Harry Truman (17 page)

“I am going tο run for reelection, if the only vote I get is my own.”

That is what I remember my father saying early in 1940.

According to some reports from Missouri, that was about all the votes he could expect. In spite of the support Dad had given the Roosevelt Administration, Lloyd Stark seemed to have FDR’s blessing. The brisk correspondence between the President and the governor, the frequent White House visits, continued. The Jackson County Democrats were in sad disarray, cringing every time the name Pendergast was mentioned.

Late in January my father made a trip to Missouri to see what he could do about rallying some support. He wrote to some thirty friends who he was sure would stick with him and asked them to meet with him in the Statler Hotel in St. Louis to discuss his campaign Less than half of them showed up, and those who came spent most of their time telling Dad he did not have a chance. He could not even persuade anyone to take on the vital job of finance chairman for the campaign.

One of the few who urged him to run was Harry Easley, an old friend from Webb City in southwest Missouri. He had known Dad since 1932, and he arrived in time to have breakfast with him and report that Senator Truman had a lot of support in his part of the state. Just after breakfast, while Easley was in one room of Dad’s suite and Dad was busy in another room, the phone rang. It was the White House calling. Easley hastily summoned Dad’s secretary, Vic Messall, who in turn asked my father if he wanted to come to the phone. Dad shook his head, and Vic took the message from FDR’s press secretary, Steve Early. It was an offer from the President. If Senator Truman would withdraw from the race, he could have a seat on the Interstate Commerce Commission, a life appointment at a salary that was a lot more than senators were paid. “Tell them to go to hell,” Dad said. “I’ve made up my mind that I’m going to run.”

The St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
found out about the discouraging meeting and chortled over Dad’s discomfiture: “Harry Truman, the erstwhile Ambassador in Washington of the defunct principality of Pendergastia, is back home, appraising his chances of being re-elected to the Senate. They are nil. He is a dead cock in the pit.”

My father went back to Washington, profoundly discouraged. John Snyder, who was working for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, joined him in his Senate office for another conference. It was a very depressing talk. Snyder could do little for him, directly, because he was a government employee. The overwhelming problem was money. As Snyder recalls the meeting, “The thought came to me that we hadn’t even enough money to buy the postage stamps to write to anybody to help us.” Not long after he made this glum observation, the meeting started to break up on a note of complete despair. But as Snyder was leaving, Dad reiterated his determination to run: “I can’t walk out on the charges that have been made against me. For my own self-respect, if nothing else, I must run.”

Snyder promised to meet him for another conference on the following day. As he left the Senate Office Building, he met an old friend from St. Louis, Horace Deal. “John, what’s happened to you?” asked Deal. “You look like you’ve just been run through a wringer.”

“Well,” Snyder said, “that couldn’t be a better description of how I feel.” He told him about his meeting with Dad and their seemingly hopeless economic plight.

“It’s pretty bad, isn’t it,” Deal said.

“It is,” said Snyder.

“Well, maybe it’s not all that bad,” Deal said. Whereupon he took out his checkbook, opened it on the fender of a car, and wrote out a check for $1,000. “I didn’t even stop to thank him,” Snyder says. “I grabbed it and ran back into the building, and into Senator Truman’s office.” He waved the check in front of Dad and said, “Well, at least we can buy postage stamps.”

Less than a week later, on my father’s orders, Vic Messall drove to Jefferson City and filed the necessary papers to make Dad a candidate for reelection. “I am filing for reelection to the United States Senate today. . . . I am asking the voters of the state of Missouri to renominate and reelect me on my record as a public official and United States Senator,” Dad said in a statement from Washington.

Governor Stark had already filed for the senatorial primary. He declared himself an all-out Roosevelt supporter and called for a third term. He also piously declared he was “not planning an attack on any other Democrat in order to win the nomination.” This lofty pose was based on his assumption he was so far ahead he could coast to victory.

For reasons I’ve already stated, Dad was not an enthusiastic backer of Roosevelt for a third term. In the statement announcing his candidacy, Dad reiterated this stand and declared himself ready to support Bennett Clark for President at the 1940 convention. By this time, Senator Clark had completely broken with Roosevelt and was edging toward the isolationists in Congress, severely criticizing the Roosevelt defense program. War had already begun in Europe, and Dad was a wholehearted backer of the defense program. He and Senator Clark simply did not see eye to eye on this and a host of other issues. But with loyalty to the Democratic Party and to Missouri as his cardinal virtue, my father was ready to offer Bennett his support if FDR withdrew or the convention was deadlocked.

Senator Clark did not reciprocate with any statement of support for Senator Truman. That was not his style. But he reacted savagely against Governor Stark’s attempt to take over the Democratic Party in Missouri and control the delegation to the 1940 national convention. Several voices had already been raised, suggesting Governor Stark as a presidential candidate in his own right. Others continued to say he would make an excellent vice president on the Roosevelt ticket. The governor did nothing to discourage either of these sentiments.

