Hints of a huge insurance scandal were in the wind, involving a Pendergast man in the state government, R. Emmett O’Malley, Missouri’s Superintendent of Insurance. Marquis Childs of the Post-Dispatch had been to the Waldorf to interview T.J. earlier in the spring, before T.J. sailed for France on the new Normandie, and in the course of the questioning, T.J. had said, “Yes, I told O’Malley to approve the insurance deal,” adding angrily, “And what’re you going to do about it?” which had been a mistake. (When Childs went to the ship later, to see T.J. off, he found him in a better mood. “Pendergast and the very blond Mrs. Pendergast were ensconced in the living room of their suite which was almost literally filled with flowers, orchids and lilies of the valley, expensive flowers. This was Pendergast, the Maharajah of Missouri, in all his glory.”) But apparently Harry’s conversations at the Waldorf included none of the truth of what was going on behind the scenes with O’Malley, even if to Harry it appeared as though he and T.J. had covered “everything under the sun.”
One topic they did take up was a replacement for Governor Park, who by Missouri law could serve only a single term. Harry thought perhaps it should be a wealthy Pike County apple grower named Lloyd C. Stark. Harry and Stark had met through the American Legion—Stark, too, had served as an artillery officer in France—and had compared notes as time went on, Stark confiding his own political ambitions. Harry had been a guest at Stark’s estate in Pike County, in northeastern Missouri, home of the Stark nursery, largest in the United States and famous for the Stark “Delicious” apple. At Stark’s urging, Harry had provided him with a list of key people throughout the state and put in a word for him at 1908 Main Street. “Confidentially, I had a fine visit with our mutual friend in Kansas City last Friday,” Stark had written Harry that spring of 1935, delighted by how things were shaping up.
But T.J. didn’t like Stark and had already crossed him off as a possible governor at the time of Francis Wilson’s death. (At Wilson’s funeral, a news photographer happened to catch the massive Big Boss and the trim, elegantly tailored apple grower, each with cigarette in hand, deep in conversation among the parked cars.) Neither T.J. nor Jim Aylward thought Stark could be trusted and told Harry so.
“He won’t do,” said T.J. “I don’t like the son-of-a-bitch. He’s no good.”
Long afterward, Harry would remark to a friend, “The old man had better judgment than I did.”
However, as was said, the apple grower was also an accomplished apple polisher, and when Harry took both Stark and Bennett Clark with him on a third trip to the Waldorf that summer, T.J. at last consented. Stark was to have the organization’s full support—which meant Stark could count on being the next governor—and, of course, with the implicit understanding that the organization could in turn count on Stark.
On the train back to Washington, Stark, “the most grateful man alive,” promised to do anything to help Harry any time. He had only to say the word.
Relations with Bennett Clark, meanwhile, were also improving. Few in the Senate had been quite so contemptuous of Truman as Clark during Harry’s first several months, and Clark still did little to make Harry’s job any easier. Clark also seemed to go out of his way to annoy or embarrass the administration, and yet invariably it was Clark that Roosevelt worked with on federal appointments in Missouri, not Senator Truman, who voted consistently with the administration. It was Roosevelt’s way of trying to win Clark over, and Clark’s way of getting more than his share of patronage, all of which left Harry far out in the cold, trying to swallow his pride and resentment. Further, Clark had little time for what Harry called “the ordinary customers” from back home who had favors to ask or troubles to settle.
But Clark, as Harry recognized, was a man with an extraordinary mind, who knew the Constitution and parliamentary law as well as anyone in the Senate. He was hugely entertaining, a good host, a good cook—country ham with red-eye gravy and turnip greens his specialty—and like Cactus Jack Garner he enjoyed a sociable “libation” over lunch, or in mid-afternoon, or day’s end, or most any time. Harry adored the banter and storytelling that went with this side of senatorial life. It was closer to the comradeship of Army life than anything else he had known. He enjoyed Clark’s humor as they “took a little something to settle the nerves.” At a lunch for the health faddist Bernarr Macfadden, they regarded each other with long faces across the table. “Kind of hard on Bennett and me to attend a dry lunch in this town,” Harry noted.
