Harry Truman (44 page)

In a letter to his mother in September 1946, Dad gives a good picture of the way the boys relaxed by tormenting each other: “Some Hearst columnist by the name of Tucker had called Harry Vaughan a fat, lazy major general who ought to be a corporal and they really made Vaughan believe that Tucker was right. I really felt sorry for both Vaughan and Graham [who was kidded for answering nut mail] before the raggers let up on them.”

Dad played a delightful joke on Dr. Graham early in September 1946. Here is how he described it to his mother: “Made Doc Graham a brigadier general yesterday and nearly embarrassed him to death. I told him to come to the morning Secretaries Conference at nine o’clock. I had something I wanted to discuss with him. He came and I asked Vaughan if he had anything from the War Department and he said that General Ike wanted to promote one of the Missouri gang. I read the document and everybody objected. We had a lot of fun and I pinned the stars on him. He’s been walking on air ever since.”

Down at Key West, the atmosphere was even more relaxed. Dad handed out cards to visitors that read: DON’T GO AWAY MAD . . . JUST GO AWAY. Ice water got poured on those who were unwary enough to lie on the beach with their eyes closed. Announcing a fishing expedition with Admiral Leahy, Dad said he was going along as the Admiral’s aide. “You know how these admirals are,” he said, “they get so they can’t do anything without an aide, even bait a hook.”

Dad never liked to fish. Mother was the fisherman in the family. He went along just to be companionable. He was not a good fisherman, and he seldom caught more than one fish. Often he caught none. But one day off Bermuda he had a moment of glory. The President and his aides were using several thousand dollars’ worth of equipment supplied to them by friends on the island. They were catching nothing with their high-powered reels and poles. Dad became impatient and announced he was going to show everyone how they caught fish in Missouri. He baited a hook at the end of a line that he was holding in his hand and dropped it over the side. Like Babe Ruth when he pointed to the fence, he made good. In less than a minute, he had landed the biggest fish of the day.

At the White House, Dad superintended a running battle between Alonzo Fields, the head butler, and John Pye, who used to prepare lunches for some of the staff in the executive wing. Charlie Ross, Bill Hassett, Matt Connelly, General Vaughan, and others dined there, largely because it was convenient and quick. Pye never ceased trying to persuade Dad to join them, and when he yielded, Pye strutted around the White House, about ten feet tall. Fields, of course, would be preparing to serve lunch in the main house, so Dad would have Matt Connelly call and ask if it was all right if the President ate in Pye’s dining room. The conversation would then go something like this:

“Is Dr. Graham nearby?”

“Oh yes, he’s right here on duty.”

“Then I guess it would be safe for the President to take a chance. But if he wants good food - and safety - he ought to come over here.”

Pye, of course, would be vastly indignant and swear by all the angels in heaven that his food was untainted and just as good as the food Fields was serving. Sometimes Reathel Odum, Mother’s secretary, and I would join the staff in Pye’s dining room and then Fields would grow indignant and condemn Pye as an interloper who was taking his customers away. One day my low resistance to germs supplied Fields with unique ammunition. Pye baked a cake for me, and it was a very good cake. I ate a lot of it. A few hours later, I came down with the flu and was flat on my back for several days. Fields told everyone he met that Pye had poisoned me. Actually he and Pye were good friends, and the barrage of insults they exchanged was part of the usual kidding atmosphere around the Truman White House.

The modern presidency is such a demanding, enervating job that it is absolutely necessary for the President to have periods, however brief, for complete escape from the pressures of the office. Along with Key West, Dad and Mother sometimes used a retreat which President Roosevelt had created on the site of a former Civilian Conservation Corps camp in the Catoctin Mountains about sixty-five miles from Washington, near Thurmont, Maryland. FDR had called the camp Shangri-la, and Dad let the name stand. Later, President Eisenhower changed it to Camp David.

The main building was a nine-room, one-story lodge, paneled inside in natural oak. There was a floor-to-ceiling stone fireplace in the living room, and each of the four bedrooms had smaller fireplaces. The extra warmth was badly needed. Deep in the woods, Shangri-la was damp and cold most of the time. I thought it was a terrible place and went there as little as possible.

Earlier in 1946, before he found Key West, Dad had tried to arrange a cruise aboard the
Williamsburg
along the Maine coast. On August 22, 1946, he told his mother why he gave it up: “The Maine coast cruise ended in a blowup. Everybody and his brother whom I didn’t want to see tried by every hook or crook to rope me into letting him come aboard or having me be seen with him. So I just cancelled the trip.”

Dad had solved the problem, then, by sailing to Woodrow Wilson’s favorite retreat, Bermuda. Dad had a pleasant time - he called the island a paradise - but he decided he did not like to be so far away from the White House, without adequate communications. He told his mother: “We’ll be here for a week and then go back to the White House and
stay
there from now until the end of the term. It is the only place I should be. It took me a long time to find it out. But it is the fact.”

