The charge that he had been a member of the Klan, which he categorically denied, appeared first in the Hearst papers. The story broke shortly before he reached Boston, where, with the Irish-Catholic vote at stake, it might have done irreparable harm. To Truman and his entourage there was no question that the story had been Seen purposefully planted to hit Boston just in time for his arrival and that the day was only saved by the celebrated former Governor of Massachusetts James Michael Curley, then a member of Congress, who spoke from the same platform with Truman.
“Jim Curley got up to make his little speech,” remembered Matt Connelly, for whom it was one of the memorable moments of the campaign, “and [he] said, ‘We have a very unusual candidate for Vice President. He goes to California, the word comes back to us he’s a Jew; he arrives in the Midwest, the word comes back to us that he’s a member of the Klan.’ And he turned, ‘Mr. Vice President, I invite you to join my lodge, The Ancient Order of Hibernians. We’d be glad to have you as one of our members, and I assure you, we will get out the vote.’
“I said to Mr. Truman, ‘That takes care of the Klan.’ ”
But it was the old Pendergast association that dogged him most, and especially when coupled with the question of Roosevelt’s health. Attacks by the Chicago Tribune were sharpest of all:
If they confess that there is the slightest chance that Mr. Roosevelt may die or become incapacitated in the next four years, they are faced with the grinning skeleton of Truman the bankrupt, Truman the pliant tool of Boss Pendergast in looting Kansas City’s county government, Truman the yes-man and apologist in the Senate for political gangsters.
To the immense relief of the Trumans, nothing was said of the death of Bess’s father, and Truman’s anger erupted only over remarks by Republican Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, the glamorous wife of publisher Henry Luce, who, poking fun at the idea of Bess working on his Senate staff, began calling her “Payroll Bess.” If, as Truman had said, his mother didn’t bring him up to be a statesman, then she would not be disappointed, Mrs. Luce also declared.
In the normal rough-and-tumble of a campaign, Truman could take nearly anything said about him, but at any mention of his family, even an implied slight, he got “hotter than a depot stove.” He would have nothing but contempt for Clare Boothe Luce from that point on, commenting privately that she spelled her name L-O-O-S-E.
Between Truman and the White House there was little or no communication. The real battle, after all, was the one Roosevelt was waging against Dewey, and to the delight of those close to the President, the battle revived him wonderfully. Though he made few public appearances, one before the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in Washington was considered the best campaign speech of his entire career. He seemed his old self, spontaneously adding a little extra to the prepared text, delivering it with great, feigned gravity and savoring the moment as only a seasoned performer could:
These Republican leaders have not been content with attacks—on me, or my wife, or on my sons. No, not content with that, they now include my little dog, Fala. Well, of course, I don’t resent attacks, and my family doesn’t resent attacks, but [pause] Fala does resent them….
As Robert Sherwood, his speechwriter, later observed, the Fala story put the needed excitement into the campaign. “The champ” was back. Ed Flynn, after all his anguish and exertions over the choice of a Vice President, would later tell friends that Roosevelt was in such fine form in the campaign that he could have won had he put Fala on the ticket.
The night the President spoke in Chicago, more than a hundred thousand people packed Soldier Field. He “improved visibly in strength and resilience,” recalled Sherwood. In New York, in the face of a cold driving rain, he rode for hours in an open car, bare-headed, so millions of people could see him with their own eyes and know he was all right. It was an ordeal that could have put a younger, stronger man in the hospital, but at the end Roosevelt seemed exhilarated, glad for the chance to show what he could take.
Dewey had raised the specter of Communist infiltration in Washington. “Now…with the aid of Sidney Hillman…the Communists are seizing control of the New Deal…to control the Government of the United States,” Dewey warned. Roosevelt had grown to detest Dewey as he never had a political opponent, and like the driving rain, this too seemed to brace him up.
