Kati Marton (16 page)

Truman had a great deal to prove in assuming FDR’s mantle; his wife also faced a great burden. The day the country bade farewell to its most public first lady, it welcomed one of its most private. Bess had little love for the White House and hated what she called “the rigmarole” of official duties. No first lady today could get away with what Bess did: her long absences in Missouri, her snubbing of the press, her lack of support
of “good causes.” As first lady, Bess was Eleanor’s opposite. She despised being in the public eye. Harry was her business, history was her enemy.

She was terrified of the spotlight. Aboard FDR’s special funeral train from Hyde Park to Washington, Frances Perkins caught the insecurity Bess generally masked with gruffness. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Bess confessed. “I don’t know how I’m going to handle my part of it. It’s bad enough for Harry, but what am I going to do? I’m not used to this awful public life.” In a voice Perkins described as “plaintive and emotional,” Bess asked if she would have to hold regular press conferences the way Mrs. Roosevelt had. Eleanor was unique, Perkins told her. “I have nothing to say,” Bess said, “I don’t even think about public affairs.”

In fact, Bess thought a great deal about public affairs, but she was not going to share that with Perkins or anybody but her husband. She loved politics. “I’ve been in politics for twenty-five years,” she once proclaimed to a reporter. She had always been Harry’s full political partner and did not intend to change now. As for her husband, however his wife chose to play her new role suited him, just as long as Bess was close by. It was Bess who enabled Harry to write in his diary the day FDR died, “Went to bed, went to sleep, and did not worry any more.”

Harry Truman, who had spent his boyhood on a farm without running water, found the courage to spend billions of dollars to reconstruct ravaged Europe. He authorized the use of the atomic bomb against Japan—his most momentous decision. He established NATO and, with the famous Truman Doctrine, drew the line on Soviet aggression. He saved Berlin with the airlift and sent troops to South Korea in response to North Korea’s surprise attack in June 1950. He raced to ensure that the United States would be the first nation to recognize the new State of Israel, and laid the foundations for American foreign policy for the half century that would follow. Truman transmitted a contagious vitality to the American people. In the French phrase, he was “comfortable in his skin.” Bess, “the only person in the world whose approval and good opinion” he needed, had much to do with that.

Her views on marriage and on the role of political wives were far from her predecessor’s. “A woman’s place in public,” Bess declared, “is to sit beside her husband and be silent and be sure her hat is on straight.”
As freshly demobilized G.I.’s reclaimed places filled by women during the war, Bess’s reticence meshed with the times. It was a time when ladies wore white gloves and gentlemen tipped their hats when they passed them. Bess’s
ordinariness
reassured the country that normalcy had returned. She drove the American dream car—a Chevrolet—around Washington and shopped like any suburban matron at Woodward and Lothrop’s department store.

The Roosevelts played the part of a close couple in public and lived something different in private. By contrast, the Trumans kept a low public profile and were intensely connected in private. As with most good marriages, they essentially agreed on the rules governing their partnership. Both were raised to believe it was a man’s role to provide for his wife and family. The wife was there to stand beside him, support him, never upstage him, never embarrass him, never get in front of him. The Trumans projected the image of a secure, loving, but undemonstrative couple to the country. It was the way post–World War II Americans searching for normalcy wished to be.

They met when he was six and she was five. He fell in love and stayed in love. Years later, Harry still saw in the dowdy matron a young girl who could beat any boy in Independence, Missouri, in tennis and outrun most of them around the baseball diamond. In his own mind, he was still the boy who was too nearsighted to play ball and spent much of his time pushing a plow or reading great tomes of history. She was all Harry ever wanted. No other woman would interest him, which may make him unique in the annals of politics. His voluminous letters provide a moving record of his love for his wife.

Truman never went to college—there wasn’t enough money and his family could not spare him from the farm. But unlike Richard Nixon, another twentieth-century president from humble beginnings, Harry was not grudging or angry. He was determined, and determined to win Bess. She was a town girl, from a place where everybody knew who their neighbors were and what they were up to. In the Independence social hierarchy, the Wallaces were near the top. Daughter of a “good” family, Bess lived in a big house and was courted by the “right” suitors. Decades later, their daughter, Margaret, found among her mother’s effects letters from other suitors. Harry’s character, not his promise of escape and
adventure, won Bess, who waited for him to return from the Great War to marry him at the alarmingly old-maidish age of thirty-four.

The power balance between Bess and Harry was made possible in part by Elizabeth Wallace Truman’s advantage of birth and social position. As he rose steadily—from farmer to haberdasher, army captain to judge, United States senator to vice president and finally president—Bess remained who she had always been, unimpressed and unintimidated by her husband. She was already who she wanted to be. She hoped only to end her days in the same white clapboard house on Independence’s leafy North Delaware Street where she was born. Unlike in most political marriages, Bess was the one who did most of the leave-taking, while Harry suffered and missed her. “It was quite a wrench to see you go away,” Truman wrote Bess during the summer of 1941, when he was a senator. “I watched the train pull out as I walked up the platform and I felt most decidedly lonesome.” It was a familiar feeling for Truman.

Though Bess usually got her way, Margaret Truman remembered that her mother made her father happy. The undemonstrative, steady Bess played the stabilizing, maternal role for both husband and daughter. “What she could say with a look! Make you feel so small. But they were well matched,” Margaret observed fifty years later. “They had the same upbringing, they came from the same region. They both went through hard times. Mom’s father killed himself …. They were both stubborn and had definite ideas about right and wrong. And neither of them had social aspirations.” They also agreed on a wife’s proper role and appearance. Harry liked to point out with pride that his wife—5 feet 4 inches tall and 140 pounds—“Looks just like a woman ought to look who’s been happily married for a quarter of a century.”

To many outsiders, Bess seemed to take her husband entirely for granted. She frequently took off for six weeks at a time to spend time in Independence with her mother and her bridge club. Bess never aspired to live in the White House, and she hated it. It seemed to her that she was giving up more than she was getting. She was forced to sit in the back of a big black limousine, while pesky “news hens” claimed the right to know what she was up to. Most of all, she feared that the presidency would diminish the only role she cared about, being Harry’s wife.

In the White House, they were no longer able to share politics the
way they had previously. Over her husband’s entire political life, Bess had played the role of his first sounding board. She had enjoyed ten years in the clubby world of the Senate. She had been his political partner, had even worked in his office during part of his term. When he was in the Senate, she had urged him to undertake the investigation of defense contracts that led to the Truman Committee. His effort saved the taxpayers millions of dollars and gave him a national profile. Senator Truman always brought home a stuffed briefcase that the two of them would tackle together after clearing the dinner table. But in the White House, an army of aides, agents, reporters and servants formed a wedge between Bess and Harry. Bess felt superfluous.

As her husband agonized about dropping the atomic bombs on Japan, his wife, who could be selfish and singularly unhelpful, smoldered at being a spectator rather than a participant in his new life. Unlike Harry, who frequently poured his heart out or vented his anger in letters, his wife’s way had always been to disengage and leave him miserably alone. “I was ever so lonesome when you all left,” Harry wrote Bess on December 21, 1946, upon her departure for Christmas with her mother in Independence. The refrain was their theme song. Was this her way of keeping the upper hand she had always had in the relationship?

How much his wife’s attitude had to do with Truman’s essential humility, how much their different social status, is a matter of conjecture. What is undeniable is that Harry had a partner who treated him the same way at the end of their life as at the beginning. Truman took the presidency, but never himself, seriously. Bess always saw Harry as a man, not as a position. She never gave him what he called the “bump of ego” that so many politicians get from those who shelter them from reality. When, as a result of a snowstorm, Harry arrived late for Christmas in Independence, his irate wife greeted him with “I guess you couldn’t think of any more reasons to stay away. As far as I’m concerned, you might as well have stayed in Washington.” Back in the White House, Harry wrote a letter that surely has no equal for humility and misery from a sitting president. “You can never appreciate what it means to come home as I did the other evening after doing at least one hundred things I didn’t want to do and have the only person in the world whose approval and good opinion I value look at me like I’m something the cat dragged in …. I wonder why we are made so that what we really think and feel we cover up?” he asked plaintively.