In his office, for special guests like Clark, Harry kept a supply of T.J.’s best bourbon. (“And while I heard criticism aplenty of Pendergast himself,” recorded William Helm, “I have yet to hear a noble senator raise his voice against the quality of Pendergast liquor.”) Other “supplies for the thirsty” were kept by the Secretary of the Senate, Colonel Edwin Halsey (and later by his successor, Les Biffle), in an office only a short stroll across the hall from the chamber. Unlike Clark, Harry kept to a rule of one stroll, one drink only.
Though younger than Harry by six years, Clark was heavyset and jowly, and with his thinning hair looked both older and more senatorial. Clark’s biography in the Congressional Directory, written by Clark himself, took up nearly three-quarters of a page of fine print. Senator Truman’s, also self-penned, consisted of three lines.
A year later, in the summer of 1936, as the Democrats convened in Philadelphia to renominate Franklin Roosevelt for a second term, Harry was with T.J. again, and more conspicuously now than at any time in years past. Just back from still another European vacation—he had returned this time on the maiden voyage of the Queen Mary—T.J. came down to Philadelphia by train from New York, planning to commute back and forth every day from his suite at the Waldorf. He arrived Tuesday, June 23, the morning the convention opened. Jim Farley, chairman of the national committee, Jim Aylward, and Senator Truman clustered about him to pose for pictures on the convention floor, T.J. beaming as the flash cameras exploded.
All the big bosses of the Democratic Party were gathered in Philadelphia—Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite, the urbane, affable, extremely powerful Edward J. Flynn of the Bronx; tall, natty Frank Hague of Jersey City, who would be remembered by history for his comment, “I am the law” Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago; E. H. (“Boss Ed”) Crump of Memphis, former farm boy and noted bird lover; and T. J. Pendergast, a white carnation in his lapel, who the day before had celebrated his sixty-fourth birthday. At one time or other, Roosevelt had courted and worked with them all, depending on their help, and he would again. He called them all his friends. And all appreciated perfectly what wonders the Roosevelt magic had worked for them in four years. As Marquis Childs observed, “The vast expenditures of the New Deal had put into their hands power they had hitherto scarcely dreamed of.” Though no one could know it at the time, the day was to mark T.J.’s last big public appearance. So, as a gathering of the era’s big-city Democratic bosses, all figuratively on stage together, it was a final, historic moment.
Harry, who had driven up from Washington, had no real part to play. He had been named to no committees of importance. He was only a delegate-at-large. He was there really to be with Pendergast, and indeed the group photograph taken on the convention floor is the only known picture of him at the Boss’s side.
Returning by train to New York that night, Pendergast was suddenly taken ill. The doctors diagnosed coronary thrombosis. Harry, who had stayed on in Philadelphia but did not bother to remain for Roosevelt’s speech the final night, apparently was not told for some time how serious the situation had become. In August, still confined to his hotel room, T.J. suffered another relapse and was rushed to Roosevelt Hospital for surgery. He had intestinal cancer and the operation required the closing of his rectum. For T.J. it meant the use of a tube in his side for the rest of his life.
Had T.J. only died that summer, Harry Truman would later reflect, his reputation would have been secure as the greatest political boss of the time. But it was not to be.
Not until
September was Pendergast able to return to Kansas City, traveling by train in a special car and with great secrecy. By then the primaries were over, the organization having performed at peak efficiency: Lloyd C. Stark was the Democratic nominee for governor and as certain of election in November as was Franklin D. Roosevelt.
IV
During the second half of his first term in the Senate, Truman felt the cloud he was under begin to recede. His standing among his colleagues improved. He was assigned more spacious offices down the hall, suite No. 240, again looking onto the interior courtyard. By his own staff, by others on his committees, he was perceived as dogged, productive, respectful of the opinion of others, good-natured, and extremely likable. “We all found Truman a very nice man…[and] his heart was in the right place,” recalled the historian Telford Taylor, who was then a young attorney on the Interstate Commerce Commission. The senator’s patience, even with the dreariest assignments, seemed infinite. And though no one would have singled him out as exceptional in any particular way or predicted a brilliant future—“But he showed no signs of leadership,” Taylor also remembered—his reputation was clearly on the rise.
