Margaret Truman (7 page)

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Womanpower in the White House would seem to work best when it is subtle. It is interesting that Dolley Madison had the right idea two hundred years ago, and a modern woman like Hillary Clinton had to learn it the hard way.

From this vantage point, maybe the most influential first ladies are not the ones who do their politicking in public. My favorite example is someone I had the opportunity to watch in action from very close up—Bess Wallace Truman.

Coming into the White House in the wake of Eleanor Roosevelt, my mother made a decision not to even try to imitate Mrs. Roosevelt's model of a first lady. Bess gave only one press conference—to announce she would not be holding any others. She never made a political statement if she could possibly avoid it. But behind the scenes, Bess Truman was as deeply involved in politics as any congressman or senator.

The president of the United States discussed his problems with her with a candor he would never dream of using with anyone else—and she didn't just listen. She gave him her unvarnished advice. Not until I saw Bess Wallace Truman in the perspective of womanpower in the White House did I begin to appreciate her accomplishment. From her point of view, the less people knew about her influence, the better. Her covert political status gave her the freedom of thought and speech she wanted.

A Washington newswoman recently wrote an estimate of Bess Truman and the other first ladies she knew in her fifty years of covering the White House. Bess, she concluded, had “rejected the role of first lady.” Citing one of Dad's favorite sayings, “If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the reporter maintained that Bess Truman had adopted her own version of the saying, to wit: “If it's too hot for me, I'll get back to the kitchen.”

When I read that, I laughed out loud. If there was one room Bess Truman stayed out of, except in moments of dire necessity, it was the kitchen! Somewhere, I suspect, Mother was laughing, too. Without reporters or anyone else catching on, Bess Truman had White House womanpower down cold.

Questions for
Discussion

Why were Thomas Jefferson's attempts to discourage women's interest in politics doomed to failure?

Besides holding office, how can women influence politics?

Should first ladies take an active role in public affairs?

II

It seems hard to believe now but our early chief executives had no staffs worth mentioning. Most of them made do with a single secretary, often a relative or close friend. Thomas Jefferson's man Friday, Meriwether Lewis, was not related to the president, but their families were old friends and Jefferson had taken an interest in the young man after his father's death.

Lewis lived and worked in a pair of rooms that had been constructed at the south end of the unfurnished East Room. His job was a snap compared to later presidential secretaries. He had so little to do, he often went hunting in the nearby woods and fields and brought back rabbits and grouse for the White House table. He also took three years off to explore the Louisiana Territory. Jefferson's relationship with Meriwether Lewis was warmer than many other presidents and their secretaries. Long hours and close quarters often made subordinates a target for executive irritability. James Buchanan's nephew, James Buchanan “Buck” Henry, had to put up with barked orders and frequent tongue-lashings. The breaking point came when Buchanan rebuked him for growing a mustache. Buck quit and headed for New York. His replacement was another namesake nephew, James Buchanan II.

III

When Abraham Lincoln was nominated for president by the Republican Party in 1860, he invited a twenty-nine-year-old Illinois newspaperman, John George Nicolay, to be his secretary. Nine months later, with the southern states seceding and civil war looming, they prepared to leave Springfield for Washington, D.C. Foreseeing the immense workload ahead of him, Nicolay suggested engaging a twenty-three-year-old law student, John Hay, as his assistant.

The workload John George Nicolay had foreseen materialized all too soon. The day after the inauguration, he sat down to write a letter to his fiancée back in Illinois. After two sentences, the call bell in Lincoln's office rang. Nicolay did not finish the letter until midnight two days later.

John George Nicolay and John Hay soon acquired the cachet that goes with working in the White House. Outraged public officials and other VIPs sputtered that the two young men were blocking access to the president and not delivering their letters. Nicolay and Hay, in turn, often gazed with less than friendly eyes on cabinet members and congressmen. On one occasion, Hay wryly remarked that rather than pay another visit to short-tempered Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, he would gladly “make a tour of a smallpox hospital.”

About Lincoln neither man had any doubts, no matter what anyone else said or thought about him—and he had plenty of critics in those days. Lincoln reciprocated their affection. The two men slept in a bedroom across the hall from their second-floor White House office. On more than one midnight, the chief executive appeared in their doorway in his nightshirt to read them a funny story from a newspaper or discuss a problem he had figured out how to solve when he should have been sleeping. When Lincoln's son Willie died in early 1862, the president stumbled into Nicolay's office about five P.M. and said: “My boy is gone—he is actually gone!” Bursting into tears, he retreated to his own office.

The White House was almost as unhealthy for Nicolay and Hay as it was for poor Willie. Hay compared summer odors from the swamps south of the mansion to “ten thousand dead cats.” When one of them was laid low, the other worked twice as hard. Nicolay and Hay's contribution to the eventual victory of the Union was incalculable. Almost as important, they later wrote a ten-volume life of Lincoln that is a starting point for anyone who wants to understand his greatness.

IV

For all their dedication and intelligence, Nicolay and Hay were still very young men. They never achieved the status of presidential advisers. The first aide to rise to this level was Grover Cleveland's secretary, Daniel Lamont.

This shrewd, genial man got to know Cleveland when he was hired to write his inaugural address as governor of New York. Cleveland took him to Washington after his election to the presidency and Lamont was soon the closest of companions. He swiftly became Cleveland's political adviser as well as his man of all work. He was also extremely astute in his handling of the press.

Lamont got reporters on Cleveland's side with a combination of charm and a steady diet of information. One veteran newsman of the era described his approach: “He let the ‘boys' do most of the talking and guessing but never allowed them to leave the White House with a wrong impression, or without thinking they had got all there was in the story.”

