Upstairs at the White House

by J. B. West

  We discovered soon after they moved in that the Trumans had an extraordinarily close and stable family life, one that they had obviously enjoyed for a long time, and that gave strength to them all.

  When Mr. Truman ascended to the Presidency, he and his wife had already settled into a simple pattern of living that reflected their small-town background, their age, and their economic status. Even in his three months as Vice President, Mr. Truman had been able to live quietly out of the spotlight, as he had when he was the U.S. Senator from Missouri. I think this was partly because Franklin Roosevelt was such an overpowering figure, partly because World War II, not personality, was the all-consuming public interest, but mostly because the Trumans preferred it that way.

  The Trumans were the closest family who lived in the White House during the twenty-eight years I worked there. Some of the staff called them the “Three Musketeers,” as they obviously enjoyed each other’s company very much. They were essentially very private people who didn’t show affection in public. But they did everything together—read, listened to the radio, played the piano, and mostly talked to each other. They had few private dinner parties; they ate informally together, in the third-floor solarium or, in good weather, on the South Portico. They lived as simply at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as they had at 4700 Connecticut Avenue or in Independence, Missouri.

  The next four months held, in their capsule of time, the most tumultuous events within one short period of the twentieth century. The White House, with President Truman at the helm, remained at the center of those events. From May through September, the United Nations was born, the Potsdam Conference divided up Europe, the two atomic bombs were dropped on Japanese cities, Japan surrendered, and the war was over.

  September 2 was V-J Day, the day when a battered Japan signed the unconditional surrender aboard the battleship Missouri. There has never, in my lifetime, been such jubilation in Washington. Thousands and thousands screamed and danced in the streets, in riotous celebration that the four-year holocaust had come to an end, that their boys were coming home. The President came out to speak to the crowds. But they became so raucous he feared they’d tear the fence down in their joy, so he spoke over a loudspeaker from the North Portico.

  Four days later he introduced his bold, liberal domestic proposals to the Congress—a program so far-reaching, with its “economic bill of rights,” to ensure all Americans a job at fair pay, decent housing, a good education, and increasing minimum wage and social security, and fair employment practices—that it brought the Republicans out of hibernation and began the vicious anti-Truman movement. On the other side, he was snubbed by the Roosevelt people, the men who had fashioned the country for the past thirteen years. The President of the United States was caught in a vise. At home, the Trumans tightened their belts and dug in for the duration. They didn’t really emerge until spring.

  Perhaps they were following a lifetime habit of private pleasures, perhaps they were limited in their activities by their personal finances, perhaps they felt bound by wartime austerity, or perhaps, as I said, they just preferred it that way. I rather think the President took very seriously the burden of office that had fallen on his shoulders, and, not being a young man, directed his private life first and foremost at the preservation of his health.

  He was deeply aware of the role then being assumed by the United States in reshaping the world, and of his own predominant responsibility in these broadened international responsibilities. At home, the entire economy had to be restructured, as he had to formulate policies for converting from war to peace. He had no Vice President. He had to stay alive and keenly alert, if he were to cope with his job.

  “A man in my position has a public duty to keep himself in good condition,” he said. “You can’t be mentally fit unless you’re physically fit.”

  Our lives changed drastically to fit his Spartan regimen. He was up every morning at 5:30. I reported in at 6, and often met him heading for his brisk morning walk.

  “It’s the best part of the day,” he told me often, as he took off, 120 paces a minute, marching his Secret Service agents around Washington for an hour, in heat, rain, or freezing cold. His walks were well publicized, but they were only the warmup of President Truman’s daily physical fitness program. He went from his walk to the swimming pool, where he worked out with Master Sergeant Gaspar, the physical therapist.

  From the pool—where he swam with his glasses on—to the rowing machines, to the exercise machines, and twenty-five sit-ups. Then to the sweat box, and back to the pool. Pretty soon he had certain overweight members of his staff going through the same routine.

  Punctuality was the order for the Trumans. A hearty family breakfast was served at eight, and he expected Mrs. Truman and Margaret to be up and at the table with him. After breakfast, they all went to work.

  I saw Mrs. Truman at nine every morning in her little office. She sat behind her desk, dressed for the day, decorous to a degree, often wearing a simply tailored housedress.

  Mr. Crim had turned all the Truman family business over to me. “You’re younger and sharper,” he told me, “and since you’re both from the Midwest, you seem to get along pretty well. I’ve got more than I can handle here in the office, what with the engineering, gardening, and all. And I’ve got to get ready for the Congress.”

  In October, I received my official discharge from the Navy, and entered “civilian” life at my same desk. So I went upstairs every morning, as Mrs. Truman’s main contact with the operation of the White House. First I presented the day’s schedule to her. Then the housekeeper presented the menu sheet. Sometimes the First Lady would scratch it up, sometimes not.

  Mrs. Truman explained their diets at the beginning. There was to be no salt used, because she suffered from high blood pressure. We even had to remove the water-softening system from the cold-water plumbing, because it contained sodium.

  The President was on a high-protein, low-calorie diet, and they shunned rich sauces and desserts. It was mostly plain, meat-and-vegetables, American food. (“I’m sorry to limit the kitchen so,” she said at first, but she soon found that the kitchen was pretty limited anyway.)

  After the menus, we got down to business, as Mrs. Truman was very conscious of economy in housekeeping. She kept her own books, went over the bills with a finetooth comb, and wrote every check herself.

  It was during those morning sessions that I began to appreciate Mrs. Truman’s humor. Her wit was dry, laconic, incisive and very funny. It’s difficult to capture in words because it was so often silent.

  She was at her funniest with a straight face, perfectly deadpan. If you weren’t looking for one raised eyebrow, one downturned corner of her mouth, you might miss the joke entirely.

  She undoubtedly performed her best material for the President and Margaret, who would howl with laughter at the dinner table while Mrs. Truman sat pokerfaced, enjoying her audience.

  She made a big joke out of being grouchy in the morning. At eight, when she went upstairs to the solarium for breakfast, she might growl at her husband or Margaret and they’d tease her all through breakfast.

  The butlers had a running wager on her mood for the day. “Is she wearing two guns this morning?” Fields would ask the butler who served breakfast.

  “Just one today,” he might answer, or if she had peppered her family with mock criticism—by mimicking their behavior of the night before, the butler’s judgment would be: “Both guns smoking.”

  After our nine o’clock sessions, Mrs. Truman worked at her desk all morning, sometimes dictating to Reathel Odum, but most often handling her own correspondence, reading all her mail, writing her own letters in longhand.

  She usually joined the President for lunch, or, if he had other plans, she ate lunch alone with her mother in Mrs. Wallace’s room.

  Mrs. Truman’s mother, Margaret Gates Wallace, was as close to an aristocrat as the Midwest could produce, as formal a lady as ever lived in the White House. She called her son-
in-law “Mr. Truman,” even though he’d been in her family for twenty-six years by this time, and she delicately opposed a career for her granddaughter, Margaret. In the White House, where she lived for the rest of her life, she hardly ever left her room. Bess Truman visited her mother faithfully every day, and as Mrs. Wallace grew older, read the newspapers to her.

  At two o’clock, after lunch, Mr. Truman went upstairs for a nap. He could go to sleep at the drop of a hat, and went to bed in the afternoon as if it were a long winter’s night.

  Mrs. Truman chose that hour to sit in her sitting room, reading. She liked to say that she didn’t nap, but many times I went upstairs to see her about something or other and I’d find her sitting upright in her chair, sound asleep, her book open in her lap.

  An hour later, the Trumans were off to their respective business. Mrs. Truman often received charity groups or servicemen in the afternoon, or appeared at charity functions such as a Salvation Army benefit, elsewhere in Washington.

  At the end of the work day, the Trumans had cocktails in the West Hall, which is the family sitting room. One drink each, before dinner. But it took a while to learn their tastes. Shortly after they moved in, the First Lady rang for the butler. Fields came up, tray in hand.

