Harry Truman (16 page)

Commenting on one mail mixup, Arnold wrote: “I can’t figure out from the enclosed letter whether this guy thinks I am you or whether he thinks you are me. What is your opinion?”

Dad replied: “I guess he thinks I am you; at any rate, in this instance you are me, or vice versa. From time to time I receive letters addressed to you or to a ‘combination’ of us. . . . Frankly, I think the writers are giving me entirely too much credit. . . .”

While he was carving out his own niche as an investigator in the complicated world of business and finance, my father also participated vigorously in the turbulent political battles of the middle and late 30s. Most of the time, he supported the Roosevelt Administration. Ironically, looking back on his reward for this loyalty in later years, he said: “I was one of those in the Senate who was called a rubber-stamp senator. Do you know what a rubber-stamp congressman or senator is? He is a man who is elected on the platform of the party, and who tries to carry out that platform in cooperation with the President of the United States - that’s all he is.”

These words were spoken by a President who valued every so-called rubber-stamp congressman he could find.

My father was never an unthinking rubber stamp. He supported the administration in perhaps the greatest political brawl of the decade - Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt to alter the balance of the Supreme Court by obtaining the power to appoint additional justices. This was a battle that almost tore the Democratic Party apart. Some of my father’s best friends in the Senate were on the other side. Burton K. Wheeler was, in fact, the leader of the opposition, and Vice President Garner was a less vocal but perhaps more powerful opponent of the plan. Bennett Clark was another fierce foe of it. But Dad’s investigation of big business had led him to conclude that the tycoons and financiers dominated not only state governments and federal regulatory commissions but the Supreme Court as well. He pointed out there was nothing sacred about a nine-man court. The number of justices had varied from five to ten throughout the nation’s history. “The cry,” he said, “is that the President wants to pack the Court. . . . I say the Court is packed now and has been for fifty years against progressive legislation.”

My father never forgot the lessons he learned from that fight. It was a monumental example of how a President should
not
deal with Congress. Roosevelt had let the “blizzard of 1936” - his tremendous landslide victory - deceive him into thinking he could get anything he wanted from Congress. With seventy-five Democrats and seventeen Republicans in the Senate and the count in the House 334 to eighty-nine in his favor, it would seem to have been a logical conclusion - for anyone who relied on mere statistics. But human beings are not statistics, and there were many Democratic senators who were already having severe doubts about the ultimate goals of the New Deal. Some of the Senate’s greatest liberals, such as George W. Norris, denounced the President’s Supreme Court plan with as much fervor as did the conservatives. From February to July the battle raged and only ended when the exhausted Senate majority leader, Joe Robinson, collapsed and died of a heart attack. More than anything else, this Senate revolt forged the alliance between conservative Democrats and Republicans that was to torment Dad and future Democratic Presidents.

Disaster threatened the Democratic program. On the long train ride down to Arkansas for Joe Robinson’s funeral, the senators discussed only one topic - who would be the next majority leader? On this choice depended to a large extent the President’s ability to lead Congress. From the viewpoint of long service to the party and to Roosevelt, the choice of most senators was Pat Harrison of Mississippi. Everyone knew Roosevelt owed Senator Harrison a debt of gratitude for swinging the Mississippi delegation to him at a crucial moment at the 1932 convention. Jim Farley says he told Roosevelt, “If it wasn’t for Pat Harrison, you might not be President.”

But Roosevelt feared that Senator Harrison, a Southern conservative, would not support the New Deal with sufficient enthusiasm. So the President swung the weight of his approval behind Alben Barkley of Kentucky. It immediately became obvious that it would be a very close vote. My father liked Harrison personally, and before Roosevelt had decided to attempt this unprecedented intervention in the affairs of the Senate, Dad had promised the genial Mississippi senator his vote. Jim Farley recalls the intense pressure Roosevelt exerted to swing senators into line. His arm-twisting even extended to Farley. But he had given the senators his word he would not intervene in the battle. He adamantly refused to yield to the President’s plea to call various political bosses around the country and ask them to browbeat individual senators. “I have no doubt that calls were made, and my name used,” Farley says. In fact, he recalls being visited by a distraught Senator William H. Dieterich of Illinois who told him he had just received a phone call from Ed Kelly, the boss of Chicago, ordering him to vote for Barkley or forget about reelection. Farley urged Dieterich to defy Kelly, but he shook his head and switched his vote.

