Harry Truman

by Margaret Truman

  Here my father made his first miscalculation as President. Although Byrnes, as Dad put it later, “practically jumped down my throat to accept” when he offered him the job, their relationship was flawed almost from the beginning by Byrnes’s low opinion of Harry Truman and his extravagantly high opinion of himself.

  My father spent the rest of the afternoon conferring with Secretary of State Stettinius and Charles E. Bohlen of the Department of State, who had acted as interpreter at the Yalta meetings with Stalin. The subject was Russia’s gross violation of the Yalta agreements, particularly in Poland. The Russians were totally ignoring the solemn agreement to create a representative Polish government and were installing their Communist lackeys, known as the Lublin government, in Warsaw. My father decided there was no time to waste, and he immediately cabled Prime Minister Churchill, who seemed inclined to denounce the Russians publicly for their conduct. Dad felt this might cause a major breach among the three Allied leaders at the worst possible moment, and he urged instead that we “have another go” at Stalin.

  With some reluctance, the British prime minister agreed and a diplomatic crisis, which might have prolonged the war, was averted.

  In this same afternoon meeting, my father was able to use the melancholy fact of President Roosevelt’s death to score a diplomatic breakthrough, with the help of our ambassador in Moscow, W. Averell Harriman. Harriman had been summoned to see Stalin when the news of Roosevelt’s death arrived in the Russian capital. He immediately urged the Russian leader to make a gesture which might repair the strong impression that Russia was no longer interested in cooperating with the United States to create a peaceful postwar world. Stalin offered to send Molotov to the San Francisco Conference, if the new American President would back up Harriman’s request for him. My father immediately cabled the American Embassy his strong approval of this request, and one of the major stumbling blocks in the path of the San Francisco meeting was removed.

  So, with one crisis averted and what seemed like a major step toward repairing Soviet-American relations achieved, and with an equally urgent repair job begun on Capitol Hill, Dad wearily pondered a stack of memoranda on his desk. There was a request from the Secretary of State for instructions for the American delegation to the conference in San Francisco, and reports on our relationships with Russia, Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, and a dozen other countries. There were copies of the cables exchanged between Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt. Somehow he would have to read as much as possible of this mass of words before going to bed. Dad piled it all into his briefcase and returned to Connecticut Avenue, where Mother and I were waiting for him.

  My father was upset to find our apartment building practically under a state of siege. Secret Service men guarded every entrance, and no one could enter without producing complete identification. Dad had told Mrs. Roosevelt he had no intention of moving into the White House until she was ready to leave. But it was obviously impossible for us to stay here much longer. Wisely, Mother had decided it would be best if I did not go to school that day, so we personally had suffered a minimum of inconvenience. But our neighbors, who had to come and go to earn a living, were by no means as fortunate.

  The following morning my father arose at dawn to continue his reading of top-secret documents and departed for the White House at around 8:15. He found his desk already covered with telegrams and cables. His first visitor was his old friend John W. Snyder. He had been in Mexico City, at an inter-American banking conference, and had flown to Washington as soon as he heard of President Roosevelt’s death. Snyder was in the process of leaving the government, after some ten years of service, to take a position as executive vice president of a leading St. Louis bank. It was the fulfillment of one of his life’s ambitions, and he admits he was very dismayed to hear Dad inform him he wanted him to stay in Washington as Federal Loan Administrator.

  “I told him that my boss at the bank would be extremely upset at this change in plans,” Snyder recalls, “but he stopped me cold on that one by calling him long distance and getting his approval. I was still hemming and hawing, when Jimmy Byrnes walked into the office and said, ‘Don’t let him talk back to you, Harry, you’re the President. Draft him.’ I capitulated.”

  My father was delighted. Not only was he getting on his team one of his oldest, most trusted friends, but a man who was widely respected by business and banking interests. Snyder had been one of Jesse Jones’s top assistants in the RFC. As head of the Defense Plant Corporation, he had lent $11 billion to private industry, to help create the American war effort.

