Harry Truman (23 page)

In his letter to me about his Jackson Day dinner speech in Florida, Dad, with his usual modesty, did not even bother to mention the speech, under-attended though it was, contained one of his most important public statements. He urged the renomination and reelection of FDR for a fourth term to fight the war to a victorious conclusion. Dad explicitly identified the work of his committee with the administration, praising it for welcoming the criticisms he made (most of the time, anyway) and warning Republicans against playing politics with any of the committee’s disclosures. He made similar speeches in Topeka, Kansas, and at state Democratic conventions in Missouri and Connecticut in the coming months.
The New York Times
was soon reporting that Dad’s words “had the effect of giving a stamp of approval to the nation’s war leaders and war program from a source which command’s considerable respect.” The
Times
concluded the speeches were “an important boost for President Roosevelt’s nomination and for his chances with the electorate next November.”

After something happens, particularly an election or some other historical event, we tend to believe it was inevitable. It is hard, often impossible, to recapture the frame of mind that prevailed before the event. Early in 1944, there was considerable alarm within the Democratic Party about their prospects in the coming presidential election. Although the war was going reasonably well, there was as yet no sign of an imminent Axis collapse. D-Day had yet to come. The home front was seething with labor unrest. The civilian side of the war effort was wracked by personal feuds, and Congress was almost out of the President’s control. Dad’s support - entirely unsolicited by the White House - was not only welcome, but needed.

Privately, I might add here, my father was very critical of the way the Roosevelt Administration handled the politics of the home front. In a letter to his fellow Young Turk, Lewis B. Schwellenbach, who had become a federal district judge in Washington, he remarked in mid-1943: “The political situation is bad everywhere. If an effort had been made to do things in the way that would make people against the Administration a better job along that line couldn’t have been done. In Missouri nearly every man in charge of the Office of Price Administration have been people who thoroughly hated the Administration and everything it stands for, and naturally they do the harsh things that are necessary for the enforcement of price control and production management in such a way as to put all the blame on the White House, and I have been informed that that same policy in appointments has been followed in most of the States.”

Once more my father voiced his disapproval of this Rooseveltian approach to political opponents: “The President’s mistaken notion he was getting cooperation by taking the enemy into the camp is something I never did believe in and I don’t believe in that policy now.”

Throughout the early months of 1944, my father was in the forefront of a vital, politically explosive home-front battle - the debate over reconversion to a peacetime economy. He called for a reconversion plan, now. The military and their big-business supporters did everything in their power to wreck Donald Nelson’s inclination to follow Dad’s lead in this direction. I stress this theme again, because I don’t believe people realize the leadership Dad exerted on major policy decisions which shaped the entire war effort. Most of the American public, preoccupied by the war news that poured in every day from the far-flung battlefronts, ignored this aspect of things. But acute observers in Washington were very much aware of it. On March 5, 1944, Donald Nelson released to the press a letter he had written to Senator Francis Maloney of Connecticut in which he outlined his future policy on reconversion. Almost every detail was drawn from recommendations made by the Truman Committee. On March 11, the Kiplinger
Washington Letter
observed: “WPB [the War Production Board] especially is allied closely to Truman brand of thinking and WPB is already moving along the Truman lines.”

In the last part of 1943, my father and Hugh Fulton prepared a paper outlining some of the problems of reconversion. The report pointed to the tremendous opportunities open to America if they developed programs to use resources and facilities developed by the war. The report called on the War Production Board to begin giving “special attention” to this aspect of the war effort. But the military pressure inside the War Production Board was simply too strong; when Nelson made some tentative steps in the direction my father suggested, the battle that erupted cost him his job. As a result, the American economy went steaming into the abrupt end of World War II with practically no plans for reconversion. It seems especially ironic that the man who first suggested careful planning to make the transition from peace to war as smooth as possible was then in the White House, stuck with the gigantic headaches that developed.

My father was far more interested in the battle over reconversion than he was in the rumors and suggestions that were already beginning to float around, naming him as the Democratic candidate for vice president. On May 26, 1944, he went to Brooklyn and made one of his most significant wartime policy speeches, to the Chamber of Commerce there. Called “The War in Review,” it blasted the military for their opposition to removing restrictions on civilian production. He was especially incensed at the army’s suggestion that any workers who were idled by cutbacks and cancelations in the defense program should be held by government order in a manpower pool. That’s their way, Dad said, “of referring to what I call unemployment.”

