Harry Truman (4 page)

More than once, Howard McGrath, the Democratic Party chairman, or Jack Redding, the publicity director, carried $25,000 or $30,000 in cash to broadcasting studios, to pay for radio time. While candidate Dewey was delivering long, exquisitely polished radio addresses without an iota of trouble, my father was frequently cut off in mid-sentence because the radio networks would not allow him to speak a single second beyond the paid-for time. Louis Johnson became philosophic about this harassment. He decided it was actually helping Dad because people were annoyed by such insulting treatment of the President.

In Oklahoma City on September 28, the cash shortage struck again. We found that we did not have enough money to get the train out of the station. Once more, Governor Roy J. Turner was the miracle man. He convened a fundraising party aboard the train and raised enough cash to pay for the rest of that tour.

None of this in the least fazed or, as far as I could see, even momentarily discouraged my father. He was absolutely and totally convinced that he was on his way to victory, and he let other people worry about the details. What I like to think of as his finest unknown or private moment came on October 11, 1948, when one of the White House aides jumped off the train and bought the latest issue of
Newsweek.
The magazine had polled fifty veteran political writers around the country. Huge black type announced the results: FIFTY POLITICAL EXPERTS UNANIMOUSLY PREDICT A DEWEY VICTORY. Morale visibly sagged all around us. Dad stared at the magazine for a moment and then grinned. “Oh well,” he said, “those damn fellows - they’re always wrong anyway. Forget it, boys, and let’s get on with the job.”

Sometimes nature itself seemed to be against us. The first major speech of the fall campaign came at Dexter, Iowa, at the National Plowing Contest. It was a hot, humid September day. The plowing plus the feet of 75,000 farmers and their families stirred up a huge cloud of choking dust, which simply hung there between the sky and the earth, as dust clouds are wont to do in the Midwest. Ignoring the dirty air and the heat, Dad gave a rousing, scorching speech, which almost tore his throat apart. For at least a week, Dr. Wallace Graham, his personal physician, had to spray his throat before every speech. Dad was the only man on the train who was surprised by this particular bit of damage.

His attitude is visible in his comment on his throat to his sister Mary: “Dr. Graham just sprayed, mopped and caused me to gargle bad tasting liquids until the throat gave up and got well.”

The big speeches were extravaganzas in which all of us -except my father, I suppose - felt almost superfluous. Big crowds have an almost numbing effect. It’s like being swallowed in a maelstrom of roaring voices, waving hands, and swirling faces. For all of us - and I know this included Dad - the whistle-stops were the heart of the trip. A President can always fly to Detroit, or Denver, or Los Angeles to make a major speech. But he can’t get to Pocatello, Idaho; Clarksburg, West Virginia; or Davis, Oklahoma - at least he is not likely to go there - unless he’s whistle-stopping.

The whistle-stop routine seldom varied. As we pulled into the station bands would blare “Hail to the Chief” and the “Missouri Waltz.” Dad, usually accompanied by three or four local politicians, would step out on the back platform of the train, and they would present him with a gift - a basket of corn, a bucket of apples, or some item of local manufacture. Then one of the local politicians would introduce the President, and Dad would give a brief fighting speech, plugging the local candidate, and asking the people for their support. But the heart of these little talks was a local reference, sometimes supplied by Dad spontaneously, more often by careful advance research on the part of the staff.

Whenever possible, my father preferred to say something that he knew or felt personally. He told his listeners in Clarksburg: “I’ve always had a warm spot in my heart for Clarksburg. I have been a student of the War Between the States, and I remember that Stonewall Jackson was born here in Clarksburg.” At Hammond, Indiana, where many of the tanks for our World War II armies were produced, he drew on his knowledge of our war effort, which he had scrutinized intensively, as head of the Truman Committee in the Senate. “Our armies all over the world were grateful for the high quality of work you turned out,” he told the crowd. This was authentic. It was not just something he was reading off a card. He knew and felt these things.

I have always believed that the great difference between Harry S. Truman and Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 was Dad’s uninhibited refusal to be anyone but himself. At Dexter, Iowa, I think he won thousands of farm votes with an impromptu talk he gave after his formal speech. “I can plow a straight furrow,” he said, “a prejudiced witness said so - my mother.” He told his farmer audience how he used to “sow a 160 acre wheatfield without a skip place showing in it.” Then, bragging as only a Missourian can brag, he added that he did it all with only four mules and a gangplow. There were few tractors around during the eleven years before World War I, when he was a farmer.

After his whistle-stop talks, Dad would introduce first my mother and then me. Mother was introduced as “the boss,” and me as “the one who bosses the boss.” We never did get him to stop introducing us this way in spite of numerous demands. He was equally stubborn about other routines. Hitting hard at the Republican Congress’s failure to do something about the housing shortage, he often included himself in the problem. In Ogden, Utah, for instance, he suggested that if the voters did the right thing on the second of November, “That will keep me from suffering from a housing shortage on January 20th, 1949.” In Colorado Springs, he told the crowd: “If you go out to the polls . . . and do your duty as you should, I won’t have to worry about moving out of the White House; and you won’t have to worry about what happens to the welfare of the West.”

Frantic memorandums and letters from White House staffers and friends in the sophisticated East warned that these housing remarks did not “help create a picture of strength and confidence.” My father ignored them. He knew that the people were delighted to find their President talking their language, on this and all other points.

