Bess Truman

by Margaret Truman

  She filled me in on other details of life in the Gates-Wallace manse. “Grandmother is taking all of us to the Plantation [a local restaurant] tomorrow to dinner. She surely has come to life since she has been home - but [she is] back at her old tricks. Waked me up twice before 7:30 this morning wanting me to call to make the reservations. [She] thought it was already Sunday. You can easily imagine how happy I was!

  “May [Wallace] is having the [Bridge] Club Tuesday and I guess that will start the parties. All this is pretty humdrum compared to the glamorous things you will be doing.”

  Next came the inevitable reminder to write. She wanted to hear all about whom we had met, what we had seen at each stop. She particularly hoped that Reathel, who had worked so hard for me and her, would “enjoy every minute” of the trip. Then a final “Mother” touch. “Don’t forget flowers to the Queen . . . along with a note.”

  I can see now that painting the old house was exactly the sort of relaxation Mother needed after the harrowing six months she had just spent in Washington. I also was stirred to see how much sheer pleasure she took in thinking about me having a good time. I guess you have to become a parent yourself before you can understand how love makes this phenomenon possible.

  Bess spent the summer of 1951 in Independence fretting over her mother. She urged Mary Paxton Keeley to pay a visit. “Mother would love to see you if you get there on a good day. Today is a bad one - doesn’t remember one thing for five minutes even. Told Vietta I haven’t been in to see her today and I have been in there not less than ten times.”

  Dad paid her a brief visit in July and spent the rest of the time worrying about the war in Korea, which dragged on although the Communists had implicitly admitted they could not win by agreeing to begin peace negotiations late in June. He could not ask Mother to leave Grandmother Wallace, but he could not resist going back to his old tactic of letting her know what she was missing.

  Early in September, he sent her a marvelously detailed report of a baseball game he attended to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the American League. Chief Justice Vinson was along and “knew all the old players and all the new ones.” The owner of the Washington Senators, Clark Griffith, sat next to Dad and told him “what the various players on the Washington team should have done and didn’t do.” Dad had absolutely no interest in baseball, but he knew that Mother was going crazy, reading this. She would have loved every minute of it. Dad ended the torture by remarking: “Old Clark said Washington lost because you were not present, I agreed with him.”

  A few days later, Mother persuaded Dad to take a five-day vacation in Independence on his way back from San Francisco, where he opened a conference that led to the signing of a treaty of peace with Japan. It was the best rest he got all year. Most of the time he just lazed around the house and backyard or strolled over to chat with the Nolands and other neighbors.

  When Bess returned to Washington with her mother later in the month, she immediately reopened the question of Chief Justice Vinson and his candidacy. The longer it slid along, the more she feared that Dad might be persuaded by the party politicians or his staff to run for another term. This time Dad really pressed the chief justice. After another three months of hemming and hawing, he said no. He did not think he could handle the strain of four years in the White House. He also feared he would embroil the Supreme Court in politics if he became a candidate.

  Mother was even more disappointed than Dad, if that was possible. The Big Judge’s refusal threw everything back to June 25, 1950. Harry Truman was not the sort of man to walk out on his deep sense of responsibility for achieving a peaceful world. How much ground she had for worry is visible in a letter Dad wrote to Dwight Eisenhower in the middle of December 1951.

  The columnists, the slick magazines and all the political people who like to speculate are saying many things about what is to happen in 1952.

  As I told you in 1948 and at our luncheon in 1951 [when Dad appointed him NATO commander], do what you think best for the country. My own position is in the balance. If I do what I want to do I’ll go back to Missouri and maybe run for the Senate. If you decide to finish the European job (and I don’t know who else can) I must keep the isolationists out of the White House. I wish you would let me know what you intend to do. It will be between us and no one else.

