The Thirty-Second

With hardly a care on his mind, Harry Truman had left his spacious, picture-lined office in the Senate Office Building, walked over to visit Speaker Sam Rayburn in the Capitol. Others had already gathered in the Speaker's office: White House Assistant James M. Barnes and House Parliamentarian Lew Deschler. It was the kind of company Harry Truman liked. None of them was a policymaker from the high levels of the Roosevelt Administration. In his two and a half months as Vice President, Harry Truman had not been invited to sit in with the policymakers; he had continued to hobnob with his Congressional cronies. At the end of a working day, he liked especially to sit with Sam Rayburn's lively, politically wise group.

Sam Rayburn had just poured the Vice President a drink of bourbon and tap water when there was a call from the White House. Steve Early was on the wire. As he listened, Harry Truman's face turned pale. He left abruptly, saying not a word. But his sudden action spoke loudly enough. Every man in that room knew that Franklin Roosevelt's health had been swiftly declining. Said Sam Rayburn before the Vice President got to the door: "We'll all stand by you, Harry."

Harry Truman had been haunted for weeks by the prospect that he might one day soon be President. Only the day before, chatting with Senators and newsmen, he had said that he wished he could have remained just a Senator. "But they wanted me to be V.P.," he added ruefully.

For more than a month, he had had a secret service guard in case of the emergency that had now come. Speeding down Pennsylvania Avenue in a White House car, Harry Truman, hard-working product of small-town Missouri, had little time to think of the sudden turn of fate. He had dreaded the burden that might be laid on him. Now it was here.

At the White House, Steve Early took him to see Mrs. Roosevelt, and it was she who told him the solemn news.

First Steps. There was plenty to do, right away, and methodical Harry Truman went at it. He promptly: 1) summoned the Cabinet, and asked all its members to stay in office; 2) ordered no interruption in plans for the San Francisco conference. He also called Bess Wallace Truman, his wife.

Bess Truman, whom Harry had met in Sunday School at Independence, Mo. when he was seven and she six, and had married 28 years later, was at the Trumans' modest five-room apartment at 4701 Connecticut Avenue. When she heard what her husband had to tell her, she wept. A few minutes later, with the Trumans' daughter (and only child), 21-year-old Mary Margaret, she left by a rear door. A White House car was waiting.

By now the White House was in confusion. Cabinet members and heads of war agencies had arrived, grave and solemn-faced. Newsmen scurried about, buttonholing everyone; except for Steve Early, the White House secretariat had collapsed with grief. Shortly before 7 p.m. the Trumans, the Cabinet members and other bigwigs gathered in the green-walled Cabinet Room. Harry Truman, not quite at ease, sat down nervously in a brown leather chair. When Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone strode in, Harry Truman rose, clasped a Bible between his hands, stood stiffly underneath Seymour Thomas' portrait of Woodrow Wilson. The clock on the mantel stood at 7:08. It took just one minute for the oath to be administered, and Harry Truman, 60, the neat, slim, spectacled man from Missouri, became the 32nd man to be President of the U.S./- The ceremony over, he lifted the Bible to his lips.

First News. As the news of Harry Truman's first few hours as President came over the newswires and radio, the U.S. people, still thunderstruck by the massive fact of Franklin Roosevelt's death, took some reassurance in the firm way in which their new President had grasped the reins. They had further cause for reassurance the next day.

It was a busy day. Never a man to lie late abed, the new President was up at 6:30, breakfasted in his apartment with his old friend Hugh Fulton, the ex-Wall Street lawyer who had been counsel, investigator and workhorse for the Truman (now Mead) investigating committee (see below). At 9, President Truman was ready to go to the White House.

Getting into a White House Cadillac, he spied Associated Pressman Ernest B. Vaccaro, who had been assigned to watch the Truman apartment. "C'mon in, Tony," said the President. Tony hopped into the Presidential car. Driving down Connecticut Avenue, President Truman made it clear that he had no illusions about the immense difficulty of his job or about the greatness of the leader he followed. He was frightened, but he was also determined. "There have been few men in all history the equal of the man into whose shoes I am stepping. I pray God I can measure up to the task."