Some of the letters Dad wrote me around this time are fascinating in retrospect. He seemed to sense, and simultaneously recoil a little from, the destiny that was facing him. On May 14, 1944, he wrote me from Hot Springs, Arkansas:

My father was inclined to ignore the vice-presidential rumors and suggestions that began coming his way in early 1944 because they were not new to him. As early as 1942, letters began arriving from friends in Missouri, urging him to run for the office. These mounted in frequency as the fame of the Truman Committee investigations grew. Again and again he gave them much the same answer he gave to Adelbert E. Weston, a friend from Neosho, Missouri, on April 25th, 1944: “I have no intention of running for Vice President. I don’t want the job and I’ve never solicited it and don’t expect to. . . . I’ve been trying to do a job in the Senate, and would like to stay here and do it. It takes a lot of work and a lot of time to get started in the Senate, and then to throw it all away would just be something unheard of.”

Earlier in the year he had written to another friend, Harry G. Waltner, director of the Unemployment Compensation Commission of Missouri. He had sent Dad a clipping from the Independence
Examiner,
in which the publisher, “Pop” Southern, had declared Dad had no ambition to be vice president. Dad wrote: “The old man is right. I have worked nine years learning how to be a United States Senator and I see no reason in the world to throw it away. The Vice President simply presides over the Senate and sits around hoping for a funeral. It is a very high office which consists entirely of honor and I don’t have any ambition to hold an office like that.”

To another friend, Frank Schwartz of Detroit, he spelled out in more detail why he wanted to remain in the Senate. Writing on June 16, he said: “It takes six or seven years for a man to get adjusted in the Senate so he can be of some use to his community. I am a member of three of the most important and three of the nosiest committees in the Senate - the Appropriations, Military Affairs, and the Interstate Commerce Committee, and in addition to that I have this Special Committee to Investigate the War Program, and I feel that the Committee has made some contribution to the war effort, and it is the only contribution I can possibly make.”

These were all letters to personal friends, and in no way intended for publication at that time. Frank Schwartz was, in addition, a delegate to the coming Democratic Convention. They are, I think, a pretty good indication Dad really did not want the job of vice president. They refute, once and for all, the assertions of a few who claimed to be close to him that he wanted it and in fact connived to get it. But the best proof of all, as far as I am concerned, is an answer he sent to me on July 9, 1944, in response to a question I asked him by mail from Missouri about the mounting furor:

THAT LETTER WAS written only ten days before the 1944 Democratic Convention opened. The pressure on my father to run for vice president was obviously growing intense. Most important, the comment about the back door of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue made it very clear Dad had been told what almost everyone in the White House circle - and not a few Democrats outside it - knew. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a sick man.

For someone with my father’s knowledge of the past, this created a very unpleasant prospect. It was obviously on his mind when he remarked to a
Post-Dispatch
reporter: “Do you remember your American history well enough to recall what happened to most vice presidents who succeeded to the presidency? Usually, they were ridiculed in office, had their hearts broken, lost any vestige of respect they had had before. I don’t want that to happen to me.”

In his struggle to avoid the nomination, my father was hampered by some previous appointments of his own, and several unexpected twists of fate. The most important of the appointments was his choice of Robert Hannegan as national chairman of the Democratic Party. President Roosevelt had offered the job to Dad, in 1943, but he had declined, preferring to continue as head of the Truman Committee. He had recommended Bob Hannegan, who, thanks largely to Dad’s influence, had become Commissioner of Internal Revenue.

Hannegan did not want the job either. He even asked Dad how he could avoid it.

“Don’t take it unless the President calls you personally,” Dad said.

A few days later FDR phoned and made the request very personal. Hannegan called Dad. “What do I do now, coach?” he asked.

“You take it,” Dad said.

Before many more months went by, Bob Hannegan was working almost full time to make my father vice president. It was not just sentiment. One of the shrewdest politicians, Bob - and many other leading Democrats - had become convinced that with Henry Wallace on the ticket, the Democrats were in serious danger of being beaten. As vice president, Wallace had been a calamitous failure. An aloof, intensely shy man, he had made no attempt to ingratiate himself with members of the Senate - the one important service a vice president can provide a President. His ultra-liberal pronouncements alarmed conservatives and moderates alike and he made enemies by the score within the party by a much-publicized political brawl with Jesse Jones. At this point, the Democrats needed all the friends they could find. A Gallup poll in July showed Roosevelt beating Thomas E. Dewey, whom the Republicans had nominated in June, by only 51 percent to 49 percent of the popular vote.

