A first installment of $50,000 in cash was delivered to T.J. personally at his Main Street office on May 9, 1935. An agreement releasing the insurance money was then worked out in a room at the Muehlebach Hotel by Street, O’Malley, and attorneys for the insurance companies, after which further payments on the bribe continued. One delivery to T.J.’s house on Ward Parkway in the spring of 1936 was for a total of $330,000 in cash in a Gladstone bag.
Though none of this was disclosed for some while, Stark fired O’Malley and rumors were rampant. How much or little Senator Truman knew is not recorded. Probably it was very little, in view of how hard he took the news when it broke. But when District Attorney Milligan’s term expired early in 1938 and both Stark and Roosevelt were calling on the Senate to confirm his reappointment, Harry Truman found himself facing the nearly certain prospect of being the lone senator with objections. By senatorial custom, he could have blocked the reappointment simply by saying that Milligan was personally obnoxious to him. This he did not do, however, because Franklin Roosevelt called him on the phone and asked him not to, as a personal favor.
He could also, of course, have had nothing to do with the matter, and remained silent.
Instead, on Tuesday, February 15, 1938, he marched through the swinging doors of the Senate Chamber and delivered a full-scale attack on Milligan, as well as on the federal judges in Kansas City, a scathing, bitter speech that helped his reputation not at all, nor served any purpose other than to release a great deal of pent-up fury and possibly bring Tom Pendergast a measure of satisfaction. Milligan, he said, was Roosevelt’s “personal appointment” and made to appease the “rabidly partisan press.” He called Milligan corrupt, and charged the judges with playing politics, since they had been appointed by Republican Presidents Harding and Coolidge, “I say, Mr. President, that a jackson County, Missouri, Democrat has as much chance of a fair trial in the Federal District Court of Western Missouri as a Jew would have in a Hitler court or a Trotsky follower before Stalin.”
It was the one time he had ever attacked the President, the one time he had ever touched on, let alone defended his political origins in the Senate, and it was his worst moment in the Senate. Again he read from a prepared text. Yet he seemed out of control, grossly overreacting even if some of his points deserved hearing—the refusal of the courts, for example, to let anyone from Jackson County sit on the juries.
“The manner in which the juries were drawn,” remembered a federal district judge in Kansas City years later, “and the fact that only Democrats were indicted in the polling precincts in which the vote fraud occurred, when it was obvious that the Republican judges and clerk of elections in the same precincts were equally guilty, distorted Truman’s view beyond comprehension. He felt he had to blast, and blast he did—to his discredit.”
Possibly, with a more measured, thoughtful defense, he could have taken his audience beyond the stereotypical picture of boss rule. By his own bearing, the decency and common sense that were so much a part of him, he might have encouraged appreciation of the accomplishments of the Kansas City organization that he himself so admired. As it was, he achieved nothing. When the time came to confirm Milligan by vote, he was the lone senator in opposition.
To his credit, it would be said only that he had made a brave gesture of loyalty to an old friend. At least he had not “run for cover.”
So harsh were the expressions of disapproval issued at the White House that Truman began feeling his career was over. He brooded for days. In a confidential letter to a friend, he said that “in view of my speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday and the reaction to it from the White House,” he would not be running for reelection in 1940—though later he would ask for return of the letter.
He had made matters no better, meantime, by announcing his intention to have his burly factotum, Fred Canfil, custodian of the Jackson County Courthouse, appointed a U.S. Marshal in Kansas City, an idea that met with immediate outrage there. The Justice Department sent FBI agents to begin inquiries and across one interdepartmental memorandum J. Edgar Hoover scrawled: “I want to make certain a very complete and thorough investigation is made of this man.” By early March 1939, sensing the tide of opinion on Canfil was strongly against him, Truman said he was for Canfil or nobody. “I am for Canfil, first, last, and all the time.” But Canfil was found unsatisfactory and rejected, chiefly because of the volume of adverse rumors and opinion gathered by the FBI. Five months earlier, in November, the senator had been assured through channels high up in the Justice Department that Canfil was acceptable and would be approved. “They figure they’ll need Harry next session,” he had said of the administration in a letter to Bess. But that was in November.
In Kansas City, by appearances, the functioning of the organization continued as before, T.J. somehow managing a serene face to the world. He went to his office as usual, except that now, because of his health, he rode the elevator in the adjacent hotel and crossed through to 1908 at the second-floor level, to avoid the stairs. In a municipal election in the spring of 1938, despite a new election board appointed by Governor Stark, despite the sensation of the vote fraud trials, the organization’s candidates won by large margins. Considering the forces aligned against him, it was T.J.’s most impressive triumph ever, showing, as was said, that “the party in power…had lost none of its hold on honest voters.” An exuberant, immensely gratified T.J. issued a rare statement to the press:
If it is true…that the Democratic President of the United States was against us, that the Attorney General of the United States was against us, that the Governor of Missouri was against us, that the independent Kansas City Star newspaper was against us—I think under those circumstances we made a wonderful showing.
To Senator Truman it seemed to prove, as it did to many observers, that prior vote frauds had been unnecessary; the party would have won anyway.
How often or to what degree T.J. and Harry were in contact at this stage is again unknown. Mildred Dryden, Harry’s secretary, could recall no correspondence from Tom Pendergast.
Only one communication written in T.J.’s own large, clear hand has survived, a note in red pencil on a single sheet of Jackson Democratic Club stationery: “Please help Sam Finklestein. He will explain. He has been my friend for 40 years. T.J. Pendergast.” As Sam Finklestein did explain when he carried the note to Senator Truman in December 1938, he was trying to get two of his relatives out of Germany, Siegfried and Paula Finklestein of Berlin. Harry moved quickly, but in a report to T.J. mailed just before Christmas, Vic Messall could say only that the matter had been taken up with the American consul general in Berlin and that as soon as more information was available T.J. would be advised “immediately.” For the moment the quota was full. Whether the Finklesteins ever succeeded in escaping to America is not known.
On Tuesday, April 4, 1939, J. Edgar Hoover himself arrived in Kansas City. On Friday, April 7, T. J. Pendergast was indicted for tax evasion. In Washington, Senator Truman was reported to have looked “hurt and astounded” at the news. “I am sure he had little inkling of his old friend’s troubles before the grand jury returned its indictment,” wrote William Helm. “Even then he seemed to cling to the hope that Pendergast somehow would prove his innocence….” Asked for a comment by reporters, Harry said, “I am very sorry to hear it. I know nothing about the details…Tom Pendergast has always been my friend and I don’t desert a sinking ship.”
To Bess he would write, “The terrible things done by the high ups in K.C. will be a lead weight to me from now on.”
On May 22, at the federal court in Kansas City, T.J. pleaded guilty. The total in evaded taxes, including fines, came to $830,494.73.
R. Emmett O’Malley and the director of the Kansas City police department were also convicted of tax evasion, as was Matthew S. Murray, the city’s Director of Public Works. Charles Street, the insurance executive involved in the bribe, was dead. Edward L. Schneider, secretary treasurer of seven Pendergast companies, kille
d himself, or so it appeared, after making a full statement of his transactions to the grand jury. How many millions of dollars had been stolen from the city was never precisely determined. City Manager Henry McElroy, who also died while facing indictment, was found to have misplaced some $20 million with his unique system of bookkeeping, a figure nearly twice the city’s annual budget. The assertion later by several of his friends that Harry Truman could have walked off with a million dollars during his time as presiding judge, had he chosen, seems an understatement.
“He was broke when he went to the Senate,” Edgar Hinde would say. “He didn’t have a dime and he had all the opportunity in the world. He could have walked out of that office [as county judge] with a million dollars on that road contract. You know that would have been the easiest thing in the world. He could have gone to one of those contractors and said, ‘I want ten percent.’ Why you know they would have given it to him in a flash. But he came out of there with nothing.”