The Republican Borah, one of the Senate’s certified great men, made a point one day of throwing his arm about Senator Truman’s shoulder in an open show of friendship. Truman was even attempting an occasional speech in the chamber by this time, reading always from prepared texts heavy with facts and figures. Once, in the middle of a debate, Arthur Vandenberg called on him to substantiate a point and after Truman obliged, Vandenberg told the Senate, “When the Senator from Missouri makes a statement like that we can take it for the truth.” It was a gesture Harry would not forget.
“He was always going out of his way to do favors for others and you couldn’t help but like his smiling, friendly manner,” said Vic Messall, “…and he was that way with everyone. I never heard him say a cross word to his staff, and that’s a real test….” Mildred Dryden, Truman’s secretary, said, “Never in all the years that I worked for him did I ever see him lose his temper. He was always soft-spoken and very considerate to his staff….” She remembered no “salty language” either, never ever if women were present.
Alben Barkley, though he had liked Harry Truman “instinctively” from the start, said that his real appreciation of the man only came clear to him at the dramatic climax of the battle over Roosevelt’s Court-packing plan, the contentious, frustrating issue that dominated in 1937.
In his acceptance speech at the Philadelphia convention—the speech Harry had missed hearing but called a masterpiece after reading it in the papers—Roosevelt said, “To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” In his second inaugural address in January 1937, the President became more specific. “I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” he said, and the Congress, like the country, had waited in anticipation to see what new legislation he would demand.
In the first week of February came the surprise. It was the Supreme Court he was out to “reform”—really to reshape to his liking—because the Court had found some earlier New Deal programs unconstitutional. His scheme was to enlarge the Court from nine members to fifteen if justices refused to retire at the age of seventy, and after the landslide in November, which gave him the largest majority in Congress ever enjoyed by a President, Roosevelt felt confident of having his way. He neither consulted with the leadership in Congress nor gave any advance word of what he was up to. The President was wrong in his approach; the whole attempt to influence the decisions of the Court by increasing its size was a blunder, damaging to Roosevelt and to the Senate.
Opposition in the Senate was fierce, and especially among Democrats, including not just conservatives like Carter Glass and Bennett Clark, but such formerly reliable Roosevelt men as Connally and Wheeler, who now led the fight against the Court-packing bill. Barkley, Truman, virtually every Democratic senator who had been a steadfast Roosevelt supporter now found himself caught between vehement pressure from the White House on the one hand and, on the other, outrage at home over the whole idea. By June, even Garner, Roosevelt’s own Vice President, had become so infuriated over the affair that he packed his bags and went back to Texas. “The people are with me,” Roosevelt had snapped when Garner took issue with him. A disappointed Carter Glass thought probably the Senate was with him, too, so great was the Roosevelt magic. “Of course I shall oppose it,” said Glass. “I shall oppose it with all the strength that remains to me, but I don’t imagine for a minute that it’ll do any good. Why, if the President asked Congress to commit suicide tomorrow they’d do it.”
Truman, like Barkley, decided to stand with the President, on the grounds that the size of the Court had been changed before in times past. But he took no part in the debate. He was preoccupied with the railroad investigations, where Wheeler, because of his part in the Court battle, had lost interest and left him most of the work, making Truman vice-chairman of the subcommittee. In June, in the midst of the Court fight, Harry ventured his longest, most daring speech thus far in the Senate, a preliminary report of the railroad investigations. As summer came on, he would have preferred greatly to stay free of the whole Court issue and like so many wished only that it had never happened. He found himself deluged with angry mail. Having announced his position on the bill, he was accused of being a Roosevelt stooge. His headaches returned.