My father’s solution to this Democratic dilemma was a return to the kind of ticket that had helped the party sweep the country in 1932 and 1936 - a Texan for vice president. His choice was Speaker Sam Rayburn. Toward the end of March 1944, Dad was at a cocktail party in San Francisco with Sam, and he proposed a toast to him as the next vice president of the United States. He repeated the proposal during his speech at a Democratic Party dinner, and he was delighted when he got an enthusiastic response. A week later, he repeated the performance in St. Louis. But Sam’s fellow Texans torpedoed him a few weeks later. Conservatives, already restive about the New Deal’s support of black rights, turned the state convention into a donnybrook between pro- and anti-Roosevelt Democrats. The liberal wing of the party plumped for Sam but the so-called regulars would not even name him a delegate to the convention. When a man cannot deliver his own state, his potential as a candidate withers very fast. Regretfully - he really did want the nomination - Sam withdrew his name from contention.

Although my father stubbornly refused to recognize it, he had all the qualifications which he saw in Sam - and even a few more. Missouri and Texas were very similar when it came to both political and ideological geography. His achievements as head of the Truman Committee had given him a national reputation. But Dad continued to backpedal furiously from the job, while others, notably Jimmy Byrnes and Henry Wallace, were working mightily to obtain FDR’s blessing.

Jimmy Byrnes was an interesting man, suave, decisive, and energetic. He had won FDR’s admiration as his “assistant president” in charge of the war effort in the White House. Byrnes wanted to be vice president very badly because he knew with far more certainty than Dad it was going to lead to the presidency. Few men were in a better position to see President Roosevelt’s weariness and declining vitality. Henry Wallace was equally eager for the nomination. At this point, he saw himself as a savior figure, the man best qualified to keep the Democratic Party faithful to the New Deal. In January 1944, he had proclaimed: “The New Deal is not dead. If it were dead the Democratic Party would be dead and well dead. . . .”

There would seem to be considerable evidence that President Roosevelt did not want either one of them. The story has long been told that FDR finally yielded to the hostility of the city bosses - notably Ed Kelly of Chicago and Frank Hague of Jersey City - who assured him they could not deliver their heavily Catholic constituencies for Byrnes, because he had abandoned Catholicism in his youth and become a Protestant. James Farley recently told me the true story is the exact reverse - it was the President who
ordered
the bosses to spread this story, to eliminate Byrnes. As for Vice President Wallace, FDR sent him off on a trip to China on May 20, which kept him out of the country for the vital two months before the convention.

President Roosevelt, ever the astute politician, did not want to alienate either one of these powerful men. He was also acutely conscious of the need to create the illusion, at least, of an open convention because the Republicans were trumpeting the charge of one-man rule, and many segments of the party, notably the South, were restive under his no longer vigorous leadership.

Vice President Wallace did not allow his absence from the country to damage his position. He had powerful supporters, notably Sidney Hillman and his associates in the CIO, who worked day and night to line up delegate support for him. Jimmy Byrnes, a shrewder and tougher man, took a more direct approach. First, he had his good friend, Bernard Baruch, sing his praises almost continuously, while the President was vacationing at Baruch’s South Carolina estate, Hobcaw Barony. On June 13, the President told Bob Hannegan he would prefer Byrnes above any other candidate, and Byrnes extracted from him something very close to an endorsement.

But over the next month, Byrnes had several more conversations with the President which made it clear he did not have FDR’s unqualified support. The best he could get out of the weary Chief was a promise he would not express a preference for anyone. Byrnes then demonstrated his shrewdness - perhaps duplicity is a better word - by phoning my father in Independence.

In 1949, when Byrnes had turned to the right and begun attacking the policies of the Truman Administration, Dad made the following memorandum about that phone call: “As to the nomination in Chicago in 1944, Mr. Byrnes called me from Washington Friday morning at 8:00 a.m. before that Convention was to meet, after he heard that Mr. Roosevelt was about to ask me to go on the ticket with him, and told me (I was in Independence, Mo.) that Roosevelt wanted him for Vice President. Mr. Byrnes asked me to nominate him. I agreed to do it. . . . I was very fond of him . . . until I found out the facts about Chicago, which was only on Friday of last week!”