“Looks like everybody got rich in Jackson County but me,” Harry wrote privately to Bess from Washington.
At 8:45 A.M., May 29, accompanied by his son, T.J., Jr., and Jim Pendergast, T.J. arrived at the east gate of the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth to begin serving a sentence of fifteen months, reduced from three years in view of his age and health. On the day of his sentencing, the judge had remarked to reporters that he could well understand the feelings expressed for Pendergast by his friends. “I believe if I did know him I, too, might have been one of his friends. I think he is a man of character that makes friends.”
In all that was revealed by the investigations there was nothing to suggest any involvement with illegal activities on the part of Harry Truman. As District Attorney Milligan, never a particular admirer of the senator, would state: “At no time did the finger of suspicion ever point in the direction of Harry Truman.”
In its issue of April 24, 1939, Life magazine devoted six pages to the meteoric rise of Governor Lloyd C. Stark, the article illustrated with numerous lurid photographs of the Pendergast debacle. Governor Stark, said the magazine, was the new Democratic version of young Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican racket-buster of New York, and claimed that the major result of Pendergast’s fall was to “catapult honest, efficient Lloyd Stark, an apple grower, right into the presidential ring.” Or at the least to a seat in the United States Senate. (Elsewhere there had been talk of Stark as the next Secretary of the Navy.)
In Missouri, praise for Stark was overflowing. He was called “Missouri’s Moral Leader,” a figure of national importance, a presidential possibility, and in any event, “a man with a future.”
“He has earned the high estimate,” wrote the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in an editorial that Stark clipped and sent to Roosevelt.
He chose the hard way, and, of course, the right way, of meeting all the obligations of his office. He could have chosen the easiest way. He might have gone through the routine perfunctorily, basked in the approval of the all-powerful Pendergast machine that had supported him for the nomination, acquiesced in the Boss’s few but salient demands, kept the peace…. The Governor entered his office under the shadow of the Kansas City machine. He had to live down the suspicion of being a Pendergast man….
The contrast to the path chosen by Senator Truman went without saying.
Life, too, acknowledged that Stark had accepted Pendergast support in 1936, but stressed there was nothing new in American politics about a governor turning on the machine that helped elect him. Theodore Roosevelt had done it in 1899, Woodrow Wilson in 1910, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. All three became President, and “square-shouldered, poker-faced, dignified” Lloyd C. Stark, too, would like to be President, “quite definitely.”
In September, Stark announced he was running for Truman’s seat in the Senate.
V
It was the toughest campaign of Harry Truman’s career. “If Governor Stark runs against me,” he had told the papers, “I’ll beat the hell out of him.” But this was mostly bluff; he knew what the odds were.
Franklin Roosevelt, who could have made all the difference, only toyed with him awhile, leading Truman to think he was on his side. Truman had gone to the White House about some pending legislation and the President insisted instead on talking Missouri politics. He spoke of Stark as “funny,” meaning phony, as Harry explained to Bess. “I do not think your governor is a real liberal,” Roosevelt said. “He has no sense of humor…. He has a large ego.” Later Harry had run into Bennett Clark, who, though “cockeyed,” also promised his support. It was all too much for one day, Harry decided.
But Roosevelt gave no endorsement or even encouragement, no help at all except to let the senator know in roundabout fashion that he would be glad to appoint him to a well-paid job on the Interstate Commerce Commission. “Tell them to go to hell,” Harry responded. If he couldn’t come back as a senator, he didn’t want to come back at all.
Clearly he would be on his own this time. Tom Pendergast was in prison, the organization in shambles. At best Roosevelt could be counted on to remain neutral, but then not even that was certain. For all his loyal service to the New Deal, Senator Truman was not someone Roosevelt was willing to stand by or utter a word for. In Washington, as columnist Drew Pearson observed, “the wise boys” wrote Truman off.
