Bess Truman

by Margaret Truman

  In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory was over themselves and their carnal urges. Self-discipline with all of them came first. I found that most of the really great ones never thought they were great. . . . I was not very fond of Alexander, Attila, Ghengis Khan or Napoleon because while they were great leaders of men they fought for conquest and personal glory. The others fought for what they thought was right and for their countries. They were patriots and unselfish. I could never admire a man whose only interest is himself.

  He went on to summarize the major events of his life, from meeting Bess Wallace in kindergarten through his struggle on the farm to joining the army in World War I. Central in these memories were the figures of his mother and Bess.

  My mother and sister came to see me at Camp Doniphan. My mother was sixty-five years old, but she never shed a tear, smiled at me all the time and told me to do my best for the country. But she cried all the way home and when I came back from France she gained ten or fifteen pounds in weight. That’s the real horror of war.

  I believe that the great majority of the country were stirred by the same flame that stirred me in those great days. I was a Gallahad after the Grail and I’ll never forget how my love cried on my shoulder when I told her I was going. That was worth a lifetime on this earth.

  He next wrote a history of his political career, complete with vivid character sketches of Tom Pendergast and the men with whom he served on the county court. He was unsparing in his description of the corruption of some of them and what this meant to him philosophically.

  I have always believed in Santa Claus I guess. It was my opinion . . . that most men had a sense of honor. Now I don’t know. “The Boss” [his first recorded use of this name for Bess] says that instead of most men being honest most of them are not when they are put into a position where they can get away with crookedness. I guess I’ve been wrong in my premise that 92% are honest. Maybe 92% are not thieves but it is a certainty that 92% are not ethically honest.

  I am obligated to the Big Boss [Tom Pendergast], a man of his word, but he gives in very seldom and usually on a sure thing. But he’s not a trimmer. He, in times past, owned a bawdy house a saloon and gambling establishment, was raised in that environment, but he’s all man. I wonder who’s worth more in the sight of the Lord?

  Who is to blame for present conditions but swindling church members who weep on Sunday, play with whores on Monday, drink on Tuesday, sell out to the [Big] Boss on Wednesday, repent about Friday and start over on Sunday. I think maybe the boss is nearer heaven than the swindlers.

  And now I am a candidate for the U.S. Senate. If the Almighty God decides that I go there, I am going to pray as King Solomon did, for wisdom to do the job.

  Although Bess remained at the center of Harry Truman’s vision of his life, she was not there at the Pickwick Hotel to share this lonely meditation. I found myself wishing, as I read it, that this was not so. But even the closest, most enduring marriage is not always idyllic. Perhaps the difficulty of perfect union between a strong man and a strong woman, even the impossibility, is an important truth - it might even be the central truth of this book.

  Perfect union suggests that there has to be a surrender of one self to the other self - usually the woman to the man. Bess Truman never did that. But she also never forgot that promise she had made to Captain Truman in Trinity Episcopal Church in 1919. When he announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate, she was there beside him. No one, except the candidate, was aware of the reluctance and doubt in her troubled heart.

  The campaign was one of the most painful experiences of Bess’ life. Until this point, Harry Truman had had his share of verbal rocks thrown at him. But they mostly were hurled from local political platforms in speeches that were forgotten the day after they were made. The newspapers, even the Kansas City Star, had been fairly kind to him. The Star had praised him remarkably often, considering the paper’s rock-ribbed Republican allegiance.

  Now he was running for one of the highest offices in the nation. And he was being backed by a political organization that suddenly had become unsavory to the highest degree. An outburst of gangster violence in Kansas City added to the shock of reading about dead and wounded around the polling places. As a result, the men opposing Harry Truman’s Senate candidacy felt no holds - or more exactly, no smears - were barred.

  Senator Bennett Clark announced that if Harry Truman were elected to the Senate, he would not have “any more independent control of his own vote than he had as presiding judge of Jackson County.” Tuck Milligan sneered that Truman would get “callouses on his ears listening on the long distance telephone to his boss.” Reporters gleefully rushed into print with these gibes. To someone as sensitive about her family’s reputation as Bess Truman, they were painful reading. These men were saying her husband had been Tom Pendergast’s toady, and she knew that this was a lie.

  She was discovering the hardest part of being a politician’s wife - the problem of swallowing one’s rage and disgust at the lies that other politicians get into print (and now, onto the TV screen) with the eager cooperation of journalists.

  The campaign of smear and innuendo went on and on. I think it was Tuck Milligan who said that if elected Harry Truman would be Pendergast’s office boy. A third candidate entered the race, Congressman John Cochran, who specialized in violent attacks on the “Pendergast machine” and conveniently ignored the Dickmann-Igoe machine that was backing him in St. Louis.

  One of the most dismaying enemies to emerge was a friend of Bess’ youth, Spencer Salisbury. He and Harry Truman had quarreled over Salisbury’s attempt to seize control of the bank that Truman and he had founded. Salisbury now leaped into the smear game with the claim that federal employment officials were using their influence with jobseekers to help Truman.

  Harry Truman did not take this abuse lying down. Nor did the Jackson County Democrats. Joe Shannon roared that if elected, Tuck Milligan would be Bennett Clark’s office boy. As for Cochran, Shannon said he was “the office boy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.” Judge Truman pointed out that he had never voted in Kansas City in his life and had nothing to do with the shenanigans that went on there. He was from Independence, and he dared either of his opponents to point out a single dishonest act in his twelve years in politics. Dad had resigned as federal reemployment director within two days of announcing his candidacy, so if anyone was pressuring jobseekers on his behalf, he had nothing to do with it. As for Pendergast’s support, Dad noted that each of the politicians who were attacking him for accepting it had sought Pendergast’s help in 1932, when all the congressmen in the state ran at large because of a redistricting dispute with the Republican governor.

  An important backer of Truman’s clean image was Colonel William Southern, editor of the Examiner, and, as I have mentioned before, the father of Bess’ sister-in-law, May Wallace. Along with praising him wholeheartedly in the paper, Colonel Southern inestimably boosted Judge Truman’s image as a man of integrity in a less noticed way. In Missouri, Southern was better known as a Sunday school teacher than as a newspaper editor. He introduced Harry Truman to a convention of fellow Bible teachers and preachers in Maryville with the declaration: “I vouch for him, and don’t pay any attention to what others say about him.”

  Through the baking heat of one of the hottest Julys in Missourians’ memory, fifty-year-old Harry Truman roamed the state, speaking as often as sixteen times in a single day, and in between, doing most of the driving himself. Exhaustion may have had something to do with a collision that left him with two broken ribs and a badly bruised forehead. Bess, always fearful of death on the highway, was distraught. She persuaded him to take a friend with him to do the driving thereafter.

  Bess made several platform appearances with her husband at major rallies in and around Kansas City, but she never said a word on his behalf. She already had made it clear to him that speeches, even brief ones, were not her style. Around this time, she summed up her idea of
the wife’s role in a comment to Ethel Noland: “A woman’s place in public is to sit beside her husband, be silent, and be sure her hat is on straight.”

  I appeared on the platform with them at one of these shindigs, and someone in the candidate’s entourage decided I was “cute” and could be an “an asset” if I showed up regularly. Bess firmly vetoed the suggestion. I doubt if Harry Truman took the idea seriously. Nor did he, knowing how leery Bess was of becoming overtired, even consider asking her to accompany him on the long, hot drives to the dusty small towns and parched hamlets where he did most of his politicking that summer.

  He was convinced that he was going to win the election in the countryside. The St. Louis machine and the Kansas City machine would produce roughly equal numbers of votes for Truman and Cochran. As the campaign mounted in intensity, it rapidly became apparent that Tuck Milligan was running a poor third. Gradually, a lot of people began to realize that Truman was pulling into the lead. There were frantic pleas to Milligan to quit the race so that Cochran, who had only a limited appeal to rural voters, could have a chance.

  On August 9, 1934, with the temperature still above 100 degrees, the voters went to the polls. Harry Truman’s prediction proved almost mathematically correct. The two big city machines fought each other to a standstill. The Truman vote in St. Louis was almost invisible, and the Cochran vote in Kansas City was equally minute. How would the farmers vote? That became the crucial question for the Truman-Wallace clan, as they clustered around the radio in the living room at 219 North Delaware Street. The returns dribbled in from the countryside all night. Finally, toward dawn, it became apparent that Harry Truman had won the election, as one reporter put it, “in the creek forks and grass roots.” The final count was 276,850 for Truman, 236,105 for Cochran.

  It was an amazing victory, but for Bess it was embittered by the smears and lies that had been flung at her husband. The worst insult was yet to come. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, on its editorial page, which was read with respect by other papers around the nation, denounced the results of the election. The editorial carped that the winner was “an obscure man . . . scarcely known outside the confines of Jackson County. . . . Judge Truman is the nominee of the Democratic Party . . . because Tom Pendergast willed it so.” What made this smear doubly painful was the man who produced it. Charlie Ross was now the editor of the Post-Dispatch editorial page.

  Although I never heard Bess say a word about it, I am certain she knew Charlie was responsible. Mary Paxton Keeley and she still were in close communication, and Mary would hardly fail to report that Charlie had returned to St. Louis from Washington, D.C.

  The smear was, of course, untrue. Charlie had been out of Missouri politics for fifteen years and did not know what he was talking about. But it was still painful to someone like Bess, who remained so loyal to the friends of her youth.

  Harry Truman was not a senator, yet. He still had to beat the Republican incumbent, Roscoe Patterson, in November. Patterson tried to split the Democrats by dividing them into pro- and anti-Roosevelt voters. But the Democratic nominee refused to let this tactic shake his nerve. He steadfastly insisted he was for Roosevelt and the New Deal. This time, with a united party behind him, Judge Truman rumbled to a smashing quarter-of-a-million-vote majority.

  On the day after the election, Bess went to a meeting of her bridge club. As usual, they played cards, had lunch, and played more cards. But at this meeting, the hostess kept the radio on, and everyone screamed and whooped every time the announcer reported that another county had produced a majority for Harry S. Truman. What amazed everyone was Bess’ absolute calm. “That’s what twelve or fourteen years of political campaigns will do for a wife,” she replied. Another explanation, of course, was her insider’s knowledge that her husband was certain to win.

  There is a third explanation, which can be glimpsed in an interview that Bess gave to the Kansas City Star the following day. “Of course I’m thrilled to be going to Washington,” she told the reporter. “But I have spent all my life here on Delaware Street and it will be a change. I was born on Delaware Street and was married to Harry here sixteen years ago when he came back from the World War. We never have had or desired another home.” It is interesting to note that Bess’ sense of 219 North Delaware as home was so strong, she forgot she had been born several blocks away on Ruby Street.

  The full import of the election only dawned in my ten-year-old head when Bess explained that we would spend six months of every year in Washington, starting on January 1, 1935. I burst into tears. I realize, now, that Mother was probably tempted to join me. But she concealed her feelings, as usual, and briskly told me there was no point in crying about it. She was trying, in her oblique way, to give me some of the hard wisdom she had learned about the futility of tears. But I am sorry to say I thought she was being coldhearted.

  Only now, after entering the hidden part of her life, do I realize that leaving Delaware Street was more painful and threatening to her than it was to me. The very time of the year probably compounded the pain; 219 North Delaware Street was particularly beautiful in November. The huge maple trees in the yard were fiery red in the glowing sunshine, and the full bushes overhanging the porch added an extra touch of glory.

  With their daughter clutching her battered Raggedy Ann doll, for which Aunt May Wallace had sewed a new dress and some hair, we drove to St. Louis and took a train to Washington, D.C. On January 3, 1935, Mother and I sat in the Senate gallery and watched Harry S. Truman walk down the center aisle and take his oath of office before Vice President John Nance Garner. In his striped pants and swallowtail coat, her husband must have looked almost as strange to her as he did to me.

  We were staying in the Hamilton Hotel, and Bess spent the majority of her time riding around Washington looking at apartments. The rents struck her as appalling, and so did the prices of everything else, which were roughly twice Missouri levels. It was easy to see that Senator Truman’s $10,000-a-year salary was not going to go very far. In retrospect, they probably should have stayed in the hotel and shopped a bit longer for an apartment - or “flat,” as they called it in their Missouri parlance. But Bess could not stand being crammed into one room for very long. The senator was equally anxious to get settled so he could concentrate on learning his job. So they took a four-room apartment at 3106 Connecticut Avenue at a rent they could not really afford - $150 a month.

  I was the next problem to be solved. Bess decided to send me to Gunston Hall, a private school for young ladies that no doubt reminded her of Barstow. It was located in four old houses, with some modern additions for such necessities as a gymnasium, theater, and laboratories. She took me there every morning and picked me up each afternoon. It was not easy to enter a school in the middle of the year, when cliques and friendships have been formed. Bess listened patiently to my complaints that everyone in the school hated me (even then, I had an instinct for the dramatic) and assured me that I eventually would make some friends. To my amazement, she turned out to be right.

  Meanwhile, Bess was feeling her way into the Washington, D.C., social scene. She had been led by Washington’s geographical location to think of it as an eastern city, which she presumed would be “cold.” She was surprised to find the Washington of 1935 was much more like a small southern city, relaxed, hospitable, and informal, except when the government was playing the official panoply game. She also was pleased to discover some Missourians who were eager to be friendly. Jeannette Cochran, the wife of Congressman John Cochran, Harry Truman’s primary opponent, was particularly cordial, and she and Bess quickly became good friends.

  Congressman Cochran could not have been more cordial, and so, to Bess’ amazement, were Senator Bennett Clark and his wife. It must have made her wonder about the terrible things both these gentlemen had said about her husband during the primary campaign. It gradually dawned on her that name calling was seldom taken seriously by politicians. It was part of the rough game they played. But for Bess, with her memor
y of the price of political failure, politics could never be a mere game.

  Nevertheless, she was surprised to discover that she enjoyed Washington. She had no difficulty coping with the dozens of new people she had to meet. Almost everyone is more or less a stranger in Washington and anxious to make friends. At the comfortable mansion on New Hampshire Avenue that houses the Congressional Club, she exchanged woman-talk about home and family with the wives of senators from both parties. Having run a substantial household on Delaware Street, she easily included the five administrative assistants and secretaries of Dad’s office staff in her routine. She visited the office regularly and soon was on a first-name basis with everyone.

  The staff soon understood that Senator Truman did not call Bess “the Boss” by accident. She took an intense interest in their personal lives, especially if their conduct had any potential political impact on Senator Truman. One staffer, Edgar C. “Bud” Faris, was something of a playboy. He ran around with a Washington gossip columnist, who rewarded his attentions by frequently dropping his name in her column as one of the guests at various glittering parties. He was always described as “Senator Truman’s top AA.” Bess decided that the home folks would not appreciate the idea that the senator’s staff was living it up in the capital. Dad ordered Bud to keep his name out of the papers or else.