First Deeds. Then he plunged into work. The great mahogany desk in the oval study had been cleared of all of Franklin Roosevelt's crowding knickknacks. On it lay only a Bible, a thesaurus, and a leather-bound pictorial history of the U.S. In rapid order, President Truman had a 45-minute conference with Secretary of State Stettinius, then a 48-minute session with the war leaders: Generals Marshall, Vandegrift and the Air Forces' Barney M. Giles (subbing for "Hap" Arnold); Admiral King; Secretaries Stimson and Forrestal. At noon he broke his first precedent: he went up to Capitol Hill for lunch.

This gave an inkling of the kind of administration President Truman will conduct. Administration leaders were present, also such Republicans as Senators Vandenberg, Austin and White, House Minority Leader Joe Martin, and such longtime Roosevelt opponents as Montana's Burton Wheeler and Wisconsin's Bob La Follette.

To his friends in Congress, President Truman said humbly and simply that he just wanted to assure them in person of his intense desire for cooperation. Temporarily, at least, the days of Congressional-Executive fights are gone. To Senators Tom Connally and Arthur Vandenberg, delegates to the San Francisco conference, Harry Truman said: "I expect you men to do a good job. I'm depending on you for that." (Same day it was announced that President Truman would not go to San Francisco, but would stay on the job in Washington.)

Lunch over, Harry Truman showed another side of his character. Spotting newsmen waiting outside Les Biffle's office, he shook hands all around and asked: "Did you ever have a bull or a load of hay fall on you? If you have, you know how I felt last night. I felt as if two planets and the whole constellation had fallen on me. I don't know if you boys pray, but if you do, please pray God to help me carry this load."

Citizen-Soldier. Upon what sort of man had this cosmic load fallen? After their first shocked incredulity at the news that Franklin Roosevelt was dead, almost the next words of most U.S. citizens were: "What's Harry Truman like?"

His career was shaped by: 1) two wars; 2) life inside the narrow horizons of a small farm; and 3) an early political career in a machine that knew little and cared less for broad-scale statesmanship. Son of a Missouri farmer, he went no farther than high school before setting to work. He was a timekeeper for the Santa Fe Railroad in Kansas City, wrapped papers for the Star, clerked in a bank. Then he went back to the farm until World War I swept him in. A longtime National Guardsman, he went to France a captain, won commendation for his coolness under fire (he once disciplined a panicked company in combat) and returned a major. From then on, Harry kept up his citizen-soldier interest in the Army, still holds a colonel's commission in the Army Reserve. He is the first ex-soldier to sit in the White House since Theodore Roosevelt.

In Kansas City after World War I, Harry Truman was a hero, but he soon sank back into anonymity. With a war comrade he opened a haberdashery: it failed. He went into politics, became a county judge (an administrative, not a judicial post). He probably would have remained a minor politician except for a lucky break given him by Kansas City's late Boss Pendergast. In 1934, as a fine magisterial whim, Boss Tom made unknown Harry Truman a U.S. Senator. With Pendergast's control of the state, it was as simple as that. In 1940, Senator Truman won reelection, solely because of a party split and not because of his own record in the Senate, which had been one of hard work, colorlessness, and fidelity to the New Deal. In his second term, the war came; what he did about it made him a national figure.

Senate Investigator. With a long memory for the waste of World War I, with a veteran's patriotism and a politician's shrewd eye for the main chance, Harry Truman organized the Senate investigating committee which soon bore his name. Overnight, he became the watchdog of the war effort, scourging shortages, prodding production, forcing the manufacturers, the Army & the Navy to toe the mark. By the summer of 1944, Harry Truman had shown that he was playing no political tricks with his committee. The record made him a Vice Presidential possibility.