By the time Cleveland returned to Washington for his second administration, he thought so highly of Daniel Lamont he appointed him secretary of war.

V

William Howard Taft was the first chief executive to work in the West Wing, setting up shop in the Oval Office that was built at his request. One of the most frequent visitors to the new office was Major Archie Butt, who had been Teddy Roosevelt's military aide and continued in the job for Taft. Butt adored Roosevelt and his family and at first was underwhelmed by Taft, but he gradually became devoted to him.

Two years before the end of his term as president, Roosevelt had chosen Taft, his secretary of war, as the best man to succeed him. As time went on, Roosevelt began cooling on Taft. Butt tried to bridge the gap between them. When Roosevelt returned from a postpresidential trip to Europe, Taft asked Butt to deliver a confidential letter, inviting Teddy to the White House for a frank talk. Roosevelt declined with a formal letter, in which he addressed Taft as “Dear Mr. President” instead of the usual “Dear Will.” The two men finally met while Taft was vacationing in Massachusetts. Butt, who joined them, reported that the conversation was strained and nothing was resolved.

Meanwhile, Archie Butt slowly but steadily shifted his allegiance to Taft. It was a stressful time for the major. As chief military aide, he was in charge of White House receptions and dinners, of which there were many. He was also William Howard Taft's sounding board as the president brooded over his former friend's threat to run him out of his job.

Finally came Teddy's announcement that he would be a candidate for the Republican nomination in 1912—the break Butt had struggled in vain to prevent. The exhausted aide had scheduled a trip to Europe to visit a friend. Now he wondered if he should go.

“I really can't bear to leave him just now,” he wrote to an aunt. “I can see he hates to see me go, and I feel like a quitter in going.”

The next morning, Butt canceled his reservations. When he told Taft, the president ordered him to reinstate them. A month's rest would restore Butt to fighting trim, Taft assured him.

So the weary aide sailed to Italy. Together, he and his friend traveled across Europe to England. There they decided to return home on the maiden voyage of the new luxury liner, the S.S. Titanic. On the night of April 14, 1912, the two men were last seen on the slanting deck, calmly awaiting the final plunge. They had given their life jackets to women passengers.

President Taft was devastated by the news that Butt was among the dead. “He was like a member of my own family,” he said. “I feel as if he had been a younger brother.”

VI

Under Woodrow Wilson, the presidential secretary added another responsibility to his chores: congressional liaison. Wilson was fortunate enough to find the ideal man for the job—thirty-three-year-old Joseph Tumulty of Jersey City, New Jersey, a town where politics came close to being the major industry.

Tumulty backed Wilson when he ran for governor of New Jersey in 1910, and gave the college professor a political education second to none. (Wilson later remarked that anyone who does not understand politics after playing the game for a year or two in the Garden State had better go into another line of work.) When Wilson headed for the White House in 1913, he took Tumulty with him. He trusted Tumulty's political judgment completely. He let him decide whom he should see and whom he should duck. He also depended on Tumulty to cajole leaders of Congress into looking with favor on the legislation Wilson sponsored.

Alas, inside the White House, Tumulty found himself confronted by an unexpected enemy: Wilson's second wife, Edith Galt. She was jealous of Tumulty's influence with the president, and persuaded her husband to fire him at the beginning of his second term. A reporter friend of Tumulty's talked Wilson into changing his mind, but their relationship never regained its previous intimacy.

Nevertheless, Tumulty remained devoted to Wilson to the sad end of the president's life in 1924. Few aides have left more emotional tributes to their departed chief. “Yes, Woodrow Wilson is dead,” Tumulty wrote. “But his spirit still lives—the spirit that tried to wipe away the tears of the world, the spirit of justice, humanity and holy peace.”

VII

Herbert Hoover expanded the White House staff from a secretary and a dozen or so office assistants to some forty people—a number that seems positively minuscule by today's standards. Hoover's staff were anonymous, faceless men operating in the shadow of their boss. In contrast, Franklin D. Roosevelt's staff was twice the size of Hoover's and many of them rapidly became celebrities in their own right.

At the top of the list of Roosevelt aides was Harry Hopkins, a former social worker from Iowa. FDR enjoyed his cynical humor and his ability to get things done. As head of the Works Progress Administration, better known as the WPA, Hopkins spent eleven billion dollars in five whirlwind years and created jobs for 8.5 million men and women.

On the downside, Harry was often too fast with the come-back for his own good. When a reporter informed Hopkins that many congressmen said he was no politician, he sneered: “Tell 'em thanks for the compliment.”

Many presidents would have jettisoned such a controversial adviser, but FDR was a stubborn man. He not only kept Hopkins around, he moved him into the White House when his health collapsed in the late 1930s. His illness, a rare form of stomach cancer, did not stop Hopkins from masterminding Roosevelt's bid for a third term in 1940. During World War II, FDR made him an unofficial secretary of state, sending him abroad to talk politics and military strategy with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin.

Another staff member who won FDR's trust was his secretary, Marguerite “Missy” LeHand. Missy had been with FDR since 1920, when she worked for him during his failed run for the vice presidency. She lived through his ordeal with polio and followed him to the governor's mansion in Albany. She was thirty-seven when she came to the White House and moved into a pair of rooms on the third floor.

Missy acted far more like a wife than a secretary, boldly disagreeing with FDR in front of others, shopping for him, and making sure he took his cough medicine. “She was one of the very, very few people who was not a yes-man,” one aide said.

In 1941, Missy collapsed from a stroke that left her partially paralyzed, and retreated to the home of a sister in Massachusetts. She died in a Boston hospital on July 31, 1944, nine months before the man she called “F.D.” died in Warm Springs, Georgia.