Truman(20)

Only in rare cases did the committee seek retribution. Its aims were essentially that lessons should be learned for the future and that economy and honesty should be encouraged by the fear of exposure. No more than three or four people went to gaol as a result of its activities. But neither this continence nor the eschewal of deliberate publicity-seeking prevented the Committee, and particularly Truman himself, from gaining speedily in both the awareness and the esteem of the public.

As the 1944 election began to loom so thoughts turned to the composition of the Democratic ticket. The prospect of a fourth term for Roosevelt was much more easily accepted than had been the idea of a third term. The country was at war, as opposed to being buffeted by a European conflict, and once the 150-year-old convention of a maximum of eight years had been breached there was no great excitement in favour of erecting a new limit. Truman did not repeat his reluctance of 1939/40. At a 1944 Jackson Day (February 17th) dinner in Florida he came out firmly and early in favour of electing F.D.R. to see the war through.

There was much more doubt as to whether Henry Wallace should be asked to do it with him. And some of those who doubted began to think of Truman as a possible substitute. The first reference to the matter in his letters to his wife came as early as July 12th, 1943:

‘The Senator from Pennsylvania [Guffey] took me out into his beautiful back yard [garden in the capital] and very confidentially wanted to know what I thought of Henry Wallace. I told him that Henry is the best Secretary of Agriculture we ever did have. He laughed and said that is what he thinks. Then he wanted to know if I would help out the ticket of it became necessary by accepting the nomination for Vice-President. I told him in words of one syllable that I would not—that I had only recently become a Senator and that I wanted to work at it for about ten years.’13

There is no reason to doubt the genuineness of Truman’s reluctance at this stage. In fact it persisted and strengthened over the ensuing year. But this was the oddest possible way of putting it. At the time he had been a senator for eight and a half years, and on the day he was sworn in as vice-president he had been one for exactly ten years and seventeen days.





4

HEIR TO A DYING PRESIDENT


‘The truth is that … the last year and a half of the President’s life was a time when his superb machine … was slowly but inexorably running down, because of the long and taxing use that he had made of it.’1 So in 1981 wrote Joseph Alsop in his penetrating and succinct centenary evocation of Franklin Roosevelt. Eighteen months back from April 12th, 1945 takes us to October 12th, 1943, a few weeks after the second Quebec meeting between Churchill and the President, a few weeks before the Teheran Conference, the first meeting of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill.

If, as I believe it to be, Alsop’s judgment is true, it means that during the whole period when Roosevelt was contemplating a fourth term, deciding upon it, influencing the choice of a vice-presidential running-mate, campaigning for re-election, winning, being re-inaugurated, seeing, if he happened to look that way, his third vice-president in operation, he had no surplus energy and probably knew, if he cared to contemplate it, which he mostly did not, that he had not long to live.

There were a substantial number of other people who knew this too, including the possible vice-presidential nominees and the would-be king makers in the Democratic Party organization. Apart from favourite sons, of whom there were many, there were at least eight, who, with varying degrees of seriousness were at one time or another discussed as possible vice-presidents by Roosevelt himself. There was obviously Wallace, the incumbent. There was Byrnes, ex-senator from South Carolina, then (very briefly) associate justice of the Supreme Court before becoming Director of the Office of War Mobilisation and, as some dubbed him, not to his displeasure, ‘assistant President’ and future Secretary of State under Truman. There was Barkley, majority leader in the Senate; and there was Rayburn, Speaker of the House. There were Winant, ambassador to London and ex-Governor (Republican) of New Hampshire, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and Henry Kaiser, the man who, it was currently thought, could build anything from ships to motor cars to aircraft, quick, plentiful and cheap. And there was Truman.

Winant, Douglas and Kaiser in vice-presidential terms, were little more than figments over whom Roosevelt allowed his imagination to flicker. Whether or not any of them wanted the job is therefore not known; they may not even have posed the question to themselves. All the others except for Truman did, stimulated or at least undisturbed by the prospect of the succession and therefore by the unusually ambiguous nature of the nomination they were seeking.1 Truman, by no means wholly out of modesty, was unattracted either way. So far as the vice-presidency per se was concerned he stressed the obscurity in which nearly every vice-president in the history of the Republic had lived and died. He liked asking those who pressed him if they could remember who was vice-president to Fillmore or Polk or some other nineteenth-century president who had survived his term, and even on one occasion over-reached himself by asking it in relation to McKinley and still getting a negative response.