From Byrnes’s point of view, this was a very neat, though unethical, move. If the backstairs fighting had been limited to these maneuvers, the 1944 convention would have been a battle between Wallace and Byrnes. The “assistant president” had, on paper at least, eliminated Harry Truman from the race. But other men had been getting other things down on paper that would undo this devious plan. FDR had been talking to many people. Sidney Hillman told him he and other leaders of the labor movement were unalterably opposed to Byrnes. Ed Flynn, the Democratic boss of the Bronx and one of Roosevelt’s closest friends, reported to the White House after a personal cross-country survey and told the President Wallace was certain to cost the Democrats several large states. Sam Rosenman, architect of Roosevelt’s New Deal speech and numerous other FDR talks, and Harold Ickes, both men with impeccable liberal credentials, also told him Wallace had to go. The President and Flynn, huddling on July 6, decided that my father was by far the best candidate. Truman “just dropped into the slot,” Ed Flynn wrote later.

Still dreading a convention fight - the President told Sam Rosenman it would “kill our chances for election this fall” - FDR ordered Flynn to convene the party’s top brass on July 11 and casually mention Dad as a candidate, to see what would happen. The brass included Bob Hannegan; Frank Walker, the postmaster general; Ed Pauley, the treasurer of the Democratic National Committee; Ed Kelly, Democratic boss of Chicago; and George Allen, the secretary of the Democratic National Committee. All were totally opposed to Wallace, and before the meeting was over, each of them was convinced he had suggested Dad as the best man. Such was the magic of FDR’s political expertise.

As the leaders were leaving, Frank Walker, knowing the President’s penchant for changing his mind, suggested Bob Hannegan get something in writing. Pretending he had misplaced his coat, Hannegan returned to the White House second-floor study and asked him for a written endorsement. On the back of an envelope, the President scribbled: “Bob, I think Truman is the right man. FDR”

Earlier on this fateful day, the President had had lunch with Henry Wallace. He showed Roosevelt a Gallup poll which gave him 65 percent of the rank and file Democratic vote for vice president and claimed he had 290 first-ballot convention votes - almost half what he needed for nomination. The President could have solved the whole thing on the spot by telling Wallace he was not the White House candidate. But, again, he preferred to avoid a confrontation. Instead he gave Wallace a letter, addressed to Senator Samuel Jackson, the chairman of the convention. In it he said:

This was another example of Roosevelt’s magnificent political guile (I say magnificent because I admire politics and politicians and appreciate the agonizing situation in which the President found himself that July). FDR reiterated his “personal feelings” for Lloyd Stark after my father had defeated him in Missouri. He was saying the same thing here, in a more oblique way.

Meanwhile, Bob Hannegan was collecting another letter from the President, which he wrote while his special car was on a siding in Chicago:

Other versions of the story have the President writing the letter in the White House on July 11, before he left for the West Coast via Chicago. Grace Tully in her memoir maintains the President originally put Bill Douglas first, and Bob Hannegan had her retype it, reversing the order of the names. There is no evidence for this in the files of the Roosevelt Library, and Bob Hannegan denied it in a conversation with Sam Rosenman only a few weeks before his death in 1949. The letter was dated July 19 so Hannegan could make maximum use of it when the convention opened. Whether the President wrote it in Chicago or in Washington, it is very clear he was reaffirming his decision to back my father for the vice presidency. The addition of William O. Douglas’s name was designed to make it appear he was not dictating anything to the convention. At this point, Douglas had no organized support whatsoever, and the nomination was totally beyond his grasp.

Harry Hopkins confirmed this conclusion in conversations with several persons. “People seem to think,” he told Jonathan Daniels, then a White House press aide, “Truman was just suddenly pulled out of a hat - but that wasn’t true. The President had had his eye on him for a long time and . . . above all he was very popular in the Senate. That was the biggest consideration. The President wanted somebody that would help him when he went up there and asked them to ratify the peace.” Hopkins later told Robert Sherwood, “I’m certain that the President made up his mind on Truman months before the convention.”

Meanwhile, Dad, Mother, and I drove to Chicago totally oblivious to all this frantic backstage warfare. My father was convinced he had finally and totally squelched the attempt to make him vice president, and if he hadn’t, he intended to stamp out the last few flickers of it in Chicago. Just before we left Independence, he told my cousin Ethel Noland’s mother: “Aunt Ella, I’m going up there to defeat myself.”