Harry Truman (13 page)

Happily for me, I remained unaware of these attacks on my father’s reputation. I was leading the normal life of an energetic ten-year-old, preoccupied with school and games and numerous friends. Our big old house on North Delaware Street was perfect for all sorts of lively activities, from the publication of a neighborhood newspaper, the Henhouse Hicks Secret Six, to my first theatrical venture, a play written by my friend Betty Ogden, about a Mexican bandit called “The Clever One.” When Dad was elected to the Senate - he beat his Republican opponent with almost ridiculous ease - I was told we were going to move to Washington, D.C. I was appalled. For the next two days, every time Betty and I saw each other, we burst into tears, wailing dramatically that we would never meet again. Mother and Dad couldn’t make up their minds whether to laugh at me or scold me.

But on December 27, 1934, only a week or so before we departed for Washington, I decided perhaps it was worthwhile to have a politician for a father. This was the day Jackson County Democrats gathered to dedicate the new courthouse. I led a procession to the shrouded statue of Andrew Jackson and pulled the string which unveiled it. It was my first public appearance with a role to play - even if it didn’t have any lines. I decided I liked it.

Less than a week later, I sat in the gallery of the United States Senate in Washington, D.C., and watched my father, barely recognizable to me in a morning coat and striped pants, walk down the center aisle to the dais to take his oath of office. He was escorted by Senator Bennett Clark. Although I didn’t really understand what was happening, and I was still morose about the prospect of attending a strange school in a strange city, I was able to perceive that my father - and my mother and I - were starting a new life.

When my father reminisces about his Senate days, he always chuckles over the advice he got from an old judge who had worked with him on the County Court. The judge had once worked for a Mississippi senator in Washington. “Harry,” he said, “don’t you go to the Senate with an inferiority complex. You’ll sit there about six months, and wonder how you got there. But after that you’ll wonder how the rest of them got there.”

The day after Dad was sworn in, the Democratic whip, Senator J. Hamilton Lewis of Illinois, “a very kindly man,” as my father describes him, sat down beside him and gave him exactly the same advice the old judge had given him back in Missouri.

Apartments were expensive in those days, and my father was appalled to find some wealthy senators were paying as much as $1,500 a month in rent. This was out of the question for him. We had to live on his $10,000-a-year salary. He rented a four-room apartment for us in Tilden Gardens, just off Connecticut Avenue in the northwest part of Washington. It was a shock for all of us to find ourselves crowded into this tiny space, after living in fourteen big rooms on North Delaware Street. By way of consolation, Dad provided us with a piano, which he rented from a local music store. By now, I had become fairly proficient on my baby grand, and I enjoyed many an evening of music on that spinet. Dad had little time to play the piano himself. As soon as he was sworn in, he launched a tremendous reading program. Night after night, he came home with a bulging briefcase and stacks of books from the Congressional Library on legislation coming before the Senate.

In the Senate, he had very little to say. It was a calculated silence, adopted at the advice of John Garner. The vice president took an almost instant liking to Dad. Texans and Missourians have always felt a strong kinship. They play a similar role on the national scene, balanced between Southern and Western loyalties.

There was another good reason for my father’s silence during those first months. Democratic senators were hardly a novelty. With the Republican Party in disarray, twelve other Democrats had been sworn in with him on that January day. A new tier of seats along the back wall had to be constructed to fit them into the Democratic side of the chamber. With such a surplus of political strength, there was not much interest from the White House.

But my father did not, as some biographers have claimed, spend five months trying to wangle an interview with Roosevelt. The White House records show he visited the President in February 1935, about a month after he arrived in Washington. Dad ruefully recalls he did not handle the interview very well. “I was practically tongue-tied,” he says. He puzzled over this reaction for a long time - and he finally decided it was caused not by awe of Roosevelt, personally, but of the presidency, and the tremendous role it played in the American republic. “I was before the greatest office in the world,” he says. When Dad became President, he noticed more than a few senators and congressmen were equally tongue-tied when they came to see him. He understood what they were feeling and made an extra effort to put them at their ease.

The most painful part of Senator Truman’s freshman year in the Senate was the contempt various Washington correspondents showered on him, because of his relationship with Tom Pendergast. My father resented the notion that he was Boss Tom’s mouthpiece in Congress. He was perfectly willing to admit Pendergast sent him telegrams occasionally, but as he told a reporter from the Kansas City
Star,
“I don’t follow his advice on legislation. I vote the way I believe Missourians as a whole want me to vote.”

He soon proved he meant what he said. One of the major tests of power in the nation was the Senate vote on the Public Utility Holding Company Act. These vast and complex financial structures had enabled the Wall Street bankers and a handful of other tycoons, such as Samuel Insull, to dominate a major segment of American business during the 1920s, with disastrous results. The act was aimed at limiting these giants to a manageable size and subjecting them to a reasonable amount of federal regulation, in the interests of all the people. In Kansas City, only one newspaper regularly supported Democrats. This was the
Journal-Post
, which was controlled by Henry L. Dougherty, president of the Cities Service Company in Kansas City, the area’s main public utility. The
Journal-Post
editorialized against the bill, and so, of course, did the Kansas City
Star.
Tom Pendergast was equally opposed to it. Not long before, when 11,000 citizens had petitioned to create a municipally owned gas company in Kansas City, Pendergast’s city clerk had thrown out 4,900 of the 11,000 signatures and nullified the petition.

Knowing all this, my father still made it clear he was voting for the bill. Dougherty and his cohorts switched to another kind of pressure. In a single day, 2,000 telegrams and letters poured into Dad’s Senate office. Again he stood firm, and when the bill came up in the Senate, he voted for it. The
Journal-Post
flayed him alive in a two-column front-page article. “Harry S. Truman . . . became United States Senator from Missouri by default, so to speak, getting the Democratic nomination in 1934 because there were no other takers.” The editorial writer went on to call him a “tool” of the Roosevelt Administration. They couldn’t call him a Pendergast tool, so they called him a Roosevelt tool. Four months before this diatribe was published, this same paper had been calling him one of the best senators from Missouri in over a generation. It is easy to see why he soon became cynical about newspaper criticism.

At the same time, he never blamed the newspapermen who wrote these articles - with the exception of columnists who controlled their own material. Charlie Ross, the bright boy of his high school class, was a rising star at the
Post-Dispatch,
Dad’s most vituperative foe during these years, but my father never allowed this fact to trouble their friendship. He reserved his often ferocious but always private comments for the publishers who set editorial policy and ordered reporters to make the facts fit this policy.

In the case of the
Journal-Post
attack, Dad knew the man who had written the devastating front-page editorial. A few months later he was fired by the paper in an economy wave and could not find work anywhere. Bill Helm, the
Journal-Post’s
Washington reporter, who wrote a charming though frequently inaccurate book about Dad, told of having a conversation with Senator Truman about this unfortunate fellow.

“What became of him?” Helm asked.

“Oh, he has a little job with the County,” Dad said, meaning Jackson County.

“A little job with the County?” said Helm incredulously. “Did you, by any chance get him that job?”

“No, I can’t say I did,” Dad replied, refusing to take the credit. “All I did was recommend him for it.”

Gradually, over the course of the next two years, my father achieved membership in that exclusive inner circle of the Senate, known as “the Club.” It is an invisible hierarchy, unknown to most of the voters. Membership is not based upon anything tangible or definable. It requires integrity, of course, but a good personality and an appetite for hard work off the floor of the Senate, in the committee rooms where the real work of government is done - these are far more vital requisites.

One of his first signs of acceptance came when he was solemnly invited to join the “Lowell B. Mason Chowder, Marching and Baseball Club.” An attorney for one of the owners of the Washington Senators, Mason had the best box in the municipal stadium, and he passed out tickets freely to both Republicans (he was one) and Democrats. Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, Alben Barkley of Kentucky, and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn of Texas were among the members. “Membership was controlled entirely by the man’s personality, whether or not he was well liked by his colleagues,” Lowell Mason said. “It was a very interesting thing that many of the senior senators never got on the invitation list.”

On opening day, the journey to the baseball game always began with a luncheon in Arthur Vandenberg’s private dining room. As Mason later told it, a few days before this event, in 1935, both Alben Barkley and Sam Rayburn spoke to him about Dad. “Lowell,” Sam said, “we want you to put a new senator on the list because we think he’s a comer and we like him personally; he’s a fellow by the name of Truman, newly elected senator from Missouri. . . .”

My mother is the baseball fan in our family. How she complained when she found out my father was getting one of the best seats in the park. But it should be obvious that baseball was only a minor consideration in Lowell Mason’s club. For years, my father never missed one of his conclaves. In fact, Mason loves to tell the story of another demonstration of that dominant Truman trait, loyalty. One year Mason had carefully worked out all arrangements for a luncheon and the trip to the game in cars borrowed from the president of the Senate and the Speaker of the House. Then, to his dismay, he got phone calls from four of his most prominent senators. “Lowell,” they said, “we’re sorry, but the British ambassador has the Archbishop of Canterbury visiting him and they’re going to the game and they would like to have us sit in their box.”

In despair at seeing his luncheon fall apart, Mason began calling his other guests. My father was first on his list. “Oh, yes, Lowell,” he said, “I was invited by the British ambassador and the Archbishop of Canterbury to eat lunch and sit in their box, and I told them I had already accepted an invitation from you.”

My father and Lowell Mason used to play an amusing game, based on their mutual knowledge of Charles Dickens’s
Pickwick Papers.
“I remember one day we were standing in the doorway of his office,” Mason said, “and a fellow went by, and Mr. Truman turned to me and said, ‘Lowell, there goes Alfred Jingle.’” For those who haven’t gotten around to rereading the
Pickwick Papers,
Alfred Jingle was the wily villain of several incidents in the story, a man who got others involved in duels, was always trying to seduce wealthy heiresses, and wound up in Fleet Prison.

But this relaxed good humor came in the later years of my father’s senatorial career. Even though on a personal level he made rapid progress with his fellow senators, politically he remained on the horns of a dilemma. When he voted with the Roosevelt Administration, the newspapers back home called him a White House tool. When he voted against the administration, the papers sneered that he had done so on the orders of Tom Pendergast, or worse (from my father’s point of view) he had surrendered to Bennett Clark, who was building up a name for himself as an anti-Roosevelt Democrat with an eye on the 1940 presidential nomination. No one, it seems, was willing to give Harry Truman credit for voting his convictions.

But the record shows he established his independence from Roosevelt, as thoroughly as he did from Tom Pendergast. Throughout the first eighteen months of his term, one of the major political brawls revolved around the veterans’ bonus. In his campaign for the Senate, my father had repeatedly said he favored a bonus while his two opponents had denounced the idea as fiscally irresponsible. The Roosevelt Administration took the same position. Yet in vote after vote, Dad never wavered in his support of a bonus, because he knew the desperate need for one throughout the nation, and he believed men who had risked their lives for their country deserved special consideration. He finally voted to override the President’s veto of the bill. The St. Louis
Post-Dispatch,
unable to indict him for subservience either to Roosevelt or Pendergast on this issue, decided it proved his “lack of stature.”

There were times when my father resented this endless pressure and browbeating. “A Congressman, as you know, is elected by the people,” he wrote to one friend, “and most of the people who come to Congress have an honest and conscientious intent to do what is best for the country, but they are pulled and hauled so much of the time that they get to the point where they would just as soon let the country be damned as not.” He especially resented the idea that a senator should represent only the wishes of his constituents. He declined to become anybody’s Charlie McCarthy. When, later in his senatorial career, the
Post-Dispatch
printed a letter to the editor from a reader who denounced Dad for failing to represent the wishes of the people who elected him in Missouri, he angrily replied, “I voted for what I thought was the welfare of the country and was not governed by threats, pleas or political considerations.”

My father was even tougher on this subject with labor leader Otto Maschoff of the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America: “It doesn’t make any difference to me whether you like the way I vote or not because I vote for what I think is right, regardless of what anyone else thinks [he wrote Maschoff]. You people have a peculiar slant on a man’s political career. No matter what he does, if he uses his head and does something you don’t like then he is down and out as far as you are concerned. Well, as far as I’m concerned I am doing what I think is right and I don’t care what anyone else thinks about it and I don’t care whether they like it or not - I can take care of myself while I am doing it.”