  Ike replied in a handwritten note on January 1, 1952, disclaiming any political ambitions. “The possibility that I will ever be drawn into political activities is so remote as to be negligible,” he wrote. Unfortunately, this only increased the possibility of Dad running for another term. At this point, he and everyone else presumed that Ike was a Democrat and the Republican candidate would be Robert Taft. The thought of him in the White House was behind that sentence in the letter to Ike about keeping the isolationists out. Memories of Mamma Truman’s detestation of this sour-faced Republican added fuel to Dad’s determination.

  Back in the White House after a Christmas visit home, Dad’s diary jottings and letters reveal his divided state of mind - of which Bess was all too aware. “What a New Year’s Day!” he wrote on January 1. “1952 is here and so am I - gloomy as can be. But we must look to the program of world peace, and keep on looking. . . . I wish I was seventeen instead of sixty-seven.”

  On January 3, with that amazing ability to look objectively at himself, he wrote an essay on his health and strict diet, which he disliked. It began with a fatherly, if highly opinionated, comment on my appearance, as he assessed it over the Christmas holidays.

  Margie looked very well except she’s too thin. These damned diets the women go for are all wrong. More people die of dieting these days than of eating too much.

  My good doctor is all the time trying to cut my weight down. Of course he’s right and I should weigh 170 pounds. Now I weigh 175. What’s five pounds between my doctor and me?

  When I went into World War, I weighed 145 pounds. After two years service I weighed 155. While I was in the Senate I was ten pounds heavier - 165.

  When I moved into the White House I went up to 185. I’ve now hit an average of 175. I walk two miles most every morning at a hundred and twenty eight steps a minute. I eat no bread but one piece of toast at breakfast, no butter, no sugar, no sweets. Usually have fruit, one egg, a strip of bacon and half a glass of skimmed milk for breakfast; liver & bacon or sweet breads or ham or fish and spinach and another nonfattening vegetable for lunch with fruit for dessert. For dinner I have a fruit cup, steak, a couple of nonfattening vegetables and an ice, orange, pineapple or raspberry for dinner. So - I maintain my waist line and can wear suits bought in 1935!

  This meditation suggests a president who was in fighting trim. But Mother knew better. She saw the slow erosion of Dad’s vitality as he began his eighth year in the White House. It took him longer to recover from his bouts of exhaustion. As he approached his sixty-eighth birthday, he found it harder and harder to keep working a sixteen-hour day.

  With all these worries on their minds, Dad and Mother still found time to remember ordinary people who had crossed their paths and came to them now in need of help. Here is Dad’s reaction to a problem Mother brought to his attention. The memorandum was addressed to White House aide Don Dawson, a savvy lawyer who usually dealt with much weightier problems.

  Mrs. Ricketts was the manager of 4701 [Connecticut Avenue] when we lived there. She has become invalided and needs a place to stay.

  She is an Eastern Star, who has kept up her dues. She wants to go to the Eastern Star Home, which is the only place she can go. Make them take her. She’s one of the 153,000,000 who have no pull except the President. She has the right to go to the home.

  If this damned District of Columbia had old age homes where a paid old age retirement could be arranged the “boss” & I could take care of the situation. But there is none. So only the Eastern Star home is left. If the good old lady was not eligible, I wouldn’t raise hell about it. But they are cheating her. Stop it.

  Mrs. Ricketts got into the
home.

  Meanwhile, the question of running again in 1952 was still rumbling around Dad’s mind. It crept into a letter he wrote and decided not to send to The New Yorker magazine.

  I’ve been reading your Jan. 5 Talk of the Town - and you’ve been taken in by one of Missouri’s lovable old fakirs, Cyril Clemens - at one time there was a t before the s! He claims to be a seventh - it may be a seventeenth - cousin of Hannibal’s (Missouri not Carthage) well known humorist, Mark.

  He has carried on a copious, one way letter writing for his I.M.T.S. [International Mark Twain Society] for years & years. How I wish my lamented friend and press secretary, Charlie Ross, had lived to see you taken in!

  He is the International Mark Twain Society and he merely puts people into it without a “by-your-leave” or any other formula. You’ll get in now and no doubt be the recipient of nutty letters like the enclosed - which is my latest.

