Truman(25)

Whatever happened, he had plenty of time to recover, because between election day on November 5th, 1944 and inauguration day on January 20th, 1945, he had practically nothing to do. He saw Roosevelt only once. He did not even have a new house into which to move. There was then, as for nearly 30 years subsequently, no official vice-presidential residence. He just stayed in his old five-room apartment on Connecticut Avenue. He was vicariously victorious, highly likely to be President within a year or two, unbriefed but untroubled by any attempt to brief him, and probably less occupied than he had been at any time in the previous five years.

Roosevelt decided to have his fourth inauguration ceremony on the south porch of the White House rather than on Capitol Hill. The war provided the excuse. It was a bleak ceremony on a day of driving rain and sleet. Roosevelt had done it too often before to be much interested. He made a fairly perfunctory address to the 7,800, a high proportion from Missouri (one of his few signs of consideration for Truman) who were given the privilege of standing on a squelching lawn, and then quickly disappeared upstairs, leaving Mrs Roosevelt and the Trumans to receive these guests in their damp shoes and somewhat lowered spirits.

In spite of this inauspicious beginning, Truman rather enjoyed being Vice-President. He only held the job for eleven weeks and five days (both Tyler and Andrew Johnson had held it even more briefly), which hardly gave him time to become bored. Of these 82 days, Roosevelt spent only 30 in Washington. His absences did not of course mean that Truman took over the government of the United States. The power of executive decision remained wholly with the Cabinet officers and with the White House staff left in Washington, subject to such instructions as they received from the other members of the staff who were travelling with the President. But it at least meant that Truman, who had not been considered for inclusion in the Yalta party, could not feel resentment at not seeing Roosevelt, who was mostly 6,000 miles away. He got on with presiding over the Senate, cultivating his congressional relationships, and, rather surprisingly, being the most social Vice-President for many years. ‘For a while,’ Margaret Truman wrote, ‘scarcely a night went by without him and mother departing from our Connecticut Avenue apartment, looking tremendously regal in evening dress.’9

The main task, at once ironical and disparaging, which Roosevelt set him was that of getting Henry Wallace confirmed by the Senate as Jesse Jones’s replacement as Secretary of Commerce. He achieved it with great difficulty and at the price of Wallace losing a substantial part of the powers that Jones had exercised.

The main initiative that he took was to requisition a US Army bomber to attend Tom Pendergast’s funeral in Kansas City. Pendergast died on January 26th. He was long since out of gaol, but was without influence and left only $13,000. It was six days after the inauguration and Roosevelt had already departed for Yalta. So Truman had to make his own decision about both the funeral (which he would no doubt have done in any event) and the bomber (which alone made his attendance compatible with an important Philadelphia speaking engagement). He was much criticized, but his presence meant a great deal to the Pendergast family. He had no doubt that it was a proper discharge of an old debt of political friendship.

Roosevelt got back at the end of February. A week before Washington had been swept by a rumour that he had died at sea, but it was General ‘Pa’ Watson, his long-standing military aide, and not the President himself who had gone. March was a month of continuing allied military success, but also of gravely deteriorating relations with the Russians, with the exchange of messages of mounting complaint and acerbity between Stalin and Roosevelt. There were also several disagreeable edges to the relationship between the President and Congress. Truman had two meetings at the White House during the month, but it was only Congressional difficulties and not global problems which were even perfunctorily discussed. Truman was given no special account of the Yalta Conference. It became abundantly clear that the President had neither the energy nor the desire to bring a new face into the inner core of government.

At the end of March Roosevelt left for Warm Springs, Georgia. There, two weeks later, at the beginning of a sunny afternoon he had his massive stroke and was dead in a couple of hours. Truman received the news in Washington in the rain. After a desultory day presiding over a desultory session of the Senate he was having a restorative drink in Sam Rayburn’s office when he was hurriedly summoned to the White House. He made the journey only half fearing the worst. When he got there he was shown to Mrs Roosevelt’s upstairs study, where she was with her daughter and son-in-law and the White House press secretary. She told him what had happened. He was sworn in at 7.09 p.m. just over three hours after President Roosevelt had been pronounced dead. So, as the news rang around the world, there began the transition described at the beginning of this book.