Harry and “the Boss” at home, April 15, 1942. What is remarkable about this picture, staged to boost Senator Truman’s chances for the vice presidential nomination, is the state of the kitchen, utterly ordinary and even sloppy.

If Harry impressed his countrymen as salt of the earth, Bess helped to keep him that way. A steadying presence amid the turbulence, Bess embodied their remarkable shared journey and anchored him to the values they shared growing up. On their wedding anniversary on June 28, 1948, he wrote Bess, “Twenty-nine years! It seems like twenty-nine days. Detroit, Port Huron, a farm sale, the Blackstone Hotel, a shirt store, County Judge, a defeat. Margie, Automobile Club membership drive, Presiding Judge, Senator, V.P. and now!” But they were not together that day, and he needed her. When she wasn’t around, Harry was apt to drink too much and his temper would flare. Who but a wife can tell a president to take a deep breath and count to ten? With Truman, the temper often took epistolary form. In a famous incident, he sent a scalding note to
Washington Post
music critic Paul Hume for an unflattering review of a concert performance by Margaret, who had embarked on a singing career. The outraged father wrote: “I have just read your lousy review. You sound like a frustrated man that never made a success, an eight ulcer
man on a four ulcer job, and all four ulcers working. I have never met you but if I do you’ll need a new nose and plenty of beefsteak and perhaps a new supporter below ….” When Bess saw the letter in the
Washington Post,
she erupted at her husband. “I don’t think I ever saw her so angry,” Truman recalled.

And then she would take off again. “He was very lonely in the White House,” Secret Service agent (and future chief usher) Rex Scouten remembered, “with nothing much to do. We were an outlet for him. On his daily walks he enjoyed the talking as much as the walking. On weekends we’d drive out to General Marshall’s place in Leesburg to get away from that big, empty house.” During her many absences, a letter from Bess would immediately alter the day’s mood for the president. Clark Clifford recalled, “Once he went to the mail room after a few days without a letter from Bess and announced, ‘If you don’t get me a letter from Mrs. Truman I’m gonna fire all of you!’”

Holidays without Bess could be particularly lonely for him. One New Year’s Eve, it occurred to Clifford that the president, alone again, may have had no plans. Clifford asked his boss to join him and his wife, Marny, at a black-tie dinner dance at the home of Washington socialite Mrs. Dwight Davis. Clifford was surprised by how quickly the president accepted. In keeping with the strict protocol of the times regarding presidential appearances, the party was changed from black to white tie. “The president had a spectacular time,” Clifford said. “He drank bourbon and branch water and stayed late into the night.” It is hard to imagine Truman having such a carefree time in the company of his wife.

Truman enjoyed the role of lifelong suitor. “You know there is no busier person than your old man,” he wrote to his wife in July 1946, “but he’s never too busy or too rushed to let his lady love, the only one he ever had, hear from him every day no matter what portends.” To her he could show a sentimental side few others saw. “You are still on the pedestal where I placed you that day in Sunday school in 1890. What an old fool I am.” He also felt he owed Bess his political success. “Suppose Miss Lizzie [Harry’s nickname for Bess] had gone off with Mr. Young, Julian Harvey or Harris,” Truman wrote a cousin from the White House, listing some of Bess’s suitors from their school days, “what would have been the result? For Harry I mean. He probably would have been either a
prominent farmer in Jackson County or a Major General in the regular army ….” He wrote Bess with the same ardor in his sixties as in his twenties. “I’m happier when I can see you—even when you give me hell.” It is hard to avoid concluding that she took advantage of his need, sometimes giving too little back. But those were the roles they had chosen for themselves many years before. Both seemed comfortable playing them.