By this time, even in formal speeches, Dad was working with nothing more than an elaborate set of notes. At the beginning of his career, even his best friends admitted he was a very mediocre speaker. Ted Marks, one of his old battery mates from World War I, often told the story about one of the first speeches my father ever made, when he was running for county judge in Missouri. “We were all sitting at the top of the hill when Captain Harry started to talk. By the time he finished, we had slid all the way to the bottom.”

In succeeding years, Dad taught himself to speak effectively in his own Missouri way. Whenever possible, he always preferred to speak off the cuff. That was when his dry wit came through, along with his sincerity. But during the first three years in the White House, he was so acutely conscious of the historical importance of what a President said, he hesitated to use anything but prepared texts. The result was continuous erosion of his public support. He read a speech badly, always seeming, as one man said, to be “rushing for the period.”

On April 17, 1948, a time when his statistical popularity had sunk to an all-time low - George Gallup said only 36 percent of the people approved of his performance as President - he gave a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington. His prepared address drew no more than a flicker of polite applause from the crowd. But instead of sitting down, he started telling this very important and influential group of men exactly what he thought of the national and international situation, in his own vigorous down-to-earth language. Charlie Ross, a man never given to overstatement, said, “The audience went wild.”

“The old philosopher,” as everyone in the White House called Charlie, talked the experience over with his lifelong friend, and they both decided it was a major discovery. Henceforth, every speech my father made, from there to the end of the campaign, was off the cuff - to some extent at least. For major speeches, he had carefully worked out phrasing for key statements on foreign or domestic policies. But even in the major speeches, there were long passages which were only outlined. The wording, the facts, were up to the President to supply. This meant, along with the already enormous amount of reading and absorbing my father had to do, he voluntarily added the extra burden of cramming his mind with material for the speeches.

On May 7, Dad wrote to his sister Mary explaining why he was willing to make the effort.

On May 1, 1948, after Dad had experimented with another off-the-cuff speech which “seemed to go over big,” he noted on his desk calendar: “Suppose I’m in for a lot of work now getting my head full of facts before each public appearance. If it must be done I’ll have to do it.” Ever a realist about himself, he added, “Comes of my poor ability to read a speech and put feeling into it.”

A few days later, my father made an even riskier experiment - an off-the-cuff radio and television speech on family life.

Then he added a fascinating recapitulation of his experience in becoming President:

My father’s speeches reflected his dislike of big words and flowery language because they gave the audience the impression the orator was showing off - and they also interfered with the communication of the facts. When it came to deciding how to phrase something, he had only two rules. No “two-dollar words” and make the statement as simple and understandable as possible. “Let’s not weasel-word it,” he often said to Clark Clifford, Charles S. Murphy, Matt Connelly, and Charlie Ross, who worked on speeches with him in the dining room of the
Ferdinand Magellan.

The simplicity was another reason why my father loved the whistle-stops best. There was no need to get into elaborate discussions about foreign or domestic policy. There simply wasn’t time. So he could tell the crowd what he thought of the Eightieth Congress in the plainest, bluntest terms. At a whistle-stop he also got the kind of feedback that he loved. “Give ‘em hell, Harry,” someone invariably yelled, and Dad would beam and promise to give them exactly that.

He had his share of hecklers, but they never bothered him. He would let them shout for a few minutes, and then he would say, “Now give me a chance to be heard.” Fair play took over and in another sixty seconds he had the crowd with him. Once, some twelve- and thirteen-year-olds got really raucous and ignored this approach. Dad waited another minute for them to shut up, and then he pointed to them and said, “I think it’s time you boys went home to your mothers.” The crowd roared, and they did a sheepish vanishing act.

Our biggest concern - and my personal nightmare - in all of these whistle-stops was the possibility of someone getting hurt. A railroad train is a very odd, very dangerous contrivance. The average person has no idea that it operates under mysterious laws of physics which are uniquely its own. For instance, when a train brakes in a station, the cars bunch together, and then slowly roll back the length of their couplings. On a seventeen-car train, this means the last car may roll back as much as three or four feet. Invariably, as we stopped, people would crowd around the rear platform, and frantic efforts had to be made to keep them at a safe distance until the
Ferdinand Magellan
had completed its rollback. For a while, a Secret Service man broadcast a warning through the loudspeakers as the train rolled into a station. “For your own safety, keep back; six feet at the sides, thirty feet at the rear. For your own safety, thirty feet.” But no one paid any attention to him. They would surge right up under the wheels. Once I tugged on an emergency brake that was on the rear platform to prevent a rollback. I was quietly reprimanded. Dad pointed out I was liable to start a panic in the crowd.

Trying to stop a 285,000-pound railroad car isn’t fun. We were particularly sensitive about this problem, because Dewey’s train had rolled back at Beaucoup, Illinois, and in a fit of pique he publicly suggested shooting the engineer, thereby probably costing himself several hundred thousand labor votes. Dad would never have said anything so heartless.

At another stop in Oklahoma, a young man on a very skittish horse was among the crowd. The train terrified the animal, and he was obviously close to bolting. There was a real danger that he might have hurt or killed the rider, as well as many other people in the crowd. While White House aides and Secret Service men wondered what to do, my father stepped down from the rear platform, strode over to the jittery animal and unsteady rider, and seized the bridle. “That’s a fine horse you’ve got there, son,” he said. He opened the horse’s mouth and studied his teeth. “Eight years old, I see.” Calmly, he led the animal over to one of the Secret Service men, who escorted him a safe distance from the train.