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Biographies & Memoirs Home Biographies & Memoirs Truman Page 28 IV During the second half of his first term in the Senate, Truman felt the cloud he was under begin to recede. His standing among his colleagues improved. He was assigned more spacious offices down the hall, suite No. 240, again looking onto the interior courtyard. By his own staff, by others on his committees, he was perceived as dogged, productive, respectful of the opinion of others, good-natured, and extremely likable. “We all found Truman a very nice man…[and] his heart was in the right place,” recalled the historian Telford Taylor, who was then a young attorney on the Interstate Commerce Commission. The senator’s patience, even with the dreariest assignments, seemed infinite. And though no one would have singled him out as exceptional in any particular way or predicted a brilliant future—“But he showed no signs of leadership,” Taylor also remembered—his reputation was clearly on the rise. The Republican Borah, one of the Senate’s certified great men, made a point one day of throwing his arm about Senator Truman’s shoulder in an open show of friendship. Truman was even attempting an occasional speech in the chamber by this time, reading always from prepared texts heavy with facts and figures. Once, in the middle of a debate, Arthur Vandenberg called on him to substantiate a point and after Truman obliged, Vandenberg told the Senate, “When the Senator from Missouri makes a statement like that we can take it for the truth.” It was a gesture Harry would not forget. “He was always going out of his way to do favors for others and you couldn’t help but like his smiling, friendly manner,” said Vic Messall, “…and he was that way with everyone. I never heard him say a cross word to his staff, and that’s a real test….” Mildred Dryden, Truman’s secretary, said, “Never in all the years that I worked for him did I ever see him lose his temper. He was always soft-spoken and very considerate to his staff….” She remembered no “salty language” either, never ever if women were present. Alben Barkley, though he had liked Harry Truman “instinctively” from the start, said that his real appreciation of the man only came clear to him at the dramatic climax of the battle over Roosevelt’s Court-packing plan, the contentious, frustrating issue that dominated in 1937. In his acceptance speech at the Philadelphia convention—the speech Harry had missed hearing but called a masterpiece after reading it in the papers—Roosevelt said, “To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” In his second inaugural address in January 1937, the President became more specific. “I see one third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” he said, and the Congress, like the country, had waited in anticipation to see what new legislation he would demand. In the first week of February came the surprise. It was the Supreme Court he was out to “reform”—really to reshape to his liking—because the Court had found some earlier New Deal programs unconstitutional. His scheme was to enlarge the Court from nine members to fifteen if justices refused to retire at the age of seventy, and after the landslide in November, which gave him the largest majority in Congress ever enjoyed by a President, Roosevelt felt confident of having his way. He neither consulted with the leadership in Congress nor gave any advance word of what he was up to. The President was wrong in his approach; the whole attempt to influence the decisions of the Court by increasing its size was a blunder, damaging to Roosevelt and to the Senate. Opposition in the Senate was fierce, and especially among Democrats, including not just conservatives like Carter Glass and Bennett Clark, but such formerly reliable Roosevelt men as Connally and Wheeler, who now led the fight against the Court-packing bill. Barkley, Truman, virtually every Democratic senator who had been a steadfast Roosevelt supporter now found himself caught between vehement pressure from the White House on the one hand and, on the other, outrage at home over the whole idea. By June, even Garner, Roosevelt’s own Vice President, had become so infuriated over the affair that he packed his bags and went back to Texas. “The people are with me,” Roosevelt had snapped when Garner took issue with him. A disappointed Carter Glass thought probably the Senate was with him, too, so great was the Roosevelt magic. “Of course I shall oppose it,” said Glass. “I shall oppose it with all the strength that remains to me, but I don’t imagine for a minute that it’ll do any good. Why, if the President asked Congress to commit suicide tomorrow they’d do it.” Truman, like Barkley, decided to stand with the President, on the grounds that the size of the Court had been changed before in times past. But he took no part in the debate. He was preoccupied with the railroad investigations, where Wheeler, because of his part in the Court battle, had lost interest and left him most of the work, making Truman vice-chairman of the subcommittee. In June, in the midst of the Court fight, Harry ventured his longest, most daring speech thus far in the Senate, a preliminary report of the railroad investigations. As summer came on, he would have preferred greatly to stay free of the whole Court issue and like so many wished only that it had never happened. He found himself deluged with angry mail. Having announced his position on the bill, he was accused of being a Roosevelt stooge. His headaches returned. At the White House the President’s advisers were saying that if this fight were won, everything else he wanted would “fall into the basket.” But all strategies were suddenly shattered on July 14, when Majority Leader Joseph Robinson, who had been carrying the fight for Roosevelt, fell dead in his apartment across from the Capitol, the victim of a heart attack. Only days before Senator Royal Copeland, who was a physician, had slipped into a seat beside Robinson to warn him that he should slow down. Bess, who was suffering acutely from Washington’s oppressive heat, voiced worries about her own husband’s stamina in a letter to Ethel Noland. “H. is worn out and is not well and will simply have to have a good rest or he will be really ill.” The fight on the Court was deferred until a new majority leader could be named. In the running were Barkley and the arch-conservative “Pat” Harrison of Mississippi, chairman of the Finance Committee. It was a critical juncture that could determine the future of the New Deal in the Senate, and Roosevelt, determined to see Barkley win, wrote an open “Dear Alben” letter in which he referred to Barkley as the “acting” majority leader. To many in the Senate this seemed arrogant interference with what was solely Senate Business, and so another bitter fight resulted. From a private poll, Jim Farley calculated that Harrison stood to win by a single vote. Pressure from the White House grew intense—and not especially subtle. Senator William H. Dieterich of Illinois, who had pledged himself to Harrison, received a call from Boss Kelly of Chicago promising Dieterich a say in the appointment of two federal judges, should he vote as Roosevelt wished, which was quite enough to convince Dieterich to switch sides. On July 19, a day before the vote, Harry heard from Tom Pendergast, who had been called by the White House and asked to “tell” Harry Truman how to vote. Only in this instance no offer of patronage was forthcoming. Harry told T.J. that he had already promised Pat Harrison his support and could not go back on his word. “Jim Aylward phoned me, too,” Harry told William Helm an hour later. “I didn’t mind turning Jim down, not so much, anyhow, but to say No to Tom was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.” According to Harry, this was the one and only time T.J. had ever called him about a vote. Normally, T.J. made his views known by telegram. But possibly T.J. did not like pressure from the White House any more than Harry, for as Harry also related, Pendergast had said it “didn’t make a helluva lot of difference to him….” Why Harry had ever lined up with Harrison remains a mystery—he liked Barkley, nor had he any reason to oppose him—unless he saw it as a way to show the President he could not be taken for granted any longer. He refused to be budged and was so furious with the people at the White House, the President included, that he could hardly contain himself. By going to Pendergast, rather than coming directly to him, they had left little doubt as to what they really thought of him. In their eyes, he was still truly the Senator from Pendergast, It was the worst insult he had suffered since coming to Washington and he decided to let Roosevelt know how he felt. Told that the President was not available, he talked to Steve Early, the press secretary. He was tired of being “pushed around” and treated like an office boy, Truman said. He expected the consideration and courtesy that his office entitled him to. Senator Barkley, all the while, was under the impression that Harry Truman had given him his pledge of support. Barkley would later describe how Harry had come to him saying, “The pressure on me is so great [to vote for Harrison] that I am going to ask you to relieve me of my promise.” It was this foursquare approach of Truman’s that so impressed him, Barkley said. “I always admired him for the courage and character he displayed in coming to me as he did. Too often in politics the stiletto is slipped between your shoulder blades, while its wielder continues to smile sweetly….” On July 21 the Democratic members of the Senate met in the white marble Caucus Room of the Senate Office Building to vote for a majority leader by secret ballot. The winner was Alben Barkley by one vote. (Barkley would later speculate on how he might have felt about Harry Truman had he lost by one vote.) Harry immediately pledged Barkley his support and they were to be friends and allies thereafter. The steam was gone from the Court bill. On July 22, by a margin of 50 votes, the Senate sent it back to the Judiciary Committee, where it died. The President had suffered his first and worst defeat since taking office, which to Harry’s mind he richly deserved. The whole affair, Harry thought, had been a mistake and very badly managed by Roosevelt. As time passed, in the comparatively few months of each year when Bess and Margaret were with him in Washington, the Trumans moved from one small, temporary apartment to another—to Sedgwick Gardens on Connecticut Avenue in the spring of 1936, to the Carroll Arms on 1st Street in early 1937, the Warwick Apartments on Idaho Avenue in 1938. In 1939 they were back again at Tilden Gardens, where they began. Margaret, who had grown taller and even more spindly, was attending Gunston Hall, a private school for girls, which was another financial worry for Harry. Independence, however, remained “home” for Margaret, as for Bess, who felt the constant pressure of her mother’s need for her. Madge Wallace, who still believed Bess could have done better in the way of a husband, gave no sign of interest in Harry or his career. The long separations grew no easier. “I just can’t stand it without you,” he wrote to Bess as the new session got under way in 1937. She was not only Juno, Venus, and Minerva to him, he wrote, but Proserpina, too, and urged her to look that up. Proserpina, as Margaret would remember ever after, was a goddess who spent half of each year in Hades with her husband Pluto, separated from her grieving mother. His letters dutifully reported his modest social life. He went to the movies, played some penny-ante poker, listened to the symphony or opera on the radio. One weekend he drove to Gettysburg to hike over the battlefield with John Snyder, a St. Louis banker he had gotten to know at summer Army camp over the years. Another day he “played hooky” from the Appropriations Committee and went to the War College to hear Douglas Southall Freeman lecture on Robert E. Lee, which he thought “one of the greatest talks I ever heard.” His health was uneven and he worried about it perhaps more than necessary. In the wake of the Court-packing fight, he felt so wretched he went to the Army-Navy Hospital at Hot Springs, Arkansas, for a checkup and complete rest. A month or so later, working harder than ever, nerves ragged, he was beset again by savage headaches. “This so-called committee work is nothing but drudgery and publicity,” he wrote, “all so depressing sometimes.” Vic Messall thought possibly he was drinking too much. William Helm wrote later that he had never known anyone who could hold his liquor so well as Senator Truman. On one occasion Helm had seen him take five drinks and show no effect. “Not once did I ever see him under the slightest influence of liquor.” The records from his stay at the Army-Navy Hospital at Hot Springs say only that he had developed severe headaches and “a sense of continually being tired,” a “general malaise.” The President and his people continued to exhibit only supreme indifference toward him, which became especially grating whenever the governor of Missouri, Harry’s friend Lloyd C. Stark, came to town. It had been Harry who arranged for Stark to meet Roosevelt for the first time, in October 1936, when Stark was running for governor. By mail and telegram Harry had urged the President to invite Stark and his wife to join him on board his train, as he campaigned across Missouri. “They are charming people,” Harry had assured the President in a telegram from Independence. Now Stark went frequently to the White House and spoke warmly of Roosevelt as “the Chief.” Stark was invited to join poker parties on the President’s yacht on cruises down the Potomac, something Senator Truman could only dream of. Senator Truman often had difficulty getting the President’s secretary even to return his calls. Once, on a quick visit to Capitol Hill, Stark poked his head in at Harry’s office door to say that some of the folks in Missouri were trying to get him to run for the Senate when Harry came up for reelection, but that Harry need not worry. When Stark had gone, Harry told Vic Messall, “That son-of-a-bitch is fixing to run against me.” Alone one night in October listening to the radio, he began to weep. “A couple of kids were singing ‘They’ll Never Believe Me’ from the Girl from Utah,” he wrote to Bess, “and I sat here and thought of another couple of kids listening to Julia Sanderson and Donald Brian singing that beautiful melody and lovely sentiment, and I wished so badly for the other kid that I had to write her to sort of dry my eyes.” No one ever seemed to understand how sentimental he was, below the surface. He was lonely, homesick, feeling unappreciated, feeling sorry for himself, thinking often of times gone by. “Today is my father’s birthday,” he wrote on December 5. “He’d be eighty-six, if he’d lived. I always wished he’d lived to see me elected to this place. There’d have been no holding him.” The brighter side was an unlikely new friendship. A staff member of the railroad subcommittee, Max Lowenthal, had invited him to meet Justice Louis D. Brandeis, at one of the winter teas that Brandeis and his wife gave Sunday afternoons in an old-fashioned apartment on California Street. These Brandeis teas, as Marquis Childs would write, had become a “slightly awesome institution” in the capital, with Mrs. Brandeis presiding as umpire over a kind of musical chairs game designed to give the justice ten or fifteen minutes of individual conversation with as many guests