Truman (98 page)

Delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, on June 29, to a crowd of ten thousand people, it was the strongest statement on civil rights heard in Washington since the time of Lincoln, and the first speech ever by a President to the NAACP. Full civil rights and freedom must be obtained and guaranteed for all Americans, Truman said, with Walter White, head of the NAACP, standing beside him.

He called for state and federal action against lynching and the poll tax, an end to inequality in education, employment, the whole caste system based on race or color. That someone of his background from western Missouri could be standing at the shrine of the Great Emancipator saying such things was almost inconceivable. As he listened, Walter White thought of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. “I did not believe that Truman’s speech possessed the literary quality of Lincoln’s speech,” he later wrote, “but in some respects it had been a more courageous one in its specific condemnation of evils based upon race prejudice…and its call for immediate action against them.”

Late in 1946, at the urging of White and others, Truman had established his own blue-ribbon commission on civil rights, with Charles E. Wilson, the head of General Electric, as chairman. It was an unprecedented step and Truman, White was sure, had put his political fortunes on the line. “Almost without exception,” White wrote, “Mr. Truman’s political advisors from both South and North were certain that his authorization of inquiry into the explosive issue of civil rights was nothing short of political suicide…. Mr. Truman stood firm.” The report of the commission would not be ready until October.

Taking his seat again after the speech, Truman turned to White and said he meant “every word of it—and I’m going to prove that I do mean it.”

To his mother, Truman said it was a speech he wished he did not have to make. “But I believe what I say,” he told her, “and I’m hopeful we may implement it.”

He described for her the flowers in bloom at the White House, “down in the yard.” With so much wet weather, were Vivian’s sons able to get in the hay crop, he wanted to know.

He was thinking more than usual about times gone by. The morning of July 26, writing to Bess in Independence, he found himself reminiscing about Uncle Harrison and about Tasker Taylor, their high school classmate who had drowned in the Missouri River after graduation. July 26 had always been known to Missouri farmers as Turnip Day, the day to sow turnips, he told Bess. Once, in 1901, a particularly dry year, Uncle Harrison had walked into the seed store and declared he needed six bushels of turnip seed. Asked why so large an amount, Uncle Harrison said he understood turnips were 90 percent water and that maybe if he planted the whole farm in them the drought would break.

But he must not dwell on the past. “You see age is creeping up on me. Mamma is ninety-four and a half because she never lived in the past.”

An hour or so later, Mary Jane telephoned from Grandview to say Mamma had pneumonia and might not live through the day. Truman ordered his plane made ready, but there was a delay. He wanted to sign the National Security Act and name James Forrestal the new Secretary of Defense before Congress recessed. A few congressional signatures were still needed. At the airport, he held off departure, waiting beside the plane for nearly an hour until the bill was brought to him. Minutes later the plane was airborne.

Somewhere over Ohio, dozing on a cot in his stateroom, he dreamt Mamma came to him and said, “Goodbye, Harry. Be a good boy.” He later wrote, “When Dr. Graham came into my room on
The Sacred Cow,
I knew what he would say.”

She had died at 11:30 that morning. “Well, now she won’t have to suffer any more,” Truman said. For the rest of the flight he sat by the window looking down at the checkerboard landscape and saying nothing.

Martha Ellen Young Truman had been born in 1852, when Millard Fillmore was President, when Abraham Lincoln was still a circuit lawyer in Illinois, when her idolized Robert E. Lee was Superintendent at West Point, overseeing the education of young men from both North and South. She had seen wagon trains coming and going on the Santa Fe Trail. She had been through civil war, survived Order No. 11, survived grasshopper plagues, flood, drought, the failures and death of her husband, the Great Depression, eviction from her own home. She had lived to see the advent of the telephone, electric light, the automobile, the airplane, radio, movies, television, short skirts, world wars, and her adored eldest son sitting at his desk in the White House as President of the United States. As Margaret would write in memory of her “country grandmother” some years later, “Everything had changed around her, but Mamma Truman had never changed…. Her philosophy was simple. You knew right from wrong and you did right, and you always did your best. That’s all there was to it.”

The funeral at the house in Grandview was simple and private. She was buried on the hillside at the Forest Hill Cemetery, next to her husband.

A few days later in Washington Truman asked Charlie Ross to bring the White House press into the Oval Office.

“I couldn’t hold a press conference this week,” Truman began quietly when they were assembled, “but I wanted to say to you personally a thing or two that I couldn’t very well say any other way, so I asked Charlie to ask you to come in.

“I wanted to express to you all, and to your editors and publishers, appreciation for the kindness to me during the last week.

“I was particularly anxious to tell the photographers how nice they were to me, and to the family, and I didn’t know any other way to do it but just call you in and tell you.

“I had no news to give you, or anything else to say to you, except just that, and I felt like I owed it to you.

“You have been exceedingly nice to me all during the whole business, and I hope you believe it when I say to you that it is from the heart when I tell you that.”

To Margaret he wrote, “Someday you’ll be an orphan just as your dad is now.” Later, when she was on tour, he would tell her:

On August 24, Margaret sang at the Hollywood Bowl before nineteen thousand people. To the Los Angeles
Times
her performance was only “satisfactory,” but the audience brought her back for seven curtain calls. On October 17, she returned to Pittsburgh to make her first full-length concert appearance at the city’s immense old Syria Mosque auditorium, before a full house that included her mother, who was hearing her sing in public for the first time. Truman stayed away because he wanted Margaret to have all the attention.

Again her stage presence and rapport with the audience were remarkable for someone so young and inexperienced. The audience loved her. She had nine curtain calls, sang three encores. Everyone seemed to be pulling for her, even the ushers and the press, wrote the music editor of the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette,
Donald Steinfirst. “You felt it in the waves of kindly feelings directed to this girl, standing assuredly with complete poise over the footlights in the spotlight. You wanted to feel that this young girl, who gave up most of the pleasures of White House living, if any such there might be, for a career in music, would realize her life’s ambitions.”

She was wearing a full-length, off-the-shoulder gown of pink taffeta, her blond hair in soft curls, and she sang, as she had in Detroit and Los Angeles, as if she were enjoying every moment. But this time the critics were considerably less kind.

Others said she had launched her career too soon, before she was ready, just as her father had worried she might. The critic in the Pittsburgh
Press
thought her training “very faulty.”

“I called up Daddy after the concert, and he seemed to be satisfied,” she remembered. “I can’t say I was.”

The tour went on. She sang in Fort Worth, Amarillo, Oklahoma City, Shreveport, and Tulsa, and she did better. “Margaret seems to be making a hit wherever she goes,” Truman reported to Mary Jane. Fort Worth was a sellout. So was Amarillo. All the same, he wished she would come home and stay.

Sometimes, relaxing with friends, Truman liked to say that he and his small family might have been a hit as a vaudeville team. Margaret would sing, he would play the piano, and Bess would manage the act. He would then grin at Bess, while she responded with a skeptical look. It had become a family joke.

To those who knew Bess well the manager’s role was perfect casting, and greatly to her husband’s advantage. Margaret spoke of her mother as “the spark plug” of the family. Truman himself said many times he seldom made a decision without consulting “the Boss.”

She had no more interest than ever in the limelight of public life, no desire to play any part beyond that of wife and mother.

Old friends from Independence or members of the White House domestic staff who saw her on an almost daily basis would speak warmly of her kindness, her “rollicking sense of humor.” She would laugh so hard her whole body would shake, laugh, remembered one of the servants, Lillian Parks, “as if she had invented laughter.”

No First Lady in memory had been so attentive to the welfare of the servants, and particularly in the summer months, before the advent of air conditioning in the White House. “It’s too hot to work,” she would say. “If it wasn’t hot,” remembered Lillian Parks, “she’d say, ‘You’ve been working too long. Stop now.’ [She] was the kind of First Lady who hated fussiness, loved cleanliness and neatness and an all-things-put-away look, but who didn’t want her servants to keep working all the time and would order, yes
order,
them to rest.”

To nearly everyone she seemed “the perfect lady,” the phrase used so often to describe her mother. “She’s the only lady I know who writes a thank you note for a Christmas card, and she writes it in a beautiful hand,” a Kansas City friend would tell a reporter. Marquis Childs of the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
called her the perfect
Missouri
lady. Once, when Childs and his wife gave a party at their Washington home for a poet who was an old friend, they invited the Trumans. “Mrs. Truman came with great apologies for her husband…who just couldn’t possibly get away,” Childs remembered. “And the wife of the poet had too much libation, and had to be taken off somewhere, put to bed somewhere. But Mrs. Truman was very polite and never made any fuss of this at all. She was a
very proper
woman. I think her whole life was Harry Truman….”

Reathel Odum, her secretary, remembered Bess as “the white gloves type.” Serene, shy, and stubborn were other words used often to portray her.

California Congressman Richard Nixon and his wife, attending their first White House reception, were impressed by the way both the President and Mrs. Truman made them feel at home. “They both had the gift of being dignified without putting on airs,” Nixon wrote. “Press accounts habitually described Mrs. Truman as plain. What impressed us most was that she was genuine.”

The longer people knew her, the more they appreciated her quiet strength and quality. Among her greatest admirers were Robert A. Lovett and his wife. Lovett, who, at the end of June 1947 replaced Dean Acheson as Under Secretary of State, was a suave, urbane New York investment banker, a partner at Brown Brothers Harriman, and a Yale graduate like Harriman and Acheson. To Lovett there was no question about the importance of Bess Truman. She was “one of the finest women I ever saw in my life,” Lovett remembered. And, “of course,” she helped Truman “immeasurably”: “My wife and I absolutely loved her. She was simply superb….”

Clark Clifford would later describe her as “a pillar of strength to her husband” and credit her with “better insight than her husband into the quality and trustworthiness of people who had gathered around him….”

But if Truman relied on her, as he himself also attested, she clearly was extremely dependent on him. Years later, when asked by a friend what she considered the most memorable aspect of her life, Bess answered at once: “Harry and I have been sweethearts and married more than 40 years—and no matter where I was, when I put out my hand Harry’s was there to grasp it.”

Five foot four and stout, Bess Truman stood as straight as a drum major, head up, shoulders squared. She dressed simply and conservatively. There was nothing ever in any way mannered or pretentious about her. (Throughout her years in Washington, as Jonathan Daniels reported, she laughed at nothing so heartily as the sudden pretensions of some officials’ wives.) She was exactly as she had always been and saw no reason to change because she had become First Lady. Some guests at the White House found her so natural and unprepossessing they had to remind themselves to whom they were speaking.
Time
said somewhat condescendingly that with her neatly waved gray hair and unobtrusive clothes she would have blended perfectly with the crowd at an A&P.