Harry Truman

by Margaret Truman

  Another battle in which my father played a prominent part had to do with the structure of the postwar world. The internationalists in the Senate, of which Dad was emphatically one, wanted President Roosevelt and the Democratic Party to come out strongly for an effective world security organization. The subject was frequently discussed at Truman Committee conclaves. Finally, three members of his committee, Republicans Joseph Ball of Minnesota and Harold Burton of Ohio, and Democrat Carl A. Hatch of New Mexico, joined with Senator Lister Hill of Alabama to introduce Senate Resolution 114, which soon became known as B2H2. It called on Congress and the President to begin making concrete plans for postwar international machinery with power adequate to maintain the peace.

  The resolution received very little encouragement from the White House. FDR, remembering Wilson’s experience with the League of Nations, was extremely cautious about discussing his postwar plans with Congress. He feared he might antagonize the powerful isolationist sentiment among both Republicans and Southern Democrats. My father was one of the most vigorous backers of B2H2. He spent endless hours buttonholing fellow senators, urging them to support it. “The bipartisan character of this proposal is the best thing that has happened in Congress in many years,” he said in a public statement of support.

  From March 20, 1943, when the resolution was introduced, until early November, the battle over B2H2 raged in Congress and the press. Finally, the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Tom Connally of Texas (also on the Truman Committee), introduced a resolution calling for the “establishment and maintenance of international authority with power to prevent aggression and preserve the peace of the world.” The Senate approved it overwhelmingly. My father considered his work on behalf of B2H2 and its descendant, the Connally Resolution, one of the most important achievements of his senatorial career.

  At the time, I knew little of these behind-the-scenes dramas. I had enrolled in George Washington University in 1942 and was struggling to fight my way through horrendous required courses, such as botany, as well as staggering amounts of my major subject, history, which I loved. Dad was delighted when I decided to major in history. But his delight soon turned to chagrin, when he discovered I was as contrary as the rest of the Trumans and was concentrating on English history, not American. However, his spirits rose in 1944, when I took a required course in American history. When we got to the Civil War, he envisioned himself somehow finding time to overwhelm me with his vast and complex knowledge of the various military campaigns. But our teacher was not interested in the military history of the country. He concentrated on social and political history and skipped over the whole military side of the Civil War in about twenty minutes. Dad’s outrage was absolutely spectacular. Mother and I loved it. Battles - who needs them?

  With all the pressure he was working under, my father seldom if ever said a cross word to me intentionally. I was still his baby. But the paths of father-daughter relationships don’t always run smoothly, especially when daughter is emerging from her cocoon of shyness and coping with the problems of late adolescence. One night, early in 1944, the Truman Committee gave a dinner for General George C. Marshall, the army’s chief of staff. I was one of the supernumerary guests. I happened to be standing near the door when the General arrived, and Dad introduced me. Then someone called him away, leaving me and the General together. I fell in love instantly with this remarkable man. He asked me what I was studying in college. When I told him it was history, we got into a fascinating discussion. What impressed me - even staggered me - was his eagerness to know my opinion of my courses and the teaching techniques I was seeing. He was amazingly interested in education, and he discoursed for some time on his belief that film is one of the best ways to teach history. He urged me to suggest it to my professors.

  Finally, after twenty or twenty-five minutes, Dad came over and said, “You can’t monopolize the guest of honor and the General of the Armies, you know.” My mouth fell open. I had forgotten I was talking to General Marshall. He was marvelous at making you forget his importance while simultaneously making you feel that you and what you were saying were important to him.

  When I got home that night, I was on Cloud 9. I floated around the apartment, rhapsodizing about the attention General Marshall had paid me. Finally, Dad could stand it no longer. He looked up from a report he was reading and brought me abruptly down to earth. “Why wouldn’t General Marshall sit down and talk with the daughter of the head of the investigating committee of the war effort?” he snapped.