as possible within an hour and a half. Truman was not accustomed to meeting such people, he had told Lowenthal candidly when the invitation was first issued. But to his surprise, Brandeis had spent more time with him than any of the other guests, wanting to hear about Harry’s railway investigations and appearing extremely pleased to learn that Harry had read some of his books. They sat in stiff, uncomfortable chairs in a large living room where little had changed since the time of Woodrow Wilson, the walls decorated with photographs of classical ruins. Brandeis, the first Jew to serve on the Supreme Court and the country’s most distinguished Jeffersonian liberal, was by then in his eighties and to Harry, “a great old man.” The day was cold, with snow forecast, but Harry felt warmed by the whole experience, a little out of place, yet more welcome than he had ever expected. “It was a rather exclusive and brainy party. I didn’t exactly belong but they made me think I did.” He went several times again, and as he later wrote, he found that he and Brandeis were “certainly in agreement on the dangers of bigness.” The influence of Brandeis was apparent soon enough. On Monday, December 20, 1937, Senator Truman delivered the second of his assaults on corporate greed and corruption. In the earlier speech in June he had recalled how Jesse James, in order to rob the Rock Island Railroad, had had to get up early in the morning and risk his life to make off with $3,000. Yet, by means of holding companies, modern-day financiers had stolen $70 million from the same railroad. “Senators can see,” he said then, “what ‘pikers’ Mr. James and his crowd were alongside of some real artists.” Now, in a prepared address written and rewritten several times with the help of Max Lowenthal, he attacked the power of Wall Street and the larger evil of money worship, sounding at times not unlike his boyhood hero, William Jennings Bryan. He had announced the speech in advance, so as to be heard by something more than an empty chamber. “It probably will catalogue me as a radical,” he warned Bess, “but it will be what I think.” His lifelong hatred of high hats and privilege, all the traditional Missouri suspicion of concentrated power and of the East, came spouting forth with a degree of feeling his fellow senators had not seen or heard until now. He attacked the “court and lawyer situation” in the gigantic receiverships and reorganizations that destroyed railroads, and named the powerful law firms involved—Cravath, de Gersdorff, Swaine & Wood of New York; Davis, Polk, Wardwell, Gardner & Reed, also of New York; Winston, Strawn & Shaw of Chicago. He cited the immense fees taken by the attorneys for the receivers, told how some attorneys took their families on free vacations to California in the private cars of a bankrupt line, how a receivership judge on the federal bench had a private car on the bankrupt Milwaukee & St. Paul at his beck and call. “Do you see how it pays to know all about these things from the inside?” he asked. How these gentlemen, the highest of the high-hats in the legal profession, resort to tricks that would make an ambulance chaser in a coroner’s court blush with shame? The same gentlemen, if the past is any guide to the future, will come out of the pending receiverships with more and fatter fees, and wind up by becoming attorneys for the new and reorganized railroad companies at fat yearly retainers; and they will probably earn them, because it will be their business to get by the Interstate Commerce Commission, to interpret, and to see that the courts interpret, laws passed by the Congress as they want them construed. These able and intelligent lawyers, counsellors, attorneys, whatever you want to call them, have interviews and hold conferences with the members of the Interstate Commerce Commission, take them to dinner and discuss pending matters with them. The commission, you know, is the representative of the public and it has its lawyers also, but 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. The underlying problem throughout, he said, was avarice, “wild greed.” We worship money instead of honor. A billionaire, in our estimation, is much greater in these days in the eyes of the people than the public servant who works for public interest. It makes no difference if the billionaire rode to wealth on the sweat of little children and the blood of underpaid labor. No one ever considered Carnegie libraries steeped in the blood of the Homestead steelworkers, but they are. We do not remember that the Rockefeller Foundation is founded on the dead miners of the Colorado Fuel & Iron Company and a dozen other similar performances. We worship Mammon; and until we go back to ancient fundamentals and return to the Giver of the Tables of Law and His teachings, these conditions are going to remain with us. It is a pity that Wall Street, with its ability to control all the wealth of the nation and to hire the best law brains in 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 self interest. People can stand only so much, and one of these days there will be a settlement…. He saw the country’s unemployment and unrest as the fault of too much concentration of power and population, too much bigness in everything. The country would be better off if 60 percent of all the assets of all insurance companies were not concentrated in four companies. A thousand insurance companies, with $4 million each in assets, would be a thousand times better for the country than the Metropolitan Life, with its $4 billion in assets. Just as a thousand towns of 7,000 people were of more value than one city of 7 million. Wild greed along the lines I have been describing brought on the Depression. When investment bankers, so-called, continually load great transportation companies with debt in order to sell securities to savings banks and insurance companies so they can make a commission, the well finally runs dry…. There is no magic solution to the condition of the railroads, but one thing is certain—no formula, however scientific, will work without men of proper character responsible for physical and financial operations of the roads and for the administration of the laws provided by Congress. The speech was front-page news in The New York Times and drew the immediate attention of labor leaders and reform-minded citizens across the country. Nor did anyone in the Senate doubt that he had done his homework. Not even the dullest of hearings seemed to wear him down and some were as dull as any ever recorded at the Capitol. Many times he was the only senator present. In the eyes of those working with him, he had also shown uncommon courage. Much of the focus had been on the financial finagling behind the bankrupt Missouri Pacific Railroad. Max Lowenthal, a former labor attorney, had written a critical analysis of railroad reorganization, The Investor Pays. As an expert on the subject, he warned the senator that the inquiries might produce some “pretty hot stuff,” and that this could be embarrassing for him in Missouri. Truman instructed Lowenthal and the staff to proceed as they would with any other investigation. Pressures on him to call off the hearings, or at least to go easy, did become intense. But there was no letting up, Lowenthal did not think there were a half-dozen others in the Senate who could have withstood the pressure Truman took. The hearings continued, the senator cross-examining witnesses in a courteous but persistent fashion. Lowenthal would remember that it seemed “an innate part of his personality to be fair and to know what is fair, and to exercise restraint when he possesses great power, particularly the power to investigate…the power to police…. He gave witnesses all the time they wanted.” Ironically, the senator whose own background had seemed so suspect was gaining a reputation as a skilled investigator. Though it did not seem of particular importance at the time, Truman was also taking positions on civil rights that appeared to belie his Missouri background. He consistently supported legislation that would abolish the poll tax and prevent lynchings. In 1938, in a Senate battle over an anti-lynching bill, he voted to limit debate on the bill in an unsuccessful effort to break a filibuster against it. Still more outspoken were his feelings on “preparedness,” national defense. “We must not close our eyes to the possibility of another war,” he warned an American Legion meeting at Larchmont, New York, in 1938, “because conditions in Europe have developed to a point likely to cause an explosion any time.” He called for the establishment of an air force “second to none.” No one could be more mistaken than the isolationists, he said. America had erred gravely by refusing to sign the Versailles Treaty and refusing to join the League of Nations. “We did not accept our responsibility as a world power.” America couldn’t pull back and hide from the world. America was blessed with riches and America wanted peace, but “in the coming struggle between democracy and dictatorship, democracy must be prepared to defend its principles and its wealth.” image The end for Tom Pendergast was drawing near. The once robust, florid Big Boss looked dreadful, gray, drawn, physically diminished, and for all his high style of living he was close to financial ruin as a consequence of his chronic, consuming need to gamble. In one month he lost nearly $75,000 betting on the horses. His new private secretary at 1908 Main Street, Bernard Gnefkow, regularly kept tabs on bets of $5,000 to $20,000 on a single race. Later estimates were that T.J. may have squandered $6 million on the horses. But as would be shown, he had kept these transactions cleverly hidden from friends and family, as well as the government, by using cash only and devising fictitious names to conceal where the money came from and where it went. In the last part of the 1930s he had become so in debt to gamblers and bookmakers around the country as to be virtually in their control. They spoke of him not as “the Big Boss” but “the Big Sucker.” To anyone who knew the story of the Pendergasts and their dynasty this seemed an odd turn of fate, since it was luck at the track that had given them their start, with Alderman Jim and his winnings on the horse called Climax. Later, in an effort to explain the downfall of Boss Tom, his admirers, including Senator Harry Truman, would insist that he was “not himself,” that failing health and the gambling fever drove him to do things he never would have done in his prime. A Kansas City police officer named John Flavin, a veteran of years on the force, would remember that on the day T.J. gave him his job, he had said, “Don’t ever take any money that doesn’t belong to you and you’ll never have any trouble in life.” A new federal district attorney for Kansas City had begun investigations, focusing first on vote fraud in the ’36 elections. He was Maurice Milligan, the younger brother of Tuck Milligan, and he, too, was Bennett Clark’s man (Clark had arranged his appointment). But after the ’36 elections Milligan’s chief ally in the assault on Pendergast was Governor Lloyd C. Stark, whose own rise to office owed so much to T.J. and the whole Kansas City organization. Stark had turned on Pendergast as no one ever had—or ever dared try—determined to destroy him once and for all. It was Stark’s conviction that his loyalty belonged to the people, not to any machine or its boss. The documentation amassed by Milligan and a swarm of FBI agents revealed that approximately 60,000 “ghost” votes had been cast in Kansas City in 1936. Many precincts had registration figures exceeding the known population. Hundreds of defendants were brought to court and, as the Star reporter William Reddig noted, what surprised most people from Kansas City, who had heard about election thieves for years, was to find how many of them looked just like ordinary citizens, as indeed most were. The trials, lasting nearly two years, led to 279 convictions, and Milligan, a handsome, pipe-smoking “country lawyer,” became a local hero. But what would prove the crucial investigation began only after Governor Stark, accompanied by Milligan, went to Washington. Bennett Clark had given Roosevelt the tip that Pendergast had failed to report huge sums of income on his tax returns. Roosevelt notified the Treasury Department and it was then that Treasury investigators started looking into the story of the insurance bribe first described by Marquis Childs in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1935. Before they were finished, Stark and Milligan had five federal agencies at work on special assignment. They found that an official of the Great American Insurance Companies, Charles Street, had met with Pendergast in a Chicago hotel in January 1935, or just as Senator Truman was trying to learn his way about Capitol Hill. The Chicago meeting had been arranged by R. Emmett O’Malley, Missouri’s Superintendent of Insurance. Charles Street, speaking for some eight different insurance companies, told Pendergast he wanted the settlement by O’Malley’s office of an old issue over fire insurance rates that had kept nearly $10 million impounded. And that of course he was willing to pay for it. When Street offered $200,000, T.J. declined. When Street offered $500,000, T.J. said yes. Later, An the interest of speeding things along, the $500,000 was increased to $750,000. A first installment of $50,000 in cash was delivered to T.J. personally at his Main Street office on May 9, 1935. An agreement releasing the insurance money was then worked out in a room at the Muehlebach Hotel by Street, O’Malley, and attorneys for the insurance companies, after which further payments on the bribe continued. One delivery to T.J.’s house on Ward Parkway in the spring of 1936 was for a total of $330,000 in cash in a Gladstone bag. Though none of this was disclosed for some while, Stark fired O’Malley and rumors were rampant. How much or little Senator Truman knew is not recorded. Probably it was very little, in view of how hard he took the news when it broke. But when District Attorney Milligan’s term expired early in 1938 and both Stark and Roosevelt were calling on the Senate to confirm his reappointment, Harry Truman found himself facing the nearly certain prospect of being the lone senator with objections. By senatorial custom, he could have blocked the reappointment simply by saying that Milligan was personally obnoxious to him. This he did not do, however, because Franklin Roosevelt called him on the phone and asked him not to, as a personal favor. He could also, of course, have had nothing to do with the matter, and remained silent. Instead, on Tuesday, February 15, 1938, he marched through the swinging doors of the Senate Chamber and delivered a full-scale attack on Milligan, as well as on the federal judges in Kansas City, a scathing, bitter speech that helped his reputation not at all, nor served any purpose other than to release a great deal of pent-up fury and possibly bring Tom Pendergast a measure of satisfaction. Milligan, he said, was Roosevelt’s “personal appointment” and made to appease the “rabidly partisan press.” He called Milligan corrupt, and charged the judges with playing politics, since they had been appointed by Republican Presidents Harding and Coolidge, “I say, Mr. President, that a jackson County, Missouri, Democrat has as much chance of a fair trial in the Federal District Court of Western Missouri as a Jew would have in a Hitler court or a Trotsky follower before Stalin.” It was the one time he had ever attacked the President, the one time he had ever touched on, let alone defended his political origins in the Senate, and it was his worst moment in the Senate. Again he read from a prepared text. Yet he seemed out of control, grossly overreacting even if some of his points deserved hearing—the refusal of the courts, for example, to let anyone from Jackson County sit on the juries. “The manner in which the juries were drawn,” remembered a federal district judge in Kansas City years later, “and the fact that only Democrats were indicted in the polling precincts in which the vote fraud occurred, when it was obvious that the Republican judges and clerk of elections in the same precincts were equally guilty, distorted Truman’s view beyond comprehension. He felt he had to blast, and blast he did—to his discredit.” Possibly, with a more measured, thoughtful defense, he could have taken his audience beyond the stereotypical picture of boss rule. By his own bearing, the decency and common sense that were so much a part of him, he might have encouraged appreciation of the accomplishments of the Kansas City organization that he himself so admired. As it was, he achieved nothing. When the time came to confirm Milligan by vote, he was the lone senator in opposition. To his credit, it would be said only that he had made a brave gesture of loyalty to an old friend. At least he had not “run for cover.” So harsh were the expressions of disapproval issued at the White House that Truman began feeling his career was over. He brooded for days. In a confidential letter to a friend, he said that “in view of my speech on the Senate floor on Tuesday and the reaction to it from the White House,” he would not be running for reelection in 1940—though later he would ask for return of the letter. image He had made matters no better, meantime, by announcing his intention to have his burly factotum, Fred Canfil, custodian of the Jackson County Courthouse, appointed a U.S. Marshal in Kansas City, an idea that met with immediate outrage there. The Justice Department sent FBI agents to begin inquiries and across one interdepartmental memorandum J. Edgar Hoover scrawled: “I want to make certain a very complete and thorough investigation is made of this man.” By early March 1939, sensing the tide of opinion on Canfil was strongly against him, Truman said he was for Canfil or nobody. “I am for Canfil, first, last, and all the time.” But Canfil was found unsatisfactory and rejected, chiefly because of the volume of adverse rumors and opinion gathered by the FBI. Five months earlier, in November, the senator had been assured through channels high up in the Justice Department that Canfil was acceptable and would be approved. “They figure they’ll need Harry next session,” he had said of the administration in a letter to Bess. But that was in November. In Kansas City, by appearances, the functioning of the organization continued as before, T.J. somehow managing a serene face to the world. He went to his office as usual, except that now, because of his health, he rode the elevator in the adjacent hotel and crossed through to 1908 at the second-floor level, to avoid the stairs. In a municipal election in the spring of 1938, despite a new election board appointed by Governor Stark, despite the sensation of the vote fraud trials, the organization’s candidates won by large margins. Considering the forces aligned against him, it was T.J.’s most impressive triumph ever, showing, as was said, that “the party in power…had lost none of its hold on honest voters.” An exuberant, immensely gratified T.J. issued a rare statement to the press: If it is true…that the Democratic President of the United States was against us, that the Attorney General of the United States was against us, that the Governor of Missouri was against us, that the independent Kansas City Star newspaper was against us—I think under those circumstances we made a wonderful showing. To Senator Truman it seemed to prove, as it did to many observers, that prior vote frauds had been unnecessary; the party would have won anyway. How often or to what degree T.J. and Harry were in contact at this stage is again unknown. Mildred Dryden, Harry’s secretary, could recall no correspondence from Tom Pendergast. Only one communication written in T.J.’s own large, clear hand has survived, a note in red pencil on a single sheet of Jackson Democratic Club stationery: “Please help Sam Finklestein. He will explain. He has been my friend for 40 years. T.J. Pendergast.” As Sam Finklestein did explain when he carried the note to Senator Truman in December 1938, he was trying to get two of his relatives out of Germany, Siegfried and Paula Finklestein of Berlin. Harry moved quickly, but in a report to T.J. mailed just before Christmas, Vic Messall could say only that the matter had been taken up with the American consul general in Berlin and that as soon as more information was available T.J. would be advised “immediately.” For the moment the quota was full. Whether the Finklesteins ever succeeded in escaping to America is not known. On Tuesday, April 4, 1939, J. Edgar Hoover himself arrived in Kansas City. On Friday, April 