First Ladies

by Margaret Truman

  I headed for the post office, wondering why the President of the United States could not get some unoccupied Secret Service agent to handle this job. I had no trouble extracting the letter from the grasp of the U.S. Postal Service. They joked about how nice it was of me to help deliver the mail. I took it home, wandered casually (I hoped) into the backyard, and dropped it into the metal basket where we burned trash in those pre-air pollution days.

  I felt bewildered, appalled, and guilty. I had never before in my life concealed anything important from my mother. I could not imagine why Dad had sent her an angry letter. Not until I wrote Bess Truman’s biography, forty years later, did I figure it out.

  Back in the White House, Dad wrote Bess one of the most important letters of both their lives. He said he felt like “last year’s birds nest… on its second year.” It was not very often, he added, that “I admit I am not in shape. I think maybe that exasperates you… as a lot of other things I do exasperate you.”

  Then he got to the heart of the matter: “You can never appreciate what it means to come home as I did the other evening after doing at least one hundred things I didn’t want to do and have the only person in the world whose approval and good opinion I value look at me like I’m something the cat dragged in.”

  Time and Life were saying he was the “No. 1 man in the world.” But he somehow lacked “a large bump of ego” that would enable him to believe such nonsense. On the contrary, he knew he needed help from “you, Margie [that’s me], and everyone else who may have any influence on my actions.” If he could get that help, “the job [would] be done.” If he could not get it, William Randolph Hearst and his fellow Republican critics, who were saying Harry Truman lacked presidential stature, would turn out to be right.

  Mother came back to the White House in a much improved mood. She was still unreconciled to the job in many ways, but the air had been cleared of her smoldering resentment. The President had made it plain that he was ready and eager to resume their partnership whenever she was so inclined. The world outside the White House cooperated with this spirit of marital detente, subsiding from the global-size crises of 1945 to the ordinary upheavals we have come to regard as politics as usual.

  One of the first things Bess tackled was a problem left behind by Mrs. Roosevelt—the housekeeper, Henrietta Nesbitt. A few months after we moved into the White House, I met Elliott Roosevelt, who cheerfully inquired: “Has Mrs. Nesbitt begun starving you yet?” When I politely shook my head—the food was bad but starvation seemed an extreme term—Elliott replied: “Don’t worry, she will.”

  At one point during our first troubled months in the White House, I was serving as substitute First Lady (I had just turned twenty-two) while my mother was in Denver trying to decide what to do with her mother, who was living unhappily with her son, my uncle, Fred Wallace. Mrs. Nesbitt served my father brussels sprouts, a vegetable he detested. I offhandedly told her not to serve brussels sprouts again. Little did I know I had issued a declaration of hostilities. Brussels sprouts were on the table the next night. I again told Mrs. Nesbitt not to serve them—and there they were the following night. I called Mother in Denver and warned her that the next time I saw brussels sprouts, Mrs. Nesbitt was going to get them between the eyes.

  Bess brought my grandmother back from Denver to take up permanent residence in the White House. She soon had a talk with Mrs. Nesbitt. The brussels sprouts vanished, but the food did not otherwise improve. Mrs. Nesbitt was determined to show the new First Lady who was boss. Whenever Mother suggested the slightest change in routine, she was told, “Mrs. Roosevelt did not do it that way,” apparently presuming the new First Lady would be cowed by the mere mention of her predecessor’s name.

  Bess bided her time. She knew firing top personnel in the White House was always a delicate matter. They can go straight to the nearest reporter with outrageous lies about you. One day Mother stopped by the White House kitchen to pick up some butter to take to a potluck luncheon with her Senate wives’ bridge club. “Oh no!” Mrs. Nesbitt said, acting as if Mother had never heard of wartime food shortages and government rationing. “We can’t let any of our butter leave this kitchen. We’ve used up almost all this month’s ration stamps already.”

  Mrs. Nesbitt did not have to add, “Mrs. Roosevelt would not do it this way.” By now that was implied. Not content with bullying the new First Lady in private, she was now intent on humiliating her before the entire White House kitchen staff.

