Senator Guffey was not the only Democrat who was troubled about Vice President Henry Wallace. He represented the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party in all its high-minded craziness. He was an example of FDR’s tendency to place ideology above competence in many of his appointments. As a vice president, Wallace had been a disaster. That is no mean trick, to gum up that job. All a veep has to do is preside over the Senate and ingratiate himself and the administration with its leaders. Henry Wallace did the precise opposite, ruffling feathers, rarely appearing to preside.

Even worse was his performance as Chairman of the Board of Economic Warfare. It was probably an impossible job, but he proceeded to get into a public shouting match with Jesse Jones, head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation and idol of the Senate conservatives. FDR had to publicly rebuke both of them.

Another worry that emerged in whispers among Democratic Party leaders as 1944 began was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s health. His body already crippled by polio, he was showing signs of the strain of running a global war. In 1943, exhausting trips to international conferences in Casablanca, Quebec, and Cairo had added to the stress. The toll on his health became more and more visible. For a while, some people wondered if he would run for a fourth term, especially as the momentum of the war shifted in favor of the Allies.

But most people believed FDR’s leadership would be needed to carry the war to a successful conclusion and to construct a lasting peace. One of the first politicians to make this point was Harry Truman, in a Jackson Day Dinner speech in Florida, early in 1944. He made the same speech three or four more times in the next few months. Simultaneously he began pushing other candidates for vice president.

Almost all these candidates were critical - or at least independent - of Roosevelt. As he did on most issues, Dad was reflecting the mainstream of the Democratic Party. The politicians sensed that roughly half the Democrats now disliked or distrusted Franklin D. Roosevelt. The president’s zigs and zags on countless issues, his habit of dumping or humiliating loyal supporters, had accumulated a host of disillusioned enemies within his party. Time magazine quoted a prominent Washington Democrat as declaring: “I haven’t an ounce of confidence in anything Roosevelt does. I wouldn’t believe anything he said.” Southern Democrats were especially restive. They threatened to organize a new party that might back a Republican for president and deny Roosevelt reelection in 1944.

The president’s attempts to outmaneuver his enemies only added to the disenchantment. As 1944 began, he announced that the New Deal was dead. It was no longer needed to doctor America’s ills. “Dr. Win-the-War” was now in charge. Two weeks later, in his economic message to Congress, he made some of the most radical proposals of his career, calling for an “economic bill of rights” that would guarantee jobs, housing, medical care, and education to every American. The message, to quote one of FDR’s biographers, “fell with a dull thud into the half-empty chamber of the United States Congress.” But it convinced his conservative opponents that Roosevelt was still determined to destroy the free enterprise system.

Next came a ferocious brawl over a tax bill. Roosevelt wanted to boost taxes to combat inflation. The lawmakers declined to go along and sent a tepid compromise to the White House. The bill had been passed by FDR’s fellow Democrats, who controlled both houses of Congress. Yet the president vetoed it and used scathing language to defend his action. He called it “relief not for the needy but for the greedy.” Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley resigned in protest and castigated the president for his “calculated and deliberate assault upon the legislative integrity of every Member of Congress.” For the first time in the history of tax legislation, the bill was passed over the president’s veto.

These nasty episodes help explain why the Democratic leaders in 1944 felt that the man they put up as vice president had to be opposed to, or at least distinctly independent from, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Henry Wallace, who identified himself totally with FDR, would cost the Democrats 40 percent of the vote at the precinct level, the party leaders warned.

Senator Barkley was Harry Truman’s first candidate for vice president. That boomlet collapsed when “Dear Alben” accepted reelection as majority leader and made his peace with the president. Dad turned to another prospect, Speaker of the House of Representatives Sam Rayburn of Texas. He took Mr. Sam to Missouri and presented him to the people as an ideal vice president. Everyone liked him - Texas and Missouri have always had kinship feelings - but that boomlet too collapsed when conservative Democrats seized control of the Texas state convention and humiliated Sam by refusing to endorse him as a favorite son because he was a Roosevelt supporter.

Meanwhile, Senator Truman was getting more and more letters from friends in Missouri urging him to enter the race himself. To each of these letters, he wrote an earnest negative reply, giving as his chief reason the one he had given Senator Guffey - his desire to stay in the Senate.

