Truman(22)

‘… because I know that many rumours accompany annual [sic] conventions, I am wholly willing to give you my own personal thought in regard to the selection of a candidate for Vice-President … The easiest way of putting it is this: I have been associated with Henry Wallace during his past four years as Vice-President, for eight years earlier while he was Secretary of Agriculture, and well before that. I like him and I respect him, and he is my personal friend. For these reasons, I personally would vote for his renomination if I was a delegate to the Convention.

At the same time I do not wish to appear in any way as dictating to the Convention. Obviously the Convention must do the deciding. And it should—and I am sure it will—give great consideration of the pros and cons of its choice.

Very sincerely yours,

Franklin D. Roosevelt.’5

Three days earlier, in the White House, Roosevelt had caused Ed Flynn, the boss of the Bronx and his closest persistent friend and ally amongst the ‘pros’ to summon the core of the Democratic Party organization to dinner. The main participants, apart from Flynn, were Hannegan, the National Chairman and Truman’s St Louis ally of 1940, who had taken on this post when Truman himself refused it at the end of 1943, Edwin Pauley, a Los Angeles oil man who was National Treasurer and powerful at this stage, Frank Walker, the Postmaster-General, Ed Kelly, Mayor of Chicago, and George Allen, the Secretary of the Democratic National Committee.

They were all against Wallace, not only as a vote loser (although Flynn had previously reported to Roosevelt, surely with a touch of hyperbole, that his presence on the ticket would cost the party New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New Jersey and California) but also because they were terrified of the prospect of having him as President of the United States. Roosevelt was well informed of their opposition beforehand. If he had really wanted Wallace, he would have asked a different group to dinner. Wallace’s name was hardly seriously discussed.

Others were fairly quickly discarded: Rayburn with regret because he could not carry the Texas delegation, and Barkley nominally on grounds of age (which did not prevent his being elected four years later) but perhaps more because he and Roosevelt had fallen out over the President’s veto of a tax bill. Winant and Kaiser did not get off the ground. Nor did Douglas, except that Roosevelt chose to keep him in play. That left Byrnes and Truman. The President had undoubtedly been recently and actively encouraging Byrnes, while there is no evidence that he had made any sort of direct approach to Truman. Nonetheless he easily accepted the ditching of Byrnes, on the grounds that he was too Southern and that being a renegade Catholic gave him the worst of two religious constituencies.2

That left Truman. Hannegan and Pauley were determinedly for him. The others with the possible exception of Kelly of Chicago, who wanted to keep Senator Lucas of Illinois in with a chance, were somewhere between content and enthusiastic. Truman just dropped into the slot,’ Flynn wrote. Roosevelt spoke appreciatively of him on a number of grounds, said that he did not know him very well (which was indeed the truth), in particular did not know his age (just 60), but allowed those present who must have known it perfectly well to remain silent while not causing it to be looked up, and is variously reported as having summed up by saying ‘Let’s make it Truman’ (Jonathan Daniels) and ‘Everybody seems to want Truman’ (James Macgregor Burns).

They filed out in satisfaction. Then they remembered Roosevelt’s capacity for changing his mind, and Hannegan was sent back to try to get something in writing. Roosevelt does not appear to have resented this slightly suspicious precaution, and there is a unanimity of testimony that Hannegan did get something. But there is no unanimity about what he got. Truman believed that he got a pencilled note on the back of an envelope saying ‘Bob, I think Truman is the right man, F.D.R.,’ and that this is what he (Truman) was shown in Chicago. No trace of that note remains. The alternative view is that he got the first version of a famous letter, a copy of which is in the Roosevelt archives:

‘Dear Bob:

You have written me about Harry Truman and Bill Douglas.3 I should of course be very glad to run with either of them and believe that either one of them would bring real strength to the ticket.

Always sincerely,

Franklin D. Roosevelt.’

The complications do not however end here. First Grace Tully, the President’s principal secretary of this time, stated in her memoir of F.D.R. that the letter she typed in Washington put Douglas’s name first and the order was only reversed in a second version, written under pressure from Hannegan and Pauley when they again met the President in his train in the Chicago yards on Saturday, July 15th. Again there is no trace of such a first version, and Hannegan specifically denied its existence a few weeks before his death in 1949. But Miss Tully had no motive for making it up. Second, the letter in the archives is dated July 19th, when the President was already on the West Coast, although it was certainly in Hannegan’s hands by July 15th, if not on July 11th.