How he got the nomination is political history known to every voter. Jimmy Byrnes did not get it because P.A.C. would not take him. Henry Wallace did not get it because Southern Democrats would not take him. Harry Truman got it because he was palatable to all.

Presidential Beliefs. What kind of President will Truman be? During the campaign, when the possibility of his becoming President was often discussed, some political pundits labeled him the "Democratic Coolidge." He will probably earn his own proper label in time. One thing can be said with certainty: he will be a great change from Franklin Roosevelt.

Harry Truman is a man of distinct limitations, especially in experience in high-level politics. He knows his limitations. He is frank with himself and his friends in visualizing himself as the ordinary, honest politician grown to stature through patience, hard work and luck. He believes in strict party responsibility, a politician's reward for work done, and complete loyalty to friends. (He never forsook Tom Pendergast, even after Boss Tom had gone to Leavenworth.) He is no theorist. In his Administration there are likely to be few innovations and little experimentation.

Some facts about him:

P: He has a settled conviction against personalized government, is unlikely ever to have to face the charge of "one-man government." His overtures to Congress are not mere gestures. He means them. And, at the moment, members of Congress, who generally like Harry Truman as a good fellow, and a good Senator, undoubtedly mean their pledges of support from both Republican and Democratic sides.

P: He hates the palace politics that sometimes marred the Roosevelt Administration. He has no use for political bickering and, so far as his friends know, has never played one man off against another. To Harry Truman, the complete politician, a promise is a promise, something to be kept.

P: He is a whole-souled Democrat, and there will be no flirting with Republicans or independents from minor parties when jobs arise. Jut-jawed Bob Hannegan, his longtime friend, will now have a firm hold on all patronage.

P: He will not disturb the present top team of military men which is running the war. Like many another member of Congress, he has a feeling of almost reverential respect for General Marshall.

P: Never an athlete, he is in top physical shape. He recently underwent a thorough clinical examination, passed all the tests. On doctor's orders he took up walking as exercise, sloughed off five pounds.

P: His knowledge of foreign affairs is limited. He did not go to Yalta, was never given a complete fill-in on that conference. He must rely for that on Jimmy Byrnes (who was not fully informed either) and perhaps on Harry Hopkins (who returned to the Mayo Clinic after Franklin Roosevelt's funeral). Yet, before his Administration was 48 hours old, Truman scored a major diplomatic coup in persuading an apparently willing Joseph Stalin, whom he has never met, to send Foreign Affairs Commissar Viacheslav Molotov to the San Francisco conference (see INTERNATIONAL).

P: His Senate voting record on foreign policy was consistent, never tinged with Midwestern isolationism. He is committed to carrying out the Roosevelt plan for world security, and in a speech last month in Chicago he said: "We must not wait for a perfect international plan. . . . We must act, and act promptly. ... As we united in victory, we must unite in peace." His friends predict that in international dealings (i.e., bases, air routes, etc.) he will be a shrewd bargainer, with U.S. interests firmly in mind.

P: Although, as a Senator, he voted almost 100% New Deal, he is regarded as "a little right of center."

With almost complete unanimity, Harry Truman's friends--in Washington and across the land--agreed last week that he "would not be a great President." By this they did not mean that he would not be a good President. But he would not be a bold, imaginative, daring leader, carrying the U.S. people through reforms and upheavals and crises and flights of idealism as Franklin Roosevelt did. A period of relaxed controls and consolidation seemed to be in the cards; the future would be entered in slower tempo.

By long tradition, Harry Truman was guaranteed a honeymoon of months, perhaps longer. Then he would be tested in the fire of criticism and controversy. But for the time being, the ranks were closed. The United States were still united--behind a new leader.

* Administering the oath, Chief Justice Stone called the President: Harry Shippe Truman. Replying, Truman answered: "I, Harry S. Truman. . . ." Although his middle name has for years been printed as "Shippe," his middle initial "S" actually stands for nothing. Explanation: his grandfathers were named Anderson Shippe Truman and Solomon Young; to offend neither, Harry's parents gave him the common initial only.

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