First Ladies

by Caroli, Betty

  Whether Eleanor Roosevelt placed her successor among the Marthas or the Marys is not clear—she might have lacked the information on which to judge—because Elizabeth Virginia (“Bess”) Wallace Truman (1945–1953) moved into the White House an unknown quantity. In more than twelve years of the Roosevelt administration, journalists had depended so heavily on Eleanor that they had paid little attention to those waiting in the wings, and Bess Furman, of the Associated Press, admitted that she and her colleagues had been caught with “their pencils down.”77

  Harry Truman had served less than three months as vice president when Franklin Roosevelt died. Although Harry had served in Congress and lived with his family in Washington since 1935, none of the Trumans had attracted much notice. Other Senate wives could offer little insight into Bess because she reportedly stopped attending their meetings when she found them boring.78 Even the Democratic Party lacked accurate biographical information on the wife of the new president and erroneously reported that she had once taught school.79

  Margaret Truman called her mother the “least understood” member of the family.80 Bess’s deep desire for privacy evolved out of her view that publicity was undignified and unbecoming a lady, a bias that guaranteed her a different relationship with the American public than her predecessor had cultivated. Neither Eleanor Roosevelt nor any other First Lady exceeded Bess in her commitment to help her husband but she wavered on just what that meant. At first she had agreed to have Eleanor introduce her to reporters; but then on the train back to Washington after the Hyde Park funeral, she had sounded out Frances Perkins on the subject. “I’m not used to this awful public life,” Bess explained, and Perkins consoled her and assured her that Eleanor was unique in thriving on the exchange with reporters. When Bess learned that no other president’s wife had held regular press conferences, she promptly cancelled hers and never scheduled another one.81

  Ceremonial appearances could not so easily be avoided, much as Bess would have liked to limit them. Her hands perspired profusely at White House receptions even when things went smoothly,82 and when some mishap occurred, Bess detested being at the center of attention. One of her least pleasant public appearances, permanently recorded on film, occurred only weeks after Harry’s inauguration. Scheduled to christen two hospital planes, she approached the first one and swung the champagne bottle in a way she hoped would befit a lady but also break the bottle. Neither that strike nor the eight others that followed had any effect and finally an exasperated Bess turned to a military aide for help. His four swings failed because no one had scored the bottle first.

  Margaret Truman, who accompanied her mother that day, found the spectacle amusing, but Bess was nonplussed as she moved on to the second plane. This time the bottle had been prepared too well and her first strike showered her with champagne. The navy lieutenant in charge of the ceremony suggested that reporters describe it as though it had gone perfectly but they preferred the real version and gleefully relayed all the details. Harry Truman tried to make a joke of it all by teasing his wife about losing the tennis champion’s arm of her youth, but she refused to be placated and retorted that she would have liked to have cracked the bottle on his head.83

  Although Bess Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt were born within months of each other, Bess remained very much a private, introspective woman of the nineteenth century while Eleanor pushed farther and farther outside herself and into the twentieth. Eleanor found traveling by plane efficient and invigorating; Bess thought it too fast to be dignified—she took the train.84 Eleanor struggled with public speaking and eventually mastered it while Bess refused to try. Eleanor thought women would continue to make gains in politics until one of them eventually won the presidency but Bess believed that “would never happen.”85 Eleanor went out on her own, apparently unconcerned about criticism, while Bess kept carefully in her husband’s shadow because she feared looking foolish. On a 1948 trip to Cuba, she would not even attempt speaking Spanish, a language she had studied, because she feared an error might be reported in the newspapers.

  Such low public visibility should not obscure a very important part for Bess in the Truman administration. Margaret Truman noted that her mother felt shut out of some decisions during the White House years and became a spectator, but it was only a relative exclusion. (Harry later composed a significant epitaph for her: “First Lady, the United States of America, 1945–1953.) Eleanor Roosevelt, who strongly supported her successor’s desire to do the job her own way, might well have noticed that the Truman marriage was much closer than her own to the partnership of respecting equals that she herself had described as ideal. Servants and neighbors, visiting royalty and newsmen, all agreed that the Trumans were the closest family they ever saw in the White House. With their daughter, a senior in college when Harry became president, they were dubbed by their staff the Three Musketeers. All of them laughed a lot, but particularly Bess who, one maid observed, acted as though she had invented laughter.86

  Neither Bess nor Harry concealed the fact that their partnership extended to his work. Her family connections in politics had helped launch his career. In 1944, when a reporter asked what role she would have in Harry’s campaign for vice president, Bess replied that she would make no speeches but would help him write his “because we’ve done that so long, it’s a habit.”87 When it was revealed that she had been on his Senate payroll, Harry defended hiring her: “She’s a clerk in my office and does much of my clerical work. I need her there and that’s the reason I’ve got her there. I never make a report or deliver a speech without her editing it.”88

  A lifetime of correspondence between Harry Truman and his wife reveals how much he valued her judgment and how often he conferred with her on important matters. Not all the letters survived, as their daughter pointed out. After he had become president, Harry found Bess burning some papers and inquired what they were. “They’re your letters to me,” she said, and he responded, “Well, why are you burning them? Think of history.” “I have,” she replied and kept on burning.89 Enough were saved, however, to make more than one book, and in 1983, hundreds of Harry’s letters, written to his wife over half a century, were published in Dear Bess.

  The correspondence shows a continued sharing of thoughts with so much background information missing that the writer must have assumed no need to repeat it. In September 1941, for example, Harry wrote from his hotel in Kansas City that he had spent hours with various Democratic Party leaders. After naming some of them, he concluded: “My, what a difference from last year … and what a kick there is in it. They all … wonder what I am going to do for the poor old ‘Party’. What should I do?”90

  In his breezy accounts of meetings with Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill at the end of World War II, he summarized in the manner of one associate updating another. From Berlin he wrote on July 25, 1945: “We have accomplished a very great deal in spite of all the talk. Set up a council of ministers to negotiate peace with Italy, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Finland and Austria. We have discussed a free waterway program for Europe, making the Black Sea straits, the Danube, the Rhine, and the Kiel Canal free to everyone. We have a setup for the government of Germany and we hope we are in sight of agreement on reparations.”91

  Harry Truman continued to defend his confidence in Bess’s opinions long after he left office. In a 1963 interview with the Washington reporter Marianne Means, he explained that he had talked over with his wife the use of the atomic bomb, the Marshall Plan and post-war rebuilding, and the Korean military action: “I discussed all of them with her. Why not? Her judgment was always good.” The Trumans’ daughter later underlined her mother’s impact on the administration by crediting her with obtaining increased funding for the National Institute of Health and with arranging for theater groups to tour the world under the auspices of the State Department.92

  The foundation for strong mutual respect between Bess and Harry was established when they were very young. His family had left their Missouri farm when
he was six and moved into Independence so that he and his brother could get a “town” education. The Trumans owned hundreds of acres but like many farmers, they had borrowed heavily in order to buy. They always owed money, Harry once said, to somebody. First in Sunday school and then in the Independence elementary school, the bespectacled Harry was permanently smitten by a blond, blue-eyed classmate (whose family rarely owed money to anyone). Almost sixty years later he wrote her from the White House, “You are still on the pedestal where I placed you that day in Sunday School in 1890.”93

  Bess Wallace’s maternal grandfather, George Gates, had moved to Independence from Vermont in the 1850s and had established a profitable milling business that produced the nationally famous “Queen of the Pantry” flour. For his wife and three daughters, he built a seventeen-room Victorian mansion that was still impressive when it became the summer White House almost a century later. It was, one reporter wrote, a residence that “in any city anywhere … would command respect.”94

  When one of Gates’s daughters, Madge, the “queenliest woman” Independence ever produced,95 married David Wallace, the son of the town’s first mayor, it seemed a perfect match. But neighbors later concluded that Madge’s egotism made her a less than sensitive wife. One story that made the rounds of Independence had it that Madge had her dress splattered by a cantering horse, and she had immediately registered her surprise. “Doesn’t he know who I am?” she asked, leaving it unclear whether she referred to the rider or the horse.96

  Whatever his reasons, David Wallace put a gun to his head and took his life when he was forty-three, leaving Madge with four children. Bess, the oldest, was just eighteen, and according to Margaret Truman, this tragedy, more than any other single event, produced Bess’s unusually great insistence on privacy.97 Widow Wallace moved her family back into her father’s house on North Delaware Street but she never quite recovered from the shock. Bess, the dutiful daughter, did not go away to college, but remained in Independence and commuted to Barstow Finishing School in nearby Kansas City. Thus, she could begin a long correspondence with Harry Truman who was working his parents’ farm ten miles out of town.

  Harry, the most faithful of writers, constantly chided Bess about owing him a letter and reported his own activities with a combination of self-doubt and braggadocio. He insisted that if she married him he would try to provide the same level of luxury she had in the Gates mansion or, failing that, he would supply equivalent prestige. “How does it feel being engaged to a clodhopper who has ambitions to be Governor of Montana and Chief Executive of U.S.?” Harry wrote in 1913, but continued, “He’ll do well if he gets to be a retired farmer … but I intend to keep peggin’ away and I suppose I’ll arrive at something. You’ll never be sorry if you take me for better or for worse because I’ll always try to make it better.”98

  The combination of blundering ambition and great determination evidently appealed to Bess and, although she admitted she found him an enigma, she appreciated his devotion. He repeatedly offered to buy tickets for whatever show she would consider seeing with him. Aware of her tennis prowess, he constructed a playing court at the Truman farm to tempt her to come visit him on Sundays.

