing it to be looked up, and is variously reported as having summed up by saying ‘Let’s make it Truman’ (Jonathan Daniels) and ‘Everybody seems to want Truman’ (James Macgregor Burns).

  They filed out in satisfaction. Then they remembered Roosevelt’s capacity for changing his mind, and Hannegan was sent back to try to get something in writing. Roosevelt does not appear to have resented this slightly suspicious precaution, and there is a unanimity of testimony that Hannegan did get something. But there is no unanimity about what he got. Truman believed that he got a pencilled note on the back of an envelope saying ‘Bob, I think Truman is the right man, F.D.R.,’ and that this is what he (Truman) was shown in Chicago. No trace of that note remains. The alternative view is that he got the first version of a famous letter, a copy of which is in the Roosevelt archives:

  ‘Dear Bob:

  You have written me about Harry Truman and Bill Douglas.3 I should of course be very glad to run with either of them and believe that either one of them would bring real strength to the ticket.

  Always sincerely,

  Franklin D. Roosevelt.’

  The complications do not however end here. First Grace Tully, the President’s principal secretary of this time, stated in her memoir of F.D.R. that the letter she typed in Washington put Douglas’s name first and the order was only reversed in a second version, written under pressure from Hannegan and Pauley when they again met the President in his train in the Chicago yards on Saturday, July 15th. Again there is no trace of such a first version, and Hannegan specifically denied its existence a few weeks before his death in 1949. But Miss Tully had no motive for making it up. Second, the letter in the archives is dated July 19th, when the President was already on the West Coast, although it was certainly in Hannegan’s hands by July 15th, if not on July 11th.

  So the extraordinary story unrolled itself. But this was not the limit of the opéra bouffe. There was a Byrnes sub-plot. That adroit and ambitious gentleman from South Carolina was not going to give up merely because Hannegan and Walker told him that the President had switched to Truman. He had the good sense to realize that the President’s ‘switch’ might not be as firm as these two wished it to be. He insisted on telephoning Roosevelt at Hyde Park. The call was well worth the toll. When asked why he was reported as having turned against him and as favouring Truman and/or Douglas, Byrnes recorded the President as saying: ‘Jimmy, that is all wrong. That is not what I told them. It is what they told me … They asked if I would object to Truman and Douglas and I said no. That is different from using the word “prefer”.’ He ended by ‘virtually urging Byrnes to run’.6

  Byrnes responded to these ambiguities with boldness and skill. At eight o’clock the next morning (Friday, July 14th) he telephoned Truman in Independence, said that he was sti
ll the President’s choice and asked Truman to make the nominating speech for him at the Convention. As no one seemed to have bothered to tell Truman about the July nth dinner, as Truman was in any event a reluctant candidate, and as at this stage he was fond of Byrnes, he readily agreed. Byrnes caught him at a characteristic moment: he was packing up the family car in order to drive to Chicago with his wife and daughter. Before he could complete the job he was summoned back into the house to take another call, this time from Alben Barkley, with the same request on his own behalf. He was bespoken to Byrnes, Truman said. And in this conviction he drove the 350 miles.

  When he got to Chicago he encountered a horrified Hannegan and Pauley, and was then forced to a gradual realization that just as the political establishment of the Democratic Party would not have Wallace, so the labour union leadership, Sidney Hillman, Whitney, Murray, Green, with whom Truman ate a lot of break-fasts, would not have Byrnes. Both groups would have him. And there was mounting evidence too that Byrnes was misrepresenting his position with Roosevelt. Eventually on the Wednesday (July 19th) Truman confronted Byrnes and made him try to corner the President in his own presence. Byrnes failed. Roosevelt would not return his call. This made Truman disengage and Byrnes withdraw without his name being placed before the delegates. He had no strength on his own.

  Truman still needed to be persuaded that he himself should be a candidate. This second stage of persuasion was accomplished by the now famous Hannegan-Roosevelt telephone conversation in Truman’s presence: ‘He’s the contrariest Missouri Mule I’ve ever dealt with’ was Hannegan’s opening line: ‘Tell him that if he wants to break up the Democratic Party in the middle of the war, that is his responsibility’ was Roosevelt’s response. Obviously there was a substantial element of contrived theatre about it; but it at least showed that Hannegan’s lines of communication with Roosevelt were at this stage better than Byrnes’s. Obviously, too, Truman was already prepared to move when it took place. The words attributed to him by his daughter after Roosevelt clicked his telephone down are both plausible and reasonable: ‘Well, if that’s the situation, I’ll have to say yes. But why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place?’7

  Apart from anything else, Wallace, who unlike Byrnes had real strength without official backing, was well on the way to stampeding the convention. He had the galleries packed although Mayor Kelly was not for him; but he was not for Truman either. He wanted a deadlock, with Senator Lucas coming through as a compromise. Wallace had acquired an organist who would play nothing but ‘Iowa, that’s where the tall corn grows,’ to such an extent that Pauley had to threaten to chop the wires unless the tune were changed. Most important he had genuine enthusiasm and the support of a large number of delegates. Pauley and Hannegan decided that they could not risk nominations and balloting that (Thursday) night, and managed to get a fire hazard declared in the overcrowded hall and the Convention adjourned until the next day.