  I don’t know him, never saw him and don’t want to. But of all the things to happen - the New Yorker to be hooked. . . . Mark, himself, was a kind of charlatan and fakir - but all natives of Missouri love him - he was the lying columnist of his day. We have lots of’em now but no Sam Clemenses.

  This is a personal & confidential communication. You may publish it when I retire - which may be some time yet.

  Dad wrote that last sentence the day after General Eisenhower announced that he might be responsive to a draft for the presidency - less than a week after writing the letter I have just quoted, denying all political ambitions. At the same time, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge revealed that the general was a Republican who had voted for Dewey in 1948. The Eisenhower for President organization promptly opened offices in half the states in the country. If Ike did not know this campaign was about to begin, he had to be the most naive man alive. If he knew it, his letter to Dad comes awfully close to a lie.

  This only added urgency to Dad’s search for a Democratic candidate. His number one choice was Adlai Stevenson, the popular governor of Illinois. In his four years as chief executive of that pivotal state, he had built a distinguished record. He was a moderate, acceptable to the party’s conservatives and liberals. Dad invited Mr. Stevenson to Blair House for a talk on January 22, 1952. Personally, they hit it off well. The governor listened to Dad’s sermon on the importance of keeping the presidency in Democratic hands and said he was deeply impressed by the offer and awed by the responsibility.

  Dad thought this was an acceptance. Several days later, he discovered Mr. Stevenson thought he had said no. Listening to reports of this confusion - and noting Dad’s growing irritation with the Eisenhower candidacy, Mother became more and more alarmed. She could see the whole scenario heading straight to a renomination in July. She sat down one night with Dad in his study and told him that she could not survive another four years in the presidency. She did not think he could do it either, but she was speaking for herself, first.

  That warning shook Dad to the depths of his soul. A few weeks later, he convened a meeting of his top aides, to which he invited Chief Justice Vinson and a few other close friends. One by one, he asked them whether he should run again. Each said no. With a candor that he always encouraged from his friends and his staff, they told him they were worried about his growing exhaustion. If he ran and won, which they were certain he could do, he would be seventy-three by the time he left office.

  Perhaps Dad was hoping that Poppa Vin might be moved by this dramatic scene to change his mind. If so, it did not work. The chief justice only concurred with the rest of the room that Harry Truman should not run again.

  This informal poll did not mean the issue was decided, by any means. Like all presidents, Dad often ignored or overruled the advice of his cabinet and staff. He really believed that sign on his desk, “The buck stops here.” Only he could decide, finally, what was best for the nation.

  A few days later, Matt Connelly, his appointment's secretary, heard his decision and why. Matt had just come from a party given by Les Biffle, the secretary of the Senate, one of the men who had talked Dad into becoming vice president in 1944. Mr. Biffle still saw himself as a president maker. He and everyone else at the party denounced Adlai Stevenson’s reluctance to run and dismissed him as a candidate. They all said Harry Truman was their only hope, the only man who could beat General Eisenhower.

  Back at the White House, Matt found Dad still in his office, working late as usual. Matt told him what they were saying at the Biffle party. Dad listened, growing more and more upset. “Matt,” he asked, “Do you think the old man will have to run again?”

  Matt’s normally cheerful Irish-American face grew somber. With Charlie Ross gone, he was closer to the Trumans than any other member of the staff He pointed to a portrait of Bess on the wall to the left. “Would you do that to her?” he asked.

  Dad looked at the portrait, and at the photograph of Mother on his desk, the one he had carried through France in World War I. Slowly, sadly, he nodded. “You know if anything happened to her, what would happen to me?”

  Matt nodded. He knew.

  “All right,” Dad said. “That settles it.”

  In mid-March, Dad went to Key West for another vacation. Mother did not go with him. She had an important job to do - supervising the final preparations for the reopening of the renovated White House. She had kept in close touch with the Fine Arts Commission that redecorated the downstairs rooms. In her files are reports on their progress, four-or five-inches thick. Upstairs, she worked with decorators from B. Altman’s on our private quarters.

  Late in March, Bess gave the women reporters a tour of the house. She was rewarded for her courtesy with some tough questions on the topic that was absorbing everyone in Washington. “Would you like to spend four more years here?” one of the reporters asked.

  “You’re not going to get a yes or no out of me on that one,” Bess said.

  “Could you stand it if you had to?”

  “I stood it for seven years,” Bess said.

  Mother was good at keeping secrets.

  Dad returned from Key West looking much more like his old self. Mother greeted him at the airport with the news that the White House was ready for his inspection. Naturally, the former builder of county courthouses and hospitals wanted to see it immediately. They were greeted at the front door by the staff. Mr. Crim, the head usher, gave Dad a gold key. Mother was amused to discover it opened nothing.

  The president followed the First Lady through the gleaming East Room, Green Room, Blue Room, Red Room, and State Dining Room and pronounced them all magnificent. Mother went off to preside at a Salvation Army dinner, and Dad continued his inspection for most of the evening. One might wonder if regaining this now really palatial mansion might have given Harry Truman second thoughts about his decision. But raising that question would only prove you did not know Harry Truman well.

  On March 29, every Democratic VIP in the country crammed into the Washington Armory for the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner. Dad was the principal speaker. On the dais, he sat next to Alice Acheson, the secretary of state’s wife. On the way to the dinner, Alice had asked her husband if he thought the president might say something about running again in his speech. “Not at all,” replied Mr. Acheson in his most autocratic tone, one of the many reasons why he was a superb secretary of state. Mrs. Acheson, properly subdued, dropped the subject.

  After dessert, Dad took out the binder containing his speech. He opened it to the last page and showed it to Mrs. Acheson. The final paragraph read: “I shall not be a candidate for reelection. I have served my country long, and I think efficiently and honestly. I shall not accept a renomination. I do not feel that it is my duty to spend another four years in the White House.”

  “You, Bess and I are the only ones here who know that,” Dad said.

  Mrs. Acheson wondered if he ought to reconsider one last time. She asked Dad if she could tell the secretary of state, who might want to try to talk him out of it. Dad shook his head. His mind was made up and not eve
n the eloquence of the most brilliant man in his cabinet could change it now.

  Dad gave a magnificent speech that night. He summed up the achievements of the Democratic Party at home and abroad. It was a great record. Under his leadership, the United States had restored the strength of the free world and met the challenge of Communist aggression. He scorched the Republican isolationists and red-baiters who were undermining our bipartisan foreign policy and summed up the Democratic Party’s record of service to the farmer, the worker, and world peace.

  Finally, he paused. “Whoever the Democrats nominate for president this year, he will have that record to run upon,” he said. Then he read his statement, announcing his decision not to seek another term. General Vaughan had his eye on Mother while the words spread shock and dismay through the assembled Democrats. “She looked,” the general said, “the way you do when you draw four aces.”

  The reporters rushed to Governor Stevenson’s table to ask him if he was a candidate. They should have talked to Bess Wallace Truman. For the first and only time during her eight years as First Lady, she might have given them an interview. I can almost see the head on the story:

  BESS TRUMAN SAYS SHE IS THE HAPPIEST WOMAN IN WASHINGTON

  Back in the restored White House, Bess found herself working harder than ever. Several major state visits, which had been put off so that the foreign guests could enjoy the $5 million worth of splendor that the Trumans had created for future presidents, now became realities.

  First to arrive was Queen Juliana of the Netherlands and her husband, Prince Bernhard. Mother was especially eager to greet the royal couple, who had been most hospitable to me on my tour of Europe in 1951. When I got home, I had strongly recommended inviting them. I suspected they and the Trumans would hit it off well, and I was right. Mother and the queen became instant friends. They were both down-to-earth, no-nonsense women. In fact, the queen gave Congress the kind of address that Bess would have given them if she had ever been granted the opportunity.