At the White House the President’s advisers were saying that if this fight were won, everything else he wanted would “fall into the basket.”
But all strategies were suddenly shattered on July 14, when Majority Leader Joseph Robinson, who had been carrying the fight for Roosevelt, fell dead in his apartment across from the Capitol, the victim of a heart attack. Only days before Senator Royal Copeland, who was a physician, had slipped into a seat beside Robinson to warn him that he should slow down.
Bess, who was suffering acutely from Washington’s oppressive heat, voiced worries about her own husband’s stamina in a letter to Ethel Noland. “H. is worn out and is not well and will simply have to have a good rest or he will be really ill.”
The fight on the Court was deferred until a new majority leader could be named. In the running were Barkley and the arch-conservative “Pat” Harrison of Mississippi, chairman of the Finance Committee. It was a critical juncture that could determine the future of the New Deal in the Senate, and Roosevelt, determined to see Barkley win, wrote an open “Dear Alben” letter in which he referred to Barkley as the “acting” majority leader. To many in the Senate this seemed arrogant interference with what was solely Senate Business, and so another bitter fight resulted.
From a private poll, Jim Farley calculated that Harrison stood to win by a single vote. Pressure from the White House grew intense—and not especially subtle. Senator William H. Dieterich of Illinois, who had pledged himself to Harrison, received a call from Boss Kelly of Chicago promising Dieterich a say in the appointment of two federal judges, should he vote as Roosevelt wished, which was quite enough to convince Dieterich to switch sides. On July 19, a day before the vote, Harry heard from Tom Pendergast, who had been called by the White House and asked to “tell” Harry Truman how to vote. Only in this instance no offer of patronage was forthcoming.
Harry told T.J. that he had already promised Pat Harrison his support and could not go back on his word. “Jim Aylward phoned me, too,” Harry told William Helm an hour later. “I didn’t mind turning Jim down, not so much, anyhow, but to say No to Tom was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.” According to Harry, this was the one and only time T.J. had ever called him about a vote. Normally, T.J. made his views known by telegram.
But possibly T.J. did not like pressure from the White House any more than Harry, for as Harry also related, Pendergast had said it “didn’t make a helluva lot of difference to him….”
Why Harry had ever lined up with Harrison remains a mystery—he liked
Barkley, nor had he any reason to oppose him—unless he saw it as a way to show the President he could not be taken for granted any longer.
He refused to be budged and was so furious with the people at the White House, the President included, that he could hardly contain himself. By going to Pendergast, rather than coming directly to him, they had left little doubt as to what they really thought of him. In their eyes, he was still truly the Senator from Pendergast, It was the worst insult he had suffered since coming to Washington and he decided to let Roosevelt know how he felt. Told that the President was not available, he talked to Steve Early, the press secretary. He was tired of being “pushed around” and treated like an office boy, Truman said. He expected the consideration and courtesy that his office entitled him to.
Senator Barkley, all the while, was under the impression that Harry Truman had given him his pledge of support. Barkley would later describe how Harry had come to him saying, “The pressure on me is so great [to vote for Harrison] that I am going to ask you to relieve me of my promise.” It was this foursquare approach of Truman’s that so impressed him, Barkley said. “I always admired him for the courage and character he displayed in coming to me as he did. Too often in politics the stiletto is slipped between your shoulder blades, while its wielder continues to smile sweetly….”
On July 21 the Democratic members of the Senate met in the white marble Caucus Room of the Senate Office Building to vote for a majority leader by secret ballot. The winner was Alben Barkley by one vote. (Barkley would later speculate on how he might have felt about Harry Truman had he lost by one vote.) Harry immediately pledged Barkley his support and they were to be friends and allies thereafter.
The steam was gone from the Court bill. On July 22, by a margin of 50 votes, the Senate sent it back to the Judiciary Committee, where it died. The President had suffered his first and worst defeat since taking office, which to Harry’s mind he richly deserved. The whole affair, Harry thought, had been a mistake and very badly managed by Roosevelt.