The Trumans waited out the returns in Kansas City, in a suite at the Muehlebach, a throng of old political and Battery D friends on hand to help celebrate, and before the long night ended a large number of them were extremely drunk. “I was shocked,” remembered Margaret.
One old political friend from southwest Missouri, Harry Easley, stayed on with Truman after everyone had left. Stretched out on a bed, Truman talked of how lonely he had felt through the campaign. He had seen the look of death in Roosevelt’s face, Truman said. “And he knew…that he would be President before the term was out,” Easley remembered. “He said he was going to have to depend on his friends…people like me, he said…he knew that he was going to be the President of the United States, and I think it just scared the very devil out of him…even the thought of it.’
It was nearly four in the morning before Dewey conceded, and the victory was narrow, the closest presidential election since 1916. The Roosevelt-Truman ticket won by 3 million votes, carrying thirty-six of the forty-eight states. Yet a shift of just 300,000 votes in the right states would have elected Dewey and Bricker. Dewey asked all Americans to join him in the hope that “in the difficult years ahead Divine Providence will guide and protect the President of the United States.”
Roosevelt, before turning in at Hyde Park, said, “I still think he is a son-of-a-bitch.”
In deference to the tragedy of war and the President’s limited strength, the inauguration at noon, January 20, 1945, was a somber affair lasting less than fifteen minutes. It was the first wartime inauguration since Lincoln and the first ever held at the White House, the ceremony conducted on the South Portico before a crowd that included numbers of disabled soldiers. A thin crust of snow covered the lawn. The day was grim. There were no parades. The red jackets of the Marine Band were the one note of cheer in the whole chill, muted scene.
Truman, wrapped in a heavy dark blue overcoat, his shoulders braced as if at attention, took the oath of office from Henry Wallace, a serious look on his face. Then the President was helped to his feet by his Marine son Jimmy and a Secret Service agent. Roosevelt wore only a thin summer-weight suit and moved slowly, stiff-legged from his braces, until he could reach out and grip the edge of the lectern. Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, standing close by, was suddenly reminded of how her husband had looked when he went into his decline.
V
Truman was Vice President for eighty-two days and as busy as he had ever been, doing what was customarily expected of a Vice President—presiding over the Senate, attending parties and receptions, shaking endless numbers of hands. Roosevelt was out of the country until the end of February. He had slipped away from Washington in strictest secrecy just two days after the inauguration, traveling by rail to Norfolk, where the cruiser Quincy carried him to the Mediterranean Sea, to the island of Malta. From Malta he went by plane to the old Black Sea health resort of Yalta, for his second Big Three conference with Churchill and Stalin. Jimmy Byrnes had gone, too, as a special adviser, and so had Ed Flynn, as a kind of official stowaway. Vice President Truman had been told only that if it was “absolutely urgent,” he could make contact with the President through the White House. Since taking office, Truman had seen nothing of Roosevelt nor had he been told anything at all about the conference. Truman had not even met the new Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius.
To his surprise, however, he was enjoying himself. The round of social engagements not only didn’t bother him, he delighted in it. “The amiable Missourian with the touch of country in his voice and manner,” reported Time, “had conquered a schedule that had Mrs. Truman and Capitol society writers breathless.”
Perle M
esta, heir to Oklahoma oil money and the widow of a wealthy Pittsburgh toolmaker, gave a party in the Vice President’s honor that was described as “one of the most glittering in Washington’s long history of glittery parties.” Mrs. Mesta had come to Washington initially as a Republican, but “jumped the fence” to become a Democrat only the summer before, because the Republicans had refused to renominate Wendell Willkie. Now she had “taken up” Harry Truman.
[The party] had all the charm of an English court tea, the sparkle of a Viennese ball, and the razzle-dazzle of a Hollywood premiere. The best names in officialdom and society attended. Shirt fronts gleamed with star-ruby studs. Evening gowns fairly dripped with diamonds and pearls. Champagne, at $20 a bottle, flowed in cascades….