Unquestionably, Mother and Dad discussed the vice presidency during the first months of 1944. It was inevitable, because the senator now had a friend close to the president. Early in 1944, Dad had proposed Robert Hannegan, a St. Louis politician who had given him crucial support in the 1940 election, to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee. When Bob got the job, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch promptly declared that this appointment moved Truman into prime consideration for the vice presidency.

We now know something even more important. Mr. Hannegan, who began seeing FDR regularly, became convinced that the president would not live out a fourth term. The choice of a vice president thus became considerably more than a matter of winning the 1944 election. It involved the future of the United States of America.

Dad undoubtedly heard about the president’s declining health from Bob Hannegan and others. When friends and staffers such as Max Lowenthal urged him to accept the vice presidency, Dad used me as his first line of excuse. Later, Mr. Lowenthal recalled that he said he had “talked it over with the Mrs. and he had decided not to be a candidate. Also, he had a daughter and the White House was no place for children.” Bess undoubtedly pointed to the awful smears and rumors that had swirled around the Roosevelt children and asked Dad if he wanted to subject me to a similar ordeal, at the age of twenty. She also stated her own antipathy to the idea for reasons we shall soon discuss.

In the spring of 1944, the Independence Examiner suddenly published an editorial, grandly informing the world and the state of Missouri that Harry Truman did not want to be vice president. I have no hard evidence, but I would be willing to bet a lot of money that the source of that editorial was Bess Truman. She did not have to use any clandestine device to get it in the paper. She may have told the paper’s editor, Colonel Southern, himself, or told her sister-in-law, May Southern Wallace, with the implicit confidence that the news would soon reach her father’s ears.

A Missourian sent Dad a copy of the editorial and asked him if it was correct. Dad said it was. He had worked nine years to become an influential senator and did not want to throw it away. “The Vice President . . . is a very high office which consists entirely of honor and I don’t have any ambition to hold an office like that,” he wrote.

Mother had every reason to assume that the matter was settled by the time the D-Day landing on June 6, 1944 pushed political news off the front page. In mid-June the entire family, including Dad, left Washington and headed for Denver, where again Mother planned to leave Grandmother Wallace for the summer. They now had a new worry in that locale. Fred Wallace’s wife, Christine, was pregnant again, and the doctor was predicting twins.

June 28, 1944, was the Trumans’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. It is an index of her brother Fred’s importance to Mother that she celebrated this day not at 219 North Delaware Street or at our apartment in Washington, either of which place might legitimately be called home, but in Freddy’s rented house in Denver. Nevertheless, Harry Truman made it a memorable day. He gave Mother twenty-five roses and a chest of Gorham silver in the Fairfax design. If anyone doubts that this ex-farmer had good taste, a look at this silver (it is now on display at 219 North Delaware Street) would change that opinion. It is exquisite.

I had been collaborating with Dad on the silver since Christmas time, when I helped him buy it. Two days before the anniversary, I bought the chest in which he gave it to Mother. So I was almost as excited as she was when she saw it. The set was not only beautiful, it was complete. Along with eight place settings, there were sixteen teaspoons, ladles, and salad forks. Bess was overwhelmed. Her two sisters-in-law had sets in this design, which Dad had long admired. Mother had chosen another much simpler design for her wedding silver.

That anniversary was one of the happiest days in the Truman marriage. But Bess found it difficult to sustain her happiness in the anxious weeks that followed it.

The senator returned to Washington, where the push to make him vice president resumed with furious intensity. Now that the Second Front was established, President Roosevelt was certain to be renominated for a fourth term. (It may surprise some readers to learn that he did not announce he was a candidate until July 11, 1944.) In Denver, I had seen a newspaper story about Dad becoming vice president and asked Mother about it. She dismissed the idea as a “plot” by Robert Hannegan and other ambitious politicians and assured me Dad did not want the job. I wrote him a letter, remarking offhandedly that I hoped he would continue to keep the “plotters” at bay.

I was startled by the seriousness of his reply. “Yes they are all plotting against your dad. Every columnist and prognosticator is trying to make him VP against his will. Bill Boyle, Max Lowenthal [Senate staffers], Mr. Biffle [secretary of the Senate] and a dozen others were on my trail yesterday with only that in mind. Hope I can dodge it. 1600 Pennsylvania is a nice address but I’d rather not move in through the back door - or any other door at sixty.”

In my biography of Dad, I quoted that letter to demonstrate his reluctance to accept the nomination. While that is still visible, a lot of other things are now much more visible to me. One is the assumption, already firm in Dad’s mind, that the vice president was going to become president. The other is the extraordinary frankness of the letter. Dad was not in the habit of discussing the inner secrets of his political career with me. If anything, he and Mother had gone to extreme lengths to keep politics out of my life. I am now convinced that this letter was meant for Mother. He was certain I would show it to her - which I did. She frowned, shook her head, and reiterated her disapproval of these plotters. She told me, and her mother that Dad was definitely not a candidate.

A few hours after he wrote that letter, Dad left Washington, D.C., and drove to St. Louis, where he paused to pick up some tires from a man who was a close friend of Robert Hannegan. With Fred Canfil, he drove up to Kansas City to do some Missouri politicking. Roger Sermon was running for governor in the August 1 primary and Bennett Clark was up for renomination to the Senate. Dad wanted to help both men, but he reported to Mother that they looked like lost causes - a grim comment on the divisions in the Democratic Party.

The senator wrote a significant letter to Bess from Kansas City. He said it was “good of her to stay at home” the previous night because she was certain he would call. “Wouldn’t I have been some sort of heel if I hadn’t?” Dad asked, and then added: “I hope I never do get into the real heel class.”

He was obviously nervous about the possibility that he was going to do something that would make Bess angry. I am quite certain that during that telephone call the senator convinced Bess that she should come to Chicago and bring me along. He was still assuring her that he did not want the vice presidency, and was doing everything in his power to avoid it (which he was). But he was beginning to get some idea of the juggernaut that was coming toward him.

The next day, he wrote Mother another letter, reporting a “tough interview” he had had with Roy Roberts, managing editor of the Kansas City Star, informing him that he did not want the vice presidency. “Also told the West Virginia and Oklahoma delegations to go for Barkley. Also told Downey [Sheridan Downey, Democratic senator from California] I didn’t want the California delegation. Mr. Roberts says I have it in the bag if I don’t say no - and I’ve said it as tough as I can.”

This was only a warm-up for the pressure Dad faced in Chicago, where the Democratic National Convention was slated to begin on July 19. Thanks to FDR’s deviousness, a veritable covey of politicians arrived at the convention, each thinking he had the president’s backing for second place on the ticket. Henry Wallace was one of them. Jimmy Byrnes, senator from South Carolina and “assistant president” for the war effort, was another one. Alben Barkley of Kentucky was a third. Wallace represented the left wing, Byrnes the right wing of the party. Barkley represented the middle, but his age and previous identification with Roosevelt made him a weak contender.

Robert Hannegan and a group of other party leaders told FDR it had to be another younger man of the center, Harry Truman. Mr. Roosevelt agreed with this analysis and gave Mr. Hannegan a letter stating that he would be happy to run with either Truman or William O. Douglas, the Supreme Court justice. His name was added to avoid the appearance of dictating to the convention, but he had no support whatsoever in the party.

How much Dad knew about this conference, which took place in the White House on July 11, I can’t be sure. He left Kansas City on July 14 and drove to Chicago, arriving there on Saturday, July 15. Almost immediately, he confronted a phalanx of party leaders who informed him that he was FDR’s choice. Bob Hannegan flourished the letter the president had given him.

Still Dad resisted. Jimmy Byrnes, who was as devious as FDR, had called Dad just before he left for Chicago and told him he had the president’s blessing, and asked for Senator Truman’s support. Dad had given it to him without hesitation and now, he insisted, that message superseded Hannegan’s letter.

In his desperation, Dad had summoned two of his closest friends, Tom Evans and Eddie McKim, to come to Chicago to help him fend off the nomination. Tom was the owner of Station KCMO in Kansas City. Eddie, whose name I have mentioned before, was his old army and reserve officer buddy, who had become a prominent insurance executive in Nebraska. Both were baffled by his reluctance to accept the vice presidency. It was to Tom Evans that Dad revealed - or half revealed - his real reason for refusing it. Here is how Tom later recalled their conversation.

“I don’t want to drag a lot of skeletons out of the closet,” Senator Truman said.

“Wait a minute. I didn’t know you had skeletons,” Tom Evans said. “What are they? Maybe I wouldn’t want you to run either.”

“I’ve had the Boss on the payroll in my Senate office and I’m not going to have her name dragged over the front pages of the papers and over the radio.”

