When my father reminisces about his Senate days, he always chuckles over the advice he got from an old judge who had worked with him on the County Court. The judge had once worked for a Mississippi senator in Washington. “Harry,” he said, “don’t you go to the Senate with an inferiority complex. You’ll sit there about six months, and wonder how you got there. But after that you’ll wonder how the rest of them got there.”

The day after Dad was sworn in, the Democratic whip, Senator J. Hamilton Lewis of Illinois, “a very kindly man,” as my father describes him, sat down beside him and gave him exactly the same advice the old judge had given him back in Missouri.

Apartments were expensive in those days, and my father was appalled to find some wealthy senators were paying as much as $1,500 a month in rent. This was out of the question for him. We had to live on his $10,000-a-year salary. He rented a four-room apartment for us in Tilden Gardens, just off Connecticut Avenue in the northwest part of Washington. It was a shock for all of us to find ourselves crowded into this tiny space, after living in fourteen big rooms on North Delaware Street. By way of consolation, Dad provided us with a piano, which he rented from a local music store. By now, I had become fairly proficient on my baby grand, and I enjoyed many an evening of music on that spinet. Dad had little time to play the piano himself. As soon as he was sworn in, he launched a tremendous reading program. Night after night, he came home with a bulging briefcase and stacks of books from the Congressional Library on legislation coming before the Senate.

In the Senate, he had very little to say. It was a calculated silence, adopted at the advice of John Garner. The vice president took an almost instant liking to Dad. Texans and Missourians have always felt a strong kinship. They play a similar role on the national scene, balanced between Southern and Western loyalties.

There was another good reason for my father’s silence during those first months. Democratic senators were hardly a novelty. With the Republican Party in disarray, twelve other Democrats had been sworn in with him on that January day. A new tier of seats along the back wall had to be constructed to fit them into the Democratic side of the chamber. With such a surplus of political strength, there was not much interest from the White House.

But my father did not, as some biographers have claimed, spend five months trying to wangle an interview with Roosevelt. The White House records show he visited the President in February 1935, about a month after he arrived in Washington. Dad ruefully recalls he did not handle the interview very well. “I was practically tongue-tied,” he says. He puzzled over this reaction for a long time - and he finally decided it was caused not by awe of Roosevelt, personally, but of the presidency, and the tremendous role it played in the American republic. “I was before the greatest office in the world,” he says. When Dad became President, he noticed more than a few senators and congressmen were equally tongue-tied when they came to see him. He understood what they were feeling and made an extra effort to put them at their ease.

The most painful part of Senator Truman’s freshman year in the Senate was the contempt various Washington correspondents showered on him, because of his relationship with Tom Pendergast. My father resented the notion that he was Boss Tom’s mouthpiece in Congress. He was perfectly willing to admit Pendergast sent him telegrams occasionally, but as he told a reporter from the Kansas City Star, “I don’t follow his advice on legislation. I vote the way I believe Missourians as a whole want me to vote.”

He soon proved he meant what he said. One of the major tests of power in the nation was the Senate vote on the Public Utility Holding Company Act. These vast and complex financial structures had enabled the Wall Street bankers and a handful of other tycoons, such as Samuel Insull, to dominate a major segment of American business during the 1920s, with disastrous results. The act was aimed at limiting these giants to a manageable size and subjecting them to a reasonable amount of federal regulation, in the interests of all the people. In Kansas City, only one newspaper regularly supported Democrats. This was the Journal-Post, which was controlled by Henry L. Dougherty, president of the Cities Service Company in Kansas City, the area’s main public utility. The Journal-Post editorialized against the bill, and so, of course, did the Kansas City Star. Tom Pendergast was equally opposed to it. Not long before, when 11,000 citizens had petitioned to create a municipally owned gas company in Kansas City, Pendergast’s city clerk had thrown out 4,900 of the 11,000 signatures and nullified the petition.

Knowing all this, my father still made it clear he was voting for the bill. Dougherty and his cohorts switched to another kind of pressure. In a single day, 2,000 telegrams and letters poured into Dad’s Senate office. Again he stood firm, and when the bill came up in the Senate, he voted for it. The Journal-Post flayed him alive in a two-column front-page article. “Harry S. Truman . . . became United States Senator from Missouri by default, so to speak, getting the Democratic nomination in 1934 because there were no other takers.” The editorial writer went on to call him a “tool” of the Roosevelt Administration. They couldn’t call him a Pendergast tool, so they called him a Roosevelt tool. Four months before this diatribe was published, this same paper had been calling him one of the best senators from Missouri in over a generation. It is easy to see why he soon became cynical about newspaper criticism.

At the same time, he never blamed the newspapermen who wrote these articles - with the exception of columnists who controlled their own material. Charlie Ross, the bright boy of his high school class, was a rising star at the Post-Dispatch, Dad’s most vituperative foe during these years, but my father never allowed this fact to trouble their friendship. He reserved his often ferocious but always private comments for the publishers who set editorial policy and ordered reporters to make the facts fit this policy.

In the case of the Journal-Post attack, Dad knew the man who had written the devastating front-page editorial. A few months later he was fired by the paper in an economy wave and could not find work anywhere. Bill Helm, the Journal-Post’s Washington reporter, who wrote a charming though frequently inaccurate book about Dad, told of having a conversation with Senator Truman about this unfortunate fellow.

“What became of him?” Helm asked.

“Oh, he has a little job with the County,” Dad said, meaning Jackson County.

“A little job with the County?” said Helm incredulously. “Did you, by any chance get him that job?”

“No, I can’t say I did,” Dad replied, refusing to take the credit. “All I did was recommend him for it.”

Gradually, over the course of the next two years, my father achieved membership in that exclusive inner circle of the Senate, known as “the Club.” It is an invisible hierarchy, unknown to most of the voters. Membership is not based upon anything tangible or definable. It requires integrity, of course, but a good personality and an appetite for hard work off the floor of the Senate, in the committee rooms where the real work of government is done - these are far more vital requisites.

One of his first signs of acceptance came when he was solemnly invited to join the “Lowell B. Mason Chowder, Marching and Baseball Club.” An attorney for one of the owners of the Washington Senators, Mason had the best box in the municipal stadium, and he passed out tickets freely to both Republicans (he was one) and Democrats. Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, Alben Barkley of Kentucky, and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn of Texas were among the members. “Membership was controlled entirely by the man’s personality, whether or not he was well liked by his colleagues,” Lowell Mason said. “It was a very interesting thing that many of the senior senators never got on the invitation list.”

On opening day, the journey to the baseball game always began with a luncheon in Arthur Vandenberg’s private dining room. As Mason later told it, a few days before this event, in 1935, both Alben Barkley and Sam Rayburn spoke to him about Dad. “Lowell,” Sam said, “we want you to put a new senator on the list because we think he’s a comer and we like him personally; he’s a fellow by the name of Truman, newly elected senator from Missouri. . . .”

My mother is the baseball fan in our family. How she complained when she found out my father was getting one of the best seats in the park. But it should be obvious that baseball was only a minor consideration in Lowell Mason’s club. For years, my father never missed one of his conclaves. In fact, Mason loves to tell the story of another demonstration of that dominant Truman trait, loyalty. One year Mason had carefully worked out all arrangements for a luncheon and the trip to the game in cars borrowed from the president of the Senate and the Speaker of the House. Then, to his dismay, he got phone calls from four of his most prominent senators. “Lowell,” they said, “we’re sorry, but the British ambassador has the Archbishop of Canterbury visiting him and they’re going to the game and they would like to have us sit in their box.”

In despair at seeing his luncheon fall apart, Mason began calling his other guests. My father was first on his list. “Oh, yes, Lowell,” he said, “I was invited by the British ambassador and the Archbishop of Canterbury to eat lunch and sit in their box, and I told them I had already accepted an invitation from you.”

My father and Lowell Mason used to play an amusing game, based on their mutual knowledge of Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers. “I remember one day we were standing in the doorway of his office,” Mason said, “and a fellow went by, and Mr. Truman turned to me and said, ‘Lowell, there goes Alfred Jingle.’” For those who haven’t gotten around to rereading the Pickwick Papers, Alfred Jingle was the wily villain of several incidents in the story, a man who got others involved in duels, was always trying to seduce wealthy heiresses, and wound up in Fleet Prison.

But this relaxed good humor came in the later years of my father’s senatorial career. Even though on a personal level he made rapid progress with his fellow senators, politically he remained on the horns of a dilemma. When he voted with the Roosevelt Administration, the newspapers back home called him a White House tool. When he voted against the administration, the papers sneered that he had done so on the orders of Tom Pendergast, or worse (from my father’s point of view) he had surrendered to Bennett Clark, who was building up a name for himself as an anti-Roosevelt Democrat with an eye on the 1940 presidential nomination. No one, it seems, was willing to give Harry Truman credit for voting his convictions.

But the record shows he established his independence from Roosevelt, as thoroughly as he did from Tom Pendergast. Throughout the first eighteen months of his term, one of the major political brawls revolved around the veterans’ bonus. In his campaign for the Senate, my father had repeatedly said he favored a bonus while his two opponents had denounced the idea as fiscally irresponsible. The Roosevelt Administration took the same position. Yet in vote after vote, Dad never wavered in his support of a bonus, because he knew the desperate need for one throughout the nation, and he believed men who had risked their lives for their country deserved special consideration. He finally voted to override the President’s veto of the bill. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, unable to indict him for subservience either to Roosevelt or Pendergast on this issue, decided it proved his “lack of stature.”

There were times when my father resented this endless pressure and browbeating. “A Congressman, as you know, is elected by the people,” he wrote to one friend, “and most of the people who come to Congress have an honest and conscientious intent to do what is best for the country, but they are pulled and hauled so much of the time that they get to the point where they would just as soon let the country be damned as not.” He especially resented the idea that a senator should represent only the wishes of his constituents. He declined to become anybody’s Charlie McCarthy. When, later in his senatorial career, the Post-Dispatch printed a letter to the editor from a reader who denounced Dad for failing to represent the wishes of the people who elected him in Missouri, he angrily replied, “I voted for what I thought was the welfare of the country and was not governed by threats, pleas or political considerations.”

My father was even tougher on this subject with labor leader Otto Maschoff of the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers of America: “It doesn’t make any difference to me whether you like the way I vote or not because I vote for what I think is right, regardless of what anyone else thinks [he wrote Maschoff]. You people have a peculiar slant on a man’s political career. No matter what he does, if he uses his head and does something you don’t like then he is down and out as far as you are concerned. Well, as far as I’m concerned I am doing what I think is right and I don’t care what anyone else thinks about it and I don’t care whether they like it or not - I can take care of myself while I am doing it.”

Another of my father’s Senate problems was Bennett Clark. At first, the White House gave most of the federal patronage in Missouri to him, in spite of Senator Clark’s often violent attacks on the New Deal. Wooing his enemies with gifts was one of Roosevelt’s favorite tactics. My father never believed it was good politics and frequently said so. He thought it discouraged your friends and only made your enemies arrogant. It certainly worked that way with Dad and Senator Clark. Like many sons of famous fathers, Bennett Clark was an unstable, complex man. He felt compelled to seek the presidency because his father, “Champ” Clark, had been deprived of it, in the 1912 Democratic Convention, by an unexpected surge to Woodrow Wilson. Poor Senator Clark simply lacked the stature for the job. But the desire for it made him an instinctive foe of the Roosevelt Administration.

At first, Senator Clark regarded my father with contempt and made no effort to conceal it. But he was also intelligent enough to realize he needed the help of the Jackson County Democrats if he was to win reelection in 1938 - an absolute necessity for his 1940 presidential hopes. So he began consulting Senator Truman on appointments, and they chose mutually agreeable men. When it came to picking the WPA director for the state of Missouri - probably the most important single federal appointment, from a political point of view - my father had a lot to say. The job went to Matt Murray, a Jackson County Democrat. This meant the Jackson County organization controlled the thousands of jobs that were handed out by the WPA across Missouri.

While Dad legislated and politicked, my mother and I struggled to adjust to our new way of life. I was enrolled at Gunston Hall, a local Washington girls’ school in the old Southern tradition. It was a nice school, but I was there only six months of the year. At the end of June, we always packed up everything, abandoned our furnished apartment, and went back to Independence for the next six months. There I went to junior high school just a block from home. Then, on the first of January, we packed everything again and moved to another rented apartment on Connecticut Avenue - I knew every block of Connecticut Avenue before Dad’s senatorial career ended. Back I went to sedate, ladylike Gunston Hall.

Our trips to and from Independence were quite an ordeal. The government gave congressmen special boxes to pack the linens, clothes, and other personal effects they transported back and forth each year. I can still see my father toiling over these boxes in the Washington heat in June or early July. He prided himself on being an expert packer, and he was. My mother and I were hopeless in this department, and still are. Dad can get more things into a box or trunk than anyone I’ve ever seen.

Among the things he packed each year were the clothes for my Raggedy Ann doll. I was not a great one for dolls. Raggedy Ann was the only one I ever cared for. She had a rather large wardrobe, which my aunts, all experts with the needle, frequently supplemented. One day, I was standing around our hot Washington apartment watching Dad toil over a box that was about full. With a sigh, he took the first of Raggedy Ann’s wardrobe off her formidable pile and began folding it. Suddenly he looked up at me. I was no longer ten years old. This was 1938 or 1939, and I was fourteen or fifteen. A Mamma-Truman-like glint came into his eyes. “In the first place,” he said, “you’re pretty old to be carrying a doll back and forth. In the second place, if you insist on doing it, you’re certainly old enough to pack for her.” With that, he strolled into the kitchen for some iced tea and left me to finish packing that box. Raggedy Ann soon stopped making the trip from Independence to Washington.

On this semiannual commute, we always went by car. My father did most of the driving, and this always made for interesting family discussions. My mother was convinced he drove too fast, and she was absolutely right. I don’t think Mother ever really saw any of the scenery between Missouri and the District of Columbia. She always had at least one eye on the speedometer.

Our route usually took us through Hagerstown, Maryland, and over the mountains to Cumberland. In 1938, we came to grief in Hagerstown, and another chapter in the history of Dad’s unbreakable, unlosable glasses was written. It was a Sunday morning, and a stop sign at a key intersection was obscured by a parked car. A man in another car plowed into us as we went through the intersection. Our car was completely wrecked. It was almost a miracle we escaped alive. Dad had a cut on his forehead, and Mother had a badly wrenched neck. Sitting in the back, I escaped with nothing more than a bad fright.

As I was pulled out of the car window, I saw Dad’s glasses on the floor, surrounded by upended suitcases - intact. He had flung them over his shoulder at the moment of impact.

First the police were inclined to give the Trumans a very hard time for missing the stop sign. But Dad pointed out the stop sign was obscured by the parked car. Later, we heard that the man who hit us had had two other accidents that month. Dad called his secretary, Vic Messall, and he got dressed in record time and drove down to pick us up. We never did go back for the car. I guess it was towed to the nearest junk heap.

Back in Missouri during those mid-thirties years, my father combined politicking with a continued interest in the army reserve. Almost every summer, he spent two weeks on active duty. By this time, he was a colonel in command of a regiment. He and his friends had served without pay all through the years since World War I. Along with his enthusiasm for military lore, Dad found the army an invaluable way to maintain friendships with men from many parts of Missouri. Typical of these was an affable St. Louis banker, John Snyder. Two other close friends were Harry Vaughan and Eddie McKim. They were a pair of big easygoing jokers, constantly kidding each other, and Dad.

Eddie McKim was always accusing Dad of owing him $36. He had been a sergeant in Dad’s battery. While Dad was away for two weeks at a special artillery school, a replacement captain had busted McKim to buck private. When Dad returned, Eddie asked for his stripes, or at the very least, a promotion to private first class. Dad shook his head. “I was thinking of busting you myself, McKim,” he said.

Eddie insisted this was cruel and unnecessary punishment, and he carefully counted each month he would have earned an extra two dollars as a first class private and insisted that, morally, Dad owed him the money. The accusation, of course, gave Dad an excuse to call him the laziest, most insubordinate soldier in the history of the U.S. Army.

This was a reputation Eddie never denied. In fact, he was proud of it (although in civilian life he was a demon worker and rose to head one of the nation’s biggest insurance companies). One day at summer camp early in the decade - probably 1930 - Eddie was serving as Harry Vaughan’s aide. As an ex-enlisted man, he had only recently achieved captain’s rank in the reserve. Colonel Vaughan asked him to carry a chair up on a porch. Eddie obeyed, but he muttered that his record was ruined. It was the first work he had done in their entire two-week training tour.

Several years later, Eddie and Dad came out to St. Louis by train. Dad wired John Snyder and Harry Vaughan to meet them for an impromptu reunion. They cheerfully agreed and were waiting when the train pulled into the station. Onto the platform stepped a very worried looking senator and a very blotto friend - McKim. Dad seemed terribly upset. What would the St. Louis papers say, if they saw their favorite target, Senator Truman, escorted by a drunk? Quickly, Harry Vaughan took charge. He sent Dad and John Snyder in one direction and hustled the reeling McKim in the other direction.

Unfortunately, there was only one cab at the taxi stand, and they had to share it. But Colonel Vaughan shouldered McKim through the lobby of the Missouri Athletic Club, where he and Dad were staying, and into the elevator while Dad registered at the desk. On the sixth floor, Eddie fell out of the elevator on his face, and poor Colonel Vaughan had to hoist him onto his back and lug him the rest of the way down the long hall to the room. It was a hot day, and by the time they reached the room, Colonel Vaughan was streaming perspiration. He flung Eddie on the bed and called him a drunken so-and-so.

A moment later, Dad and Snyder walked into the room. Eddie bounced to his feet and took cover behind the couch, a big grin on his face. “You would make me carry that chair up on that porch and spoil my record,” he said, to the open-mouthed Harry Vaughan.

Eddie and Dad had cooked up the gag on the train, and it had worked beyond their wildest expectations.

This fondness for a good laugh was a universal trait in Dad’s close friends. I never found one who was not to some degree a joker. But few had Eddie McKim’s talent in this department. Eddie never quit. When Dad introduced him to President Roosevelt at a White House reception, Eddie proceeded to tell FDR in a very serious tone that he ought to do something about the $36 Senator Truman owed him. Naturally the President looked baffled. When Eddie explained, FDR threw back his head and laughed heartily.

Dad’s favorite Eddie McKim story recalled the day his artillery outfit was being reviewed by the commanding general at Fort Riley. Eddie was riding the lead horse of the team that was pulling one of the field pieces, en route to performing an intricate maneuver. Colonel Truman sat on horseback beside the general, making small talk. “Captain McKim was in my outfit during the war,” he began. At this point, something went wrong with either Eddie or the lead horse, and in a twinkling the gun, the horses, and Eddie were wrapped in an incredible tangle around a tree. The disaster coincided precisely with the end of Dad’s remark, and without even drawing a breath, or breaking the rhythm of his sentence, Colonel Truman added, “and he never was any damn good then either!”

This informal Missouri style was something all the Trumans had to shed when in Washington, D.C. Although there was plenty of room for jokes behind the scenes, on stage a senator had to be dignified. This was equally true of his wife and daughter. Washington was a small town, or at best a small city, in those days. It had a sedate Southern air, which included a great deal of formality. I can remember driving with mother through the White House gates (without anyone even stopping us) and up to the front entrance. A butler came out carrying a silver tray, and I reached through the car window, and gravely laid our calling cards on the tray. The butler gave us a solemn little nod, and we drove away. Protocol was still very important in pre-World War II Washington. Senators’ wives had to be “at home” on Thursday afternoons to pour tea for anyone who cared to visit. Congressmen’s wives were at home on another afternoon, and Cabinet wives had their day. Of course, the ladies got together and negotiated mutual assistance pacts, which eliminated the nightmarish possibility of everyone descending at the same time on one hapless woman.

On the afternoons when mother was “at home” or visiting someone else who was wielding the teapot, I rode the streetcar to the Senate Office Building and reported to Dad or his stenographer, Millie Dryden. For the next two or three hours, I was on my own, wandering the corridors or perching in the Senate gallery to watch the action - or lack of it - on the floor. Occasionally Dad introduced me to senators and other politicians who visited his office. Two that stand out in my mind are Vice President Garner and Huey Long.

My father was enormously proud of his friendship with Garner. It was justifiable pride. Garner did not make friends casually. Away from the Senate, he was practically a recluse, shunning invitations to all parties. Moreover, as a conservative Democrat, he did not agree with many of Senator Truman’s New Deal votes in the Senate. I sensed Dad’s pride and did my best to be polite to Garner. He was a small taciturn man, who did not smile easily. Much later I realized he was immensely powerful behind the scenes in the Senate. He took his vice president’s job seriously and seldom left Washington while Congress was in session. But his real work was done not while presiding over the Senate but in his “doghouse” where he huddled with influential senators over legislation and committee memberships. There were ritual pauses to “strike a blow for liberty” with some of the best bourbon served in Washington. Garner was an artist at soothing ruffled tempers and repairing damaged egos, particularly among Southern and Western Democrats who had no great love for Franklin Roosevelt.

With Huey Long, on the other hand, I could see an opposite emotion in my father’s eyes: dislike. This character from Louisiana was upsetting both the Senate and the country in 1935. He dealt in personalities and personal insults on the floor of the Senate in a style that anticipated Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin. He was a raucous critic of the New Deal, offering as a substitute his “Share the Wealth” plan, which was a pie in the sky, made with nonexistent apples. All twelve of Dad’s fellow freshman senators - they called themselves “the Young Turks” because they were the most ardent New Dealers in the Senate - loathed Senator Long and issued a statement denouncing him. I was very cool to Long - not that it made any difference to him, I am sure. But I must confess, from the viewpoint of an eleven-year-old, I enjoyed his antics on the Senate floor. He added interest to what was usually a rather boring show.

I will never forget a little drama, hitherto neglected by Long’s biographers, I believe, that I saw enacted in the Senate chamber one day. Long’s chair was just a few feet away from swinging doors to the right of the vice president’s chair. Huey arose and was obviously about to launch one of his interminable harangues. Senator Joe Robinson of Arkansas, the tall distinguished Democratic majority leader, sprang to his feet and announced, in that remarkably courteous language which almost always prevails when senators address each other, that if the honorable senator from Louisiana said another word, he was going to wipe up the floor with him. My head swiveled from Huey to Robinson, when the senator from Arkansas erupted. Now my head swiveled back to Senator Long. There was no one there. Only the doors swinging in the breeze of his hasty departure.

My father and Huey Long were almost total opposites in their approach to the Senate. Long spent his time looking for headlines. He never devoted an hour to constructing legislation. This is the real work of the Senate, and it was - and probably still is - done by thirty or forty senators who toiled wearisome hours on the various committees. These workers were the senators whom Dad instinctively joined. His experience running a county government in Missouri gave him an insight into the practical side of legislation. This, plus his appetite for hard work, made him a first-class legislator. Older senators, such as Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, were delighted to see a younger man willing and eager to tackle the many problems the Senate was attempting to solve. To my father’s delight, he was put on the Appropriations Committee and the Interstate Commerce Committee, both fields where he had had considerable local experience.

Interstate Commerce was largely involved with transportation, and Dad’s intensive study of the Kansas City region’s transportation problems, as presiding judge of the Jackson County Court, was an ideal preparation for tackling the transportation woes of the nation as a whole. He was already keenly aware there was something fatally wrong with the backbone of our national transportation system - the railroads. Before he became senator, the Missouri Pacific, one of the great railroads of the nation, had gone into bankruptcy.

But in the order of urgency, Dad and his fellow committee members decided the nation’s airlines needed the most help. Dad took charge of a subcommittee that began holding hearings on the mess in that department.

As both an ex-soldier and a civilian, my father saw the vital importance of the airplane to the country’s future. It was one more example of his ability to peer into the future, and begin planning for it. His hearings brought out the appalling fact that $120,000,000 in private capital had been invested in air transport, and $60,000,000 lost. Addressing the Senate, on July 2, 1937, Senator Truman told them:

From its very inception air transportation has been a waif in the field of commerce. It has been battered about from pillar to post and it is high time for it to be recognized as a public necessity and given a permanent place in the national transportation system.

England, France, Germany, Russia, all realize what air transport means to national defense. Only poor old Uncle Sam is muddling with civilian air transport. This bill will stop the muddling and inaugurate a real policy - a policy that will make commercial aviation a second line of defense.

Unfortunately, his bill was not passed immediately. It took another year of battling over details in the Senate. One of the big arguments brought on the first - but not the last - of Dad’s clashes with strong-willed Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada. My father wanted to create a Civil Aeronautics Authority Board on which the President would have the right to appoint or remove members at his pleasure. McCarran wanted the President’s powers limited, a typical senatorial attitude. He insisted a commissioner could only be dismissed for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office. Even then, my father did not believe in tying the President’s hands unnecessarily. Dad won the argument.