  As a courtesy, one or two days later, my father telephoned Jesse Jones and said, “Jesse, the President has just appointed John Snyder to be federal loan administrator.”

  “Did he make that appointment before he died?” asked Jones.

  “No,” Dad answered with a smile, “he made it just now.”

  Jones made an understandable mistake, Dad says. “Those first few days, even I occasionally found myself still thinking of Mr. Roosevelt as the President.”

  Meanwhile, around the nation newspapers and magazines were making a valiant effort to tell their readers about the new President. The man who made the greatest impact was probably Roy Roberts, the big, broad-beamed managing editor of the Kansas City Star. He and one of his reporters, “Duke” Shoop, had wangled an invitation to see my father for a few minutes the previous afternoon. In a widely syndicated article, Roberts struck a chord which was, while true in one sense, wildly wrong in projecting any genuine appreciation of Dad’s abilities. “The new President is the average man,” Roberts wrote. He went on to add some really incredible nonsense about Dad “approaching forty and still looking at the rear of the horse as he plowed the corn rows.” Then, stuck with his average-man thesis, Roberts tried to argue that this would be my father’s “greatest asset as he undertakes these new overpowering responsibilities.” From there his analysis became almost laughable if it had not been so misleading. “He is really more southern in viewpoint than midwestern,” Roberts wrote. “. . . If he develops a weakness, it will be in not always understanding the newly aroused mass consciousness of industrial labor.”

  Later in the week, Time magazine won my prize for the worst analysis and the murkiest crystal ball: “Harry Truman is a man of distinct limitations, especially in experience in high level politics. He knows his limitations. . . . In his administration there are likely to be few innovations and little experimentation.”

  At 10:30 that Saturday morning, President Roosevelt’s funeral train arrived in Washington from Warm Springs. My father made another gesture toward political unity and invited Henry Wallace and Jimmy Byrnes to go with him to the station and join the funeral procession. It was a hot, very humid day. The streets were packed with people, many of them weeping. There was very little conversation in the presidential limousine. Dad felt acutely that he was on display as President for the first time and did not feel it would be appropriate for him to chat in his normal manner, as if he was on his way to some routine ceremony. Wallace and Byrnes began, for some odd reason, to discuss President Roosevelt’s political mistakes. Among his worst, they agreed, was his attempt to purge Democrats who had not gone along with his 1937 court-packing plan.

  At the train, my father paid his respects to Mrs. Roosevelt and the other members of the family and then rode back to the White House in the funeral procession. It was heartbreaking to watch the tears streaming down the faces of the people on the streets. The flag-covered coffin was carried on a caisson drawn by six white horses. Ahead, the United States Marine Band and the United States Navy Band alternately played solemn funeral music. There was not a sound except the clop of the horses’ feet, the drone of military planes overhead, the hum of car motors.

  At the White House, my father went directly to his west-wing office. He did not want the Roosevelt family to feel his presence was an intrusion. Moreover, he had work to do. At 11:30, Harry Hopkins, the tall, thin, cadaverous man who was
closer to Roosevelt than anyone else in the government, appeared in the doorway. He had left the Mayo Clinic, where he was being treated for a serious digestive disorder, to fly to Washington for FDR’s funeral. By great good luck, my father felt closer to him than to anyone else in the Roosevelt Administration. They had known each other since the early 1930s. They shared a similar style. Both were direct, practical men.

  “How do you feel, Harry?” Dad asked.

  “Terrible,” Hopkins replied.

  My father explained why he had asked him to leave the hospital. At Cairo, Casablanca, Teheran, and Yalta, Hopkins had sat beside Roosevelt while he conferred with Stalin and Churchill. Dad wanted to know everything Hopkins remembered, and, in particular, because Dad valued his judgment so highly, he wanted Hopkins’s personal assessment of the Russian leader and his associates.