“He circulated around in as comfortable, unpretentious, and agreeable manner as could be,” wrote the author John Gunther, after seeing Truman at a dinner party given by the foreign affairs editor of the Washington Post. Truman had been the first to arrive, Gunther noted.
He was lively and animated…a guest among other guests.
I had the impression of what you might call bright grayness. Both the clothes and hair were neat and gray. The gray-framed spectacles magnified the gray-hazel eyes, but there was no grayness in the mind…. His conversational manner is alert and poised. He talks very swiftly, yet with concision. You have to listen hard to get it all.
Later, during an interview on the Hill, when Gunther asked him what he liked most, Truman answered, “People.”
Old friends on the Hill found him wholly unaffected by his new role, “homespun as ever.” He kept his same quarters in the Senate Office Building, Room 240, using the Vice President’s office in the Capitol mainly as a place to greet visitors, under the dazzle of a seven-tiered crystal chandelier.
For senators of both parties it became, as Charlie Ross wrote, “the most natural thing in the world” to drop in on Truman for a chat, or perhaps a nip of bourbon. “Many of them observed on these occasions that they had never been in the Vice President’s office when Henry Wallace was there. Wallace to them was otherworldly. He didn’t speak their language; Truman does.”
He, Bess, and Margaret were still living in the same five-room apartment at 4701 Connecticut Avenue at the same $120-a-month rent. The only difference was that his mother-in-law, Mrs. Wallace, had also moved in.
“Harry looks better than he has for ages—is really putting on weight,” Bess wrote to Ethel Noland. “Marg has gone to a picture show and Harry to a poker party,” she told Ethel in another letter. “Mother is practically asleep in her chair—so it’s very peaceful.”
The one new personal convenience with the job was an official car, a black Mercury limousine, and a driver, Tom Harty, who picked the Vice President up each morning and returned him home again at day’s end. En route to the Capitol, they would drop Margaret off at George Washington University, where she was in her junior year. Also, in the front seat rode a young man whom Truman at first assumed was a friend of Harty’s who needed a lift. He was George Drescher, the first Secret Service man to be assigned to a Vice President. The idea had been suggested by Harry Vaughan, who had returned from active duty with the Air Corps to become Truman’s military aide, another first for a Vice President. Appalled to find that no security arrangements had been made for Truman, Vaughan went to Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau and told him it seemed a bit incongruous to have seventy or a hundred people guarding the President and no one at all guarding the Vice President.
“I used to get down here to the office at 7 o’clock,” Truman wrote his mother and sister from his office.
But now I have to take Margaret to school every morning and I don’t get here until 8:30. Reathel Odum [who had replaced Mildred Dryden as his stenographer] is always here at that time and we wade through a stack of mail a foot high. By that time I have to see people—one at a time just as fast as they can go through the office without seeming to hurry them. Then I go over to the Capitol gold-plated office and see Senators and curiosity seekers for an hour and then the Senate meets and it’s my job to get ’em prayed for—and goodness knows they need it, and then get the business going by staying in the chair for an hour and then see more Senators and curiosity people who want to see what a V.P. looks like and if he walks and talks and has teeth.
What inner fear or concern Truman still felt over the President’s health, he seems to have kept to himself. Nor did he appear to be making any effort to prepare himself for Roosevelt’s death. It was as if all the dire speculation of the summer before, the nightmare he had had on the campaign train, were forgotten, locked away, now that the unthinkable was so much nearer at hand. The closest he came to open speculation on the future and its problems was an off-the-record conversation with a correspondent for Time, Frank McNaughton, who later wrote to his editor in New York:
Truman says simply that he hopes to be of value to the administration through his contacts in the Senate, and he conceives the VP’s job to be a sort of liaison between the executive and legislative branches. Truman is fervent in his declared hope that he can do this right up to the hilt.