“Well Lord,” Tom said. “That isn’t anything terrible. I can think of a dozen senators and fifty congressmen that have their wives on the payroll.”

“Yes, but I don’t want them bringing her name up,” Dad insisted. “I’m just not going through that.”

After repeatedly declaring myself out of the running as a psychologist, I am afraid I am forced to assume the role here. You have just read the words of a man who is yearning to tell his friend the whole truth - but can only tell him part of it. The metaphor Dad used is especially, sadly, revealing. The skeleton he was trying to keep in the closet was not Mother’s name on his Senate payroll. It was David Willock Wallace’s suicide.

Having seen the cruel way the newspapers had exhumed Mr. Roosevelt’s ancestors and used them to try to smear the president, Harry Truman’s fears - which were Bess’ fears - were not completely unreal. But they were somewhat hypothetical. Dad’s anguish revealed Mother’s anguish - her extreme sensitivity about this tragedy, forty-one years later. If her mother had died during these intervening years, Bess might have been less sensitive. She dreaded the impact of the story on Madge Wallace far more than on herself.

Meanwhile, at Dad’s request, Eddie McKim had been touring the state delegations trying to tell them that Senator Truman did not want the nomination. The more Eddie talked to the delegates, the more convinced he became that his old friend’s nomination was not only inevitable, it was necessary.

On Monday, July 17, Eddie, John Snyder, and several other friends tackled Dad in his hotel room. They barraged him with arguments. He was the only man who could prevent the Democratic Party from splitting down the middle. If Byrnes got it, the liberals would take a walk. If Wallace got it, the South would defect en masse. Dad continued to shake his head. “I’m still not going to do it,” he said.

“Senator,” Eddie said, “I think you’re going to do it.”

Dad furiously demanded to know where Eddie got the nerve to say that.

“Because there’s a ninety-year-old mother down in Grandview, Missouri, who would like to see her son President of the United States,” Eddie said.

Dad walked out of the room and did not speak to Eddie for twenty-four hours. With uncanny intuition, Eddie had invoked the name of the one woman who could challenge Harry Truman’s devotion to Bess.

That same day, Mother and I left Denver for Chicago. Mother seemed perfectly calm to me at the time. But my research for this book discovered a sign of her inner agitation. She did not tell her mother where we would be staying in Chicago, and Grandmother, having no other address, wrote to the empty house in Independence for the rest of the week.

We arrived in Chicago on the night of the 18th, and the convention started the next day. Dad continued to resist the nomination for the next two days, but he found no support for his reluctance from anyone. The AFL and railroad labor leaders said they would not consider anyone else. Even Sidney Hillman, the left-leaning CIO leader, told him he was that union’s choice, if Wallace could not be elected.

I spent most of these two days touring Chicago’s department stores with Marion Montague, a school friend from Washington whom I had invited to join me. Mother remained in our hotel, the Morison, and discussed the situation with Dad when he returned from the Stevens Hotel, where Robert Hannegan and the other heavy politicos were staying. She had invited an old Independence friend, Helen Bryant Souter, who lived in Evanston, to join her. Helen fended off numerous reporters who wanted to talk to Mother as it became more and more evident that Dad was the probable vice presidential nominee.

In Denver, Grandmother Wallace and Freddy and Chris listened to the radio and read the newspapers with growing puzzlement. On the 20th, Grandmother wrote a letter telling Mother that she missed her and was fighting off a “homesick spell,” She added that “F and I listened to several talks over the radio last night. They don’t seem to think Harry is not a candidate.”

The climax to the struggle was a telephone call Bob Hannegan put through to FDR, who was in San Diego, about to depart on a Pacific inspection tour. Hannegan held out the phone so Dad could hear the president declare that Truman was his choice. “Why the hell didn’t he tell me in the first place?” Dad snapped, furious at Roosevelt’s deviousness, which had already given him so many headaches and, in 1940, near heartbreaks.

At this point, Bess still could have forced Harry Truman to issue an absolute, unshakable no, a refusal on the order of General Sherman’s historic turndown of the presidential nomination in 1884. She could have told him that the whole idea of him becoming president and her becoming First Lady was intolerable to her. He would have said no, even if he really believed that his refusal might, in FDR’s words, “break up the Democratic Party in the middle of a war.”

