Truman(23)

So the extraordinary story unrolled itself. But this was not the limit of the opéra bouffe. There was a Byrnes sub-plot. That adroit and ambitious gentleman from South Carolina was not going to give up merely because Hannegan and Walker told him that the President had switched to Truman. He had the good sense to realize that the President’s ‘switch’ might not be as firm as these two wished it to be. He insisted on telephoning Roosevelt at Hyde Park. The call was well worth the toll. When asked why he was reported as having turned against him and as favouring Truman and/or Douglas, Byrnes recorded the President as saying: ‘Jimmy, that is all wrong. That is not what I told them. It is what they told me … They asked if I would object to Truman and Douglas and I said no. That is different from using the word “prefer”.’ He ended by ‘virtually urging Byrnes to run’.6

Byrnes responded to these ambiguities with boldness and skill. At eight o’clock the next morning (Friday, July 14th) he telephoned Truman in Independence, said that he was still the President’s choice and asked Truman to make the nominating speech for him at the Convention. As no one seemed to have bothered to tell Truman about the July nth dinner, as Truman was in any event a reluctant candidate, and as at this stage he was fond of Byrnes, he readily agreed. Byrnes caught him at a characteristic moment: he was packing up the family car in order to drive to Chicago with his wife and daughter. Before he could complete the job he was summoned back into the house to take another call, this time from Alben Barkley, with the same request on his own behalf. He was bespoken to Byrnes, Truman said. And in this conviction he drove the 350 miles.

When he got to Chicago he encountered a horrified Hannegan and Pauley, and was then forced to a gradual realization that just as the political establishment of the Democratic Party would not have Wallace, so the labour union   leadership, Sidney Hillman, Whitney, Murray, Green, with whom Truman ate a lot of break-fasts, would not have Byrnes. Both groups would have him. And there was mounting evidence too that Byrnes was misrepresenting his position with Roosevelt. Eventually on the Wednesday (July 19th) Truman confronted Byrnes and made him try to corner the President in his own presence. Byrnes failed. Roosevelt would not return his call. This made Truman disengage and Byrnes withdraw without his name being placed before the delegates. He had no strength on his own.

Truman still needed to be persuaded that he himself should be a candidate. This second stage of persuasion was accomplished by the now famous Hannegan-Roosevelt telephone conversation in Truman’s presence: ‘He’s the contrariest Missouri Mule I’ve ever dealt with’ was Hannegan’s opening line: ‘Tell him that if he wants to break up the Democratic Party in the middle of the war, that is his responsibility’ was Roosevelt’s response. Obviously there was a substantial element of contrived theatre about it; but it at least showed that Hannegan’s lines of communication with Roosevelt were at this stage better than Byrnes’s. Obviously, too, Truman was already prepared to move when it took place. The words attributed to him by his daughter after Roosevelt clicked his telephone down are both plausible and reasonable: ‘Well, if that’s the situation, I’ll have to say yes. But why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place?’7

Apart from anything else, Wallace, who unlike Byrnes had real strength without official backing, was well on the way to stampeding the convention. He had the galleries packed although Mayor Kelly was not for him; but he was not for Truman either. He wanted a deadlock, with Senator Lucas coming through as a compromise. Wallace had acquired an organist who would play nothing but ‘Iowa, that’s where the tall corn grows,’ to such an extent that Pauley had to threaten to chop the wires unless the tune were changed. Most important he had genuine enthusiasm and the support of a large number of delegates. Pauley and Hannegan decided that they could not risk nominations and balloting that (Thursday) night, and managed to get a fire hazard declared in the overcrowded hall and the Convention adjourned until the next day.

The Friday session did not begin well. For some inexplicable reason Truman, once persuaded of his duty, had decided that he must get his Missouri colleague, Bennett Clark, to nominate him. Clark was neither his friend nor his ally, and distinctly shop-soiled by this stage: he lost his Senate primary in that same year. Furthermore he was extremely difficult to find. Truman himself eventually ran him to ground, asleep and rather the worse for wear in a hotel other than the one in which he was supposed to be staying.

Not surprisingly in these circumstances Clark made a limp nominating address. Wallace, by contrast, was brilliantly proposed and enthusiastically carried along by five supporting speeches. On the first ballot he did extremely well. He was ahead throughout and finished with 4191/2 votes to Truman’s 3191/2. Bankhead had 98, Lucas 61, and Barkley 491/2. Eleven favourite sons polled handfuls of votes.