“There is a difficult situation after every war, and disagreements and misunderstandings spring up between the executive and legislative,” Truman, an expert on history, says. “Madison encountered it, Andrew Jackson experienced it in an aggravated degree, and Woodrow Wilson had to struggle with it. There is always a tremendous reaction after every such emergency. I don’t think the human kind has changed so much, in that regard, but I have hopes that this will be a period in history when all will rise to the seriousness of the occasion and cooperate for the good of this country and the people.”
We can’t attribute it to Truman, but he is tremendously afraid that there will be a postwar struggle between executive and legislative, and between the Allied powers, that will wreck the peace once and for all. He believes it is going to take the greatest sagacity and diplomacy to prevent postwar national and international struggles for power and prestige, and he conceives it to be his job to effect, to the best of his ability, a smooth cooperation and liaison between the Senate and the President….
His more immediate task was to help get Henry Wallace approved by the Senate as the new Secretary of Commerce. However, it was his part in two other events, both occurring in Roosevelt’s absence, that drew the greatest attention.
In Kansas City, on January 26, less than a week after the inauguration, Tom Pendergast died at the age of seventy-two. Since his return from prison nearly five years before, Pendergast had been living in the big red brick house on Ward Parkway, where, in steadily declining health, he was seen by few outside his immediate family. His name rarely appeared in the papers any longer. His political influence was entirely gone. By court ruling, he was even restricted from setting foot ever again at 1908 Main Street. Truman is not known to have called on him from the time Pendergast left prison, but then to have done so would have been extremely difficult.
But on hearing of T.J.’s death, Truman decided at once that he would attend the funeral. He took off for Kansas City in an Army bomber and was among the several thousand mourners who filed past the bier at Visitation Catholic Church. He was photographed coming and going and paying his respects to the family, all of which struck large numbers of people everywhere as outrageous behavior for a Vice President—to be seen honoring the memory of a convicted criminal. Yet many, possibly a larger number, saw something admirable and courageous in a man risen so high who still knew who he was and refused to forget a friend.
Two weeks later he was back in the news, with more pictures, and again, to some, as a figure of ridicule. He had agreed to take part in a stage show for servicemen held at the Washington Press Club’s canteen. He was playing an upright piano, to an audience of about eight hundred men in uniform, when actress Lauren Bacall, also part of the entertainment, was boosted on top of the piano to strike a leggy pose as the delighted crowd cheered and flashbulbs popped. “I was just a k
id,” she would remember. “My press agent made me do it.” “Anything can happen in this country,” a soldier was quoted at the time. The photographs of the Vice President serenading the glamorous Hollywood star were an instant sensation. What disturbed many people was that Truman appeared to be having such a good time, which he was. Bess was furious. She told him he should play the piano in public no more.
On March 1, in the House Chamber, at a solemn joint session of Congress, with Majority Leader John McCormack beside him, Vice President Truman sat on the dais behind the President as in slow, often rambling fashion Franklin Roosevelt reported on some of what had happened at Yalta. He read the speech sitting down, explaining it was easier not to carry 10 pounds of steel on his legs, which was the first time he had made public mention of his physical disability.
He appeared more pale and drawn than ever. His left hand trembled noticeably as he turned the pages. “It has been a long journey. I hope you will also agree it has been so far, a fruitful one.” At times, losing his place, he ad-libbed. “Of course there were a few other little matters, but I won’t go into them here.” At times, his voice seemed to give out and his hand shook again as he reached for a glass of water. “Twenty-five years ago, American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered. We failed—we failed them then. We cannot fail them again, and expect the world to survive again.”
Here and there in the chamber, listening to him speak, were more than a few who knew enough to have sensed what meaning could lie in these last words—John McCormack, Minority Leader Martin, Secretary Stimson, General Marshall, Henry Wallace, Jimmy Byrnes, Sam Rosenman, who had written much of the speech, Steve Early, the President’s press secretary, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who was watching from the gallery, perhaps a dozen in total who knew the great secret about which the Vice President had been told nothing.