Even before my father filed for the Senate race, warfare had erupted between Senator Clark and Governor Stark. On January 4, 1940, Bennett, in his inimitably sarcastic style, told a St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
reporter what he thought of Stark:

The story of Lloyd Stark is a classic study of a man overreaching himself. His almost boundless ambition and arrogant style had already split the Democratic Party in Missouri down the middle. This fact was dramatized by the holding of two separate Jackson Day dinners - one attended by anti-Stark Democrats, the other by pro-Stark people. My father persuaded Senator Tom Connally to speak on his behalf at the anti-Stark dinner, which was held in Springfield under the sponsorship of the Green County Democratic Committee. Governor Stark did not attend, claiming a conflict in his schedule. When one of his associates rose to say a few words on his behalf, the 700 guests at the dinner booed him so vociferously that the chairman of the dinner finally had to pound his gavel on the lectern and beg for order.

My father was pleased by this news, of course. He wrote to John Snyder that Senator Connally “said enough nice things about me to elect me (if it had been left to that crowd!). The booing of Stark was a rather unanimous affair.”

The realization that Senator Truman had some support in Missouri - or at the very least Governor Stark had some enemies - created near hysteria among the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
editorial writers. A few days after the Jackson Day dinner, they wrote an editorial captioned HARRY S. TRUMAN-STOOGE OF BOSS PENDERGAST: “The whelps of Boss Pendergast, Harry Truman and Bennett Clark, hissed and booed the speaker who rose to deliver the greetings of Governor Stark. . . . Truman was one of the toasts of the Springfield dinner. He is the stooge whom Boss Pendergast lifted from obscurity and placed in the United States Senate. He is the stooge who paid off his debt to Pendergast in the most abject way. He is the stooge who tried to prevent the reappointment of the fearless prosecutor, the United States Attorney Milligan, because Milligan was sending Truman’s pals to the penitentiary. Well, Truman is through in Missouri. He may as well fold up and accept a nice lucrative Federal post if he can get it - and if he does get it, it’s a travesty of democracy.”

Governor Stark’s Jackson Day dinner, meanwhile, turned into a political disaster. The governor of Arkansas, who had agreed to be the principal speaker, abruptly reneged. When Stark tried frantically to persuade some prominent New Deal official to come out from Washington, Dad and Bennett Clark, working together for once, blocked that move. The governor was reduced to importing a wealthy Kansas cattleman to be the speaker of the evening. This was, indeed, desperation. Importing a Kansan to address Missouri Democrats made about as much sense politically as inviting Sitting Bull to address a reunion of the 7th Cavalry Regiment.

Three months later, Governor Stark made another mistake in political judgment. Both he and my father were invited to speak at a Jefferson Day banquet in Kirksville, Missouri. The dinner was supposed to promote party unity, and all the speakers were urged to limit their remarks to lavish praise of Thomas Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Lloyd Stark was the first speaker. To everyone’s astonishment and outrage, he proceeded to make a searing political speech, blasting the many Missouri Democrats who did not support a third term for FDR, extolling the achievements of his own administration, and declaring himself practically elected as senator from Missouri. My father threw aside the speech he had prepared, calling for party unity, and gave Governor Stark the tongue-lashing he deserved. A considerable number of powerful Missouri Democrats left Kirksville that night professing profound disgust for Governor Stark.

The next round in the mounting struggle was the Missouri State Democratic Convention on April 15. My father wisely remained on the sidelines, while Senator Clark and Governor Stark met head-on in the battle for the control of the delegation. It was really no contest. When Stark’s name was mentioned on the convention floor, he got nothing but boos, and if Bennett Clark had had his way, the governor would not even have been elected a delegate at large to the national convention. My father, with that instinct for playing a peacemaker’s role, persuaded his fellow Democrats to give the discomfited Stark at least that much recognition. But the rest of the delegation was firmly in Bennett Clark’s camp, and the senior senator was named chairman.

As my father tartly reminded several of his supporters in Missouri, however, it was not enough to rejoice over these rebuffs to Stark. Something had to be done about getting people to vote for Truman. While carrying his full workload in Congress, Dad struggled to put together an organization. He sent his secretaries, Vic Messall and Millie Dryden, back to Missouri to be the mainstays. But money remained the tormenting problem. Nobody was willing to bet any real cash on Truman. My father still could not even find a finance chairman. He finally persuaded his old army friend Harry Vaughan to take the job. Wryly Vaughan recalls, “I had a bank balance of three dollars and a quarter.”

Millie Dryden, looking back on those hectic days, said, “Many times we had so little money, we ran out of stamps.” The few paid employees worked for practically nothing. One young man frequently ran out of gas and had to hitchhike back to the office. “I remember,” Millie said, “he lived out south someplace and it was downhill most of the way to where he lived and he used to try to coast as far as he could in order to save his gas because he was making such a small salary.” As one time, the treasury sank so low the last few dollars were invested in mailing an appeal to numbers of people asking them to send in a dollar. Two hundred dollars came in, and this was reinvested in another mailing, which raised even more money. But Dad finally had to borrow $3,000 on his life insurance to meet the office payroll and other “must” expenses.

Meanwhile, Stark, with his family millions behind him, was buying up radio time and spending lavish amounts of money on newspaper advertising.

Calmly, methodically, refusing to panic, my father went ahead with the most important task - organizing his campaign. John Snyder, who was present at the first organization meeting, was so impressed by the firmness and clarity with which Dad stated his principles, he copied them down verbatim. He was kind enough to show me his record of exactly what Dad said at this meeting: