“I am going tο run for reelection, if the only vote I get is my own.”

That is what I remember my father saying early in 1940.

According to some reports from Missouri, that was about all the votes he could expect. In spite of the support Dad had given the Roosevelt Administration, Lloyd Stark seemed to have FDR’s blessing. The brisk correspondence between the President and the governor, the frequent White House visits, continued. The Jackson County Democrats were in sad disarray, cringing every time the name Pendergast was mentioned.

Late in January my father made a trip to Missouri to see what he could do about rallying some support. He wrote to some thirty friends who he was sure would stick with him and asked them to meet with him in the Statler Hotel in St. Louis to discuss his campaign Less than half of them showed up, and those who came spent most of their time telling Dad he did not have a chance. He could not even persuade anyone to take on the vital job of finance chairman for the campaign.

One of the few who urged him to run was Harry Easley, an old friend from Webb City in southwest Missouri. He had known Dad since 1932, and he arrived in time to have breakfast with him and report that Senator Truman had a lot of support in his part of the state. Just after breakfast, while Easley was in one room of Dad’s suite and Dad was busy in another room, the phone rang. It was the White House calling. Easley hastily summoned Dad’s secretary, Vic Messall, who in turn asked my father if he wanted to come to the phone. Dad shook his head, and Vic took the message from FDR’s press secretary, Steve Early. It was an offer from the President. If Senator Truman would withdraw from the race, he could have a seat on the Interstate Commerce Commission, a life appointment at a salary that was a lot more than senators were paid. “Tell them to go to hell,” Dad said. “I’ve made up my mind that I’m going to run.”

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch found out about the discouraging meeting and chortled over Dad’s discomfiture: “Harry Truman, the erstwhile Ambassador in Washington of the defunct principality of Pendergastia, is back home, appraising his chances of being re-elected to the Senate. They are nil. He is a dead cock in the pit.”

My father went back to Washington, profoundly discouraged. John Snyder, who was working for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, joined him in his Senate office for another conference. It was a very depressing talk. Snyder could do little for him, directly, because he was a government employee. The overwhelming problem was money. As Snyder recalls the meeting, “The thought came to me that we hadn’t even enough money to buy the postage stamps to write to anybody to help us.” Not long after he made this glum observation, the meeting started to break up on a note of complete despair. But as Snyder was leaving, Dad reiterated his determination to run: “I can’t walk out on the charges that have been made against me. For my own self-respect, if nothing else, I must run.”

Snyder promised to meet him for another conference on the following day. As he left the Senate Office Building, he met an old friend from St. Louis, Horace Deal. “John, what’s happened to you?” asked Deal. “You look like you’ve just been run through a wringer.”

“Well,” Snyder said, “that couldn’t be a better description of how I feel.” He told him about his meeting with Dad and their seemingly hopeless economic plight.

“It’s pretty bad, isn’t it,” Deal said.

“It is,” said Snyder.

“Well, maybe it’s not all that bad,” Deal said. Whereupon he took out his checkbook, opened it on the fender of a car, and wrote out a check for $1,000. “I didn’t even stop to thank him,” Snyder says. “I grabbed it and ran back into the building, and into Senator Truman’s office.” He waved the check in front of Dad and said, “Well, at least we can buy postage stamps.”

Less than a week later, on my father’s orders, Vic Messall drove to Jefferson City and filed the necessary papers to make Dad a candidate for reelection. “I am filing for reelection to the United States Senate today. . . . I am asking the voters of the state of Missouri to renominate and reelect me on my record as a public official and United States Senator,” Dad said in a statement from Washington.

Governor Stark had already filed for the senatorial primary. He declared himself an all-out Roosevelt supporter and called for a third term. He also piously declared he was “not planning an attack on any other Democrat in order to win the nomination.” This lofty pose was based on his assumption he was so far ahead he could coast to victory.

For reasons I’ve already stated, Dad was not an enthusiastic backer of Roosevelt for a third term. In the statement announcing his candidacy, Dad reiterated this stand and declared himself ready to support Bennett Clark for President at the 1940 convention. By this time, Senator Clark had completely broken with Roosevelt and was edging toward the isolationists in Congress, severely criticizing the Roosevelt defense program. War had already begun in Europe, and Dad was a wholehearted backer of the defense program. He and Senator Clark simply did not see eye to eye on this and a host of other issues. But with loyalty to the Democratic Party and to Missouri as his cardinal virtue, my father was ready to offer Bennett his support if FDR withdrew or the convention was deadlocked.

Senator Clark did not reciprocate with any statement of support for Senator Truman. That was not his style. But he reacted savagely against Governor Stark’s attempt to take over the Democratic Party in Missouri and control the delegation to the 1940 national convention. Several voices had already been raised, suggesting Governor Stark as a presidential candidate in his own right. Others continued to say he would make an excellent vice president on the Roosevelt ticket. The governor did nothing to discourage either of these sentiments.

Even before my father filed for the Senate race, warfare had erupted between Senator Clark and Governor Stark. On January 4, 1940, Bennett, in his inimitably sarcastic style, told a St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter what he thought of Stark:

It is hard to estimate the political situation in Missouri just now, since Lloyd’s ambitions seem to be like the gentle dew that falls from heaven and covers everything high or low. He is the first man in the history of the United States who has ever tried to run for President and Vice President, Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of War, Governor General of the Philippines, Ambassador to England and United States Senator all at one and the same time.

At the same time that he is running for these offices, Lloyd is apparently trying to control the Missouri delegation and name the whole state ticket. It is rumored that he is also an accepted candidate for both the College of Heralds and the Archbishopric of Canterbury. I understand, too, that he is receiving favorable mention as Akhund of Swat and Emir of Afghanistan.

The story of Lloyd Stark is a classic study of a man overreaching himself. His almost boundless ambition and arrogant style had already split the Democratic Party in Missouri down the middle. This fact was dramatized by the holding of two separate Jackson Day dinners - one attended by anti-Stark Democrats, the other by pro-Stark people. My father persuaded Senator Tom Connally to speak on his behalf at the anti-Stark dinner, which was held in Springfield under the sponsorship of the Green County Democratic Committee. Governor Stark did not attend, claiming a conflict in his schedule. When one of his associates rose to say a few words on his behalf, the 700 guests at the dinner booed him so vociferously that the chairman of the dinner finally had to pound his gavel on the lectern and beg for order.

My father was pleased by this news, of course. He wrote to John Snyder that Senator Connally “said enough nice things about me to elect me (if it had been left to that crowd!). The booing of Stark was a rather unanimous affair.”

The realization that Senator Truman had some support in Missouri - or at the very least Governor Stark had some enemies - created near hysteria among the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial writers. A few days after the Jackson Day dinner, they wrote an editorial captioned HARRY S. TRUMAN-STOOGE OF BOSS PENDERGAST: “The whelps of Boss Pendergast, Harry Truman and Bennett Clark, hissed and booed the speaker who rose to deliver the greetings of Governor Stark. . . . Truman was one of the toasts of the Springfield dinner. He is the stooge whom Boss Pendergast lifted from obscurity and placed in the United States Senate. He is the stooge who paid off his debt to Pendergast in the most abject way. He is the stooge who tried to prevent the reappointment of the fearless prosecutor, the United States Attorney Milligan, because Milligan was sending Truman’s pals to the penitentiary. Well, Truman is through in Missouri. He may as well fold up and accept a nice lucrative Federal post if he can get it - and if he does get it, it’s a travesty of democracy.”

Governor Stark’s Jackson Day dinner, meanwhile, turned into a political disaster. The governor of Arkansas, who had agreed to be the principal speaker, abruptly reneged. When Stark tried frantically to persuade some prominent New Deal official to come out from Washington, Dad and Bennett Clark, working together for once, blocked that move. The governor was reduced to importing a wealthy Kansas cattleman to be the speaker of the evening. This was, indeed, desperation. Importing a Kansan to address Missouri Democrats made about as much sense politically as inviting Sitting Bull to address a reunion of the 7th Cavalry Regiment.

Three months later, Governor Stark made another mistake in political judgment. Both he and my father were invited to speak at a Jefferson Day banquet in Kirksville, Missouri. The dinner was supposed to promote party unity, and all the speakers were urged to limit their remarks to lavish praise of Thomas Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Lloyd Stark was the first speaker. To everyone’s astonishment and outrage, he proceeded to make a searing political speech, blasting the many Missouri Democrats who did not support a third term for FDR, extolling the achievements of his own administration, and declaring himself practically elected as senator from Missouri. My father threw aside the speech he had prepared, calling for party unity, and gave Governor Stark the tongue-lashing he deserved. A considerable number of powerful Missouri Democrats left Kirksville that night professing profound disgust for Governor Stark.

The next round in the mounting struggle was the Missouri State Democratic Convention on April 15. My father wisely remained on the sidelines, while Senator Clark and Governor Stark met head-on in the battle for the control of the delegation. It was really no contest. When Stark’s name was mentioned on the convention floor, he got nothing but boos, and if Bennett Clark had had his way, the governor would not even have been elected a delegate at large to the national convention. My father, with that instinct for playing a peacemaker’s role, persuaded his fellow Democrats to give the discomfited Stark at least that much recognition. But the rest of the delegation was firmly in Bennett Clark’s camp, and the senior senator was named chairman.

As my father tartly reminded several of his supporters in Missouri, however, it was not enough to rejoice over these rebuffs to Stark. Something had to be done about getting people to vote for Truman. While carrying his full workload in Congress, Dad struggled to put together an organization. He sent his secretaries, Vic Messall and Millie Dryden, back to Missouri to be the mainstays. But money remained the tormenting problem. Nobody was willing to bet any real cash on Truman. My father still could not even find a finance chairman. He finally persuaded his old army friend Harry Vaughan to take the job. Wryly Vaughan recalls, “I had a bank balance of three dollars and a quarter.”

Millie Dryden, looking back on those hectic days, said, “Many times we had so little money, we ran out of stamps.” The few paid employees worked for practically nothing. One young man frequently ran out of gas and had to hitchhike back to the office. “I remember,” Millie said, “he lived out south someplace and it was downhill most of the way to where he lived and he used to try to coast as far as he could in order to save his gas because he was making such a small salary.” As one time, the treasury sank so low the last few dollars were invested in mailing an appeal to numbers of people asking them to send in a dollar. Two hundred dollars came in, and this was reinvested in another mailing, which raised even more money. But Dad finally had to borrow $3,000 on his life insurance to meet the office payroll and other “must” expenses.

Meanwhile, Stark, with his family millions behind him, was buying up radio time and spending lavish amounts of money on newspaper advertising.

Calmly, methodically, refusing to panic, my father went ahead with the most important task - organizing his campaign. John Snyder, who was present at the first organization meeting, was so impressed by the firmness and clarity with which Dad stated his principles, he copied them down verbatim. He was kind enough to show me his record of exactly what Dad said at this meeting:

The Senator will not engage in personalities and asks his friends to do the same. Avoid mentioning the Senator’s opponents in any way.

Avoid getting into controversial issues. Stick to Truman - his record as judge, as a senator, as a military man.

While others discuss issues not involved in the primary, each worker will carefully avoid getting into those traps.

The press is a function of our free institutions. If they are wrong in their attitude, try to make them see the true light, but under no circumstances attack them.

Political parties are essential to our republic, our nation and we must not attack them. What we’re doing is to show by our actions what we think our party is destined to do. Provide the basic laws for a more abundant life and the happiness and security of our people. Those are the conditions under which I am going to run and those are the conditions I want each of my adherents and co-workers to observe with the greatest of zeal.

In Washington, my father did his utmost to get some help from the Roosevelt Administration. He went to see Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, who had numerous employees in Missouri and was highly regarded by farmers and others in the rural parts of the state. Ickes coldly informed him he supported Governor Stark. Over at the White House, Dad did his best to get through to the President and warn him Stark was wrecking the Democratic Party in the state of Missouri. He told him enough about Stark’s political style to lower considerably the warmth of the President’s letters to the governor.

By April 1940, FDR was telling my father that personally he would like to see him reelected. The President said he would see what he could do about persuading Stark to abandon the race. Charles Edison had recently resigned as Secretary of the Navy, and a few days after this April meeting between Dad and FDR, Stark called at the White House, and the President reportedly offered him Edison’s job. But Stark refused and later issued a statement denying the offer had been made. All told, the net result of this tough inside politicking was not too encouraging for my father. But he could console himself that he had eliminated the possibility of a Roosevelt endorsement for Stark.

Back in Missouri, Truman supporters from Jackson County were working out another political maneuver. Several of Dad’s good friends, such as Tom Evans, owner of Radio Station KCMO, went to Maurice Milligan and urged that gentleman to enter the race. They pointed out that Governor Stark was taking all the credit for putting Tom Pendergast in jail, when the real work had been done by Milligan and his assistants and the other federal investigators. Milligan already resented Stark’s grab for all the glory, and when he saw some of Harry Truman’s best friends urging him to run, he decided the senator was only going to make a token race. Why shouldn’t the real slayer of the Pendergast dragon become senator? Milligan asked himself. So, to Dad’s great but carefully restrained glee, Milligan entered the race on March 28.

In Washington, my father turned his attention to another source of potential help - labor. Reminding union chiefs of the support he had given their cause in his Senate votes, he asked them to come to his aid now. Multimillionaire Stark had shown himself no great friend of the laboring man while governor. Toward the end of May, Dad’s call for help received an enormously heartwarming response. Twenty-one railroad brotherhoods informed him they were ready to “go down the line for Truman.” They had 50,000 members in Missouri. Through their intercession, other Missouri labor groups pledged the support of 150,000 more workers.

But it was the railroad men who provided crucial assistance. Truman-for-Senator Clubs were set up in railroad stations throughout Missouri. Even more important was the chance they gave my father to reply to the smears and slanders being printed about him in most of the state’s newspapers. The brotherhoods created a special edition of their weekly newspaper, Labor. It was crammed with endorsements from labor leaders and other influential Missourians. The chaplain of the Missouri American Legion, Reverend Father M. F. Wogan, endorsed Senator Truman. Frank J. Murphy, secretary-treasurer of the state Federation of Labor, rated him “100 percent perfect” on social and labor questions during his Senate years. President William Green of the AFL applauded Senator Truman’s “very favorable record.” Dr. William T. Tompkins, president of the National Colored Democratic Association, was listed as general chairman of the Negro Division of the Truman Campaign Committee. He was a Kansas City man, incidentally, and a personal friend.

Most impressive, however, was the gallery of senators who contributed long enthusiastic statements in praise of my father. Alben Barkley of Kentucky, Robert F. Wagner of New York, James F. Byrnes of South Carolina were on the front page, and on inner pages were Burton K. Wheeler of Montana, Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, Pat Harrison of Mississippi, Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma, Robert Reynolds of North Carolina, Tom Connally of Texas, and Vic Donahey of Ohio. Included in these names were some of the New Deal’s best-known spokesmen in the Senate. Anyone reading this list would certainly get the impression the Roosevelt Administration was backing Harry S. Truman. Lloyd Stark must have shuddered when 500,000 copies of this special edition poured into Missouri. Around the same time, the Labor Tribune of St. Louis was blasting the governor for ignoring the needs of Missouri’s workingmen.

My father was only starting to go to work on Governor Stark. On June 15, at Sedalia, in the center of the state, he kicked off his campaign with a superbly organized rally. Senator Lewis Schwellenbach of Washington was on hand to tell Missourians what his fellow senators thought of their friend Harry S. Truman. On the platform were representatives of Missouri’s Democratic Party from all parts of the state. Mamma Truman had a front row seat, sizing up politicians with her usual unerring eye. The little courthouse was decorated with huge pictures of Senator Truman and the candidate of the St. Louis Democrats for governor, Larry McDaniel. I sat on the platform with Mother. At sixteen, I was able to feel for the first time the essential excitement of American politics - the struggle to reach those people “out there” with ideas and emotions that will put them on your side.

The crowd was big, over 4,000, and very friendly. This was all the more impressive because the day before, Paris had surrendered to the Germans, and most people in Missouri, and in the rest of the country, were glued to their radios, listening to the greatest crisis of the century.

My father’s talk that day sounded all the themes he was to underscore throughout his campaign. He pointed to what the Roosevelt Administration had achieved for the laboring man; he talked about the defense program, for which he had voted and fought in the Senate. Events were now proving it to be vital to the nation’s salvation. Above all, he talked about the Democratic Party’s efforts to achieve equal opportunity for all Americans. By this, he made it clear, he also meant black Americans: “I believe in the brotherhood of man, not merely the brotherhood of white men but the brotherhood of all men before the law. . . . In giving the Negro the rights which are theirs we are only acting in accord with our ideals of a true democracy. . . . The majority of our Negro people find but cold comfort in shanties and tenements. Surely, as free men, they are entitled to something better than this. . . . It is our duty to see that the Negroes in our locality have increased opportunities to exercise their privilege as free men.”

With these words, my father was saying what he truly believed. In his years as county judge, he had done his utmost to place a fair proportion of black men on the public works payroll. This appeal to black voters also exploited a large chink in Governor Stark’s armor. In October 1939, the United Negro Democrats of Missouri had condemned the governor and refused to back him for United States senator. They accused him of wholesale dismissal of blacks from public office and castigated his support of a bill in the Missouri Legislature, which purported to create separate but equal graduate school and professional facilities at Lincoln University. In reality, the bill was a crude attempt to subvert a U.S. Supreme Court decision which declared the state was denying blacks their constitutional rights by refusing them admission to the law school and other graduate schools at the University of Missouri. There were 250,000 black voters in Missouri, and it was soon evident they too were going down the line for Harry Truman.

Much has been made by many of my father’s biographers of a cartoon published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch portraying two big trucks, one labeled “Stark for Senator,” the other labeled “Milligan for Senator,” meeting head on. Scurrying between their wheels was a tiny little truck labeled “Truman for Senator.” The caption read, “No place for a kiddie car.” Actually, the cartoon is only one more proof that newspaper editors (with certain exceptions) are poor political prophets. By now Milligan was far behind, a poor third in the race. The Truman campaign was building momentum every day. Stark was still in the lead, but my father was confident he was going to win - every bit as confident as he would be in 1948.

Just as in 1948, he based his confidence on a shrewd assessment not only of his own resources and his determination to get the facts to the public, but also on the deficiencies and weaknesses of his opponent. He knew, for instance, that a sizable number of people disliked Lloyd Stark’s arrogance. When the governor approached his car, he demanded a military salute from his chauffeur. Whenever he appeared in public, a staff of uniformed Missouri state colonels made him look like a dictator. My father also knew, from his inside contacts with Missouri Democrats, that the governor, the supposed reformer of the state, was “putting the lug” (to use Missouri terminology) on state employees to contribute to his campaign fund. He had done this during the 1938 fight to elect his candidate to the State Supreme Court, and it had caused intense resentment throughout the state. Everyone making more than $60 a month had to kick in 5 percent of his annual salary.

My father reported these facts to his good friend Senator Guy M. Gillette, chairman of the Senate committee to investigate senatorial campaigns. On June 20, 1940, Senator Gillette released a report of his investigation. It was a Sunday punch to Lloyd Stark’s reformer image. “There is abundance of evidence to prove that many employees were indirectly coerced into contributing, although they may not be in sympathy with the candidacy of Governor Stark for the U.S. Senate,” Senator Gillette said. He later issued a detailed report, citing the names of the governor’s assistants who did the arm-twisting, and statements of employees who said they had contributed against their wills.

In the middle of July, everyone interrupted the primary campaign to journey to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention. Here Lloyd Stark made another blunder - as Dad expected that he would. With FDR quickly nominated for a third term, the only office in contention was the vice presidency. Although Stark had declared only a few days before the convention that there was “nothing to this talk about my being a candidate for vice president,” he could not resist making a try for the job. He sent bushels of his family’s Delicious apples (to this day I don’t like them - Mcintosh taste better) to dozens of influential delegates, opened a headquarters, and organized a demonstration on the floor of the convention, waving “Roosevelt and Stark” banners. Then came word from on high that the President’s choice was Henry A. Wallace. A chastened Stark hastily withdrew, but not before Bennett Clark sank a barb into his posterior. “A man can’t withdraw from a race he was never in,” Senator Clark gibed. To complete the governor’s humiliation, Senator Clark ordered the Missouri delegation to vote for Speaker of the House William B. Bankhead for vice president.

Governor Stark’s antics in Chicago were awfully difficult to explain in Missouri. His supporters tried hard. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch tut-tutted, waffled in all directions, and finally gave its senatorial candidate an editorial slap on the wrist: “The Governor has taken a gamble - and a not too dignified one.”

Back to Missouri went the candidates, to slug it out for the rest of the campaign. My father maintained his usual back-breaking schedule, ignoring the heat, making ten and twelve speeches a day up and down the state. Milligan and Stark continued to denounce him as a tool of Pendergast, and the newspapers maintained the same silly chorus. All the time Dad had in his files a letter from Stark which could have settled the campaign the moment he released it. It was an effusive thank you, which Stark had written to my father for introducing him to Pendergast and persuading Boss Tom to endorse Stark for governor. But Dad’s conscience would not permit him to release it. It was a personal letter between him and Lloyd Stark when they were friends, and he believed letters between friends were confidential, even after they became political enemies.

The best answer to the Pendergast smear was an endorsement from FDR, and as the campaign roared to a climax, Dad made one last try to get it. The chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers wired the White House on July 28, demanding a statement from the President. On July 30, he got the following reply from Steve Early: “The President asks me to explain to you personally that while Senator Truman is an old and trusted friend, the President’s invariable practice has been not to take part in primary contests.”

Thanks to his friends in the Senate, my father got the next best thing to a presidential endorsement - the presence of FDR’s majority leader, Senator Alben Barkley, who came out to St. Louis to speak for him. Although Alben in the flesh no doubt impressed many voters, the meeting itself was a political disaster. The St. Louis Democratic organization was backing Stark, and only 300 people turned out to hear Senator Barkley and Carl Hatch of New Mexico. The meeting was held in the Municipal Auditorium Opera House and the 300 listeners looked pretty forlorn in an auditorium with a capacity of 3,500. The Post-Dispatch had great fun describing the “monster Truman rally.”

It was the sort of news that could sink a campaign. There was now only one week left before primary day. But Lloyd Stark came to our rescue once more. He suddenly announced the Truman campaign was operating with an immense slush fund supplied by Boss Tom Pendergast. This struck Truman headquarters, where deficit financing was now the vogue, as hilarious. My father promptly wired Senator Gillette, denying the charge and asking him to demand evidence from Stark. The senator from Iowa immediately telegraphed the governor, asking him for proof. None, of course, was forthcoming, and Gillette, on the very eve of primary day, issued a statement saying, “In fairness to Senator Truman and before the primary polls open, the public should know of the sending of this telegram and the Governor’s failure to acknowledge it.”

At the same time, Bennett Clark made a dramatic entry into the race. Personally, Senator Clark leaned toward Maurice Milligan, but he was so far behind by now it would have been political idiocy to endorse him. My father was the only man who could stop Stark from taking over the Democratic Party in Missouri. But Senator Clark seesawed about coming out for Dad. First he said he would vote for Truman but would not campaign for him. Finally, several of Dad’s Senate friends pointed out Dad had campaigned for him in 1938, and it was gross ingratitude, among other things, for him to sit on his hands.

In the first days of August, Senator Clark leaped into the fray, lashing Lloyd Stark with sarcasm in his best style. He charged that the governor had “licked Pendergast’s boots” to win his support for his 1936 governorship race and now was trying to use the Pendergast name as a smear to defeat Harry Truman. Rather hysterically, Governor Stark replied that the Truman campaign had collapsed, and everyone in Missouri but Senator Clark and Senator Truman knew it.

Meanwhile, another behind-the-scenes drama was taking place in St. Louis. The nominal head of the St. Louis organization was Bernard Dickmann, the mayor. But a rising star in the city politic was a young Irish-American, Robert Hannegan. They had a candidate running for governor, Larry McDaniel. In the opening rally at Sedalia, Truman supporters had cheered vociferously for McDaniel every time his name was mentioned. They supported him and expected the St. Louis organization to return the compliment. As my father’s campaign gathered momentum, the St. Louis leaders grew more and more jittery. They kept getting calls from numerous Truman supporters around the state, but particularly from southeast Missouri where Dad had a tremendous following, warning them they were going to vote against McDaniel unless St. Louis came out for Truman. Hannegan, shrewdly sniffing the political wind, decided Dad looked like a winner and tried to persuade Mayor Dickmann to switch. But the mayor stubbornly stayed with Stark. Hannegan proceeded to pass the word among his own followers - who probably outnumbered Dickmann’s - that Senator Truman was the man to back.

My father ended his campaign with a rally in Independence. Lloyd Stark issued one last plea to “save Missouri from Pendergastism.” The newspapers continued to pour mud on the Truman name, right down to the final hour. The Post-Dispatch declared on August 5: “The nomination of Harry Truman . . . would be the triumph of Pendergastism and a sad defeat for the people of Missouri.” The Globe-Democrat topped even this bit of hysteria by printing between the news articles throughout the paper “Save Missouri - Vote against Truman.”

After taking this kind of abuse in St. Louis for a week, more than a few members of the Truman team were feeling rather glum on primary day. My father’s confidence remained unshaken, but the early returns made many of his friends wonder if he was living in a dream world. All during the early evening of August 6, 1940, Stark maintained roughly a 10,000-vote lead. Dad had to admit things did not look encouraging. But with that fantastic calm which he has always maintained in moments of crisis, he announced, “I’m going to bed.” And he did.

Mother and I stayed up, glued to the radio. I remember answering the phone about 10:30. It was Tom Evans, calling from campaign headquarters. He was very discouraged - and astonished when I told him my father was already asleep.

Mother and I finally went to bed around midnight, very weepy and depressed. Dad was still behind. I remember crying into my pillow and wondering how all those people out there could prefer a stinker like Lloyd Stark.

About 3:30 a.m., the telephone rang. Mother got up and answered it.

“This is Dave Berenstein in St. Louis,” said a cheerful voice. “I’d like to congratulate the wife of the senator from Missouri.”

“I don’t think that’s funny,” snapped Mother and slammed down the phone.

As she stumbled back to bed, Mother suddenly remembered Berenstein was our campaign manager in St. Louis. Then she realized what he had said. She rushed into my room, woke me up, and told me what she had just heard. Berenstein soon called back and explained why he was extending his congratulations. Dad had run very well in St. Louis and was now ahead of Governor Stark.

For the rest of the night and morning, Dad’s lead seesawed back and forth, drooping once to a thin 2,000, then soaring to 11,000, and finally settling to 7,396. By 11:00 a.m., Senator Truman was a certified winner. Just as in 1948, he was bouncing around after a good night’s sleep, shaking hands and accepting congratulations, as refreshed and lively as a man just back from a long vacation. The rest of us were staggering in his wake, totally frazzled from lack of sleep and nervous exhaustion.

My father captured St. Louis by some 8,000 votes - just about the same as his margin of victory. But he also polled about 8,000 more votes out-state than he had done in 1934 - running against two candidates who supposedly had strong out-state support. And he drubbed both Stark and Milligan in Jackson County as well. Obviously, the people who knew him best were least impressed by the gross attempts to link him with Tom Pendergast’s downfall.

Maurice Milligan conceded his defeat, wired my father his congratulations, and assured him he would support him in November. But from Governor Stark there was only silence. He never congratulated my father, and it was clear he intended to sulk throughout the November election campaign. He wrote FDR a long, whining letter blaming his defeat, among other things, on a drought which prevented (for some reason) the farmers from going to the polls to vote. In reply, FDR assured “Dear Lloyd” of his “personal feelings” for him and urged the governor to get behind the Democratic ticket.