But there was an invisible line in their partnership that Bess never crossed - a line that divided a wife’s power over her husband between influence and control. Bess never hesitated to try to influence Harry Truman’s decisions. But she never attempted to control him - especially in those lonely moments when he confronted his deepest instincts that drove him to risk the pain and sacrifice of meeting history head on. This was the most awesome of those moments. Bess allowed him to accept its inevitability, even though she dreaded the pain it might cause her.

For the next few days, the nomination did not look inevitable. The Wallace backers in the party were numerous and vocal, and they put up a vigorous fight for their candidate. They packed the galleries and staged ear-splitting demonstrations in the sweltering convention hall. On July 20, they came within a whisker of stampeding the convention into renominating Wallace by acclamation. After a night of furious politicking, the Truman forces met the wild-eyed Wallace devotees in a tremendous brawl the next day.

Mother and I were in a box looking down on the floor, where the state delegations sat like regiments waiting to be hurled into battle. Helen Souter was with us, still doing her best to keep reporters at bay. Several thought she was Mrs. Truman and tried to interview her. Dad remained on the convention floor with the Missouri delegation, of which he was the chairman. Ignoring his pleas, they already had voted unanimously to make him their candidate.

Henry Wallace led on the first ballot, mostly because favorite sons controlled a dozen delegations and were hoping for a deadlock that might have made one of them a compromise candidate. In the second ballot, Dad edged ahead. Suddenly delegation after delegation switched to him, and the final result was a landslide 1,031 to 105. Pandemonium exploded as exultant Truman supporters cavorted in the aisles.

Take a look at the picture in the middle of the book showing Mother and me as the final count was announced. I am cheering my head off. Mother was barely able to muster a smile. At twenty, of course, I reveled in the pandemonium and was relatively unbothered by the suffocating heat. I also had been having a good time in Chicago while Mother suffered through anguished days and sleepless nights.

I can sympathize with her now. I can see what she saw, what she felt. It was not only the fear of her father’s suicide returning to haunt her and her mother. She was losing the serene, comfortable life of a senator’s wife, which she had worked so hard to master. She was fifty-nine years old, and all her life she had been making sacrifices for people, putting herself and her concerns second to her mother’s peace of mind, her brothers’ welfare, her daughter’s health, her husband’s career. She had a right to eight or ten years of serenity and fulfillment - and she had to sit there and watch that wish annihilated by these whooping, howling maniacs who were determined to put her husband in the White House.

Her personal fears and desires were only part of Bess’ opposition to the nomination. She knew Harry Truman’s tendency to overwork. If he pushed himself to the brink of breakdown as a senator, what would he do as a president? Everyone was talking about the toll the presidency had taken on FDR. She envisioned an equally deadly impact on Harry Truman, who had recently celebrated his sixtieth birthday.

Mother’s political instincts were even more opposed to the nomination. She foresaw that anyone who succeeded FDR, especially through “the back door,” as Dad put it, was going to have a terrible time becoming president in his own right.

All in all, hindsight tempts me not only to sympathize with Mother, but to say she was right. On a rational, reasonable estimate of the situation, Dad should have said no.

But Mother was confronting - she and Dad were both confronting - something deeper, stronger than reason, logic, or common sense.

A phalanx of policemen helped Dad fight his way to the platform. An exultant Bob Hannegan held up his arm, as if he were a prizefighter who had just won a knockout victory. The delegates continued to go berserk in the aisles. Dad finally seized the chairman’s gavel and banged for order. The celebrators sat down and listened to one of the shortest acceptance speeches in the windy history of political conventions:

You don’t know how very much I appreciate the very great honor which has come to the state of Missouri. It is also a great responsibility which I am perfectly willing to assume.

Nine years and five months ago I came to the Senate. I expect to continue the efforts I have made there to help shorten the war and to win the peace under the great leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

I don’t know what else I can say except that I accept this great honor with all humility.

I thank you.

As he left the platform, Dad commandeered another cordon of police and fought his way through the frenzied crowd to our box. There we were blinded by the flashbulbs of a hundred photographers. Men pounded and pawed us, screaming congratulations. Women wept and flung their arms around us, all but fracturing our spines. Dad told the police to get us out of there as fast as possible. Clinging to each other like shipwreck victims on a raft in the middle of a hurricane, we let Chicago’s finest batter their way through the mob to a waiting limousine.

As we got into the car, Bess glared at the nominee. “Are we going to have to go through this for the rest of our lives?” she asked.

It was not a good beginning.