  Bess kept her temper—and her head. She consulted the boss of White House bosses, the chief usher, Howell Crim. “Mrs. Nesbitt tells me I can’t take a speck of butter out of the kitchen,” Mother said.

  “Of course you can!” gasped the flabbergasted Crim. “She is entirely out of line.”

  “Maybe it’s time to find a new housekeeper,” Mother said.

  That was the beginning of the end of Mrs. Nesbitt, with the chief usher, not the First Lady, wielding the ax.

  Meanwhile, a much more important change was taking place in the Truman White House routine. Each night after dinner, Bess began meeting with my father in his upstairs study to discuss the problems before him and the people he was choosing to help him solve them.

  People, personalities, were Bess’s forte. She was a listener, and she had a deadly eye for character. In his first days in the Oval Office, my father asked his old friend, insurance executive Eddie McKim, to be his chief of staff. Eddie was a wonderful man, but being propelled from Omaha to Washington, D.C., did terrible things to his judgment.

  One day he rushed into the social secretary’s office in the East Wing and demanded to know who was doing what. He was told that two secretaries were typing answers to the thousands of letters Mrs. Roosevelt had received from sympathetic admirers when FDR died. “Mrs. Roosevelt is no longer riding the gravy train!” Eddie said and fired both women on the spot.

  The social secretary, an old pro named Edith Helm, informed Mother of this decision. She was appalled. Within twenty-four hours the women were rehired, Mrs. Roosevelt’s letters continued to be answered, and Eddie McKim was on his way back to Omaha.

  Bess also repelled an invasion by Jake Vardaman, an old Missouri friend of Dad who had become his naval aide. Looking for work, Captain Vardaman decided he would “organize” the First Lady’s correspondence and introduce efficiency into the East Wing. Bess told the President that Vardaman spelled T-R-O-U-B-L-E, and he was soon kicked upstairs to the Federal Reserve Board, where he proved her a prophet by voting against any and all Truman policies and proposals.

  Mother did a lot more than spot would-be power grabbers. She also made some very valuable positive suggestions. Probably the most important was her urgent recommendation that Harry Truman ask their old Independence schoolmate Charlie Ross to become his press secretary. Head of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Washington bureau, Charlie was one of the most respected newsmen in the capital. It is hard to think of any single appointment that did more to stabilize the Truman presidency.

  Bess’s judgment of character came into play on a national level when she started warning my father about the danger of keeping Henry Wallace in his cabinet. Here I have discovered another invisible encounter with Eleanor Roosevelt. This time, however, the two First Ladies were in collision.

  Almost everyone above the age of reason when FDR died recalls my father’s exchange with Mrs. Roosevelt when he rushed to the White House on April 12, 1945, and discovered the President was dead. “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked the First Lady.

  “Is there anything we can do for you?” Eleanor replied. “You are the one in trouble now.”

  Several days later Mrs. Roosevelt wrote a letter to Henry Wallace: “Though I hope to see you today and perhaps to talk with you more about my hopes for America and the future, I want you to know that you are peculiarly fitted to carry on the ideals which were close to my husband’s heart and which I know you understood.”

  Here, instead of doing something for Harry
S Truman, Mrs. Roosevelt did something to him. That letter gave Wallace the idea that he was still FDR’s anointed successor, no matter what the Democratic Convention in Chicago had decided in July and the American people had ratified with their votes in November 1944. In defense of the former First Lady, one can say she probably did not realize what Henry Wallace would do with this endorsement.

  Harry Truman had inherited Henry as secretary of commerce from the Roosevelt cabinet. Emboldened by Mrs. Roosevelt’s backing, Wallace proceeded to make the new President’s life miserable. He went public with repeated denunciations of Dad’s get-tough approach to the Soviet Union, which was busily clamping a one-party straitjacket on Poland and the other countries of Eastern Europe. The newspapers heaped scorn on the Truman administration’s “two-headed foreign policy.”

  Against Mother’s advice, Dad tried to reach an understanding with Mr. Wallace. His response was a series of double crosses. Henry persuaded Dad to “approve” a speech he was giving—then used a completely different version. He promised to stop speaking about foreign policy—then gave a speech to reporters on his way out of the White House. Some of this happened while Bess was taking a summer break in Independence, and Dad’s letters reveal what she was telling him in sulfurous terms. “It was nice to talk with you [last night],” he wrote on September 16, 1946, “even if you did give me hell about making mistakes.”

  My mother chats with Eleanor Roosevelt and Edith Wilson at a reception. She was a warm friend of both and exchanged many letters with them. (Bettmann Archive)

  Finally, Dad wrote a letter that his First Lady had been urging on him for months. He asked Henry Wallace to resign from his administration. Henry departed and for the next two years grew loonier and loonier, at one point comparing the Soviet Communist Party with the early Christians. When Henry ran for President on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948, Eleanor Roosevelt endorsed Harry Truman. Neither she nor anyone else knew that she had lost a covert struggle with her quiet successor, Bess Truman.

  Meanwhile, Mother was going her own way as First Lady. Generous hearted as always, Mrs. Roosevelt staunchly supported her determination to shun publicity and keep the press at arm’s length. She reiterated what almost every First Lady has said about the job: each woman must find a fit with her own personality and inclinations. I suspect Mrs. Roosevelt also saw that the Truman marriage was a productive working partnership with the right to lay down its own White House ground rules.

  There was nothing furtive about Mother’s decision to opt for minimum visibility; her role was never completely invisible. Dad often referred to her as his helper. As senator he said he never made a report or a speech without her editing it. In her early interviews Bess did not try to conceal her contributions. When Harry Truman ran for vice president, she told a reporter she would help him write his speeches “because we’ve done that so long, it’s a habit.” The following year another reporter asked her if she had ever held a job: “I’ve been in politics for more than twenty-five years,” she said.

  A major principle of the partnership was no nagging. Bess would state her opinion on an issue. If Dad differed with it, and went in another direction, that was the end of the matter. She did not waylay him and try to change his mind. Only when he hesitated between two agonizing choices, as in the case of Henry Wallace, would she prod him to act one way or the other.

  A good example of how the partnership worked was the decision to run for the presidency in 1948. Harry Truman wanted to do it, even if his poll ratings had sunk so low you needed a wet suit and a few tanks of oxygen to find them. He was determined to become President in his own right, with the full endorsement of the American people. Bess did not think he could win. She was almost always the pessimist (she called it realist) in the duo. If she had had her way, they would have let some other qualified Democrat take to the campaign trail in 1948 and gone home to Independence, satisfied that they had done their best and kept their dignity.

  Once Dad decided to run, Mother never said another negative word. She climbed aboard the Ferdinand Magellan, the armor-plated railroad car General Motors had designed for presidential train travel, and gamely whistle-stopped through most of the forty-eight states.

  Though she sometimes denied it, Mother loved every minute of that campaign. Bess too had a few scores to settle with Republicans. Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce had called her an ersatz First Lady. The day after our victory, Bess came across a copy of Time magazine, owned by Mrs. Luce’s husband, Henry. There was the Republican candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, on the cover, described as the next President of the United States. “I wonder if Mrs. Luce thinks I’m real now?” Mother asked.

  Another partnership role Mother played was censor. Harry Truman’s greatest (I am tempted to say only) flaw was his quick temper. Bess did not think the President of the United States should tell people to go to hell or inform someone he was an SOB. Dad did not use profanity in his everyday speech. But when he got angry, his language could be purple. George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Dwight Eisenhower, and several other Presidents who spent some time in the U.S. Army had a similar predilection. In the White House, it became a running joke among the staff, who would inquire whether the President “was in the doghouse again” for sounding off.

  Another partnership role, which Bess shared with many other First Ladies, was protector. My father had an enormous appetite for work. He is probably the only modern President who read every line of the immense national budget—and understood it—before it went up to Congress. When a crisis was raging in the White House—and Dad liked to say we had one a week—he would work until 3:00 and 4:00 A.M., driving himself and his staff to the brink of exhaustion.

  That was when Partner Bess stepped in and said, “Harry, it’s time for a vacation.” He rarely demurred. Often in his letters to me, he confessed how badly he had needed the break. In 1947, after frantic weeks of work to rescue Greece from a Communist takeover, when he retreated to his favorite hideaway, the submarine base in Key West, he wrote: “I had no idea I was so tired. I have been asleep most of the time [since he arrived]. No one, not even me (your mother would say) knew how worn to a frazzle the chief executive had become.”

  I hope I have not given the impression that while the President was working his head off, his wife was hiding out on the second floor, doing little but avoiding the press. Even before she became reconciled to the job, Mother worked at “First Ladying,” as I called it, eight and ten hours a day.

  In 1946 the White House returned to peacetime status. That meant a full social schedule, and then some. With the United States now a superpower, the official guest lists, which included ambassadors, members of Congress, heads of federal agencies, generals, admirals, and the like, had grown to two thousand. The public rooms could only handle one thousand at a reception, so this meant the President and First Lady had to hold two of almost every event. Between November 26, 1946, and February 18, 1947, Mother had to superintend eleven “official” gatherings, ranging from two state dinners for the diplomatic corps—they had grown so large they could no longer fit into the State Dining Room—to a congressional reception, with a thousand plus hands to shake. On top of this schedule were piled innumerable teas, luncheons, and personal appearances with groups who thought they could benefit from a photo with the First Lady.

  Not only did Bess Truman work hard at these events but she was extremely good at being a hostess. Lady Bird Johnson told me a charming story when I interviewed her for this book. She went to one of the congressional receptions in 1946 or 1947. “I was only a congressman’s wife,” Lady Bird said. “I was awed to find myself visiting the White House. When I finally got to Mrs. Truman, she was so warm and outgoing, as I passed off the line I turned to Lyndon and said: ‘I think she knew me!’”

  As the social season wound down, Mother wrote me a letter in which you could almost hear her sigh: “These two weeks are really going to be a handshaking two weeks—conservative estimate forty one hundred.” Af
ter a reception for the Governor-General of Canada and his wife, she wrote to tell me how much she liked them, and added almost matter-of-factly: “The reception of course was horrible—1341 & my arm is a wreck this A.M.”

  Though her arm ached, Mother’s hand survived this ordeal, thanks to some tutoring from a master of the political handshake, Harry S Truman. He taught Mother—and me—that the essence of the art was to seize the other person’s hand before he or she grabbed yours—and to slide your thumb between the other person’s thumb and index finger, so that you, not he or she, did the squeezing.

  Even with this expert advice, by the time Mother left the White House, the glove size of her right hand had gone from 6 to 6 1/2. My hand too had gone up a half size. I cannot claim to have shaken nearly as many hands as she did, but I shook enough to produce the damage.

  Dad’s miracle victory in 1948 worked a transformation in Mother’s attitude toward First Ladying. She no longer saw it as something inflicted on her by one of fate’s crueler blows. Instead it became a job she had chosen to do, in concert with her presidential partner. One of the first signs of this more positive attitude was the intense interest she took in choosing her inauguration dresses and evening gowns.

  She had been buying most of her clothes from Agasta, a well-known Washington couturier. They were tasteful but not very exciting. Moreover, Agasta did not make evening gowns. So Mother chose Madame Pola of New York to supply these. Meanwhile, she put pressure on Agasta to come up with some more creative day wear. Twelve days before the inauguration, they still had not agreed on a fabric for her inauguration outfit.

  Agasta was getting palpitations when she found a piece of silk that was an intriguing mixture of iridescent black and gray. Mother gave her an emphatic go-ahead, and Agasta created the outfit Bess wore to the ceremony. It had a straight skirt and a peplum jacket, which went beautifully with her blackish gray hat, trimmed with a single, massive mauve-pink rose.