7, T. J. Pendergast was indicted for tax evasion. In Washington, Senator Truman was reported to have looked “hurt and astounded” at the news. “I am sure he had little inkling of his old friend’s troubles before the grand jury returned its indictment,” wrote William Helm. “Even then he seemed to cling to the hope that Pendergast somehow would prove his innocence….” Asked for a comment by reporters, Harry said, “I am very sorry to hear it. I know nothing about the details…Tom Pendergast has always been my friend and I don’t desert a sinking ship.” To Bess he would write, “The terrible things done by the high ups in K.C. will be a lead weight to me from now on.” On May 22, at the federal court in Kansas City, T.J. pleaded guilty. The total in evaded taxes, including fines, came to $830,494.73. R. Emmett O’Malley and the director of the Kansas City police department were also convicted of tax evasion, as was Matthew S. Murray, the city’s Director of Public Works. Charles Street, the insurance executive involved in the bribe, was dead. Edward L. Schneider, secretary treasurer of seven Pendergast companies, killed himself, or so it appeared, after making a full statement of his transactions to the grand jury. How many millions of dollars had been stolen from the city was never precisely determined. City Manager Henry McElroy, who also died while facing indictment, was found to have misplaced some $20 million with his unique system of bookkeeping, a figure nearly twice the city’s annual budget. The assertion later by several of his friends that Harry Truman could have walked off with a million dollars during his time as presiding judge, had he chosen, seems an understatement. “He was broke when he went to the Senate,” Edgar Hinde would say. “He didn’t have a dime and he had all the opportunity in the world. He could have walked out of that office [as county judge] with a million dollars on that road contract. You know that would have been the easiest thing in the world. He could have gone to one of those contractors and said, ‘I want ten percent.’ Why you know they would have given it to him in a flash. But he came out of there with nothing.” “Looks like everybody got rich in Jackson County but me,” Harry wrote privately to Bess from Washington. At 8:45 A.M., May 29, accompanied by his son, T.J., Jr., and Jim Pendergast, T.J. arrived at the east gate of the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth to begin serving a sentence of fifteen months, reduced from three years in view of his age and health. On the day of his sentencing, the judge had remarked to reporters that he could well understand the feelings expressed for Pendergast by his friends. “I believe if I did know him I, too, might have been one of his friends. I think he is a man of character that makes friends.” In all that was revealed by the investigations there was nothing to suggest any involvement with illegal activities on the part of Harry Truman. As District Attorney Milligan, never a particular admirer of the senator, would state: “At no time did the finger of suspicion ever point in the direction of Harry Truman.” In its issue of April 24, 1939, Life magazine devoted six pages to the meteoric rise of Governor Lloyd C. Stark, the article illustrated with numerous lurid photographs of the Pendergast debacle. Governor Stark, said the magazine, was the new Democratic version of young Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican racket-buster of New York, and claimed that the major result of Pendergast’s fall was to “catapult honest, efficient Lloyd Stark, an apple grower, right into the presidential ring.” Or at the least to a seat in the United States Senate. (Elsewhere there had been talk of Stark as the next Secretary of the Navy.) In Missouri, praise for Stark was overflowing. He was called “Missouri’s Moral Leader,” a figure of national importance, a presidential possibility, and in any event, “a man with a future.” “He has earned the high estimate,” wrote the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in an editorial that Stark clipped and sent to Roosevelt. He chose the hard way, and, of course, the right way, of meeting all the obligations of his office. He could have chosen the easiest way. He might have gone through the routine perfunctorily, basked in the approval of the all-powerful Pendergast machine that had supported him for the nomination, acquiesced in the Boss’s few but salient demands, kept the peace…. The Governor entered his office under the shadow of the Kansas City machine. He had to live down the suspicion of being a Pendergast man…. The contrast to the path chosen by Senator Truman went without saying. Life, too, acknowledged that Stark had accepted Pendergast support in 1936, but stressed there was nothing new in American politics about a governor turning on the machine that helped elect him. Theodore Roosevelt had done it in 1899, Woodrow Wilson in 1910, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. All three became President, and “square-shouldered, poker-faced, dignified” Lloyd C. Stark, too, would like to be President, “quite definitely.” In September, Stark announced he was running for Truman’s seat in the Senate.