My father got a similar call from Tom Pendergast. Tom said the White House had phoned him and asked him to order Senator Truman into the Barkley camp.

“I just can’t do it, Tom, and I’ll tell you why,” Dad said. “I’ve given my word to Pat Harrison.”

Pendergast assured Dad he had no personal interest in the conflict. “I told them that if you were committed you would stand by your commitment, because you are a contrary Missourian.”

To my father’s indignation, a Washington newspaper printed a story claiming he had switched to Barkley on Tom Pendergast’s orders. When senators vote for majority leader or whip, they do so by secret ballot. But Dad was so incensed over this smear that just before he handed in his ballot, he turned to Senator Clyde L. Herring of Iowa and showed him the ballot, which he had emphatically marked for Harrison. The vote was excruciatingly close. Senator Barkley won by a single ballot - thirty-eight to thirty-seven. Senator Dieterich’s capitulation to Boss Kelly made the difference. When a Kansas City
Star
reporter asked my father if he had been the crucial switched vote, Dad angrily told him to go see Senator Herring and he would tell him how the junior senator from Missouri had voted.

To make sure everybody got the point, Dad put through a call to Steve Early, the press secretary at the White House. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve got a message for the President. Tell him to stop treating me like an office boy.”

WHILE NATIONAL POLITICS and legislative investigations absorbed my father in Washington, he was also deeply involved in Missouri politics. People who wanted jobs or favors sought his help constantly. This was how he came to meet a man who was to give him many a bad hour - Lloyd Stark. One of the owners of Stark Brothers Nurseries and Orchards Company, reputedly the largest apple producers in the nation, Stark was a millionaire with very strong political ambitions. He had served with distinction in World War I and as early as 1932 had sought the support of Jackson County Democrats for the nomination for governor. But Tom Pendergast had turned him down. Undiscouraged, Stark continued to woo Boss Tom by mail and through every friend who had access to him.

A man of considerable charm, Stark came to Washington and soon convinced both my father and Bennett Clark to support his bid for Jackson County’s votes. Late in 1935, Dad and Senator Clark escorted Stark to New York where Tom Pendergast was staying, en route to a European vacation. They urged Tom to support Stark for governor in the 1936 election. Looking back, my father has always ruefully admitted this was one of the greatest political mistakes he ever made. After much cajoling from Missouri’s two senators, Boss Tom reluctantly agreed to back Stark if he could prove he had “out-state” - that is, rural - support.

This seemed at first glance an easy thing for Stark to do. Farmers had been buying Stark’s Delicious apple trees from the Stark Brothers Nurseries and Orchards Company for decades. But selling people apples and apple trees and getting their votes are not quite the same thing. Stark could never have gotten the nomination without the help of Harry S. Truman. Dad sent him a personal list he had compiled, containing the names of the key men in each county who had worked for him in 1934. Stark was soon sending Pendergast a list of out-state names, all of whom were carefully primed to assure Boss Tom that Stark was strong in their section of Missouri. By October, Pendergast capitulated and guaranteed Stark Jackson County’s Democratic votes. Both Dad and Bennett Clark campaigned vigorously for Stark in the primary and general election, and he swept to an enormous victory in 1936.

Meanwhile, another Democrat had entered the Jackson County political scene. He was Maurice Milligan, brother of Jacob (“Tuck”) Milligan, the congressman whom Dad had defeated in 1934. Bennett Clark, an old friend of Tuck Milligan, had wangled the post of federal district attorney in Kansas City for his brother.

Maurice Milligan launched an investigation of the 1936 election in Kansas City. He was no friend of Jackson County Democrats, and he was emboldened by the absence of Tom Pendergast, who had suffered a physical breakdown in New York earlier in the year - a severe heart attack followed by a serious cancer operation. Soon Milligan was marching Democrats by the dozen into the federal court, where they were tried under a Reconstruction Era statute originally intended to protect black voting rights in the post-Civil War South. It permitted the federal government to intervene in state voting practices, if the right to vote was being denied to a substantial number of a state’s citizens. This was not the case in Kansas City; the defendants were prosecuted for padding the vote in their districts by using names of citizens long dead, or in some cases totally imaginary. The cases were tried before two ultra-Republican judges; the juries were composed exclusively of people from outside Jackson County.

For two years, the trials dragged on, and 259 Democrats were convicted. None of them had previous police records. They were all ordinary citizens, who, if they were guilty at all, had allowed their enthusiasm for the Democratic Party to run away with their judgment. Arthur Krock in
The New York Times,
pointing out that the extra votes had not even been necessary to win the election in Missouri, explained the phenomenon: “Any observer of city politics knows the real answer. Each party worker of the professional type is an office seeker. From him results are demanded in exchange for jobs. The better showing he makes, the higher his standing over rival precinct, ward or district workers. This competition has led the boys to be what the boss calls ‘overzealous.’”

Watching this performance from Washington, D.C., my father did a slow burn. He had no love for Maurice Milligan in the first place. Every big city machine in those days padded its voting rolls. The Grundy Republican machine did it in Philadelphia, and the Hague Democratic machine did it in Jersey City. No one was investigating them under a Reconstruction statute, and that brought all the latent Southern sympathies in the Truman bloodstream to a simmering boil. Then Dad discovered Milligan himself was not simon-pure; he had been accepting fees in bankruptcy proceedings in the Federal Court of Western Missouri, something no federal attorney should have done. In 1938, when Milligan’s term as federal attorney expired, Dad felt strongly that he should not be reappointed. He was wrecking the Democratic Party in Missouri for his own aggrandizement.

When the Roosevelt Administration, with the support of Bennett Clark, reappointed Milligan, my father made his most controversial Senate speech:

My father went on to castigate Milligan for accepting bankruptcy fees, pointing out he had received more money in fees in one case than his federal salary totaled in an entire year.

The Republican federal judges had smiled sweetly on this practice. Dad also accused these gentlemen of intimidating defending lawyers in the vote fraud cases. Above all, Dad deplored the refusal to let a single person from Jackson County - a community of 600,000 people - sit on a jury. Even petit jury panels, he said, were investigated by the Secret Service, and if a man was found to have acquaintances in Jackson County he was barred from service. “I say to this Senate,” Dad declared, “a Jackson County Missouri Democrat has as much chance of a fair trial in the Federal District Court of Western Missouri as a Jew would have in a Hitler court or a Trotsky follower before Stalin. . . .”

The St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
ran a Daniel Fitzpatrick cartoon showing a Charlie McCarthy dummy on a knee saying, “Milligan and those judges are railroading the Democrats.” The caption reads: “Charlie McTruman does his stuff.” The Kansas City
Star’s
comments were, of course, equally caustic, and even the
Journal-Post
said my father had “done his cause no particular good” by attacking the high-riding Milligan. No one bothered to listen to the facts in Dad’s speech. Everyone assumed he was simply trying to protect the Pendergast machine. Dad owed Tom Pendergast political loyalty, and he always gave it to him, but never at the expense of his own conscience. In fact, my father recommended to President Roosevelt that Milligan be given a special appointment to continue his prosecution of the vote fraud cases, but some other deserving attorney, more acceptable to Jackson County Democrats, be given the district attorney’s job. Nobody except those closest to him shared Dad’s point of view or appreciated the courage it took to express it in the teeth of the inevitable disapproval of the two most powerful newspapers in Missouri.

The Senate reconfirmed Milligan. Meanwhile, Governor Lloyd Stark, sensing Tom Pendergast’s weakness, entered the battle on Milligan’s side. He cut off all patronage for Jackson County Democrats and challenged Boss Tom in a battle for the choice of a Supreme Court justice. Stark won and, together with Milligan, journeyed to Washington and asked President Roosevelt to assign a federal task force to make an exhaustive investigation of Tom Pendergast and his organization. A team composed of FBI and Treasury agents and special investigators from the Attorney General’s office soon descended on Kansas City, with shattering results. Tom Pendergast pleaded guilty to evading more than $1 million in income taxes over the preceding decade, and was sentenced to fifteen months in jail and five years’ probation. City Manager Henry McElroy resigned and died shortly before he was to be brought to trial for juggling Kansas City’s municipal books to conceal huge deficits. Several other high-ranking members of the Jackson County political organization went to jail.

I find it hard to describe how stunned my father was by these developments. He knew Tom Pendergast gambled on the horses. But he had no conception of the fantastic mania which eventually obsessed and destroyed the man. Tom reached the point where he gambled on every horse race that was run in the entire United States on a single day. By the mid-30s his losses were staggering, and he had been forced to indulge in massive fraud to sustain this destructive compulsion.

Numerous Democrats around the state rushed to denounce the fallen leader and did their utmost to pretend they had always been independent of Tom Pendergast. My father remained silent. I remember one day in 1939, being in his office when he received a call from a reporter in Missouri who urged him to condemn Pendergast and point proudly to his record of independent achievement in Jackson County and in the Senate - something Dad could certainly have done. Instead, he became infuriated at the suggestion. “I’m not a rat who deserts a sinking ship,” he snapped.

Never before or since can I recall my father being so gloomy as he was in those latter months of 1939 after Tom Pendergast went to prison. Nothing seemed to be going right. The transportation bill, the product of his four years of enormous effort investigating the railroads, was being blocked in the Senate, with Bennett Clark doing not a little of the blocking. Early in 1940, he wrote a friend in St. Louis, “I feel as if my four years and a half hard work has been practically wasted.”

Reminiscing in later years about his Senate career, my father wryly remarked that when men first come to the Senate, “They have four years in which to be statesmen. I spent that period myself. Then they have a year in which to be politicians. And one of my good friends from the great State of Washington told me that the last year the senator had to be a demagogue if he expected to come back to the Senate. I never heard a statement that is truer than that.”

By instinct, Dad rejected the idea of being a demagogue. But he did recognize the kernel of truth in that remark - a senator had to make some kind of a splash in his last year to remind the voters he had not been wasting his time and their money in Washington. The transportation bill was Dad’s hoped-for triumph along this line, and it was heartbreaking to see it bogged down in a tangle of objections raised by other senators.

Then came an even more dismaying revelation. Lloyd Stark was in Washington again, visiting the White House. He and FDR had become quite chummy, exchanging notes on a “Dear Lloyd” basis. Stark had come whooping out for a third term for Roosevelt, and there was considerable talk, at least in Missouri, about him winning the vice presidential nomination. Vice President Garner had made it clear he was going to retire. He also made it clear he did not believe in more than two terms for a President - another Roosevelt innovation that was splitting the Democratic Party. My father, with his respect for American political tradition, felt the same way. He made a number of public statements disapproving a third term, but he added that if the Democratic Party nominated the President, he would support him. With this for background, you can imagine Dad’s anger when Lloyd Stark dropped in to see him in his Senate office and attempted to pull the cheapest of all cheap political tricks.

“Everybody keeps telling me that I ought to run for the Senate,” he said with a bland smile, “but don’t you worry about it, Harry, I wouldn’t dream of running against you.”

As a Machiavelli, Stark was almost laughably inept. Dad saw instantly that the governor was trying to lull him into a state of security, so he could catch him flat-footed with the announcement of his candidacy.

The moment Stark left the office, my father said to his secretary, Vic Messall, “That S.O.B. is going to run against me.”

The 1940 campaign had begun.