Another reason why he decided the
Williamsburg
was not the answer to his vacation problems was described in the following letter to his mother:

After that experience on the high seas, Dad used the
Williamsburg
only for weekend getaways, on the calmer waters of the Potomac or Chesapeake Bay. Dad followed a policy of working a seventeen or eighteen-hour day in the White House for five or six days, and then taking a complete break and sleeping most of the time. He was particularly fond of doing this aboard the
Williamsburg,
and his letters to me and to his mother and sister are studded with remarks about the yacht which ended with “I expect to do nothing but sleep,” or “I hope I can get some sleep.” While I have said Dad’s health was good, it was not perfect. Moreover, he had a tendency to ignore his illnesses until they either went away or floored him. For instance, on July 16, 1946, he wrote to his mother: “Early last week after our trip to Shangri-la I cultivated a sore throat and an infected ear but both are all right now. That’s the first time I ever had a bad ear. But couldn’t let up. Things had to go on as usual or they’d have said I was physically incompetent. No one ever knew the difference.”

From this point of view, Dr. Graham was the perfect physician for Dad. He had a lot of common sense and was not an alarmist. But he could also be very firm about taking a vacation or doing something about a cold or sore throat. Firmness helps when you are dealing with someone as stubborn as Harry S. Truman. Dad had always admired and respected Dr. Graham’s father, and this personal link added a certain indefinable something to his son’s authority.

Dad’s thirst for good music sometimes drew him out of the White House in the evening. In the summer, he often drove down to Watergate to listen to the outdoor concerts there. He would arrive late and sit in his car on a road above the amphitheater, and then send me the concert program with comments on the performances.

Occasionally, he was not above using his presidential power to get the music he wanted. One night he went to an indoor concert to hear Oscar Straus and his orchestra. Pictures were taken before the concert started. At intermission, Dad sent Secret Service man Jim Rowley around with a request for the “Blue Danube” waltz. Straus, who was a crotchety old character, told Jim he couldn’t play it because the orchestra hadn’t rehearsed it.

“I told Jim to tell him all right, but we’d have the pictures we’d made before his appearance torn up,” Dad told us in a letter. “He played the waltz and needed no rehearsal!”

In the fall of 1946, Dad revived the regular White House social program. In one sense, he hated to do it. It put additional strain on him, and he already had too much to do. It also put a tremendous strain on Mother, since she had to superintend the preparations. She had plenty of help, of course, but she still felt responsible. Moreover, with sixty-two heads of diplomatic missions and their wives, it was necessary to divide the traditional diplomatic dinner in two. Here is the schedule for our first full winter in Washington.

From another point of view, Dad liked these dinners because the traditional ceremony was a dramatic statement of the power and prestige of the presidency. With his enormous respect for the great office, he was always eager to enhance it, no matter how much of a drain the effort made on his energies. The big moment at these affairs was the “Little Procession.” It is a really splendid ceremony. The members of the Cabinet and their wives would meet in Dad’s study. At 8:45, four husky young men, one sailor, one soldier, one airman, and one marine, commanded by an officer, would arrive and request permission to take the colors. Dad would grant the permission, and the color guard in precise military formation would pick up the American flag and the President’s flag and march to the head of the stairs, practically banging their feet through the old White House floorboards.

Meanwhile, downstairs, the diplomats were arriving, their full evening dress ablaze with decorations. The two color bearers would station themselves at the door to the Blue Room. Precisely on the stroke of nine, Dad and Mother would lead the Cabinet members and their wives in order of precedence down the stairs and into the Blue Room where they received the diplomats beneath the big chandelier. The Cabinet members received the guests in the Red Room. Then everyone went to the State Dining Room where tea, coffee, sandwiches, and cake were served. Liquor was never served at diplomatic receptions in the White House. Meanwhile, in the East Room, the Marine Band would begin playing and would continue to make music for dancing until midnight. Usually, a noted singer would also be on hand to perform. Commenting on the Cabinet dinner to his mother, Dad wrote, “It was a beautiful affair. It looked like the pictures in the books about the White House. . . . Everybody seemed to enjoy it and we got upstairs (a most important item) at 10:40.”

The signal that the reception was officially over was the departure of the color guard. When they carried the two flags back to Dad’s office, he and Mother usually beat a hasty retreat to the elevator and upstairs.

Because President Roosevelt had been confined to a wheelchair, the Little Procession had been abandoned during his three administrations. Old Washington hands were enormously pleased to see Dad restore it. Edith Helm, the social secretary, wrote in her memoirs: “The receptions, especially, of the Truman period marked the very peak of official entertaining in the old White House - and spectacular events they were.” That is the voice of authority and experience speaking. Mrs. Helm’s White House memories went back to Woodrow Wilson’s day.

Eventually, toward the end of the reception season, the down-to-earth Missouri side of Dad’s nature overcame his love of presidential panoply. In a letter to his mother on February 13, he wrote: “This is the first time I’ve been glad to have Lent come. I’m sick and tired of smirking at people I don’t like. So a rest will come in handy.”

Mother felt pretty much the same way. Toward the close of the social season, she wrote to me: “These two weeks are really going to be a handshaking two weeks - conservative estimate forty-one hundred - I’ll be plenty glad when February 19th arrives!”

Those words remind me of a lesson I learned in this, my first social season in the White House. No rings. At one of my first receptions, I stood in line shaking hand after hand and suddenly felt a vague pain. I looked down and saw that my ring had been pressed into my flesh.

Even though he was surrounded by aides, servants, and Secret Service men, Dad went into his usual decline when Mother and I left him to spend the summer in Independence. I scarcely reached home when he was writing: “Your Pop has missed you and your Mamma very much.” When I failed to write regularly, as usual, I got queries such as, “Is your arm paralyzed?” The next time around, he would try to lure me to the writing table with sentiment. For example: