Harry Truman (6 page)

After this public greeting, former Vice President Garner sat us down to the most tremendous breakfast in the history of the Truman family, and, I suspect, in the history of any American family. There was white wing dove, bacon, ham, fried chicken, scrambled eggs, rice in gravy, hot biscuits, Uvalde honey, peach preserves, grape jelly, and coffee. Dad responded by giving Cactus Jack a present, carefully concealed in a small black satchel. It was, he solemnly told him, “medicine, only to be used in case of snakebites.” It was the same medicine that Senator Truman used to share with the vice president when he visited his Capitol “dog house” in the 1930s - some very good Kentucky bourbon.

Outside, where the crowd was still waiting, Garner called Dad an “old and very good friend.” My father called him “Mr. President” explaining that was the term he used when he addressed him in the Senate. My mother was so moved by the vice president’s hospitality that she broke her usual public silence, and thanked everyone for coming out to greet us at the incredible hour of 5:00 a.m.

Along with the pressures of the campaign and the sheer physical challenge of making as many as sixteen speeches in a single day, my father had to cope with the worsening international situation. The Berlin airlift went on, making it clear that he meant what he said when he declared, “We are in Berlin to stay.” His Secretary of State, General George Marshall, was in Paris, trying to negotiate the Berlin crisis through the United Nations. Meanwhile, Dad had to fend off demands from Secretary of Defense Forrestal to authorize the use of the atomic bomb. From the left Wallace hammered away with his message of appeasement. In mid-September, Dad wrote a gloomy memorandum to himself:

On October 3, my father made a daring decision. As President George Washington had done in an earlier crisis (with England), Dad decided to send the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court on a personal mission to rescue the peace. The Chief Justice was his old friend, Fred Vinson, for whom my father had enormous respect. “I hoped that this new approach would provide Stalin an opportunity to open up,” he said. He wanted to convince the Russian dictator that the United States was sincere in its desire for a peaceful world, but Dad had no intention of attempting to prove this sincerity by disarming or surrendering at any point on the globe where the Russians were challenging us.

If Vinson could have been launched on his mission immediately, a great initiative toward world peace might have been created. But my father felt that it was important to explain the government’s intentions to the American people. So he asked Charlie Ross to get him a half hour of network time to make this explanation. In the course of negotiating with the networks, Charlie had to explain the purpose of this speech.

Charlie was fond of picturing the White House as a gigantic sieve and this time the metaphor was all too exact. In a matter of hours, the Vinson mission was leaked to the newspapers and flung into the political arena, before my father could even begin to defend it. The opposition denounced it as a political gesture, and Secretary of State Marshall, in Paris, was more than a little unsettled to discover that Dad was making such a major departure in foreign policy without consulting him. Of course, he had no intention of doing any such thing. He had planned to brief General Marshall thoroughly on the mission, before announcing it to the public. But now he had to consider the General’s feelings, and the allegations floating around Washington that the President had lost confidence in him. So he summoned General Marshall home for a personal conference and then, with deep regret, announced to the nation that the Vinson mission was canceled.

The decision was in line with my father’s fundamental philosophy of the presidency. He never undercut a subordinate or let one down. He always backed the man he had chosen to perform an important job (unless of course he failed to perform it). He considered General Marshall one of the greatest men in American history, and so he deliberately chose, at the height of this searing campaign, to accept what seemed at the time the public humiliation of withdrawing the Vinson proposal rather than embarrass his Secretary of State.

Throughout October, the crowds continued to grow in size. A few of the reporters began to comment on this fact. Charles T. Lucey of the Scripps-Howard chain wrote on October 15: “The polls and the pundits say Harry Truman hasn’t a chance to be returned to the White House, but you’d never guess it from the way people come out to see him. . . .” Like most of the reporters, however, Lucey attributed this phenomenon to the President’s high office, and his “entertainment value.”

By now, we had gone back and forth across the country once and were in the midst of our second swing. Dad had spoken to almost 4 million people. He had talked with politicians and plain citizens just about everywhere. On October 13, as the “Truman Special” was thundering from Duluth to St. Paul, he gave George Elsey, one of his aides, a state-by-state breakdown of the results as he now saw them. He predicted he would win with 340 electoral votes, 108 for Dewey, and forty-two for Thurmond. The prediction was amazingly accurate - and it was done without the aid of a single pollster. He even went through the nation, state by state, predicting how each one would go. He was right on eight out of ten. But he did not reveal this detailed bit of prophecy to the press. In their mood, it would have only made him the butt of more ridicule. When the reporters asked him if he thought he was winning, he would reply, “That’s your job. That’s what you’re along for. I am the candidate. The candidate is not going to comment. He’s optimistic.”

In the closing days of the campaign, the crowds grew from large to stupendous. In Chicago, they swarmed around our motorcade, slowing it to a crawl and almost giving the Secret Service men apoplexy. The Chicago Democratic organization pulled out every political stop known to man. The coup de grâce, as far as I was concerned, was a fireworks display which went off just as we were crossing a bridge. I hate noises. I thought the bridge was coming down. Above us, a tremendous series of explosions created a fiery image of the candidate. As an old artillery captain from World War I, Dad was not bothered in the least - in fact, he loved every bang.

From the Blackstone Hotel Dad told his sister Mary that “former Mayor Kelly and the present Mayor Kennelly . . . both said that the demonstration was better than any ever held here. . . .”

In Boston, the crowds literally engulfed us. Police estimated that 250,000 people stormed the parade route. Crowds were equally - or proportionately - huge along the line of a motor tour we took of the Bay State’s industrial cities. In Albany, New York, thousands stood in the pouring rain to hear Dad speak.

In New York City, the crowds were huge but the Democratic Party was practically inert. It did not have enough money to rent Madison Square Garden, and the tiny Liberal party had to bail them out. Even with this help, the Wallace influence was still so strong among the liberals that they were able to sell only 10 percent of the tickets for Dad’s Garden appearance. So they threw the doors open and let anyone who followed our motorcade inside, ticket-holder or not. A crowd of about 16,000 cheered when Dad came out for “a strong, prosperous, free, and independent” Israel and roared with laughter when he told them how he had complained to Dr. Graham that he had the constant feeling somebody was following him. Dr. Graham told him not to worry about it. “There is one place where that fellow is not going to follow you - and that’s in the White House.”

By now, more than a few New Dealers were returning to the fold, just as my father had predicted they would. Harold Ickes, whom my father had fired as Secretary of the Interior in 1946, endorsed him and described Dewey as “the candidate in sneakers. . . . For unity, Alice in Wonderland and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, to say nothing of home and mother.” Hollywood, where Wallace influence had been strong, suddenly produced and distributed for free a campaign film urging voters to support the President. They charged the Republicans $30,000 to make a similar film.

Eleanor Roosevelt made a six-minute pro-Truman address from Paris via shortwave radio. Mrs. Roosevelt, after some early hesitation - she conspicuously declined to support Dad during the draft-Eisenhower embroglio - became a staunch pro-Truman Democrat once she saw Dad’s fighting campaign. She did her utmost to persuade her sons to join her, in vain. At one point, she had a meeting with Jimmy, Franklin, and Elliott, and they had a long telephone talk with Dad. With great exasperation, she told him that she could not do anything with her three sons - but she was ready to go all out for a Truman victory.

We ended the campaign in St. Louis. En route from New York, all of the speechwriters got together and pooled what they called “their gems” - their best and brightest phrases - and poured them into a speech that they considered the campaign’s masterpiece. Meanwhile my father, for the first time, showed he was at least
capable
of getting tired, and took a long afternoon nap before this climactic performance. When he woke up, the train was almost in St. Louis. Only then did the writers present him with their wit-encrusted, diamond-bright, verbal tour de force. Dad glanced through it, and then said, “I’m sorry, boys, but I just haven’t got time to get all this into my head.” He threw it aside and went out on the platform in St. Louis’s Kiel Auditorium to give a completely extemporaneous address.

Then he spoke to them as one Missourian to another:

Everyone, including the White House writers whose pearls had been tossed aside, agreed it was one of his greatest speeches of the campaign. A reporter for the Washington
Post
said that if the election was close, and Harry Truman won, he would give the credit to his performance that night in Kiel Auditorium.

So we came home to Independence, to our familiar and much- loved house on North Delaware Street. We had traveled 31,700 miles, and Dad had given 356 speeches - an average of ten a day. Between 12 and 15 million people had cheered or at least seen us.

We three Trumans voted at 10:00 a.m. on November 2, in Independence’s Memorial Hall. It was my first vote for a President, and it pleased me enormously that I was able to mark my ballot for Harry S. Truman. Reporters asked Dad for a final prediction, and he said, “It can’t be anything but a victory.”

“Are you going to sit up for the returns, Mr. President?” someone asked.

“No,” he said, “I think I’ll go to bed. I don’t expect final results until tomorrow.”

This astonished everyone - except Mother and me - almost as much as his prediction of a victory. Most of the reporters simply did not understand that my father believed there was no point in worrying about whether you succeeded or failed at a job, as long as you were sure that you had done your best.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, Drew Pearson was writing that Dewey had “conducted one of the most astute and skillful campaigns in recent history.” In the column which Pearson filed for the day after the election, he surveyed for his readers the “closely knit group around Tom Dewey who will take over the White House eighty-six days from now.” Walter Lippmann, the Alsop brothers, and Marquis Childs saw a Democratic disaster of such staggering proportions that we were in danger of becoming a one-party (Republican) country.
The New York Times
gave Dewey 345 electoral votes.
Life’s
November 1 issue carried a picture of Dewey and his wife which was captioned, “The next President travels by ferry boat over the broad waters of San Francisco Bay.” Messrs. Gallup and Crossley continued to insist that there was no contest.

That afternoon, my father pulled his neatest trick of the campaign. He went to lunch at the Rockwood Country Club, where he was the guest of honor at a party given by the mayor of Independence, Roger Sermon. There were about thirty old friends at this hoedown, and they gleefully connived in his plan. While the hapless reporters lurked outside, Dad excused himself, supposedly to go to the men’s room. Then, with three Secret Service men in tow, he went out the back door and drove to the Elms Hotel at Excelsior Springs, about twenty-five miles from Independence. There he had a Turkish bath, ate a ham sandwich, drank a glass of milk, and proceeded to do exactly what he had predicted he was going to do that morning - go to bed.

This was very shrewd from his point of view, but it left Mother and me alone to cope with squadrons of frantic reporters. I am not using that word “frantic” loosely either. It became more and more apropos as the votes began to come in. At first, everyone was told that there would be a Dewey victory message at 9:00 p.m. But Harry Truman seemed to be winning at 9:00 p.m. - as a matter of fact, Dad never was behind - and this historic Republican event was postponed. By midnight, we were 1.2 million votes ahead. But commentator Η. V. Kaltenborn kept insisting that there was nothing to worry about, the Democratic candidate was a sure loser. At the Elms Hotel, Dad woke up and heard this prediction, couched in Kaltenborn’s slightly Germanic tones. The candidate chuckled and went back to sleep.