The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  Wallace finally wrote Roosevelt a firm letter calling on the president to appoint a commission to investigate the situation and either fire him or give him the power he needed to do his job as BEW chief. FDR, fed up with the feud, abolished the BEW and put its functions under a new agency with a new director. Jones crowed at the outcome and later wrote, “Mr. Wallace was out of a war job. He was once more just the Vice President with little to do but wait for the president to die, which fortunately did not occur while Henry was Vice President.”28 The liberal columnist I. F. Stone, taking Wallace’s side, wrote that Roosevelt “now, smugly even-handed, equally rebukes the loyal and the disloyal, the lieutenant who risked his political future for the war effort and the lieutenant who sabotaged it. Justice itself could not be more blind.”29

  The whole row naturally raised questions about Wallace’s political future. He lost his prime wartime staff job but had been elected to the vice presidency and could not be fired from it. But as the end of FDR’s third term loomed ahead and as the war’s end was not in sight, the question of whether Roosevelt would seek a fourth term was now under wide discussion. By the end of August 1943, Wallace himself assumed that Roosevelt would indeed run again and believed he was still in the president’s good graces. But when he got advice from friends to start lining up support from party leaders and potential 1944 convention delegates, he declined as not his style.

  A Gallup Poll in March gave Wallace the highest favorable rating of potential FDR running mates in 1944. But within the Roosevelt inner circle and among the party’s political bosses, there were conversations about removing Wallace from the line of presidential succession in the approaching election. They all knew of the toll that the war had taken on the health of the already invalided FDR and were aware that in nominating the next candidate for vice president they might well be choosing the next president. Ed Flynn, the New York Democratic boss, told Roosevelt that Wallace was now perceived as “the candidate of the radicals” and that the challenge was to find the Democrat “who would hurt him least.”30

  Roosevelt, however, in a preconvention meeting with Wallace, assured him he was his choice to be his running mate again and, at Wallace’s pointed request, would be willing to say that if he, FDR, were a delegate to the convention he would vote for Wallace. The next day, FDR finally announced his intention to seek a fourth term but made no mention of his running mate. Meanwhile, the national party chairman, Bob Hannegan, also approached Wallace, urging him to step aside, but was told, “I will not withdraw as long as the president prefers me.”31

  Roosevelt also told him, Wallace wrote later, that the president’s political advisers thought Wallace would hurt the ticket, to which the vice president replied, “If you think so, I will withdraw at once.” FDR said it was “mighty sweet” of him to offer, but he would not consider accepting it. The meeting ended with the two men shaking hands and the president saying only, “While I cannot put it just that way in public, I hope it will be the same old team.” But as Wallace was heading for the Oval Office door, Roosevelt strangely added, again according to Wallace, “Even though they do beat you out at Chicago, we will have a job for you in world economic affairs.”32

  That night, six days before the opening of the Democratic National Convention, Flynn, Hannegan, national party treasurer Ed Pauley, Postmaster General Frank Walker, and Mayor Ed Kelly of Chicago had dinner with Roosevelt at the White House. Further details of this political coup against the sitting vice president will be found in the next chapter, but it suffices to say here that not only Wallace’s personal fate but also the course of American presidential politics and history was at stake in the outcome.

  Roosevelt sent another letter to the convention on July 14, not made public until its opening. After acknowledging the likely rumors floating around, he wrote, “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 were a delegate to the convention.” But then the president tellingly added, “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 to the pros and cons of its choice.”33

  Four years earlier, he had not hesitated to dictate his choice of Wallace in no uncertain terms. Now he was openly inviting the convention to ignore his transparently worded “endorsement.” Wallace himself later observed that Roosevelt could not have been “a well man” in full command of his faculties at the time or he would have told the vice president “clean and straight” that he didn’t want him on the ticket, especially since Wallace had offered to withdraw.34 But he chose to take at face value the statement’s part about the president’s personal preference for him.

  Wallace, now in Chicago to second Roosevelt’s renomination, vowed, “I am in this fight to the finish.”35 In his seconding speech for FDR’s renomination, he triggered a demonstration for himself from the labor-packed galleries, saying the only question to be answered at the convention was whether the party believed “wholeheartedly in the liberal policies for which Roosevelt has always stood.”36 By implication he was urging his own continuation as FDR’s most liberal ally, and his speech electrified the crowd. Maybe his foes in the party were wrong, and he could be nominated after all.

  The roll call of the states for presidential nomination gave FDR an easy, though not unanimous, first-ballot victory. Roosevelt, now at a naval base in San Diego, accepted the nomination in a talk piped into the convention hall, saying that although he wanted to retire he felt could not do so with the nation still at war. He said he would not campaign “in the usual sense” and would press on to win the war and secure the peace. A long and well-planned demonstration for him ensued on the floor, but as it was dying down, the Chicago Stadium suddenly erupted in calls of “We Want Wallace! We Want Wallace!”37

  Hannegan, fearing a stampede, demanded and finally succeeded in getting the convention chairman to gavel through an adjournment until the next morning. Through the night, the anti-Wallace political bosses worked key state delegations, and the next day Chicago police, on orders from Mayor Kelly, clamped down on admission to the hall. Nevertheless, on the first ballot for vice president Wallace led, but significantly short of a majority. On the second ballot the party bosses loyal to FDR started squeezing, and their choice, Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, was put over the top with a late rush of delegates from Flynn’s New York.