  I was shattered. I could have taken this crack from Mother because she is the cynic of the family. Again and again she had pointed out to me I should be suspicious of people who were too nice to me, because Dad was a powerful senator. But somehow, Dad pointing it out made it almost unbearable. Later, he freely admitted he was wrong - he didn’t know General Marshall well at the time.) I retired to my bedroom and cried for an hour. It was a perfect excuse not to study for a chemistry exam the next day, and I came within an eyelash of flunking it. Dad never knew he upset me. But I learned the lesson of his growing importance.

  I got another glimpse of this importance - in a somewhat negative way - the day we christened the Missouri, in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It was my first real visit to New York. John Snyder’s daughter Drucie and another close friend, Jane Lingo, were invited along to be my maids of honor at the ceremony. The night before the launching, we went to see Oklahoma. It was my first Broadway show. Drucie, Jane, and I were so excited we stayed up all night, we literally did not go to sleep for one second. By the time we arrived at the Navy Yard, we were glassy eyed. It was a gray January day, typical New York weather. We stood under the bow of the Missouri, which was as high as a fifteen-story building, while workmen knocked away the beams that were holding her on the ways. Everything was on a very tight schedule. The speech-making had to be finished just in time to give me a chance to swing my magnum of champagne, and then the last timber would be knocked aside and down the ways she would go.

  With no sleep and the excitement of the occasion, I missed what was really going on. The admirals on hand were busy revenging themselves on Dad for previous humiliations. Admirals and generals are a clannish bunch. Embarrass one, and you’ve embarrassed them all tends to be their philosophy. Dad was supposed to give the main speech. One or two admirals were supposed to make brief remarks before him. Instead, they rambled on and on and on. When Dad finally got to the microphone, he had about three minutes to deliver a fifteen-minute speech. I never heard him talk so fast in my life.

  Then came the signal. I gave a mighty bash with my magnum. Nothing happened to the Missouri. It seemed to have a mind of its own and was not in the mood for launching. Playfully I put my hand on the bow and gave her a shove. Meanwhile, I was getting a champagne shower. The christening platform was about a third of the way up the fifteen-story-high bow. Normally, once the bottle, which was in a sterling silver jacket, broke, it was hauled to the deck as the ship slid down the ways. The workmen above us were dutifully doing this job - but because the “Mighty Mo” refused to move, the champagne streamed out of the broken bottle right down on me and the commanding admiral. This was an accident - it was not part of the let’s-torment-Truman program, but it did not make Dad any happier. Finally, the “Mo” started to move, and just as it struck the water, the sun came out. It was the only time we saw the sun all day. All the navy men solemnly agreed it was a good omen.

  Two years later, when Dad was in the White House, he was still sending off sparks whenever he thought of the treatment he had received from the navy brass that day. On the eve of a trip to Florida he wrote: “The darned navy have tried to give me an impossible schedule. As you know, every Admiral in nine hundred miles will want to be seen with the President. But they are going to be disappointed. I’ll never forget what the same Admirals did to me and my sweet daughter at the launching of the Missouri.”

  The same Admirals should read Josh Billings - should have read him befo
re the launching. He said: “Always be nice to your poor relations - they may suddenly become rich someday, and it will be hard to explain.”

  At the time, however, his dizzy daughter and her equally dizzy friends restored his good humor with a stunt that is still remembered by old-timers at the Waldorf. We went to dinner in the hotel’s Empire Room and just as crêpes suzette were being served for dessert, all three of us went to sleep, sitting up in our chairs. While waiters got hysterics, Mother politely suggested we ought to go to bed. We nodded, abandoned our crêpes, went upstairs, and collapsed.