  “We’d like two old-fashioneds, please,” she requested.

  Fields, who often moonlighted at Washington’s most elegant parties, prided himself on being an excellent bartender.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” he answered.

  In no time flat, he was back with the order, in chilled glasses, with appetizing fruit slices and a dash of bitters. Mrs. Truman tasted the drink, thanked him, but made no other comment.

  The next evening she rang for Fields. “Can you make the old-fashioneds a little drier?” she said. “We don’t like them so sweet.”

  Fields tried a new recipe, and again she said nothing.

  But the next morning she told me, “They make the worst old-fashioneds here I’ve ever tasted! They’re like fruit punch.”

  The next evening, Fields, his pride hurt, dumped two big splashes of bourbon over the ice and served it to Mrs. Truman.

  She tasted the drink. Then she beamed. “Now that’s the way we like our old-fashioneds!”

  They had dinner promptly at seven, usually in the third-floor solarium, after the first few days at the huge table in the high-ceilinged Private Dining Room. We had an electric “thermotator,” which kept food warm in little ovens that the butlers, Fields or Charles, brought from the kitchen via the elevator and served elegantly, even though they were in the middle of a “game room.” Although the Trumans sought informality, the traditions of waiting on Presidents are strong ones, so two butlers, dressed formally in black, served the three very informal Trumans.

  In good weather, dinner was out on the South Portico, overlooking the Washington Monument, and again served formally, although the President fed the squirrels between courses.

  After dinner, the Trumans watched movies, mainly because Margaret, a movie buff, often implored her parents to join her. Her mother spent more time with her in the theater than her father did, though I dare say neither of them sat through “The Scarlet Pimpernel” sixteen times, as Margaret did.

  Mrs. Truman and her daughter played ping-pong in the third-floor hall; they played bridge on the second floor with some of Margaret’s friends; they bowled in the new bowling alley.

  But mainly, as a family, they talked to each other.

  The second-floor scene was far different from the Roosevelt years: the sound of young college girls singing, playing the piano in Margaret’s suite. The quiet voice of Mrs. Truman reading aloud to her mother, and the spunky retorts of the President’s ninety-year-old mother, who arrived as the first weekend houseguest.

  Like most mothers of Presidents I served, she had plenty of spirit. “When my mother arrives, she definitely will not sleep in the Lincoln bed,” Mr. Truman told us. A Southerner to the core, she still fought the Civil War. “I’ll sleep on the floor first,” she said.

  We then arranged for her to stay in the Queen’s Room, but she’d have none of that either. “It’s too fancy for me,” she said, and slept next door in the small adjoining sitting room, offering the regal Queen’s Room to her daughter, Mary.

  We had taken President Roosevelt’s wheelchair ramp out of the second floor and the President’s mother tripped on the steps that weekend, injuring herself. She didn’t tell anyone because she didn’t want to be a bother.

  That’s the way the entire Truman family was. They didn’t want to be a bother to anybody on the staff, they asked for very little. They treated the staff with respect—respect for us personally, and respect for the work that we did.

  When a butler or doorman or usher would enter the room, the Trumans would introduce him to whoever happened to be sitting in the room, even if it were a King or a Prime Minister. They introduced all the staff to their visitors—something I’d never seen the Roosevelts do.

  This personal touch revealed a great deal to me about the Trumans as people. They did not see the world as being composed of aristocratic leaders on the one hand and faceless servants on the other. They had a broad sense of humanity that bridged the divisions of job and status, which seem to wall us off from each other into so many compartments.

  And Mrs. Truman always sent the maids home on Sunday afternoons. “I can turn down beds perfectly well by myself,” she said when they protested that they’d be needed. For all these human courtesies, they received in return an extra amount of respect and admiration from all of us who worked there.

  At nine o’clock, Mr. Truman picked up his briefcase, took Mrs. Truman by the arm, went into his study, and closed the door. They worked together until eleven o’clock almost every night, editing his speeches, discussing his policies, designing his politics.

