THE DAILY SCHEDULE of the president could be described in a word: relentless. As Truman wrote in his memoirs, “Being President is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or be swallowed.” “It takes about 17 hours a day,” he said on another occasion. “And then you get as much sleep as you can, start over again and do the next 17 hours as best you can. No man can do it as it should be done.”
On the morning of April 17 Truman began a new routine. After breakfast, he left the Blair House, making the two-hundred-yard commute to the White House on foot. He had to cross an intersection with a traffic light at Pennsylvania Avenue and Jackson Place, and when he reached this corner, secret service magically turned all the lights at the intersection red so the president could cross. Newspapermen and secret service clung to Truman’s heels, perspiring as they attempted to match his pace, forming a farcical retinue. The White House correspondent Merriman Smith: “This limousine-infested Capital saw something today it hadn’t ever seen—the president of the United States walking to work.” Truman shook the hands of wide-eyed women who happened to be walking by. Cabdrivers motoring past honked their horns and yelled, “Good luck, Harry!”
Mornings in the White House began with a military briefing from Admiral Leahy, who delivered the critical news from all corners of the globe. These meetings took place either in Truman’s office or in the White House Map Room, an extraordinary space filled with the most technologically advanced cryptographic and communications equipment ever invented. All top-secret cables to and from foreign leaders and embassies came through this room. National Geographic maps hung on the walls, pinned with codified colored markings noting the location of Allied and Axis troops and ships, so that the president could grasp at a glance the broad strokes of the military situation and, with Leahy’s help, how it had changed from the day before. Roosevelt had set up this secret space in a former women’s cloakroom in the White House basement soon after Pearl Harbor. It was so secret, not even the First Lady was allowed inside. Few people who worked in the White House knew of its existence.
After the president’s military briefing came a 9 a.m. staff meeting, which Truman would hold six days a week (including Saturdays). He called this “the morning meeting.” About a half dozen staffers sat around his desk, including correspondence secretary Bill Hassett (who responded to the majority of Truman’s mail), appointments secretary Connelly, the press secretary and assistant press secretary, and Truman’s portly poker pal Harry Vaughan, whom he had made an official military aide and was fast becoming the unofficial White House jester. These informal meetings lasted from twenty to forty minutes, often veering into storytelling, such as the time when a full-blown discussion dove into Winston Churchill’s startling “capacity for drink,” or the time when the group addressed French leader Charles de Gaulle’s astonishing pomposity. “I don’t like the son-of-a-bitch,” Truman said.
Then came the day’s appointments, which stacked up in small blocks of time. On Tuesday, April 17—Truman’s fourth full day in office, and the day after he addressed Congress—he was handed an official meetings schedule for the first time, prepared by Matthew Connelly. His morning on the seventeenth was devoted mostly to the press. A New York Times artist was given thirty minutes to sketch him for the Sunday magazine. (During this meeting, Truman pulled from his wallet a folded piece of paper with a section of the poem “Locksley Hall” printed on it. He read the poem “slowly and with feeling,” the New York Times man recalled. Then the president said, “Tennyson wrote that in 1842.” Truman had carried this poem with him everywhere he went since he was a little boy.)
At 10:30 a.m., dozens filed into the Oval Office for Truman’s first press conference. Standing behind his desk, he greeted reporters as they pushed into the room, which quickly grew uncomfortably crowded. Regular presidential press conferences were a tradition going back to Woodrow Wilson, who on March 15, 1913, set a precedent of welcoming newspaper reporters into his office to answer questions. Roosevelt had held two a week and had elevated these meetings to high art. Wielding his cigarette holder as if conducting an orchestra, he would deliver soliloquies that would entrance his guests, while almost always failing on purpose to answer any question posed.
On April 17 the largest crowd ever assembled for a presidential press conference pushed into the Oval Office—348 men and women reporters—all aiming to size up the new chief executive. Some were forced to stand on the terrace outside the president’s office—lucky ones, because the room got exceedingly hot.
“Good morning,” Truman said, “good morning.”
“Good morning, Mr. President,” someone in the crowd said. “Will you take it sort of slow for us today, please, sir?”
“Surely, surely,” Truman said. “Anything I can do to accommodate you.”
No one in the room could help making comparisons to Roosevelt. For one thing, this president was standing up. “We all knew that Roosevelt had gone to Groton and then Harvard,” recalled White House correspondent Robert Nixon, who was getting his first crack at Truman that morning. “That [Roosevelt] came from a quite old, well-to-do family; that he moved in what is known as the best circles all of his life . . . Truman was a small town, Midwestern Missourian of farm origin . . . The contrast was in appearance, voice mannerisms, and even their attire. President Roosevelt, while a casual dresser, was very well tailored . . . Truman dressed like he had just come off of Main Street in Independence.”
The new president called for attention. “The first thing I want to do to you is to read the rules,” he said. After telling the reporters what they already knew—everything he said was background material, no direct quotes were allowed unless there was specific permission—he began by announcing that most of the Roosevelt staff would stay on, and that Matthew Connelly had been appointed his confidential secretary. Truman read a letter aloud from Mrs. Roosevelt, thanking everyone for their wishes, “which have brought great comfort and consolation to all of us.” Due to the wartime paper shortage, Mrs. Roosevelt would not be responding to all correspondence. Instead, she had asked Truman to read her thank-you letter to the press.
Truman then opened the floor. He answered questions about reciprocal trade, race relations, the wartime ban on horseracing, and the historic United Nations Conference set to open in eight days.
“Mr. President,” said one reporter in the crowd. “Will Mrs. Truman have a press conference?”
“I would rather not answer that question at this time.”
At numerous moments Truman delivered witticisms that sparked laughter in the room. The Missourian had a simple way of speaking that amused his counterparts in the press. He whittled his ideas down to the fewest words and handed them over. Unlike Roosevelt, Truman actually answered questions, and if he chose not to, he said just that.
“His first press conferences were wonderful,” noted press secretary Daniels. At the end of this first one, something happened that had never occurred in any of Roosevelt’s meetings with the press: the room erupted in spontaneous applause.
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Nearing the end of his first week in office, Truman had inadvertently become the world’s most fascinating man. Reporters had overturned every stone to explore the man’s curious character.
How big was he? (Five feet nine inches, 165 pounds.) His gustatory pleasures? (Meat and potatoes, pie a la mode.) What did the middle initial S. stand for? (Nothing specifically.) Though Truman was associated with Kansas City, a hotbed of swinging jazz, he was no fan of what he called “modern noise,” preferring Beethoven and Bach. His favorite pastime was poker. Madame Tussauds of London asked for the president’s exact measurements and physical attributes, so the museum could build a lifelike wax statue of him. The White House delivered them: gray eyes, size 9B shoes, 35½-inch waistline.
No one was more surprised by the hoopla than Truman himself. “Six days President of the United States,” he wrote in a letter to his mother and sister on Wednesday, April 18. “It is hardly believable.”
Comparisons were made to Andrew Jackson, the first common man to become president—much to Truman’s pleasure, because Jackson was of course his hero. The famed quote “If Andrew Jackson can be President, anyone can!” was refashioned as “If Harry Truman can be President, so could my next door neighbor!” Others compared Truman to Abraham Lincoln; both Truman and Lincoln had come from humble beginnings in the Midwest, both had served as small-town postmasters at one time (Truman for a very short time), and both were failed store owners (Berry & Lincoln; Truman & Jacobson).
In reality Truman was like no other man who had ever served as president, and the family’s obscurity only brightened the spotlight. It seemed as if they had come out of nowhere. “Mr. and Mrs. Truman lived so inconspicuously in their senatorial days that few people knew them,” wrote Washington Times-Herald columnist Helen Essary. “He brings to the White House a background and personality which has had no counterpart among any recent or remote Chief Executive,” wrote Luther Huston in the New York Times. The powerful men who reported to Truman crystallized their first impressions. Undersecretary of State Joseph Grew wrote in a letter to a friend that he had “seen a good deal of [Truman] lately” and could report “nothing but the most favorable reaction . . . I think he is going to measure up splendidly to the tremendous job which faces him.” “When I saw him today,” Grew wrote of Truman in another missive, shortly after FDR’s death, “I had fourteen problems to take up with him and got through them in less than fifteen minutes with a clear directive on every one of them. You can imagine what a joy it is to deal with a man like that.” Even the notoriously cranky Admiral Leahy was disarmed by the president’s affability. “Personally,” Leahy wrote, “he proved to be easy to work with and, to use a trite phrase accurately, one of the nicest people I have ever known.”
As the man who worked most closely with Truman on an hourly basis, handsome Matthew Connelly became a subject of intrigue. Connelly met with the press the same day that Truman did.
“C-O-N-N-E-L-L-Y. That is Matthew J.”
“Are you going to function as the appointment secretary?”
“That’s right.”
Connelly was from Clinton, Massachusetts. He was thirty-seven, married with one daughter. A graduate of Fordham University, he had worked on Wall Street, then as an investigator with congressional committees. The press wanted to know if he had any political experience.
“Not in actual politics, no.”
“Do you drink, or chase women, or anything like that?”
“You should know.” (Laughter.)
The president’s family members came under the spotlight. When Margaret returned to class at George Washington University after the shock of FDR’s death, the press followed her around campus. “Back to school and photographers all over the place!” she wrote in her diary. Bess Truman had become the subject of public fascination, a fact that pleased her none at all. Eleanor Roosevelt had radically altered the role of the First Lady by holding weekly press conferences for women reporters and writing her own newspaper column. Now the pressure was on Bess to do the same; Mrs. Roosevelt had sent her a note saying that this would be good for women across America.
Unlike Mrs. Roosevelt, who enjoyed the public eye, Bess remained a mystery. “Few citizens of the capital have even had a glimpse of her,” a Washington bureau AP reporter wrote. Those who did know Bess found it hard to imagine this small-town sixty-year-old housewife as the First Lady of the United States, or a speech giver, or a newspaper columnist. Bess announced she would hold a press conference on April 17, but then she called it off, agonizing over the decision.
The first in-depth interviews with Truman’s extended family members surfaced. “My first thought was that Harry was president and we didn’t want him to be,” said Bess’s brother George Wallace. “I really can’t be glad he’s President because I am sorry that President Roosevelt is dead,” said Mamma Truman. “If he’d have been voted in, I’d be out waving a flag, but it doesn’t seem right to be very happy or wave any flags now.” She had listened to her son’s speech to Congress over the radio. “Every one who heard him talk . . . will know he’s sincere and will do what’s best,” she said.
(Truman’s press advisors told him that Mamma Truman’s comments could not have been more perfect; it was as if they had been written by a seasoned press agent. Truman wrote his mother on the matter on April 18: “I told them that my family all told the truth all the time and that they did not need a press agent.”)
Mamma Truman was correct: Her son’s speech had given the nation a boost of morale, at a time when it was desperately needed. The stock market soared the afternoon after Truman’s first speech. “Everywhere one hears the remark, ‘He’s doing all right,’” noted one political columnist. Senate reporter Allen Drury wrote in his diary the day after Truman’s speech, “Few Presidents in history have started off on such a wave of universal good will and good hope as has come to Harry Truman.”
Meanwhile, the most fevered gossip in the nation’s capital centered on power in the new administration. Rumors were, Secretary of State Ed Stettinius was out and Jimmy Byrnes would take his place. Treasury secretary Morgenthau was likely to go. Who would fill his role? Republicans were sure that FDR’s New Deal was dead, that the midwestern values of the new president would move the political metronome further right from Roosevelt’s far left, if not smack in the center. But the true nature of the president’s politics had yet to be seen.
By all accounts, Truman was off to a brilliant start. Privately, however, his presidential odyssey was unfolding differently. He was a poker player, and he knew that the deck was unlikely to spit out aces. The future was sure to thrust upon him contention and perhaps even public embarrassment. All he had to do was open a Time magazine, and there it was, talk of his incompetence: “Harry Truman is a man of distinct limitations, especially in experience in high level politics.” Even in his private conversations with his wife, the doubt was crushing.
“He shared so many moments of doubt and discouragement with her,” recalled Margaret of the early days of the Truman presidency. “This frankness combined with her natural pessimism to produce a lack of confidence.” Bess feared what everyone else in America feared. According to Margaret: “She was not sure he could do the job.”