  The Friday session did not begin well. For some inexplicable reason Truman, once persuaded of his duty, had decided that he must get his Missouri colleague, Bennett Clark, to nominate him. Clark was neither his friend nor his ally, and distinctly shop-soiled by this stage: he lost his Senate primary in that same year. Furthermore he was extremely difficult to find. Truman himself eventually ran him to ground, asleep and rather the worse for wear in a hotel other than the one in which he was supposed to be staying.

  Not surprisingly in these circumstances Clark made a limp nominating address. Wallace, by contrast, was brilliantly proposed and enthusiastically carried along by five supporting speeches. On the first ballot he did extremely well. He was ahead throughout and finished with 4191/2 votes to Truman’s 3191/2. Bankhead had 98, Lucas 61, and Barkley 491/2. Eleven favourite sons polled handfuls of votes.

  Hannegan then took the risk of a second ballot rather than an adjournment. It improved Truman’s position substantially, mainly because of shifts from Oklahoma, Maryland, and within the New York delegation. He finished just ahead but in no way decisively so: 4771/2 to 473. A deadlock and a move away from both Wallace and Truman after an adjournment could easily have been the outcome. Then, after a brief pause, there began a growing wave of vote changing. Within a few minutes, without any formal third ballot, Truman went to a final score of 1031 to 105. That was overwhelming, but it had been a very close run thing at times.

  Truman made one of the shortest acceptance speeches on record—less than 200 words—and then fought his way through a hysterical mob of photographers, police, delegates and public, first to a box to collect his family, and then out of the stadium, ‘Are we going to have to go through this for all the rest of our lives?’ Mrs Truman quietly but percipiently asked as they drove to the hotel.

  In fact Truman was then eased rather gently into his new position and exposure. He drove himself home to Independence and stayed there for ten days. Then he went to Washington, wound up his committee chairmanship, and had his only meeting of any note with Roosevelt before election day. They lunched together in their shirt sleeves on the White House terrace on August 18th.

  Even this meeting was more for the newsreels and the photographers than for any serious business. The President’s daughter, Anna Boettiger, was present, and Mrs Truman was expected, but Truman did not understand this and in any event she was in Independence. Furthermore it was an off day for Roosevelt. He looked terrible, his hand shook so much that he could not get the cream into his coffee, he talked with difficulty, and Truman thought that ‘physically he’s just going to pieces’. They hardly discussed the tactics of the campaign let alone the strategy of the war. Roosevelt merely encouraged Truman to get on with it and get around the country, although forbidding him to travel by air on the unusually unguarded ground that ‘one of us have to stay alive’.8 The main things that Truman found to record about the meeting were what they had to eat (which was not much) and the White House china, silver and butlers. It was almost certainly the first time he had ever lunched or dined there. It was also the last as well as the first time that Truman had an intimate meal with Roosevelt.

  Not notably fortified by this encounter, at once intimidating and dispiriting, Truman set about working out his schedule with his allies of the Democratic national machine. They planned a medium-profile campaign, which Truman faithfully carried out: no oratorical fireworks, but no major gaffes either. He began with a big rally at Lamar, his birthplace, which he had not visited for many years, supported by nine other senators and by too large a crowd for the facilities of the small town. He then went twice across the continent, to the Pacific, to the Atlantic and then back to Missouri. He mostly campaigned in the northern industrial states. He travelled by two special Pullman cars, one for himself and his staff, the other for the press, hooked on to ordinary trains. He was at best a semi-star, oratorically always in danger of being outclassed, by Tom Connally at Lamar, by Henry Wallace in New York, by Orson Welles in Pittsburgh. But on the whole he drew good and friendly crowds. There were attempts to portray him as being a weak almost hysterical incompetent, totally out of his depth even in a vice-presidential role, and the old Ku Klux Klan canard was revived towards the end. These attacks did not greatly stick. The truth was that Truman, like Senator Bricker, his Republican opposite number from Ohio, was not a big factor in the campaign. He neither harmed nor much helped the ticket. He had the advantage for most places of not being Wallace, but beyond that it was the fourth Roosevelt-dominated election. The issue of the succession was one for the pundits not for the public.

  For the poll and the result the Trumans went back, which was wholly traditional, to Jackson County. For some unexplained reason it was not to Independence, where the house, open in August and September, was closed, but to a suite or series of suites in the Muehlebach Hotel, Kansas City. There emerges an odd impression of the less reputable part of Truman’s Battery D and Masonic friends having been allowed to take over. Unlike previous election nights, and still more his only subsequent one, when he showed ir
on will by going to sleep with the result in total doubt, Truman stayed up, playing the piano and no doubt consuming a good deal of bourbon, until Dewey conceded at 3.45 a.m. One difference was that, unlike 1940 or 1948, it was Roosevelt and not he who was at test. His friends mostly got drunk. He himself got rather maudlin about the terrible responsibilities which would fall upon him when Roosevelt died. His wife and daughter, although present in the hotel, seem for once to have been excluded from the centre of his stage.

  Whatever happened, he had plenty of time to recover, because between election day on November 5th, 1944 and inauguration day on January 20th, 1945, he had practically nothing to do. He saw Roosevelt only once. He did not even have a new house into which to move. There was then, as for nearly 30 years subsequently, no official vice-presidential residence. He just stayed in his old five-room apartment on Connecticut Avenue. He was vicariously victorious, highly likely to be President within a year or two, unbriefed but untroubled by any attempt to brief him, and probably less occupied than he had been at any time in the previous five years.