Not even urging from the President himself, however, dissuaded Governor Stark from sulking in his mansion. My father considered his conduct unforgivable. During the November campaign, Edward J. Flynn, the Democratic National Chairman, visited Missouri and told Dad the party had scheduled speaking engagements for Governor Stark in Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas. Dad got really angry and did a little table-pounding. The governor was obviously trying to build up some national prestige in order to land a federal appointment in Washington. By the time Flynn left Missouri, Stark’s speaking dates had been canceled.

My father was a forgiving man, but there are some sins he considers unforgivable, and one of them is a refusal to close ranks after a primary fight and support the party ticket. He considers this principle fundamental to the success of the two-party system, and he believes the two-party system is essential to the political structure of the nation. The contrast between his attitude toward Lloyd Stark and Maurice Milligan is a perfect illustration. In September, Dad asked FDR to reappoint Milligan as federal attorney - he had resigned to enter the race, in accordance with the provisions of the Hatch Act, which forbids federal employees from participating in politics. The following year, President Roosevelt considered naming ex-Governor Stark to the National Labor Mediation Board. My father asked his friend former Senator Sherman Minton, recently made a federal judge, to write a strong letter to FDR, informing him the appointment would be personally obnoxious to Dad. Ex-Governor Stark remained a private citizen.

The November campaign for the Senate was almost an anti-climax, after the primary battle. My father spent much of his time in Washington fighting for - and finally winning - passage of his transportation bill. But his opponent, Manvel Davis, copied his primary style and went into every county in Missouri, making an energetic fight out of it. On August 22, the Republicans connived with the presiding judge of the Jackson County Court to pull the kind of dirty trick that convinced me - at least at the time - that all the terrible things Mamma Truman said about Republicans were true. With farm income battered by the depression, my grandmother had been forced to refinance the various mortgages against her farm in 1938. She did so by borrowing $35,000 from Jackson County. The new presiding judge in 1940, elected on an anti-Pendergast slate, foreclosed on this mortgage before my father or Uncle Vivian knew what was happening. The process servers sold the farm at auction, and Dad was forced to move his mother and sister Mary into a small house in Grandview, where a few months later, coming down an unfamiliar staircase, Mamma Truman missed the bottom step, fell, and broke her hip.

It constantly amazes me that my father’s faith in human nature and his ebullient optimism about life survived these experiences without even a tinge of bitterness.

In the final stages of the fall campaign, the Republicans tried another maneuver aimed at the strong residue of Klan feeling in many rural parts of Missouri. They distributed thousands of imitation ballots in which my father’s name was printed “Harry Solomon Truman.” With these went a whispering campaign that Dad’s grandfather, Solomon Young, was Jewish, not German. I remember a friend handing me one of these ballots. I stared incomprehensibly at it and laughed. I had never heard an anti-Semitic word uttered in our house, so the accusation did not arouse an iota of concern in me. My father treated the whole thing as if it were ridiculous.

In numerous speeches, Manvel Davis tried mightily to paint my father as a tool of “the Dickmann-Pendergast axis” - which was pretty silly, since everyone knew Barney Dickmann had gone down clinging to Governor Stark. Davis also spent a lot of time calling Dad a rubber-stamp senator and begged the Jeffersonian Democrats - as distinguished from the New Deal Democrats - to desert Truman and repair to the Davis standard. Dad practically ignored him and devoted most of his campaign to defending FDR’s third-term bid against the savage attacks of most of the state’s papers. Davis’s energetic campaign did make a fairly impressive impact, but my father won by 40,000 votes.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, obviously working on the assumption its readers had no memories whatsoever, proceeded to eat its previous words and pretend it had been behind Dad all the time: “Senator Truman has been on the whole a satisfactory Senator. Now seasoned by experience, he should make an even better record in his second term.”

The day after the election, my father flew back to Washington. Because of the world crisis, Congress was still in session. When Dad walked into the Senate chamber, every senator in the place rose and applauded. These professional politicians knew what he had achieved out there in Missouri. No one could call him names anymore, or smear him with ugly guilt by association. He was the United States Senator from Missouri in his own right.