First Ladies (11 page)

When Eleanor Roosevelt learned that Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd had been sitting with FDR, watching him having his portrait painted, at the moment of his death on April 12, 1945, the deep-buried pain of the primary wound erupted in terrible rage at her daughter. In Washington, DC, she demanded an explanation of how she could have let “that woman” above all others return to her father’s inner circle. Anna told her mother that she was only trying to comfort a very sick, very lonely man.

Eleanor Roosevelt was unquestionably a great First Lady. Her pioneering in behalf of woman’s rights, African-American rights, and a dozen other causes is beyond comparison with any other woman of her time. But her achievements as a symbolic personage have to be assessed against her tragic limitations in the private role of loving counselor, companion, protector—in a word, wife.

—

I
HAVE ALWAYS SYMPATHIZED WITH
A
NNA
R
OOSEVELT’S ATTEMPT TO
help her father. I saw at first hand how the White House can tear apart a couple. Yes, it almost happened to that seemingly perfect White House marriage of Bess and Harry Truman—and for a while I, like Anna, was a daughter trapped in the middle. There was, thank goodness, a happier ending, but the experience still left a few scars.

My mother did not want my father to become President—especially through “the back door,” as he himself called it—moving up from vice president. She had read her history books, and knew that almost every one of these accidental Presidents had a miserable time in the White House. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, almost got impeached. John Tyler, William Henry Harrison’s successor, was a President without a party. Chester Arthur, James Garfield’s successor, was considered a joke.

Bess Truman also loved being a senator’s wife. For her it was a perfect combination of being near the center of the political stage while
remaining more or less anonymous to everyone but a circle of chosen friends. Harry Truman, after his tremendous achievements as head of the Truman Committee, which saved billions of dollars by uncovering waste, mismanagement, and corruption on the home front during World War II, was guaranteed his Senate seat for life. Why give it up for something as clouded with portents as vice president to a dying President?

There was another, deeper reason why my mother did not want to become First Lady. She saw the ferocious press scrutiny Eleanor Roosevelt received and dreaded that similar treatment would exhume a family tragedy which would cause her and her brothers and above all her mother a great deal of pain. When Bess was eighteen, her handsome father shot himself in the bathroom of their Independence home. Unable to support his wife in the style she had acquired as the daughter of the wealthiest man in town, David Willock Wallace had sunk into depression and finally into suicide.

Bess’s mother never recovered from that trauma. Madge Wallace became a recluse for the rest of her long life—and mostly her daughter’s responsibility. The thought of some Hearst papers “sob sister” spreading this story across the pages of their seven-million-copy Sunday supplement,
The American Weekly
, forerunner of today’s supermarket tabloids, or the front pages of all the papers in their huge chain, horrified my mother. But she found herself outflanked and overruled in her struggle to persuade my father to reject the vice presidency. Too many major voices in the Democratic Party practically ordered him to run to avoid the disaster of the incumbent vice president, Henry Wallace, becoming President.

Piling irony on irony, Henry Wallace was Mrs. Roosevelt’s ardently supported choice to succeed her husband. I wonder what she would have thought, had she known that Bess Truman was her secret ally in this subterranean struggle.

Henry Wallace represented Eleanor Roosevelt’s boldest venture into the politics of the presidency—what you might call politics with a capital
P
. The secretary of agriculture in FDR’s cabinet, Wallace was not close to the First Lady at first. Like many other cabinet officers,
he resented her intrusions into his bailiwick. Their alliance did not take shape until FDR proposed him as his vice president in 1940.

Most of the delegates to the Democratic National convention did not want Wallace. They thought another liberal added nothing to the ticket. They wanted a moderate or a conservative like the outgoing vice president, “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas. For a while it looked as if Wallace was beaten. Fearful of being labeled dictatorial, FDR hesitated to insist on him as his one and only choice. Instead, he sent the First Lady to give an unprecedented speech to the delegates, which persuaded them to swallow Henry, though little more than half voted for him.

