the center of the political stage whileremaining more or less anonymous to everyone but a circle of chosen friends. Harry Truman, after his tremendous achievements as head of the Truman Committee, which saved billions of dollars by uncovering waste, mismanagement, and corruption on the home front during World War II, was guaranteed his Senate seat for life. Why give it up for something as clouded with portents as vice president to a dying President?
There was another, deeper reason why my mother did not want to become First Lady. She saw the ferocious press scrutiny Eleanor Roosevelt received and dreaded that similar treatment would exhume a family tragedy which would cause her and her brothers and above all her mother a great deal of pain. When Bess was eighteen, her handsome father shot himself in the bathroom of their Independence home. Unable to support his wife in the style she had acquired as the daughter of the wealthiest man in town, David Willock Wallace had sunk into depression and finally into suicide.
Bess’s mother never recovered from that trauma. Madge Wallace became a recluse for the rest of her long life—and mostly her daughter’s responsibility. The thought of some Hearst papers “sob sister” spreading this story across the pages of their seven-million-copy Sunday supplement,
The American Weekly
, forerunner of today’s supermarket tabloids, or the front pages of all the papers in their huge chain, horrified my mother. But she found herself outflanked and overruled in her struggle to persuade my father to reject the vice presidency. Too many major voices in the Democratic Party practically ordered him to run to avoid the disaster of the incumbent vice president, Henry Wallace, becoming President.
Piling irony on irony, Henry Wallace was Mrs. Roosevelt’s ardently supported choice to succeed her husband. I wonder what she would have thought, had she known that Bess Truman was her secret ally in this subterranean struggle.
Henry Wallace represented Eleanor Roosevelt’s boldest venture into the politics of the presidency—what you might call politics with a capital
P
. The secretary of agriculture in FDR’s cabinet, Wallace was not close to the First Lady at first. Like many other cabinet officers,he resented her intrusions into his bailiwick. Their alliance did not take shape until FDR proposed him as his vice president in 1940.
Most of the delegates to the Democratic National convention did not want Wallace. They thought another liberal added nothing to the ticket. They wanted a moderate or a conservative like the outgoing vice president, “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas. For a while it looked as if Wallace was beaten. Fearful of being labeled dictatorial, FDR hesitated to insist on him as his one and only choice. Instead, he sent the First Lady to give an unprecedented speech to the delegates, which persuaded them to swallow Henry, though little more than half voted for him.
In her newspaper column, “My Day,” a pleased Eleanor Roosevelt wrote: “Secretary Wallace is a very fine man and I am sure will strengthen the ticket. I have always felt in him a certain shyness that has kept him aloof from some Democrats. But now that he will be in close touch with many of them, I am sure they will soon find in him much to admire and love.”
Alas, to know Henry Wallace was not to love him. He was, quite simply, an inept politician. He did not know how to schmooze, unbend, fraternize. His idea of communication was a press release. The notion that he was FDR’s chosen successor went to his head. He picked turf fights with prominent Democrats in and out of Congress and infuriated the secretary of state, Cordell Hull, by speaking out on foreign policy in semimystical terms, calling on Americans to export the New Deal to the entire world to achieve “the century of the common man.” In her column and among her friends, Mrs. Roosevelt continued to back Wallace enthusiastically. But the harder she
There was another, deeper reason why my mother did not want to become First Lady. She saw the ferocious press scrutiny Eleanor Roosevelt received and dreaded that similar treatment would exhume a family tragedy which would cause her and her brothers and above all her mother a great deal of pain. When Bess was eighteen, her handsome father shot himself in the bathroom of their Independence home. Unable to support his wife in the style she had acquired as the daughter of the wealthiest man in town, David Willock Wallace had sunk into depression and finally into suicide.
Bess’s mother never recovered from that trauma. Madge Wallace became a recluse for the rest of her long life—and mostly her daughter’s responsibility. The thought of some Hearst papers “sob sister” spreading this story across the pages of their seven-million-copy Sunday supplement,
The American Weekly
, forerunner of today’s supermarket tabloids, or the front pages of all the papers in their huge chain, horrified my mother. But she found herself outflanked and overruled in her struggle to persuade my father to reject the vice presidency. Too many major voices in the Democratic Party practically ordered him to run to avoid the disaster of the incumbent vice president, Henry Wallace, becoming President.
Piling irony on irony, Henry Wallace was Mrs. Roosevelt’s ardently supported choice to succeed her husband. I wonder what she would have thought, had she known that Bess Truman was her secret ally in this subterranean struggle.
Henry Wallace represented Eleanor Roosevelt’s boldest venture into the politics of the presidency—what you might call politics with a capital
P
. The secretary of agriculture in FDR’s cabinet, Wallace was not close to the First Lady at first. Like many other cabinet officers,he resented her intrusions into his bailiwick. Their alliance did not take shape until FDR proposed him as his vice president in 1940.
Most of the delegates to the Democratic National convention did not want Wallace. They thought another liberal added nothing to the ticket. They wanted a moderate or a conservative like the outgoing vice president, “Cactus Jack” Garner of Texas. For a while it looked as if Wallace was beaten. Fearful of being labeled dictatorial, FDR hesitated to insist on him as his one and only choice. Instead, he sent the First Lady to give an unprecedented speech to the delegates, which persuaded them to swallow Henry, though little more than half voted for him.
In her newspaper column, “My Day,” a pleased Eleanor Roosevelt wrote: “Secretary Wallace is a very fine man and I am sure will strengthen the ticket. I have always felt in him a certain shyness that has kept him aloof from some Democrats. But now that he will be in close touch with many of them, I am sure they will soon find in him much to admire and love.”
Alas, to know Henry Wallace was not to love him. He was, quite simply, an inept politician. He did not know how to schmooze, unbend, fraternize. His idea of communication was a press release. The notion that he was FDR’s chosen successor went to his head. He picked turf fights with prominent Democrats in and out of Congress and infuriated the secretary of state, Cordell Hull, by speaking out on foreign policy in semimystical terms, calling on Americans to export the New Deal to the entire world to achieve “the century of the common man.” In her column and among her friends, Mrs. Roosevelt continued to back Wallace enthusiastically. But the harder she
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