  The defeated Wallace had made a remarkably strong run, to the point that Grace Tully, as she said later, heard FDR say he was astonished the Iowan had drawn such powerful support on the first two ballots and would have insisted on him had he thought he could be nominated. But unlike 1940, when FDR had the luxury of focusing on politics and fought for Wallace, in 1944 he was consumed by the war, aging and in decline, and vulnerable to the entreaties of his political lieutenants.

  Roosevelt’s deception of Wallace ended the vice president’s chances for a second term. He was now down but not out. On the night of the nominations, Roosevelt sent him a telegram that read, “You made a grand fight and I am very proud of you.” Then it added, “Tell Ilo not to plan to leave Washington next January.”38 What he meant would not immediately become clear, and Wallace publicly dismissed Roosevelt’s duplicity with perplexity. He observed later that it was a lot of trouble to go to: “All he needed to do was call me in and say, ‘I don’t want you to run.’ ”39

  In late August, Roosevelt invited Wallace to the White House and followed up on his vague telegram reference. He told his guest he wanted him to remain in his expected fourth administration and could have any cabinet post except the State Department,
because he could not ask his old friend Cordell Hull to step aside. FDR had told Wallace earlier that he intended to get rid of Jesse H. Jones, his arrogant commerce secretary, whom FDR derisively called “Jesus H. Jones.” So Wallace, long a bitter foe of Jones, suggested, “Well, if you are going to get rid of Jesse, why not let me have secretary of commerce, with RFC [the Reconstruction Finance Corporation] … thrown in? There would be poetic justice in that.” The deal was struck.40 That fall, Wallace campaigned diligently for Roosevelt’s reelection, focusing on the Farm Belt, as he no doubt would have done had he been campaigning for his own reelection. He traveled with little or no staff, in a demonstration of his pride and independence.

  Only a couple of days after the end of Wallace’s term as vice president did Roosevelt fire Jones and clear the way for the Iowan’s appointment as secretary of commerce. He was not destined, however, to have a satisfying tenure in it. Upon the death of Roosevelt in April, the elevation of Truman to the Oval Office, and the end of the European war in May 1945, Wallace’s views on conciliation with the Russians toward a postwar peace put him in conflict with the Truman administration’s hard-nosed foreign policy. After a Wallace speech led Truman to forbid him to speak out further on the subject, the president finally demanded his resignation, and Wallace returned to private life.

  Increasingly focused on seeking a less confrontational posture with the Soviet Union during the developing Cold War, Wallace ran for president in 1948 on the Progressive Party ticket but won only 2.4 percent of the vote in the upset Truman victory over the Republican Thomas E. Dewey. In retirement, Wallace continued his controversial foreign policy views toward the Soviet Union, as well as his longtime genetic experimentation on corn and other crops, and was an early critic of the American involvement in Vietnam.

  Afflicted with Lou Gehrig’s disease in later life, Wallace died on November 18, 1965, in Danbury, Connecticut. For four years he arguably had been the most involved and helpful vice president in the administration in which he served since Martin Van Buren. But his strong independent streak and developing anti-war positions eventually cast him as an outsider focused on a worldview that many Americans came to see as visionary, but others condemned as naive or even disloyal.

  HARRY S. TRUMAN

  OF MISSOURI

  The thirty-fourth vice president was a former midwestern haberdasher, county judge, and U.S. senator who, less than three months after assuming the office, found himself in the presidency at one of the most critical junctures in the nation’s history.

  Born a common farm boy to John and Martha Ellen Young Truman on May 8, 1884, on a six-hundred-acre farm of his grandfather’s near the small town of Lamar, Missouri, young Harry Truman had no middle name, just the middle initial S. It was the result of a compromise in honoring his two grandfathers, Anderson Shipp Truman and Solomon Young.1 As a young boy Harry suffered from poor eyesight. Fitted with thick-lensed eyeglasses, he avoided sports and opted instead for heavy reading.

  In 1890, the family moved to Independence to afford young Harry a proper education, and in 1900 he got his first real taste of politics when his father took him to the Democratic National Convention in Kansas City, where William Jennings Bryan was nominated for the presidency a second time. In 1903 when the family went bankrupt after speculating in grain futures, the Trumans moved to Kansas City, where his father got a job as a night watchman at a grain elevator. Harry yearned for a career in the army, but his weak eyesight cost him a West Point appointment, so he took up a job as a clerk in a local bank until 1905, when the Trumans moved to another farm, outside Harrisonville. Upon his father’s death in 1914, Harry took over working the large spread, spending much of his free time practicing on the family piano and delving into American history.2

  The work was hard and the return minimal. In the meantime, Harry had met and started dating a young local woman, Elizabeth (Bess) Wallace, and after a year proposed marriage in 1911, but she turned him down. He persisted over the next six years, to no avail. He involved himself in some mining ventures that disappointed him,3 and when the United States entered the war in Europe in 1917, he enlisted. At age thirty-three he was two years over the draft-age limit and, in any event, qualified for exemption as a farmer critical to the war effort. But he left the farm in the hands of his mother and sister, got into the army by memorizing the eye chart used to check his vision, and was given command of a National Guard company in Kansas City, with the rank of first lieutenant. In France, he led Battery “D” of the 129th Field Artillery into the Meuse-Argonne sector in the final days of fierce fighting before the armistice ending the war.4

  Through all this, Harry regularly wrote to Bess, describing the war and thereafter the sights in Paris from the view of this unsophisticated farm boy. Upon his return home, they were finally married in Independence on June 28, 1919, and moved in with her mother in what proved to be a permanent arrangement.5

  A month prior to the wedding, Harry and a local wartime buddy, Eddie Jacobson, a former clerk at a Kansas City clothing store who had run a canteen with Harry in the army, leased a store in downtown Kansas City. They opened a men’s haberdashery—shirts, ties, and all the other accessories of the modern smart gentleman’s attire. The business started off with a burst of success, and Harry was a personal advertisement for the store, always nattily dressed.

  One day in 1921, another old army buddy named Jim Pendergast dropped by with his father, Mike Pendergast, head of the city’s Tenth Ward Democratic Club. Harry was surprised to be asked whether he might want to run for the eastern Jackson County judgeship. It was more an administrative than a judicial position, overseeing road contracts and the like, and he immediately accepted.6 Around this same time, with a postwar drop in farm prices and general recession, the Truman and Jacobson enterprise went bankrupt, and Harry spent the next fifteen years paying off debts accumulated from the store.7

  Fortuitously he was elected as county judge in February 1922 for a two-year term, paying $3,465 a year. Harry wrote later of the period, “Went into business all enthusiastic. Lost all I had and all I could borrow.… Mike Pendergast picked me up and put me into politics and I’ve been lucky.”8 He made clear it was Mike who was his original savior, not Mike’s brother Tom, who came to be the boss of the notorious Pendergast Democratic machine in Kansas City but was unknown to Truman until later.

  After only two years as a county judge, however, a split in the Democratic ranks cost Truman his judgeship, which was lost to a Republican. The defeat in 1924, his only one in twenty-six more years in public life, was lightened by the birth of his only child, Mary Margaret, destined to play a central if uncommon role in her father’s political career. While waiting to run again in 1926, Truman sold memberships to the Kansas City Automobile Club and kept in touch with Jim and Mike Pendergast. He also finally met Tom Pendergast, who persuaded him to run for chief judge on his old court, and he won two four-year terms.

  During this time, the Pendergast machine thrived financially under boss Tom through local and state patronage and government contracts for roads and other public construction works. Part of Truman’s mandate was awarding and overseeing such contracts, and he guardedly avoided suspicions of real or imagined favoritism on the part of the machine. He proposed and pushed through a bond issue for a new network of county roads built by low-bid contractors, later lauded by the Independence Examiner. As for Tom Pendergast, Truman wrote of one conversation with him regarding three complaining contractors: “These boys tell me you won’t give them contracts,” Pendergast began. Truman replied, “They can get them if they are low bidders, but they won’t get paid for them unless they come up to specifications.” Pendergast told the complainers, “Didn’t I tell you boys? He’s the contrariest cuss in Missouri.”9

  Truman’s success as the presiding judge of Jackson County and his ability to get along with the Pendergast machine on his terms led him to approach Tom Pendergast in 1934 about running for the U.S. House of Representatives. The party b
oss had already promised the nomination to someone else and countered with an offer to be the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, an offer already turned down by three other Democrats.10

  While the offer gave Truman considerable organizational support in the Democratic primary against two Missouri congressmen, he had to combat allegations of being a mere tool of the machine. He survived and won the seat on the basis of his reputation as an honest and hard-working county judge. In the Senate, he avoided the spotlight and plunged into committee work. In his first term as a member of the Senate Interstate Commerce Committee, he coauthored, along with Chairman Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, a new transportation act regulating rail, truck, and other shipping interests.

  Truman’s hopes for a second term, however, were imperiled by the prosecution of his benefactor Tom Pendergast for tax fraud in 1939. Truman came to Pendergast’s defense, telling the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that “political animus” was involved, adding, “I am not one to desert a ship when it starts to go down.”11 Pendergast was convicted, but the anti-Pendergast vote split, and Truman was reelected.12

  American preparedness was now expanding in the face of the war in Europe. Truman, as a member of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, a colonel in the reserves, and aware of the shortage of army officers in early 1941, sought a commission from U.S. Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall. Marshall told him that at fifty-six he was too old (“We don’t need old stiffs like you—this will be a young man’s war”) and that he could do more in the Senate to advance national defense.13 So Truman called on Roosevelt at the White House and proposed the creation of a special Senate committee to oversee the implementation of defense contracts. The result was the Truman Committee, which catapulted its founder into national prominence as war came closer and eventually enveloped America. Truman traveled the country tirelessly as a watchdog of what, after Pearl Harbor, became the nation’s war production effort, while continuing to give strong support to FDR’s New Deal agenda.