When the law was finally passed in June 1938, Arthur Krock praised it lavishly in The New York Times as “the product of unremitting and intelligent toil by legislators of ability and character intent upon working out difficult national problems.” He singled out my father’s efforts as especially praiseworthy, noting his hundreds of hours of listening to witnesses from dozens of different interested groups, from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to the Airline Pilots Association. Only a handful of experts also appreciated the exquisite care with which Dad had drafted the bill, using terminology already defined by the Supreme Court in its interpretations of the Interstate Commerce Act. An immense amount of time-consuming litigation was thus saved, in advance. Some members of the airline industry were almost stunned by the high quality of the legislation. Edgar Gorrell, president of the Air Transport Association, said: “. . . Now and then democracy takes a great stride forward to catch up with the times.”

While my father was writing this law and defending it in the Senate, he was simultaneously conducting hearings on the chaotic state of the nation’s railroads. President Roosevelt had called the railroads “the most serious problem of the administration,” in 1937. The statistics of their catastrophic decline made this an understatement. In 1926, American railroads employed 1.78 million men with a payroll of $2.95 billion. By 1938, 840,000 of these men were out of work and a staggering 10,000 miles of track had been abandoned, with destructive effects on business in uncounted small towns and medium-sized cities. As Dad tried to find out why a business that was handling 75 percent of the nation’s traffic (in 1926) could now be tottering into bankruptcy, he became more and more convinced the answer lay in the manipulations of a small group of greedy men, largely operating in and around Wall Street.

These were not conclusions based on preconceived radical theories. They were reached after endless hours of hearings, and even longer hours of struggling through immensely complex reports on railroads and the holding companies that owned them and played games with their stock. Scarcely a month went by without a new struggle with another group of recalcitrant railroad or investment bank executives. Some railroads tried to refuse Dad’s committee access to their books. Others actually presented phony records, under the imprint of some of the nation’s biggest accounting firms.

I still remember the grim pleasure my father expressed over a victory he won in an exchange with George O. May, senior partner of Price Waterhouse and Company. In certifying the books of the Missouri Pacific, Price Waterhouse had allowed the company to carry as assets a debt of $3.2 million. This gambit enabled the railroad’s executives to misrepresent its financial condition to the public, when it was on the brink of receivership. May haughtily informed Dad the assets statement was “misleading in effect but not misleading in intent.” My father angrily declared it was misleading in both respects and reported the matter to the Interstate Commerce Commission. This body, whose word is law in railroad matters, immediately ordered the account transferred from special deposits on the assets side to “unadjusted debt.”

“That is the way it ought to have been handled in the first place,” Dad snapped.

“That is right,” May replied.

It was my father’s investigation of the Missouri Pacific that really enraged him and convinced him for all time that “the wrecking crew,” as he called Wall Street’s financiers, were a special interest group constantly ready to sacrifice the welfare of millions for the profits of a few. The Missouri Pacific was a huge railroad system with no less than seventy-nine subsidiaries under its control. In 1930, the Alleghany Corporation, a holding company formed by some Cleveland manipulators using money supplied by J. P. Morgan, acquired control of the entire eighty-company system. The holding company bosses then proceeded to loot the railroad. They declared dividends out of capital instead of earnings, fired thousands of workers to cut the payroll, reduced maintenance, and abandoned badly needed improvements in the road and equipment. In a few short years, the Missouri Pacific was in bankruptcy.

Digging into this mess required considerable political courage for a senator from Missouri. To obtain permission to buy the Missouri Pacific, the Alleghany Corporation had twisted arms and cajoled Democrats and Republicans in the state legislature, as well as almost every other public official in Missouri. One state senator received $1,000 “covering services in the Alleghany-Missouri Pacific matter” which he was never able to satisfactorily explain.

Once more Senator Truman was deluged by telegrams and telephone calls from powerful politicians and businessmen in his home state, urging him to abandon the investigation or at least make it as superficial as possible. My father called Max Lowenthal, general counsel for the investigating committee, and said, “I don’t want you to ease up on anything. You treat this investigation just as you do all the others.” Not long afterward, he received an anonymous note, warning him he would die on the Senate floor. Over the next several weeks, the Senate police had extra men on duty in the gallery because, from their analysis of the note, they feared the would-be assassin would try to shoot Dad from there.

Max Lowenthal told a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter he did not know a half-dozen senators who could have resisted the kind of political pressure Dad withstood.

Lowenthal was a disciple of Louis D. Brandeis, the great liberal dissenter on the Supreme Court. To be invited to the Justice’s apartment on California Street was regarded by many New Dealers in Washington during these days as a great honor. To be invited back was an even greater honor. My father was invited back again and again because, almost on sight, both men recognized they were spiritual brothers. Brandeis had denounced “the curse of bigness” and inveighed against the manipulation of American business to line the pockets of a few financiers. But simply sharing these beliefs was not enough to win a coveted membership in the Brandeis circle. You had to share his patience, skill, and determination to unravel the intricate frauds being perpetrated on the people by the Wall Street bankers. For hours at a time, while other politicians stood watching enviously, Justice Brandeis would talk with Dad about his committee’s latest discoveries in railroad wrecking and looting.

Dad agreed wholeheartedly with Justice Brandeis’s contention that a company’s size should be limited by one man’s capacity. Dad proved this point conclusively in his investigation of the Alleghany Corporation. Questioning the man who had bought it, George A. Ball, my father was able to show that Ball did not even know the names of several major companies, employing thousands of workers, which he theoretically controlled.

Almost two and a half years after he came to the Senate, Dad was ready to make some major speeches. They were in a style that should have made those with good memories less surprised by his 1948 “give ‘em hell” performance.

“Some of the country’s greatest railroads have been deliberately looted by their financial agents,” he said. Speaking of the Rock Island Railroad, he reminded his fellow senators:

. . . The first railroad robbery was committed on the Rock Island back in 1873 just east of Council Bluffs, Iowa. The man who committed that robbery used a gun and a horse and got up early in the morning. He and his gang took a chance on being killed and eventually most were. That railroad robber’s name was Jesse James. The same Jesse James held up the Missouri Pacific in 1876 and took the paltry sum of $17,000 from the express car. About thirty years after the Council Bluffs holdup, the Rock Island went through a looting by some gentlemen known as the tin plate millionaires. They used no guns, but they ruined the railroad and got away with $70,000,000 or more. They did it by means of holding companies. Senators can see what pikers James and his crowd were alongside of some real artists.

Dad bluntly accused the Alleghany Corporation of the same kind of railroad robbery.

Later that year, in another speech on the same topic, he inveighed against the curse of bigness and the impersonal financial racketeering it encouraged: “I believe the country would be better off if we did not have 60 percent of the assets of all insurance companies concentrated in four companies. I believe that a thousand insurance companies with $4 million each in assets would be just a thousand times better for the country than the Metropolitan Life with $4 billion in assets. The average human brain is not built to deal with such astronomical figures.

Above all, he was worried by the erosion of the nation’s moral sense, by the awe and brutality engendered by over-concentrated financial power: “One of the difficulties as I see it is that we worship money instead of honor. A billionaire in our estimation is much greater in the eyes of the people than the public servant who works for the public interest. It makes no difference if the billionaire rode to wealth on the sweat of little children and the blood of underpaid labor. . . .”

Reading these forgotten words, perhaps readers can appreciate a little more the sincerity of the President who fought for his reelection in 1948 against a Congress that was trying to give the country back to the control of these same special interests.

At the same time, my father made it clear again and again, during the hearings and in his speeches, that he was not against all businessmen. He went out of his way to praise the courage of many of the executives of the operating railroads, who fought to maintain efficiency and quality while the financial blood was being sucked out of their companies. His answer to the abuses of the Wall Street manipulators was not government ownership, either. More than a few New Deal senators were inclined to see this as the only solution. But Dad insisted more stringent regulation and severe restrictions on the size of the holding companies would correct most of the abuses.

My father also believed the time had come for the big financiers on Wall Street to realize they had better start thinking and acting in the public interest: “It is a pity that Wall Street with its ability to control all the wealth of the nation and to hire the best brains of the country has not produced some statesmen, some men who could see the dangers of bigness and of the concentration of the control of wealth. Instead of working to meet the situation, they are still employing the best law brains to serve greed and selfish interest.”

He also sounded a note he was to repeat again and again in later years, in his struggle to attract talented men into the government: “The ordinary government mine-run bureaucratic lawyer is no more a match for the amiable gentlemen who represent the great railroads, insurance companies and Wall Street bankers than the ordinary lamb is a match for the butcher.”

His distaste for the way the railroads were being run inclined him to side emphatically with railroad workers in their struggle against their employers. In 1938, the big operating companies asked for the right to cut wages by 15 percent. My father went before a fact-finding board that was conducting hearings and blasted the proposal. He told the board that, as a result of his investigations, he was convinced the railroads were wasting approximately $667,000 a day: “Banker management should not be permitted to sacrifice railroad labor for their inability to control a situation of their own creation.” For the first time, but not the last, union leaders awoke to Harry S. Truman’s existence. While other senators opposed the wage cut, no one else could speak with Dad’s authority on railroads and their mismanagement.

One amusing by-product of my father’s growing fame as a corporate taskmaster was a public confusion between him and Thurman Arnold, the trust-busting assistant attorney general and author of several scathing books on corporate mores, most notably The Folklore of Capitalism. Thurman and Truman were similar enough to get even the Washington Star confused. The paper once ran a picture of Dad and identified him as Arnold. There was a constant intermingling of their mail. Since they shared a common philosophy, the two of them decided it was funny and became good friends.

Commenting on one mail mixup, Arnold wrote: “I can’t figure out from the enclosed letter whether this guy thinks I am you or whether he thinks you are me. What is your opinion?”

Dad replied: “I guess he thinks I am you; at any rate, in this instance you are me, or vice versa. From time to time I receive letters addressed to you or to a ‘combination’ of us. . . . Frankly, I think the writers are giving me entirely too much credit. . . .”