  In public, Mrs. Truman never said a word. She stayed as far in the background as Mrs. Roosevelt had projected her own personality into the foreground. Bess Truman guarded her privacy like a precious jewel. And in that privacy was hidden a great secret involving the role she played in public life. She probably had more influence on political decisions than Mrs. Roosevelt had on social issues.

  A keenly intelligent, well-educated, politically experienced person (she had worked in her husband’s Senate office), Mrs. Truman knew her politics—and her husband respected her opinion. In that oval study every evening, she was more than a sounding-board, more than a “blue-penciler” for his speeches. Although it went unsuspected by nearly everybody in government, Bess Truman entered into nearly every decision the President made.

  With the crisis of war ended, the new President found himself embattled on many fronts. In addition to the shellacking he was taking on domestic issues, he further infuriated Congress by insisting on civilian, not military control of atomic energy. He struggled to bring economic order in a country beset by strikes in the automobile, steel, oil, rubber, meat-packing, and lumber industries.

  During those months of turmoil, as she had done almost every night since they moved in, Bess Truman applied her editor’s touch to every statement, her analytical thinking to every action of the President’s. Her mind was one of his greatest assets.

  His staff always referred to Harry Truman as “The Boss.” The President referred to his wife as “The Boss.” Privately, she affected the role, and the President loved it.

  “She’s the only one who bawls me out and gets away with it,” he bragged.

  The President’s salty language was a bone of contention. He was known to slip a “hell” or “damn” into his public utterances, causing quite a furor—unlike most Presidents who only cursed privately. Mrs. Truman was forever saying, “You shouldn’t have said that!”

  An apocryphal story that made the rounds had a famous woman Democrat rushing to the White House to plead with Mrs. Truman to have Harry clean up his language. It seemed that he’d called somebody’s statements “a bunch of horse manure.” Unruffled, Bess Truman is said to have
smilingly replied:

  “You don’t know how many years it took to tone it down to that.”

  We often saw her look daggers at him if he got “out of line.” But Mrs. Truman’s rebukes were given because she didn’t want her husband to be hurt by an injudicious remark, not because she was prudish.

  I often thought there was a twinkle in her eye, along with the daggers, for as her brother Fred told me, “Bess is not as shocked as they’d have you believe. She’s heard cusswords all her life, and even knows how to use them. Why, she was the biggest tomboy in Independence.”

  Her tomboy years, when she pitched sandlot ball to her three brothers, were well behind her, however. She was circumspect in her conversation, ladylike in every way. No one entered her bedroom when she was inside. No one saw her in her dressing gown. All her conferences were at her desk. All her visitors were received in her sitting room. But she retained one childhood passion: She was wild about baseball. Mrs. Truman went to see every Washington Senators game that she could fit into her schedule, and she listened to the night games on the radio in her sitting room.

  She kept up with her old friends, including the Senate wives, and she drove herself to her bridge club and to shops. Mrs. Truman was like Mrs. Roosevelt in her dislike of limousines. But where Mrs. Roosevelt walked or rode the bus, Mrs. Truman drove. I remember her first call.

  “Please have my car brought up at two o’clock.”

  “Which car would you prefer,” I asked, “the Cadillac or Packard?”

  “My own car, the Chrysler,” she replied.

  “Would you like a driver?”

  “Indeed not. I don’t want to forget how to drive!”

  And off she’d spin, sometimes alone, sometimes taking her mother for a drive. Sometimes she would tell us where she was going, sometimes she wouldn’t. But the days when a First Lady could freely move around Washington were coming to an end.

  Sadly, she stopped by the office one day and told us, “I’m going to have to give up driving. It just causes too much commotion. I can’t stop at a traffic light without somebody running up. The Secret Service has laid down the law about my driving.” Thereafter, Tom Hardy, Mr. Truman’s driver during his eighty-two days as Vice President, chauffeured her around town.