  After Hopkins left, Admiral Leahy arrived with two important messages from Churchill. He wanted to know if the President was ready to issue a joint statement hailing the junction of American and Russian armies in Europe, an event which was now only days, perhaps hours, away. The second message asked my father’s opinion of a project created by the Chiefs of Staff. It called for launching pilotless old bombers, crammed with explosives, against German cities. Churchill feared the Nazis might retaliate in kind against London. He wondered if it was necessary, with the war going so well. Reluctantly he had given his approval to it. After talking with Admiral Leahy, Dad decided to postpone the project indefinitely and wired Churchill accordingly. His goal, from the moment he took office, was to end the war as quickly as possible, with a minimum of carnage.

  That afternoon, Mother and I joined Dad to attend the state funeral for President Roosevelt in the East Room of the White House. The walls were covered with flowers from the floor to the ceiling - a stupendous sight in that huge room. The heat was almost unbearable, and the thick scent of the flowers made it almost impossible to breathe. I came very close to an attack of claustrophobia. I fought it off by concentrating on Bishop Angus Dun, who was conducting the service. A drop of perspiration kept balancing on the tip of his nose. It was easier to wonder when the drop would fall off than it was to think about the overpowering scene around me.

  About ten o’clock that night, Mother and Dad and I went to Union Station and boarded the funeral train for the trip to Hyde Park. It was a huge train - seventeen cars - and it was crammed with practically every official of the American government. In retrospect, it seems a terribly dangerous thing to have done in time of war. If sabotage or an accident had wrecked that train, the nation would have been crippled. Three times couplings broke as they tried to get us out of the station. Because of the enormous crowds along the right of way, and because it was a funeral procession, we moved very slowly. Flares glowed all along the track, illuminating thousands of grief-stricken faces. Sleep was practically impossible. When I did sleep, I had nightmares about trying to open a window and escape from a small suffocating room. I don’t think even Dad got more than a few hours’ sleep that night. For one thing, he was still working. He spent much of the night outlining his speech to Congress and discussing it with Jimmy Byrnes and others.

  We arrived in Hyde Park about 9:30 on the morning of April 15. It was a clear, sunny day, mercifully cooler in the lovely Hudson River Valley than it had been in swampy Washington. To the dull beat of the West Point band’s drummers, we followed the coffin, carried by eight servicemen, into Hyde Park’s rose garden. After the graveside service, cadets from West Point fired a final salute, which practically sent poor little Fala, FDR’s Scotty, into a fit. By noon, we were on our way back to Washington.

  Now the real politicking began. Every congressman and senator on the train was trying to get to see the President. He was working on the speech he had to give tomorrow, and it must have been maddening to be interrupted so often, but he smiled and shook hands with each of them and asked them to come see him in the White House.

  The following day, my father addressed the joint session of the Congress. Mother and I sat in the gallery, and for a moment, as he walked to the rostrum and stood there beside Sam Rayburn, he looked up and - he later told me - saw Mother and me. Dad was terribly nervous up there on the rostrum. He was always nervous before a speech, but this one, so enormously important, doubled his normal tension. He walked to the microphone and began to speak at once.

  “Just a minute, Harry,” Sam Rayburn whispered. “Let me introduce you.”

  The microphones were turned on, and everyone in the chamber - and in the country - heard him. Then the Speaker added: “The President of the United States.”

  It was a good speech, as far as I could tell. I especially liked Dad’s conclusion:

  . . . I have in my heart a prayer. As I have assumed my heavy duties, I humbly pray Almighty God, in the words of King Solomon:

  “Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge Thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this Thy so great a people?”

  The Congress interrupted him again and again with tremendous applause and gave him a standing ovation when he finished.

  The comment on his speech my father liked most came from his mother: “Harry will get along. I knew Harry would be all right after I heard him give his speech this morning. I heard every word of it, but Mary, my daughter, is going to read it to me. Everyone who heard him talk this morning will know he is sincere and will do his best.”

  That afternoon, we moved into Blair House. My father had decided it was impossible for us to stay in our Connecticut Avenue apartment, so Blair House was made ready for us.

  This lovely old house was just across the street from the White House. I fell in love with the place the moment I walked into it. Every room, especially on the first floor, was a little masterpiece of architecture and decoration. Almost every piece of furniture was a rare antique from eighteenth-century America or from France. Crystal chandeliers gleamed above Aubusson rugs. Magnificent gilt-framed mirrors redoubled the beauty of the drawing rooms, and the wood-paneled dining room was utterly charming.

  The silver service, the china, were exquisite. There was enough china to serve meals for two weeks without once repeating the pattern. Best of all, the food matched the surroundings. A few days after we moved in, we had a visit from a member of the Blair family. They had given the house to the government as a residence for the entertainment of foreign VIPs. The Blairs went back to Francis Preston Blair, a newspaperman and a member of President Andrew Jackson’s “Kitchen Cabinet.” In later years, the family settled in St. Louis, Missouri, and sent several distinguished politicians to Washington. Blair was tremendously pleased that the first President to reside in Blair House was from Missouri. So was Dad, and he took time off from his reading of crisis-filled reports to talk American history with him.

  The following day, I went back to school - another ordeal. I was pursued by a horde of reporters and photographers everywhere I went. At a more discreet distance, I was trailed by the Secret Service man assigned to me, John Dorsey. At first, the photographers almost reduced me to tears, but after I had retreated to a private room and pulled myself together, my Truman common sense came to the fore, and I decided to let them take pictures until they wore themselves or their lenses out; then, I hoped, they would go away and stop bothering me and the rest of George Washington University. It worked beautifully. I remained calm and invited my sorority sisters and even my professors to say cheese and let the photographers click away. They were satisfied by the end of the day. I have followed the impromptu formula I devised that day, ever since. There is really no point in trying to play Garbo and fight off the picture boys. If you try to beat them at their game, they will go out of their way to take bad pictures of you.

  My father, meanwhile, had more important things to worry about. Like his first press conference.

  The largest mob of reporters in White House history - 348 - showed up for it. On the whole, it was like most press conferences, a c
ombination of the trivial and the important. My father impressed everyone by how swiftly and forthrightly he answered the reporters’ questions. Roosevelt was fond of playing hide-and-seek with the press, tantalizing them with semi-answers and evasions. Dad’s approach was drastically different. He either answered a question directly, or declined to answer it just as directly.

  One reporter asked him whether the blacks in America could look forward to his support for fair employment practices and the right to vote without being hampered by poll taxes. “I will give you some advice,” Dad said. “All you need to do is read the Senate record of one Harry S. Truman.” Someone else wanted to know if he was planning to lift the ban on horseracing. “I do not intend to lift the ban,” Dad said. Another man asked his views on the disposal of synthetic rubber plants. “That is not a matter for discussion here. It will be discussed at the proper time,” was the reply. Then there was the goofball who asked, “Mr. President, do you approve of the work of the Truman Committee?” A roar of laughter saved Dad the trouble of answering that one. Perhaps his most important statement - one that drew a rare burst of applause from the reporters - was his reply to the following question: “Do you expect to see Mr. Molotov before he goes across . . .”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Before he goes to San Francisco?”

  “Yes. He is going to stop by and pay his respects to the President of the United States. He should.”

  As his press secretary, my father had decided to retain, on a temporary basis, Leonard Reinsch, a radio newsman from Ohio. But Dad knew Reinsch, with his radio orientation, would never be acceptable to the fiercely clannish newspapermen of the White House press corps. On the morning of April 18, Dad asked the man he wanted to take the enormously important job of White House press secretary to visit him. It was his old friend Charlie Ross, valedictorian of his high school graduating class and now a contributing editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. At fifty-nine, Charlie felt reluctant to say yes. The brutal hours and the pressures of the job required a younger man. There was also the problem of salary. The Post-Dispatch was paying Charlie $35,000 a year. The White House could pay him only $10,000.