In her newspaper column, “My Day,” a pleased Eleanor Roosevelt wrote: “Secretary Wallace is a very fine man and I am sure will strengthen the ticket. I have always felt in him a certain shyness that has kept him aloof from some Democrats. But now that he will be in close touch with many of them, I am sure they will soon find in him much to admire and love.”

Alas, to know Henry Wallace was not to love him. He was, quite simply, an inept politician. He did not know how to schmooze, unbend, fraternize. His idea of communication was a press release. The notion that he was FDR’s chosen successor went to his head. He picked turf fights with prominent Democrats in and out of Congress and infuriated the secretary of state, Cordell Hull, by speaking out on foreign policy in semimystical terms, calling on Americans to export the New Deal to the entire world to achieve “the century of the common man.” In her column and among her friends, Mrs. Roosevelt continued to back Wallace enthusiastically. But the harder she pushed him with FDR, the more antagonistic the President became.

There are some historians and biographers who suggest that FDR’s alienation from Eleanor in the last years of his presidency changed the course of history. Unquestionably, her attempt to make Henry Wallace President of the United States backfired disastrously and, by ironic coincidence, helped make Senator Truman his replacement. After telling Wallace he was his “personal choice,” FDR, warned that large sections of the party would revolt rather than nominate him
again, told Harry Truman he had to take the job or risk breaking up the Democratic Party in the middle of a war.

Both the incumbent First Lady and her soon-to-be successor watched with dismay as the Democratic Convention beat off an attempt by Wallace supporters to stampede the delegates and nominated Harry S Truman. When a rhapsodic crowd engulfed us as we left the Chicago convention center at the end of that sweltering July night, my mother exclaimed: “Are we going to have to put up with this for the rest of our lives?” That negative reaction acquired ominous momentum nine months later, when FDR’s death catapulted us into the White House.

Bess Truman underwent a terrific inner struggle to overcome her deep aversion to becoming First Lady. She was still worried about the Wallace family secret and as my father’s longtime political partner, she was deeply concerned about how he could cope with the enormous responsibility that had descended on him. “This is going to put a terrific load on Harry,” she said to one of their close friends. “Roosevelt has told him nothing.”

Never has any President in American history had to learn more about the problems facing him—and make world-shaping decisions about them faster—than Harry S Truman. Between that fateful April 12 when he took the oath of office in the Cabinet Room of the White House and September 2, he presided over the close of the war against Germany, supervised the opening of the United Nations, and ended the war with Japan by ordering atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this avalanche of decisions and events, Bess Truman played little part. More and more, she began to feel that the presidency had virtually dissolved the political partnership that had been at the heart of her relationship with her husband for so many years.

For the rest of that tumultuous year 1945, my father worked at the same frantic pace, trying to stabilize a war-ravaged world, deal with a steadily more hostile Russia, and solve a dozen domestic crises. My mother struggled to give some shape and coherence to her role as First Lady in the shadow of her famous predecessor. At first she announced she would hold a press conference, but the closer she got
to it, the more the idea horrified her. She canceled it at the last moment and said she would only answer written questions, submitted in advance. That left the White House press corps underwhelmed, to put it mildly.

Their sniping comments about her inaccessibility only deepened Bess’s resistance. When a reporter called to inquire what Mother was wearing to a reception, she was blunt: “Tell her it’s none of her business.” Her secretary managed to stutter out something about the First Lady being undecided for the moment.

Bess’s letters to friends in Independence became a lament about how homesick she was. This from a woman who had spent most of the previous eleven years in Washington. Bess was suffering from the White House blues. She told someone that her favorite First Lady was Elizabeth Monroe—primarily, I suspect, because of her success at virtually disappearing from the White House for most of her husband’s two terms. She may also have been identifying with a First Lady who succeeded the media icon of her era, Dolley Madison—as Mother had succeeded Eleanor Roosevelt.

It got worse—as things tend to do in the White House. Bess was invited to a DAR tea in her honor at Constitution Hall. The moment she accepted, New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell went for her jugular. He claimed his wife, the gifted jazz pianist Hazel Scott, had been banned from playing at Constitution Hall because of her race. He wired Bess that “if you believe in 100 percent Americanism, you will publicly denounce the DAR’s action” and refuse to attend the tea.

Congressman Powell aroused Bess Truman’s stubborn streak. She had accepted the invitation, hundreds of DARs were coming to the tea, and she had no power to change their policy of banning blacks from performing in the hall. She wired a response along these lines to Congressman Powell, who promptly released it to the press with another denunciation. When Bess went to the tea anyway, he called her “the last lady” and reminded everyone of Eleanor Roosevelt’s stand on Marian Anderson’s right to sing in the hall.

Bess’s White House mood went from blue to black. She had been compared with her famous predecessor, and even her friends had to
admit the result was not in her favor. But she refused to back down or apologize. She also refused to resign from the DAR, as several friends urged, and stuck to her argument that Bess Truman had no power to change their policies. Mother was still trying to deny that she was public property. She was also still very angry at her political partner, the overworked President, who had gotten her into this mess.

True to her instincts for privacy, Bess waited until she got back to Independence to explode. She and I went home to our wonderful old house on North Delaware Street on December 18, 1945. My father, embroiled in negotiations with the Russians, did not leave Washington aboard his plane,
The Sacred Cow
, until Christmas Day. He flew through weather that had grounded every commercial airliner in the nation and arrived to be confronted by a glowering wife. “So you’ve finally arrived,” Bess said. “As far as I’m concerned you might as well have stayed in Washington.”

I was having too much fun with old Independence friends to detect the chill in the air. But I noticed a certain lack of warmth when Mother said good-bye to Dad on December 27 as he rushed back to Washington to deal with yet another crisis, this one with a runaway secretary of state.

Back in the Big White Jail, Dad wrote Mother the most scorching letter of his life and mailed it special delivery. He then spent the night worrying about it rather than sleeping. The next day he called me in Independence and told me to collect the letter at the post office before it was delivered and burn it. “It’s a very angry letter,” he said. “I don’t want your mother to see it.”

I headed for the post office, wondering why the President of the United States could not get some unoccupied Secret Service agent to handle this job. I had no trouble extracting the letter from the grasp of the U.S. Postal Service. They joked about how nice it was of me to help deliver the mail. I took it home, wandered casually (I hoped) into the backyard, and dropped it into the metal basket where we burned trash in those pre-air pollution days.

I felt bewildered, appalled, and guilty. I had never before in my life concealed anything important from my mother. I could not imagine
why Dad had sent her an angry letter. Not until I wrote Bess Truman’s biography, forty years later, did I figure it out.

Back in the White House, Dad wrote Bess one of the most important letters of both their lives. He said he felt like “last year’s birds nest… on its second year.” It was not very often, he added, that “I admit I am not in shape. I think maybe that exasperates you… as a lot of other things I do exasperate you.”

Then he got to the heart of the matter: “You can never appreciate what it means to come home as I did the other evening after doing at least one hundred things I didn’t want to do and have the only person in the world whose approval and good opinion I value look at me like I’m something the cat dragged in.”

Time
and
Life were
saying he was the “No. 1 man in the world.” But he somehow lacked “a large bump of ego” that would enable him to believe such nonsense. On the contrary, he knew he needed help from “you, Margie [that’s me], and everyone else who may have any influence on my actions.” If he could get that help, “the job [would] be done.” If he could not get it, William Randolph Hearst and his fellow Republican critics, who were saying Harry Truman lacked presidential stature, would turn out to be right.

Mother came back to the White House in a much improved mood. She was still unreconciled to the job in many ways, but the air had been cleared of her smoldering resentment. The President had made it plain that he was ready and eager to resume their partnership whenever she was so inclined. The world outside the White House cooperated with this spirit of marital detente, subsiding from the global-size crises of 1945 to the ordinary upheavals we have come to regard as politics as usual.