  This incident may account for a mildly worried tone in the advice Dad gave me on my twentieth birthday:

  My dear daughter,

  On Thursday, the day after tomorrow, you’ll be twenty years old. It doesn’t seem possible but the facts of time make it so. I hope that you have a most happy birthday and that you’ll have an unlimited number of them in the future. That, of course, will depend upon you and circumstances. You first and then what happens as old Father Time marches into the future. You must meet contingencies as they arise, and face them squarely. And I’m sure you will. You should have enough of your mother’s will power and strength of character and your dad’s affability to make out.

  He wrote this letter from Jacksonville, Florida, where he had gone to make a Jackson Day dinner speech. On this trip he was not impressed either by Florida or by the crowd he drew: “Florida, as represented by Jacksonville, is one heck of a place. The sun was shining brightly when I arrived Sunday, but it turned cold in the night and clouded up, then Monday it got warm and Monday night it stormed and rained and blew a gale, breaking windows and keeping the customers away from my speech. They wouldn’t have come anyway, but they had an excuse. There were about two hundred and they were kind and enthusiastic. The optimistic national committee man and committee woman assured me there’d be two thousand - but zeros are easy to put on in politics.”

  More and more Senator Harry S. Truman was becoming a name and a voice people wanted to hear (wind and weather permitting). The work of his committee appealed immensely to Americans everywhere. The idea that my father was “obscure” at this point in his political career is utter nonsense concocted by writers who specialize in overdramatizing politics. When fifty press gallery reporters were asked to list the ten Americans who had contributed the most to the war effort, Dad was the only member of Congress they named. His independence had won him a following, and the Democratic Party simply had to acknowledge this as a fact. He even survived a distinct chill emanating from the White House - a temperature change that withered more than one promising political career during the Roosevelt era.

  Part of this chill was caused by Dad’s independence. He persisted in criticizing the manpower policies and many other aspects of the Roosevelt Administration’s conduct of the war. But most of the temperature drop came from a literary double cross. In the fall of 1942 American Magazine hit the newsstands with an article, “We Can Lose the War in Washington,” a wide-ranging, sensational critique of the whole war effort. The article had my father’s name on it. Less than a week later the Democrats took quite a drubbing in the 1942 elections. It was the first - but, alas, not the last - time Dad took a writer’s word for what was in a document. Harassed and pressured as he was, he fell victim to one of the oldest dodges in the magazine business.

  The magazine sent a girl down to Washington with a copy of the final manuscript. She put on a marvelous act in Dad’s office. She told him the presses were ready to roll and begged him to stop everything he was doing and read the article. Then she implied it wasn’t really necessary, because everything that was in it was exactly what Dad had told the writer.

  My father had insisted in his original agreement that nothing could be printed unless he initialed each page of the manuscript. Now with the poor girl having fits, Dad’s soft heart melted. “Well,” he said, “you look like an honest girl.” Without reading the manuscript he initialed each page, and she went racing gleefully back to New York. Later that day, he did read the article and his heart almost stopped beating. The piece read as if it had been written by a Roosevelt-hating Republican.

  That very night my father sent committee lawyers hustling to New York and they went to court to block the circulation of the issue. But Sumner Blossom, the editor of American Magazine, smugly informed the court the issue had already gone to press, and Senator Truman had approved the article. After all, hadn’t he initialed it? Legally Dad had no case, so he could only grind his teeth and accept the responsibility. The article, combined with the Democratic disaster on Election Day, made Dad’s name anathema in the White House for months. Harley Kilgore of West Virginia, one of the stalwarts of the committee, finally explained what had happened to the President, and FDR agreed to forgive and try to forget.

  In months to come, my father had more pleasant experiences with other magazines. Time put him on its cover on March 8, 1943. The article was inaccurate in many minor ways, and the cover portrait made him look like Rip Van Winkle, but they called him “a billion dollar watchdog” and praised the work of the committee. The Reader’s Digest also lavishly praised the committee as “the public’s most accessible court of appeals.” By this time, more and more Democrats realized the style and standards my father set for the Truman Committee had stolen all the thunder from Republican criticisms of the war -criticisms that would have been far more partisan, and aimed more directly at the President.