In Missouri every major paper was against him but one, the Kansas City Journal-Post. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch summed up Truman’s chances as “nil.” He was without money, while Lloyd Stark, riding a wave of publicity, had all the marks of a winner, including plenty of money and the apparent endorsement of Franklin Roosevelt. If ever anyone had a reason to detest Franklin Roosevelt, it was Harry Truman as 1940 approached.
Privately, he was in despair over Roosevelt, Pendergast, and the “terrible” state of the world. In late August 1939, Hitler and the Russians had signed a nonaggression pact. On September 1, Hitler invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany. Margaret had never known her father to be in such low spirits. He went to the Washington premiere of the new Frank Capra movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, hoping it would cheer him up, but came away, as he wrote to Bess, greatly discouraged by its blanket portrayal of senators as crooks and fools. Doubtless he was distressed too by the fact that the chief figure of corruption in the story was a fat, heavy-handed machine boss who acted much like Tom Pendergast and ruled a city called Jackson.
Public opinion of the New Deal seemed to be at a low ebb. Roosevelt was getting nowhere with Congress. New Deal cures for hard times had been insufficient, the Depression persisted. Eight million people were still unemployed.
Harry worried over money owed on his mother’s farm. To meet notes coming due, Vivian had exchanged a mortgage on the farm for $35,000 from the Jackson County School Fund, this according to a law that allowed the loan of school money not currently needed. Harry’s secret hope was to sell the farm and clear all the debt on it—he wished now it had been sold when he came home from France—but he knew how much the place meant to his mother. Giving it up at her age might be more than she could take.
For the record, he had kept out of the loan arrangement and later said he had known nothing about it, which was undoubtedly less than the truth, since, along with Vivian, Fred Canfil, too, had signed the papers.
The continued ranting of Adolf Hitler on the radio left him increasingly gloomy. He met for lunch in Washington with Robert Danford, his old superior officer at Camp Doniphan, now a general, and talking of events in Europe and Germany’s apparent military superiority, they both became “mighty blue.” Harry feared a Nazi world. He dug out some of his old Army maps of France and tacked them to his office wall to follow the fighting. In open opposition to such strident isolationists in the Senate as Wheeler, Borah, and his fellow Missourian, Bennett Clark, he spoke out still more and strongly for “preparedness,” called on the President to summon a special session of Congress to revise the Neutrality Act of 1936, which he himself had voted for but now realized
was a mistake. In a speech in Missouri in October, he said the three dictators, Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini, had reverted to the code of “cave-man savagery.” American neutrality was obsolete in the face of such reality, he said. The arms embargo must be lifted. “I am of the opinion that we should not help the thugs among nations by refusing to sell arms to our friends.” With Senator James Byrnes of South Carolina, he urged larger appropriations for defense, an immediate buildup of the Army, and a Navy “second to none.” He was outraged by the arguments of the America First movement and the speeches being made by Charles Lindbergh. On November 11, Armistice Day, he wrote to Bess: “You know it makes some of us who went on that first Crusade…wonder sometimes just what fate really holds for civilization.”
But as so often in his life, he went ahead uncomplaining, determined to defeat the “double-crossing” Stark and return to the Senate, where, he knew, history was going to be made as never before. His back was up. He would find out who his real friends were.
Meantime, with five other senators, he flew off to Mexico and Central America on a so-called “fact-finding” trip—“a pleasure trip,” he was frank to admit. There was “too much poverty” in San Salvador, he thought, but Costa Rica from the air looked like a painting by one of the old masters: “Smoking volcanoes, blue lakes and the Pacific Ocean all in view at the same time from 134 miles in the air,” he wrote to Bess. In Panama, he toured the length of the Canal by plane, inspected the giant 16-inch defense guns, watched a ship pass through the Miraflores Locks, and found himself “treated royally” by everyone. One artillery officer whom he had known from summer camp at Fort Riley “treated me as if I were the President of the U.S.A.”
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