While he was carving out his own niche as an investigator in the complicated world of business and finance, my father also participated vigorously in the turbulent political battles of the middle and late 30s. Most of the time, he supported the Roosevelt Administration. Ironically, looking back on his reward for this loyalty in later years, he said: “I was one of those in the Senate who was called a rubber-stamp senator. Do you know what a rubber-stamp congressman or senator is? He is a man who is elected on the platform of the party, and who tries to carry out that platform in cooperation with the President of the United States - that’s all he is.”

These words were spoken by a President who valued every so-called rubber-stamp congressman he could find.

My father was never an unthinking rubber stamp. He supported the administration in perhaps the greatest political brawl of the decade - Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt to alter the balance of the Supreme Court by obtaining the power to appoint additional justices. This was a battle that almost tore the Democratic Party apart. Some of my father’s best friends in the Senate were on the other side. Burton K. Wheeler was, in fact, the leader of the opposition, and Vice President Garner was a less vocal but perhaps more powerful opponent of the plan. Bennett Clark was another fierce foe of it. But Dad’s investigation of big business had led him to conclude that the tycoons and financiers dominated not only state governments and federal regulatory commissions but the Supreme Court as well. He pointed out there was nothing sacred about a nine-man court. The number of justices had varied from five to ten throughout the nation’s history. “The cry,” he said, “is that the President wants to pack the Court. . . . I say the Court is packed now and has been for fifty years against progressive legislation.”

My father never forgot the lessons he learned from that fight. It was a monumental example of how a President should not deal with Congress. Roosevelt had let the “blizzard of 1936” - his tremendous landslide victory - deceive him into thinking he could get anything he wanted from Congress. With seventy-five Democrats and seventeen Republicans in the Senate and the count in the House 334 to eighty-nine in his favor, it would seem to have been a logical conclusion - for anyone who relied on mere statistics. But human beings are not statistics, and there were many Democratic senators who were already having severe doubts about the ultimate goals of the New Deal. Some of the Senate’s greatest liberals, such as George W. Norris, denounced the President’s Supreme Court plan with as much fervor as did the conservatives. From February to July the battle raged and only ended when the exhausted Senate majority leader, Joe Robinson, collapsed and died of a heart attack. More than anything else, this Senate revolt forged the alliance between conservative Democrats and Republicans that was to torment Dad and future Democratic Presidents.

Disaster threatened the Democratic program. On the long train ride down to Arkansas for Joe Robinson’s funeral, the senators discussed only one topic - who would be the next majority leader? On this choice depended to a large extent the President’s ability to lead Congress. From the viewpoint of long service to the party and to Roosevelt, the choice of most senators was Pat Harrison of Mississippi. Everyone knew Roosevelt owed Senator Harrison a debt of gratitude for swinging the Mississippi delegation to him at a crucial moment at the 1932 convention. Jim Farley says he told Roosevelt, “If it wasn’t for Pat Harrison, you might not be President.”

But Roosevelt feared that Senator Harrison, a Southern conservative, would not support the New Deal with sufficient enthusiasm. So the President swung the weight of his approval behind Alben Barkley of Kentucky. It immediately became obvious that it would be a very close vote. My father liked Harrison personally, and before Roosevelt had decided to attempt this unprecedented intervention in the affairs of the Senate, Dad had promised the genial Mississippi senator his vote. Jim Farley recalls the intense pressure Roosevelt exerted to swing senators into line. His arm-twisting even extended to Farley. But he had given the senators his word he would not intervene in the battle. He adamantly refused to yield to the President’s plea to call various political bosses around the country and ask them to browbeat individual senators. “I have no doubt that calls were made, and my name used,” Farley says. In fact, he recalls being visited by a distraught Senator William H. Dieterich of Illinois who told him he had just received a phone call from Ed Kelly, the boss of Chicago, ordering him to vote for Barkley or forget about reelection. Farley urged Dieterich to defy Kelly, but he shook his head and switched his vote.

My father got a similar call from Tom Pendergast. Tom said the White House had phoned him and asked him to order Senator Truman into the Barkley camp.

“I just can’t do it, Tom, and I’ll tell you why,” Dad said. “I’ve given my word to Pat Harrison.”

Pendergast assured Dad he had no personal interest in the conflict. “I told them that if you were committed you would stand by your commitment, because you are a contrary Missourian.”

To my father’s indignation, a Washington newspaper printed a story claiming he had switched to Barkley on Tom Pendergast’s orders. When senators vote for majority leader or whip, they do so by secret ballot. But Dad was so incensed over this smear that just before he handed in his ballot, he turned to Senator Clyde L. Herring of Iowa and showed him the ballot, which he had emphatically marked for Harrison. The vote was excruciatingly close. Senator Barkley won by a single ballot - thirty-eight to thirty-seven. Senator Dieterich’s capitulation to Boss Kelly made the difference. When a Kansas City Star reporter asked my father if he had been the crucial switched vote, Dad angrily told him to go see Senator Herring and he would tell him how the junior senator from Missouri had voted.

To make sure everybody got the point, Dad put through a call to Steve Early, the press secretary at the White House. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve got a message for the President. Tell him to stop treating me like an office boy.”