  In his letter to me about his Jackson Day dinner speech in Florida, Dad, with his usual modesty, did not even bother to mention the speech, under-attended though it was, contained one of his most important public statements. He urged the renomination and reelection of FDR for a fourth term to fight the war to a victorious conclusion. Dad explicitly identified the work of his committee with the administration, praising it for welcoming the criticisms he made (most of the time, anyway) and warning Republicans against playing politics with any of the committee’s disclosures. He made similar speeches in Topeka, Kansas, and at state Democratic conventions in Missouri and Connecticut in the coming months. The New York Times was soon reporting that Dad’s words “had the effect of giving a stamp of approval to the nation’s war leaders and war program from a source which command’s considerable respect.” The Times concluded the speeches were “an important boost for President Roosevelt’s nomination and for his chances with the electorate next November.”

  After something happens, particularly an election or some other historical event, we tend to believe it was inevitable. It is hard, often impossible, to recapture the frame of mind that prevailed before the event. Early in 1944, there was considerable alarm within the Democratic Party about their prospects in the coming presidential election. Although the war was going reasonably well, there was as yet no sign of an imminent Axis collapse. D-Day had yet to come. The home front was seething with labor unrest. The civilian side of the war effort was wracked by personal feuds, and Congress was almost out of the President’s control. Dad’s support - entirely unsolicited by the White House - was not only welcome, but needed.

  Privately, I might add here, my father was very critical of the way the Roosevelt Administration handled the politics of the home front. In a letter to his fellow Young Turk, Lewis B. Schwellenbach, who had become a federal district judge in Washington, he remarked in mid-1943: “The political situation is bad everywhere. If an effort had been made to do things in the way that would make people against the Administration a better job along that line couldn’t have been done. In Missouri nearly every man in charge of the Office of Price Administration have been people who thoroughly hated the Administration and everything it stands for, and naturally they do the harsh things that are necessary for the enforcement of price control and production management in such a way as to put all the blame on the White House, and I have been informed that that same policy in appointments has been followed in most of the States.”

  Once more my father voiced his disapproval of t
his Rooseveltian approach to political opponents: “The President’s mistaken notion he was getting cooperation by taking the enemy into the camp is something I never did believe in and I don’t believe in that policy now.”

  Throughout the early months of 1944, my father was in the forefront of a vital, politically explosive home-front battle - the debate over reconversion to a peacetime economy. He called for a reconversion plan, now. The military and their big-business supporters did everything in their power to wreck Donald Nelson’s inclination to follow Dad’s lead in this direction. I stress this theme again, because I don’t believe people realize the leadership Dad exerted on major policy decisions which shaped the entire war effort. Most of the American public, preoccupied by the war news that poured in every day from the far-flung battlefronts, ignored this aspect of things. But acute observers in Washington were very much aware of it. On March 5, 1944, Donald Nelson released to the press a letter he had written to Senator Francis Maloney of Connecticut in which he outlined his future policy on reconversion. Almost every detail was drawn from recommendations made by the Truman Committee. On March 11, the Kiplinger Washington Letter observed: “WPB [the War Production Board] especially is allied closely to Truman brand of thinking and WPB is already moving along the Truman lines.”

  In the last part of 1943, my father and Hugh Fulton prepared a paper outlining some of the problems of reconversion. The report pointed to the tremendous opportunities open to America if they developed programs to use resources and facilities developed by the war. The report called on the War Production Board to begin giving “special attention” to this aspect of the war effort. But the military pressure inside the War Production Board was simply too strong; when Nelson made some tentative steps in the direction my father suggested, the battle that erupted cost him his job. As a result, the American economy went steaming into the abrupt end of World War II with practically no plans for reconversion. It seems especially ironic that the man who first suggested careful planning to make the transition from peace to war as smooth as possible was then in the White House, stuck with the gigantic headaches that developed.