  Whatever Harry could offer her, he never seemed to think it enough, and while he tried first one scheme and then another, he compiled the longest courtship record of any president. He later complained that he never understood why she made him wait fifteen years to marry her. Bess’s mother, the hard-to-please Madge Wallace, judged a farmer like Harry unworthy of her only daughter, but Harry was partly to blame, too, because he wanted to make good first. When the farm did not produce as he hoped, he turned to mining and then to drilling for oil. In 1917 he enlisted in the Army and opened a canteen.

  Fighting in France evidently tempered Harry’s expectations about what he should be able to offer his bride or changed Bess’s ideas about how long she wanted to wait. They had announced their engagement before he sailed and when the war ended, he could not conceal his eagerness. She rejected his suggestion that she meet him in New York so that they could marry there, and their wedding took place in Bess’s hometown church with the appropriate number of attendants on June 28, 1919. Madge Wallace continued to doubt that the bridegroom would ever amount to much. He had shown up for the wedding in a figured wool suit, she noted disapprovingly, when linen would have been more appropriate.99

  Harry’s mother-in-law was not the only one surprised by the marriage. The bride and groom, both in their mid-thirties, differed so much from each other that even their daughter, born when her parents were almost forty, marveled at the contrast. Bess, an athletic young woman who developed into a controlled and very private woman, made Harry look particularly bookish and impetuous. As a child, he stuck to his books because he feared breaking his spectacles, and he never did learn to mask his sharp temper. While he became widely read in American history, she liked a good murder mystery. He delighted in winning small stakes at poker, but she preferred bridge. Theirs was, apparently, one of those unions of sharply different partners who chose to team up in maturity after both had developed very separate identities.

  Harry did not immediately set out to win political office. After he failed at running a men’s store, opened in partnership with an army buddy, he accepted the invitation of another army friend, James Pendergast, nephew of Jackson County’s political boss, and tried for a judgeship. When Harry Truman assumed that office in January 1923, he began a government career that lasted, with the exception of two years, for three decades. Bess reluctantly faced the prospect of being a political wife.

  Unlike Eleanor Roosevelt, who seemed intent on carving out her own niche in Washington, Bess merged her identity with Harry’s. In 1945, when questioned about her past, Bess replied: “I have been in politics for more than 25 years.”100 But it was a subtle participation, quite unlike that of Eleanor who had combined her public and private lives into one seamless whole. For Bess, the two parts remained separate—her public role consisted of keeping quiet and making sure her hat was on straight. Her private life was her own business, although it was understood in Washington that she did not lack opinions.101

  This apparent contradiction led to considerable confusion. Although Good Housekeeping named Bess Truman one of Washington’s ten most powerful women in 1949, the public knew little about her because she refused to tell much. After nine months in the White House, she went Christmas shopping alone and unnoticed.102 When the New York Times published a feature article on her in June 1946, the headline read, “The Independent Lady from Independence,”103 and three years later readers of Collier’s learned that Bess was “still a riddle.”104

  All information about the First Lady came from her two secretaries: Reathel Odum, who had formerly worked for Harry, and Edith Helm, whose White House experience went back to the Wilson years. Reporters soon learned to expect from Odum and Helm only the barest facts, none of them very informative about the Trumans. After much badgering, Bess finally consented to respond to reporters’ written questions but even then she used “No comment” for nearly one third of their queries. She revealed that she thought the two most important characteristics for a First Lady were good health and a strong sense of humor but, she added, a course in public speaking would also be helpful.105 Perhaps her most telling response came to the question of whether she had wanted her husband to be president. “Definitely did not,” she wrote, underlining “definitely.”

  In the absence of other information, reporters wrote about her comings and goings, her housekeeping, which was “excellent,” and her “mind of her own about menus.”106 Her refusal to speak out on matters of public concern gave readers the impression she knew less than she did and that she was the “Martha” type who contented herself with “minding her knitting.”107

  Much of the information was simply wrong. One national news magazine reported that Bess Truman “neither drinks nor smokes.”108 Another ran a photograph of her refusing a glass of wine, with the caption
: “No prohibitionist, Mrs. Truman just doesn’t like the taste of the stuff.”109 When Bess and daughter Margaret chose orange juice over cocktails at a New York dinner, they made the New York Times and received an approving letter from a Binghamton (New York) Methodist church. Bess politely thanked her supporters but failed to enlighten them about her drinking preferences.110

  White House employees made clear in their published memoirs that the Trumans liked a cocktail before dinner. In fact, they had definite preferences in how their drinks were mixed, something the staff had to learn. According to J. B. West, who worked many years in the White House, Bess rang for the butler her first night there and ordered old-fashioneds for herself and the president. Since the butler had once worked as a barman, he took considerable pride in his mixing abilities, and he confidently added fruit slices and bitters to the drinks before serving them. Bess made no comment about the fruit slices but pronounced her drink too sweet. The next evening an identical order received even greater attention from the butler but the same reaction from the First Lady. Finally on the third night an exasperated butler poured straight bourdon into the glasses. This time Bess smiled. “That,” she said, “is the way we like our old-fashioneds.”111